Cognitive Perspectives on Early Christology
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Central to all christological models are concepts of agency, identity, and divinity, but few scholars have directly addressed these frameworks within their ancient West Asian contexts. Rather, the proclivity has been to retroject modern, Eurocentric, and binary frameworks onto the ancient texts, resulting in christological models that inevitably reflect modern orthodoxies and ontological categories. The future of christological research will depend on moving beyond this tendentiousness. In an effort to begin this process, this paper will apply findings from the cognitive sciences – which examine the way the human brain structures its perception of the world around it – to the reconstruction of ancient frameworks of agency, identity, and divinity. Applying these findings to early Jewish literature reveals the intuitive conceptualization of God’s agency, reified as the divine name, as a communicable vehicle of divine presence and authority. These observations support the conclusion that early Jewish conceptualizations of divine agency provided a conceptual template for the development of early christology.
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Todd Tremlin, Minds and Gods: The Cognitive Foundations of Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Jesse M. Bering, “The Cognitive Psychology of Belief in the Supernatural,” AmSci 94.2 (2006), pp. 142-49; Ilkka Pyysiäinen, Supernatural Agents: Why We Believe in Souls, Gods, and Buddhas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
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Gerhard May, Shöpfung aus dem Nichts: Die Entstehung der Lehre von der creatio ex nihilo (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1978); David Winston, “Creation Ex Nihilo Revisited: A Reply to Jonathan Goldstein,” JJS 37.1 (1986), pp. 88-91; James Noel Hubler, “Creatio ex Nihilo: Matter, Creation, and the Body in Classical and Christian Philosophy through Aquinas” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1995); Markus Bockmuehl, “Creatio ex nihilo in Palestinian Judaism and Early Christianity,” SJT 65.3 (2012), pp. 253-70.
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Jonathan St. B.T. Evans, “In Two Minds: Dual Process Accounts of Reasoning,” TCS 7.10 (2003), pp. 454-59; Wim De Neys, “Dual Processing in Reasoning: Two Systems but One Reasoner,” PsychSci 17.5 (2006), pp. 428-33; Jonathan St. B.T. Evans and Keith E. Stanovich, “Dual-Process Theories of Higher Cognition: Advancing the Debate,” PerspectPsychSci 8.3 (2013), pp. 223-41.
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Stewart Elliott Guthrie, Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); Justin L. Barrett, “Exploring the Natural Foundations of Religion,” TCS 4.1 (2000): pp. 29-34; Jesse M. Bering, “The Existential Theory of Mind,” RevGenPsych 6.1 (2002), pp. 3-24.
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Jesse Bering, “The Folk Psychology of Souls,” BehavBrainSci 29 (2006), pp. 453-98; Vera Pereira, Luís Faísca, and Rodrigo de Sá-Saraiva, “Immortality of the Soul as an Intuitive Idea: Towards a Psychological Explanation of the Origins of Afterlife Beliefs,” JCogCult 12 (2012), pp. 101-127.
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See, for instance, Cecilia Busby, “Permeable and Partible Persons: A Comparative Analysis of Gender and Body in South India and Melanesia,” JRAnthropolInst 3.2 (1997), pp. 261-78; Chris Fowler, The Archaeology of Personhood: An Anthropological Approach (London: Routledge, 2004); Mark S. Mosko, “Unbecoming Individuals: The Partible Character of The Christian Person,” JEthnogrTheory 5.1 (2015), pp. 361-93.
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Bertolotti and Magnani, “The Role of Agency Detection in the Invention of Supernatural Beings,” p. 257.
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Bauckham, Jesus and the God of Israel, p. 16. Note that in the third chapter of the Christian book of Revelation, Jesus insists that those Christians who “conquer” will be worshipped (Rev. 3:9; Bauckham dismisses this as a mere gesture) and Jesus will give them “a place with me on my throne, just as I myself conquered and sat down with my Father (sic) on his throne” (Rev. 3:21 [NRSV]).
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Robert A. Di Vito, “Old Testament Anthropology and the Construction of Personal Identity,” CBQ 61.2 (1999), pp. 217-38 (237). Di Vito highlights, among other things, the independence of bodily organs as autonomous centers of activity.
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Benjamin D. Sommer, The Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 44-57.
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G.H. Parke-Taylor, Yahweh: The Divine Name in the Bible (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1975); Michael Hundley, “To Be or Not to Be: A Reexamination of Name Language in Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomistic History,” VT 59.4 (2009), pp. 533-55. Many of the other entities would later be identified with the name, as well. See Jarl E. Fossum, The Name of God and the Angel of the Lord (Tübingen: Mohr, 1985); Charles A. Gieschen, Angelomorphic Christology: Antecedents & Early Evidence (Leiden: Brill, 1998), pp. 70-123.
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Fossum, The Name of God and the Angel of the Lord, p. 318; Charles A. Gieschen, “The Divine Name in Ante-Nicene Christology,” VC 57.2 (2003), pp. 115-58 (126); Andrei A. Orlov, “Praxis of the Voice: The Divine Name Traditions in the Apocalypse of Abraham,” JBL 127.1 (2008), pp. 53-70.
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55
Jeffrey Tigay, “A Second Temple Parallel to the Blessing from Kuntillet ʿAjrud,” IEJ 40 (1986), pp. 11; Barbara Nevling Porter, “Blessings from a Crown, Offerings to a Drum: Were There Non-Anthropomorphic Deities in Ancient Mesopotamia?” in Barbara Nevling Porter (ed.), What is a God? Anthropomorphic and Non-Anthropomorphic Aspects of Deity in Ancient Mesopotamia (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns; 2009), pp. 153-94.
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André Lemaire, “Les inscriptions de Khirbet El-Qom et l’Ashérah de Yhwh,” RB 84 (1977), pp. 597-608; Judith Hadley, “Some Drawings and Inscriptions on Two Pithoi from Kuntillet ‘Ajrud,” VT 37.2 (1987), 180-213 (185-86).
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David H. Aaron, Biblical Ambiguities: Metaphor, Semantics and Divine Imagery (Leiden: Brill, 2001), pp. 170-79.
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Stephen L. Herring, Divine Substitution: Humanity as the Manifestation of Deity in the Hebrew Bible and the Ancient Near East (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013); McDowell, The Image of God in the Garden of Eden.
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Cognitive Perspectives on Early Christology
In: Biblical InterpretationSearch for other papers by Daniel McClellan in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
Central to all christological models are concepts of agency, identity, and divinity, but few scholars have directly addressed these frameworks within their ancient West Asian contexts. Rather, the proclivity has been to retroject modern, Eurocentric, and binary frameworks onto the ancient texts, resulting in christological models that inevitably reflect modern orthodoxies and ontological categories. The future of christological research will depend on moving beyond this tendentiousness. In an effort to begin this process, this paper will apply findings from the cognitive sciences – which examine the way the human brain structures its perception of the world around it – to the reconstruction of ancient frameworks of agency, identity, and divinity. Applying these findings to early Jewish literature reveals the intuitive conceptualization of God’s agency, reified as the divine name, as a communicable vehicle of divine presence and authority. These observations support the conclusion that early Jewish conceptualizations of divine agency provided a conceptual template for the development of early christology.
| All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 474 | 77 | 6 |
| Full Text Views | 247 | 10 | 0 |
| PDF Views & Downloads | 196 | 25 | 0 |