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“Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart.”
— Deuteronomy 6:4–6
I normally like to sleep on a post before hitting it one more time the next day.
Manuscript evidence of early-Christian practice gives a solid historical backdrop: the Gospels (and other scriptures) were being read aloud, discussed, handled in codices, marked for oral use, and treated as communal teaching texts (didaskalia in the Greek and where the word “doctrine” comes from).
Scripture was memorized, practiced, and embodied. Early house churches were small groups of community; while catacombs do not really support a picture of stage-based lectures and concert halls, since they were often burial and memorial spaces.
What follows then is a Biblical, logical puzzle. Scripture is known for tucking meaning and lessons inside of things. We’ll discuss some bible study (exegesis) tools, provide a few literary devices to look out for, and we’ll not only be able to test the thesis of a recovering pastor’s musing, but also see the telos (i.e., the design or goal) of what Jesus and Scripture have been pulling towards since the beginning.
First, we’ll cover some tools for this gardening party, and then trace the roots. It’ll end with a fill-in-the-blank and a bit more contextual hints to help chase it down.
As a fair warning: It helps to approach this as a human, not with labels, camps, or positions to protect. This has to be tested, not thrown out or reacted to. Don’t worry, it’ll be like peanut butter (until it comes time to digest the Text).
Gathering A Scriptural Tool Kit
Exegesis is a fancy word for how to study something, and not just the Bible. Whether we read the news, fiction, Sophocles, the Bhagavat Gita, or Scripture, we do not read from our perspective but from theirs, especially with ancient texts. This basic literary analysis and structure analysis, which we unconsciously employ when we enjoy a good movie.
As one simple example, the Bible employs tricks and devices, and draws long conceive threads and loops. If a minister has not heard of chiasms and is using them regularly in their sermon prep, they and their congregations are missing out.
For this hands-on Bible experiment in exegesis, we’ll only need a few tools. And maybe a bit of intellectual and spiritual bravery from some readers.
“Such devices draw the reader into participation in the movement of the text.”
—David Wead
Tool #I — The Enthymeme
David Wead’s book on the literary devices of John was one of many books that I needed 20 years ago. It’s short and well done.
One of the devices Wead unpacks is the Enthymeme: A syllogism in which one of the premises or the conclusion is unstated but implied. John uses them to draw the reader into a “spiritual realization” by making them complete the logic. Think of it like a rhetorical question, or filling in a puzzle, but leaving the last piece for the person watching so they have to do it themselves
One short example from John is “If I am not doing the works of my Father, then do not believe me; but if I do them… believe the works” (John 10:37-38).
“The reader is expected to supply the missing part from his own knowledge… it is a device of persuasion which seeks to involve the audience in the movement of the argument.”
— David Wead, Literary Devices in John’s Gospel
Tool #2 — The Law of the Omitted Detail
“The Torah does not record every detail of a conversation or an event, but only that which is essential to the purpose of the narrative… leaving the reader to fill in the rest by logical deduction.”
— Cassuto, Commentary on Genesis
Another scholar who took what I thought I knew and showed me “a whole new world” (hope you’re singing it). His brilliance in many ways makes a case for reading the Old Testament as a hybrid of mythology and psychology interplaying with Jewish philosophy.
He covers how the Old Testament is a literary masterpiece that leverages narrative, names, symbols, and language to tell a much deeper story than just events and commandments. It loves leaving things out on purpose. John does this when the adulterous woman is brought to him, and instead of answering, he simply bends down to write (John 8:6-8). In Genesis, an example is Cain brings “fruit of the ground,” and Abel brings “firstborn of his flock” (i.e., Cain just brought some fruit while Abel brought the best).
This is the law of the Omitted Detail. Like saying “1+_=3,” the biblical narrator omits details that are either obvious from the context or so significant that silence speaks louder than words. The Law focuses the reader on the essential moral or ontological truth without redundant explanation.
Cassuto is not the creator of this but one of its discoverers. Wead also talks about the same concept, sometimes with different terms. Apparently, the undisputed modern king of this was Robert Alter (The Art of Biblical Narrative).
“The biblical narrator characteristically reveals only the essential details of the story, leaving the rest to be inferred by the reader.”
— Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative
Tool #3 — Kal V’Chomer (Light & Heavy)
Say it with as much phlegm as possible. The logic is simple: If it’s true in the small sense, then how much more in the big sense? Like a spectrum of extremes, it pushes logic to its ultimate conclusion (its telos). If a rule applies in a “light” (lesser) case, it must apply even more forcefully in a “heavy” (greater) case. The conclusion is a “rhetorical gap” that the listener must jump across.
