The 2014 movie Transcendence was a huge disappointment at the box office,
criticized mainly for its plot, characters, and dialogue (three rather
important elements in most any story). The main character, Will, is
transcendent; that is, he has abilities beyond the normal limits of human
beings. It is pure fiction – pure, mediocre fiction. Too bad. Transcendence, by
its very nature, is not the kind of thing to be portrayed in middle-of-the-road
fashion.
Moving beyond fiction and into
reality, Moses (under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit) addresses and
challenges one of the most basic worldview assumptions of reality held by the
prominent civilizations in ancient Mesopotamia. And he does so with the very
first sentence of written revelation.
The God Moses introduces is completely separate from and supreme over all
creation. This is in stark contrast to the stories (and their accompanying
assumptions) common in the Mesopotamian world. For instance,
When Tiamat sees
Marduk ride into battle against her, she goes wild, taking leave of her senses
and shaking to her lowest parts – an image not only of a stormy sea, but of
chaos itself. Slaying her, Marduk splits her in two like a shellfish and
thrusts one half upward to make the sky and the other downward to make the sea,
setting guards to ensure that her waters will not escape and threaten the world
again. The dome of heaven he makes to correspond to earth as its heavenly
counterpart. Then he executes Kingu and creates man from his blood so that the
gods will have a servant to maintain the earth when they have withdrawn to the
heavens. As their final work of creation the gods build Babylon and at its
center as a temple to Marduk the great ziggurat, described as reaching
as high as Apsu, as high, that is, as the primordial waters were deep. One
thing to notice in this myth is the fact that the gods need mankind in order
that they may rest from labor. They are not unlimited in power or radically
transcendent, but constitute only a part of the larger system of things that is
the cosmos as a whole (Eugene Webb, Mesopotamian Religion, n.d.).
Ralph Smith (2004) makes explicit what is
implicit: “In distinction from all the stories of the ancient world around
Israel, in the Bible, God and the creation are never mixed. His transcendence
and the dependence of all things upon Him is part of what the Bible means when
it speaks of Him as creator.” (Trinity & Reality, p. 54). God is supremely transcendent. He is
separate from all Other. He is beyond his creation. Transcendence is the idea
of being beyond comprehension, beyond the limits of human experience and
knowledge. Apart from his choosing to reveal himself (let alone actually coming
to live among us), God is beyond his creation and beyond our human experience
and comprehension within that creation.
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