by Joe
October 4, 2005 - 10:49am

Yes, one of the frustrations with Wink's work is his focus on the Powers language, which is mainly in the Pauline writings, so his analysis of the Gospels and the OT is underdeveloped in the Powers trilogy (though he may have extended it in later work - I've not read any of his stuff more recently). There are certainly several places where words ascribed to Jesus make things difficult in Wink's model:

  • 'How can Satan drive out Satan?' - Mark 3:23/Matt. 12:26/Luke 11:18

  • 'I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven' - Luke 10:18
  • Jesus turned and said to Peter, "Get behind me, Satan!' - Matt.16:23
  • 'Simon, Simon, Satan has asked to sift you as wheat.' - Luke 22:31

And in the OT, there's the serpent in the Garden, and Satan asking God to torture Job. One of the difficulties with Wink's hermeneutics is his tendency to frame interpretation within his overall model, so some of his interpretations come across as rather 'squeezed to fit', if you know what I mean. I do like his overall scheme: it's thorough, it builds intelligently from the social-scientific background of the texts and it resonates well with me. But I'd really like him do some better hermeneutics. Personally, I don't know much about the first-Century conception of Satan and the use of the term in second-Temple Judaism, so I don't know that I can say much more about those awkward passages in the Gospels, except that there's not much in Mark and that what is there isn't too troubling within Wink's scheme.

With regard to the serpent in the Garden in Genesis, several points come to mind. The first is that I personally can't ascribe much literalism to the passage for many reasons, most especially my science background.

Another comes out of the Advanced Workshop weekend that I've just had, where we had a whole day with a feminist Jewish scholar of Christian theology. She said that the Fall narrative has a very low significance in the Jewish tradition mainly because sin in Judaism is conceived very differently from the evangelical Christian understanding, and is dealt with on a collective and ongoing application of the traditions and practices of Judaism, rather than in the individual, personal and purgatory evangelical manner.

And thirdly, I just don't know enough about the conception of Satan contemporary with the writing of that passage, what the signifier 'Satan' signified for the people who first wrote/read that passage, and so I don't know enough about how to handle that scripture now. As a modern reader I can apporach it several ways. My first naivet?©, face-value reading would say that the passage is trying to tell me something about the nature of the serpetn/Satan; my more informed suspicious reading of the passage questions the literalist reading and would highlight the blame issues (man blames woman, woman blames some external force) and embedding of patriarchy, gender roles and human-divine conflict. But I think it's also important to take the wisdom of those suspicions and try to retrieve something from the passage, and that would probably take me along the lines of seeing that the identity of the serpent is assumed, so there must have been a preconception of the Satan signified, and the passage is trying to tell a different story, embedded in the wider story of Israel, to do with humanity's relationship with God and the positive possibilities and the negative consequences of contamination of that Edenic purity.

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