The first Kal V’Chomer is Genesis 44:8: “Behold, the money we found in the mouths of our sacks we brought back to you from the land of Canaan. How then could we steal silver or gold from your lord’s house?“
Applied to God, if earthly fathers (kabed) merit a certain level of response, the Divine Father merits an infinitely “weightier” one. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus applies the inverse logic to parents and God:
“If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!“
— Matthew 7:11
Digging for Wholeness
“The ‘Us’ of Genesis 1 is the first hint that the Divine is an eternal community of mutual honor… humanity reflects this only when the duality of male and female is held in a singular image.”
— Peter Leithart, Deep Exegesis
The Blueprint: Genesis 1:2, 26–27 (Creation)
Genesis opens with the Ruach (“Spirit”) already moving over the face of the waters, fluttering like a bird (merahefta). The Spirit is there before shape, before division, before land, before humanity (cf. Matthew 3:16-17; 23:37).
On the sixth day, God speaks: “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” The “us” is plural, and not explained. The first hint in the Hebrew of the plurality of God was in Genesis 1:1. The Hebrew word “god” is elohim, and in the plural (el is singular). Then, in verse 2, the Spirit “of God” hovers over the ancient waters, present from the beginning. Genesis assumes the reader can catch this. Ancient Hebrew scholars view the plural Elohim and “Let us” either as a “plural of majesty” (royal “we”) or an address to the Divine Council (heavenly host, cf. 1 Kings 22:19).
The Ruach being included in the “us” was not dictated. It was an inference: If the Ruach is already active in verse 2, then the “Us” includes the Ruach. The Spirit is a feminine noun, and it sits inside the creative agency of the Divine. The speech of God rises out of the oneness already existing. Not fragmentation or competing parts, as in other ancient Near Eastern myths.
Then in Genesis 1:27, God does what He spoke:
“So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.”
Then the human being is made from adamah (soil) and filled with ruach (spirit). Adam can literally mean “Earth-creature.” Human is a combination of Earth and Divine, soil and spirit, physical and spiritual. And much more: Male and female are in God’s image, implying the Divine is both male and female, and each is still entirely different (“holy”).
A hint at the “feminine side” of God can be found in Proverbs 8: Wisdom speaks as a personified co-creator with God before the earth was made: “Then I was constantly at his side. I was filled with delight day after day, rejoicing always in his presence.” She’s presented as a wisdom, and earlier the author advises his son to pursue her over women in general. In Hebrew, chokhmah, and in the Greek translation (the Septuagint), sophia are both feminine.
The created order itself begins in this kind of joining, this kind of shared life and shalom. Genesis 3 would fracture the story, but just before that, humanity’s created state was described as: “And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.”
“The place to start is with the doctrine of creation…”
— Doug Wilson
The Foundation: Exodus 20:12 (The 10 Commandments)
The 10 Commandments were on two tablets, and there’s some debate on how the actual order was. Some scholars think it could have been 5 and 5. They have observed that the first table contains commands related to God, and the other contains commands related to others.
If true, this means the fifth commandment, “Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you,” is on the God side.
Honor in English doesn’t mean the same thing. The word for “Honor” is Kabed, from the root meaning “to be heavy.” It means to respect and hold value. It does not mean submit or fake praise. Psychologically, this makes a lot of sense. Kabed can also mean in the negative sense of “hardening,” as in when Pharaoh made his own heart “heavy” (Exodus 10:1).
To not make the fifth commandment lighter, kabed’s dual-meaning invites worshippers back into the same Parental/Child relationship: “Those who honor Me I will honor, and those who despise Me shall be lightly esteemed” (1 Samuel 2:30).
It’s also interesting that “love” is not used in the 10 commandments, probably because it’s assumed and covered in other places. Honor is the act of ascribing “weight” or “gravity” to a person’s existence and authority. If a child is to become all and more of what their parents were, “kabed” implies empathy, respect, and understanding. IMO, it implies growing up and no longer living in their shadow.
“To honor parents is to honor the structure of reality that God Himself established as the primary school for honoring Him.”
— Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy
The Declaration: John 10:30
Jesus’ favorite title for himself was the “son of man,” and he used it often with layered meanings, as David Wead and others point out. He does not call Himself literally the “son of God,” a term that was being thrown around His time for millennia. Jesus even reframes other people’s questions and accusations to point back to the “son of man” (Mark 14:61-62; John 9:35). God called Ezekiel “son of man” over 90 times, and the New Testament uses it to frame humanity, especially a redeemed and awakened humanity.
The Septuagint (a popular ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament before Jesus) used the word timaō to capture the same weight idea. Jesus uses it in John 5:23, “That all may honor (timaō) the Son just as they honor the Father.” Crucially, Jesus uses the title Son of Man for Himself, which is distinct from the Son of God title others were bastardizing in the Greco-Roman world.
