we become blind to how our own power turns back upon us.
The myth, the story the empire uses, is rooted in scarcity. Myth functions to conceal how human power is lying to justify its violence and death. Scarcity is a lie. Pharaoh and Egypt have plenty of grain for all to live. Yet, in their rivalry with other empires they cannot get enough grain and thus perpetuate the myth of scarcity. The biblical story, the salvation story, is exposing the lie contained in myth—the human suffering and death behind it.
Today it is not national powers alone that use the myth of scarcity to enslave people and justify genocide; it is global multinational corporate power as well. Today we find ourselves engaged in wars created by privatized multinational corporate power, our national budget drained by Pentagon business contractors, and the debt from the war is used to give the political message of scarcity, which in turn is used to justify the removal of social programs such as health and education. The end goal is global corporations taking over nations through the privatization of all services and replacing government with corporate control of the people and the earth’s resources.26 In the meantime we are kept distracted, indeed blinded, by the threat of terrorism, which uses national security as myth to perpetuate the ongoing violence, keeping the cycle of war debt and privatization going. Like Pharaoh killing his slaves, global corporations are destroying their own consumers, the environment beneath their feet and all around their mansions.
Paul Ricœur has noted that myth is never about morality, it is always about human death and human desire for immortality.27 Therefore the bible is not a morality book. The bible is an engagement with human myths that conceal violence and death, which in its evolution, sets out to expose human violence and injustice. Yet, this process is no quick matter. For myths also evolve and appear again in yet another form, always in an attempt to hide the violence that is rooted in our human rivalry—mimesis—our copying.
25. Brueggemann, Journey to the Common Good, 9–11.
26. Klein, The Shock Doctrine, 354–407.
27. Ricœur, The Symbolism of Evil, 187.
Exodus 3
1 Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian; he led his flock beyond the wilderness, and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. 2 There the angel of the LORD appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush; he looked, and the bush was blazing, yet it was not consumed. 3 Then Moses said, “I must turn aside and look at this great sight, and see why the bush is not burned up.” 4 When the LORD saw that he had turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, “Moses, Moses!” And he said, “Here I am.” 5 Then he said, “Come no closer! Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” 6 He said further, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God. 7 Then the LORD said, “I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters. Indeed, I know their sufferings, 8 and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey, to the country of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. 9 The cry of the Israelites has now come to me; I have also seen how the Egyptians oppress them. 10 So come, I will send you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt.” 11 But Moses said to God, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh, and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?” 12 He said, “I will be with you; and this shall be the sign for you that it is I who sent you: when you have brought the people out of Egypt, you shall worship God on this mountain.”13 But Moses said to God, “If I come to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” 14 God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM.” He said further, “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘I AM has sent me to you.’”
Moses encounters a God whose name in Hebrew is Eheyeh Asher Eheyeh. Eheyeh is the first person of the imperfect tense of the Hebrew verb “to be.”28 The translation really is more like “I am becoming that which is becoming.” God is not finalized like something that was made, but rather a living process—“a becoming.” Only completed things have names. This living God cannot have a name. Idols have names.29
This nameless God of becoming is akin to the meaning of word, “debar” in Hebrew, which is “event—happening.” Thus in Moses’ encounter with God we discover a process that is taking place to engage myth, the story of human power that is created by humans, a thing, an idol. God’s Word, God’s event is now encountering the power of Pharaoh. The salvation story in the Old Testament is the emergence of this nameless God who starts to shatter the power of human myth and the oppression and violence behind it.
This is why in Hebrew tradition the name for God is not spoken and the Hebrew word Adonai (my Lord) is used. It was not easy for the Israelites to keep straight their nameless God from the idols all around them. And this nameless God is not kept straight from the many idols of powers today by biblical literalists. This nameless God is much more akin to evolution, which we can behold, but not control, through our human power, nor be masters over it. Richard Dawkins, though a great writer on evolution, did not make this distinction, and as a result engaged biblical literalists in an entire book titled The God Delusion.30 In the end neither Dawkins nor the biblical literalists grasp the emergence of this event—this nameless God who is the liberation from our violence, who is not the power of idols and human myths.
28. Fromm, You Shall Be As Gods, 26.
29. Ibid., 27.
30. Dawkins, The God Delusion.
Exodus 20
4 You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.
Eric Fromm argues that moving from idols to the nameless God of becoming is our being moved from alienation of our self into freedom. It marks an evolution from gods that are material or human to the presence of being engaged in justice, love, and forgiveness. Idols also often represent the authoritarian leaders we cling to out of fear and anxiety. The God that is becoming empowers us to be free from the slavery of idolatry and the power of fear.31
Working in close conjunction with Fromm, Paul Tillich sees much of religion as a place of escape from fear and anxiety. Tillich argues that the presence of God is the presence of “the courage to be” despite the threat of non-being and death.32 It is my wager that it is our human mimetic rivalry over objects that is tied in with the creation of our idols of power, our fearful obedience to their authoritarian power, and the violence and death that this produces. The biblical salvation story is the encounter with a God who is the source of our courage to live for others, life, and world. This courage is indeed faith, no longer the blind power of human rivalry, but the ability to love,
