Relationships in the Bible

The "original meaning scholar" inside of me always cringes a little when I read about Moses' relationship with God... or David's or Peter's or Paul's. Frankly, I have the same reaction when people talk about the relationships between the persons of the Trinity. The reason? These sorts of comments strike me as vastly anachronistic.

Six months ago I would have tried to explain this "feeling" I get in terms of ancient personalities being "dyadic" or group embedded. I might have suggested that the modern, introspective self traces back to the Romantics and in some ways back to Augustine, who individualized our understanding of Paul's writings.

Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self has been filling in some of the details. I wish I had the time to encapsulate his massive tome in detail. One of the main shifts that I blogged on a few weeks back is a shift from seeing truth as something out there that is part of the order of the world to seeing truth as something that my mind has to sort out by sifting through all the particular evidence of my reason and senses.

Inadvertantly, "I" become the center of the universe. I can still affirm that God is the center, but I am keenly aware that I am concluding that God is the center. Before I simply assumed God was the center unthinkingly. (I sense that Taylor will go Heideggerian on me at the end, but I'm no fan of Heidegger, meaning that I find this Cartesian situation unavoidable to some extent).

Eventually, individual identity becomes more and more particular to me. "I" become more and more self-defined, determined, and differentiated. It thus entails the eventual birth of modern intimacy, where my vastly increased in size self connects with your vastly increased in size self.

What I'm getting at is that pre-moderns did not have nearly as developed senses of themselves as individuals as so many of us do. And as a result, their relationships were not nearly as deep or complex as ours can be. It is not simply that "abba" did not mean "Daddy" in Aramaic (it didn't). I am saying that there really weren't any "Daddys" of the modern sort. Love between individuals did not have the kind of differentiated complexity--or post-Romantic age feeling--that we often have in the Western world. Go look at relationships in Africa or Asia if you want to know what biblical relationships were like.

Now of course the Trinity is a realm of absolutes beyond cultural contexts. The Trinity did not change their interrelationships after Descartes, as far as I know. But I'm not sure any of us mortals could really fathom what their absolute relationships would be like. Nevertheless, I predict that most of the trendy trinitarian stuff right now will be completely abandoned within twenty or thirty years. I suspect that an aweful lot of it is yet more of the post-Cartesian, post-Romantic projection of the modern self on God.