(urth) The Wizard

Daniel Petersen danielottojackpetersen at gmail.com
Thu Mar 8 12:07:12 PST 2012


Hey, I thought you didn't want to discuss this! :)

The *larger* summary of the doctrine of God from the entire OT could not
possibly be accurately represented by a summary of the (alleged) doctrine
of God one garners merely from the orders to exterminate the Canaanites.
 Wolfe, in Long Sun for example, is surely drawing on a doctrine of a
merciful, enlightening, liberating God culled partly from themes in Genesis
and Exodus in terms of God's grace toward Abraham 'lost' in idolatry and
then the Israelites in slavery.  Sure, Wolfe needs the NT development of
the doctrine of God in addition - but humanly understandable divine
revelation and the provision of a leader to lead an oppressed people out of
idolatry and slavery are already powerfully embodied in the Torah.  Thus,
the God in the fiction of Gene Wolfe echoes the God who is progressively
revealed from Old into New Testaments (on the orthodox Christian
understanding.)  That's my thesis.  Seeing the God of the OT merely as a
genocidal tryant does violence to the theology found in Wolfe's fiction, I
think.  Maybe Wolfe's wrong in his understanding.  I, at least, do not
think he is.  (Trying to keep us *slightly* on topic here, heh.)

-DOJP

2012/3/8 António Pedro Marques <entonio at gmail.com>

> Daniel Petersen wrote (08-03-2012 16:30):
>
>> Your summary of the OT God as genocidal and
>> whatnot just is unsophisticated in its reading of the library of texts
>> (...)
>>
>
> The key word is *summary*. Otherwise there's just no way to go around all
> the clear, insistent and absolute *orders* to fully exterminate the
> Canaanites.
> ______________________________**_________________
> Urth Mailing List
> To post, write urth at urth.net
> Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20120308/d5b86def/attachment-0004.htm>


More information about the Urth mailing list