One of the things that ended up getting Jesus killed was Him saying, “The Father and I are one.” The Greek word for one means “one.” Jesus was ἕν (one) with the Father, meaning at least in being, will, purpose, and holiness (c.f. 1 Peter 1:16). In John 14, during the Upper Room discourse, Jesus will invite His disciples to be one with Him, as He was with the Father, by being one with one another. Even his “one commandment” answers how to abide in Him, as He abides in the Father: love.
“In John, Jesus is not just claiming to be like God; He is claiming to be the space where the ‘Oneness’ of God finally intersects with the ‘Oneness’ of humanity.”
— N.T. Wright
Paul’s Application: Galatians 3:28
Originally called Saul, he was a Pharisee and a persecutor of Christians, called the Way then. After his conversion, and some time in Arabia and meeting with the Apostles, he became Rome’s most fierce missionary, spreading a Gospel that would literally outshine Caesar Augustus’s.
As a disciple of Christ, in every town he spent time in, he taught a common message about dying to self and being one in Christ. Over and over again, he’ll say things like: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”
Our relationship with the Divine, and our relationship with our parents, and with the opposite sexes are where the union and onesess come from, as well as our healing and reconciliation.
Paul applies the “Oneness” of John 10:30 to the human social order. If the Father, Son, and Spirit are “One,” then those in the “Image of God” (Genesis 1:26) must reflect that same “Oneness,” regardless of gender, status, wealth, etc.
As Jesus was, humans can be wholly re-adopted back into the love of God we’ve run from. It takes dying to our old selves.
The Math: “…that God may be all in all.”
So, here’s the front-facing math: Jesus + Father = 1. So…where is the Feminine? Would a “good Jew,” raised on the Tanakh (the Hebrew Bible), wonder about where the mother from Exodus 20, or the “female” of Genesis 1, fit into all this Gospel stuff, especially with the commonality of first-century female cults:
More directly, if God is the Source of both Male and Female, would not Jesus also be One with the “Divine Feminine”? Would Jesus also have been willing to say He was one with the Mother if the story was a ego-driven matriarchy?
If Jesus is One with the Father, and God created both Male and Female, what is the logical and Scriptural limitation of including the Mother?
And maybe that’s yet another point. Being one with Creation and the Feminine, as with the Masculine. All in All. God is One.
Let’s double down on this dichotomy collapsing didactic.
Chaser #1: The Subversion of the Male Ego (Nicodemus vs. The Woman)
John stages the contrast as a verdict.
Nicodemus enters the Gospel with everything the religious world counts as weight (John 3). He is a Pharisee, a ruler of the Jews, and a teacher of Israel: credentials, status, rule, education, public authority. And yet, he comes in the secrecy of night. The man carrying social gravity cannot see what is in front of him. Jesus speaks in the language of birth and spirit from above, of rising and descending, and Nicodemus responds from the level of Pharisaical literalism. He could manage doctrine, but he could not move with the logic. He vanishes from the scene unresolved (until later).
The Samaritan woman was the opposite kind of witness. She comes with no prestige to defend, no religious title to protect, or certainty to perform. She engages with the argument and dances with Jesus. Jesus starts with water, and she follows the movement. From Jacob’s well to living water, from thirst to spring, from earth to spirit, from the ordinary vessel to the eternal source. She is the first person in John to stand inside the revelation and actually answer it. The Samaritan female was not just the first to recognize Jesus as the Christ, but also led more people to him, well before the early church, which is why the Greek Orthodox called her Photini (the enlightened one) and recognized her as an “Equal to the Apostles.”
Jesus gave her the identity statement that Nicodemus couldn’t receive in full, yet. It’s also to her that he speaks the Divine name and one of the other 7 “I am” statements: “I who speak to you am he.” A woman is the first clear bridge between the earthly sign and the divine self-disclosure that lands in the mouth of a woman, beside a well, in a conversation the religious world would have considered unimportant.
Then, there’s Mary Magdalene.
The Resurrection scene carries the same logic again, just heavier. In the first-century world John is writing into, a woman’s testimony held little public weight, yet Mary becomes the first commissioned witness of the risen Christ. She sees, hears her name, believes, and is sent to men who struggle to believe it at first. Resurrection begins in the mouth of a person whom the system discounted. Many Christian traditions view “Mary Magdalene [as] being the primary apostolic witness to the resurrection.”1 That is Johannine irony, another literary device of his (c.f. Wead)2. The lowest are the greatest in God’s Kingdom.
Nicodemus carries the ego of a sanctioned world and cannot solve the math. The Samaritan woman and Mary Magdalene first received what the hardened men missed. John keeps overturning the tables until the reader finally sees that spiritual weight belongs where God places it, not where human systems dictate.
Chaser #2 — The Witness of Creation (The Mother/Earth Link)
“The earth is not a neutral stage; it is a generative participant in the drama of redemption, waiting for the ‘Oneness’ of God’s children to be revealed.”
— N.T. Wright, Romans Commentary
Romans 1:20 says God’s invisible nature is “clearly perceived” in what has been made. Paul’s claim about revelation is that Creation itself already tells the truth. As a rabbi, Paul knew his Old Testament, from Genesis 1 through Psalm 8:1 and following: “O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth! You have set your glory above the heavens.”
In Hebrew, אֶרֶץ (erets, earth/land) is a feminine noun, and in Greek γῆ (gē, earth) is also feminine; κτίσις (ktisis, creation) is feminine too. That does not mean “earth is a woman” (silly linear Westerners) in some crude biological sense. But we’d better treat her like one. In Revelation 11:18, God has a court case against the “destroyers of the earth“—the physical stage He built for us, and the verdict is much like both curses humanity inflicted on the Earth in Genesis 3 and 4. When humanity gets over its “stuff,” we stop being strip-miners and return to being the gardeners of Genesis 1, before ego and empires took over. Redemption is when the chaotic noise of our world finally gives way to peace in Creation.
The language repeatedly frames earth and creation with feminine grammatical form, which opens a field of receptive, generative imagery rather than neutral abstraction.
Genesis already set that direction. Ruach (spirit/breath/wind) hovers over adamah (soil/ground), and the human being is formed as a union of earth and Spirit. Earth receives and provides, breath animates, and life emerges. The created order functions as a witness: It is not dead, sitting outside God’s sovereign love, but a formed reality that bears the trace of the One who made it.
The Apostle Paul will tie Creation’s redemption directly with humanity’s in Romans 8:19-24:
“For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved.”
Scripture does not ask us to choose between spirit and earth. It gives us the logic of both held together. To honor the Father while treating creation as a commodity and disposable would be to miss the way Genesis and Romans were already talking. The Earth is not an afterthought; the World is. Creation speaks its own testimony.
“Creation itself is caught up in the purposes of God and will share in the final redemption.”
— N. T. Wright
A Recovered Pastor’s Second Sermon
“The most important thing in your life is not what you do; it’s who you become. And you become ‘One’ only when your internal world is no longer at war with the Image of God within you.”
— Dallas Willard, Renovation of the Heart
This “hunch” hit me a while ago, and I kept leaning in to it. There were a lot of meditations and visualization practices that helped me, so IFS (Internal Family Systems) and psychology matter here for context.
Aside from mediation, reading, and studying Scripture, I have also found healing in Cognitive Behavior Therapy, Internal Family Systems, and AA. These corrected behaviors and called out patterns, and keep doing so. The fact that all of Scripture contains the former and oceans more has been more than “interesting” to a formerly fractured, analytical, emotional basket case such as myself…and that’s being generous.
For about a month before this piece, I had been meditating on “My fathers and I are one,” as well as “My mothers and I are one.” I had more than one parental figure in each of those roles, and recovery has brought more.
Mothers and fathers are archetypal (psychological) and not merely confined to a single person. That includes, for me, obviously, my biological and step parents, as well as God, Creation (Mother Earth?), and the psychological concepts of anima/animus. As a 41-year-old father in recovery, this brought up a lot. This little analytical study here came after, as did the Scriptural evidence and “logic.” In this sense, it was shown to me, not through mediation only, but I would not have seen it if God had not been opening my eyes more. Study has been a huge part of life, as the search for truth, so those are not absent from this picture.
There might be some gulps and gut reactions. If uncertainty is all you’re met with, welcome to the party. For some, it may cast questions on things: Feel and sit with them. Surrender them and see what happens. We’re much too afraid of love and God.
This is another encapsulation of findings from years of study, experience, recovery, and real-life results. I stand by this because Christ has saved my wretched ass and “taught” it to me. This is part testimony, all thesis.
So, I’ll swagger now: this stands on Scripture and logic. Gospel cuts through the heart of this. Jesus was one with his Mother, too.
I understand, better now, how long a journey it can be and how much there could be to wade through: safeguards, doctrinal fences, old assumptions, social structures, stigmas, and baggage all could potentially create a confusing mess for some. It is not with a light heart that I say you can trust Jesus—don’t worry about the rest. Most of it doesn’t actually go away. And it is as good as it said it was.
Digest, give it time, and you can see it too, but the real question will be if you want to. The next will be, “What to do next?“
~P.S. Doing this can be a bitch. Jesus warned about it (Luke 14:28-33).
If you’d like to see how any human can go on this kind of journey, of becoming one, check out www.everyhumansjourney.com (a bit out of date), and let me know if your church or organization is interested in a small group (peer-led) 12-week curriculum.
