Anthropology of God.

[John D. Brey]

The theory of recapitulation, also called the biogenetic law or embryological parallelism—often expressed in Ernst Haeckel's phrase "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny"—is a largely discredited biological hypothesis that in developing from embryo to adult (ontogeny), animals go through stages resembling or representing successive stages in the evolution of their remote ancestors (phylogeny).

Wikipedia, Recapitulation Theory.​

In a thread here a couple years ago --Sex and the Origins of Death --- a quasi-recapitulation theory was hatched showing how modern science is disturbingly similar to the embryo of that science found in the first few chapters of Genesis. A thumbnail sketch would point out that in Genesis, the original living organisms, humans, were immortal (as modern science tells us was the case with all the original living organisms on planet earth). Furthermore, Genesis tells us that "death," that is programmed, cellular death (biologically guaranteed death), arises when Adam and Eve experiment with sex for the first time:

With only a handful of exceptions, single-celled organisms reproducing exclusively by simple fission lack one feature that ultimately brings death to all single-cells that have sex, and all multicellular organisms, including human beings: senescence, the gradual, programmed aging of cells and organisms they make up, independently of events in the environment. Accidental cell death was around from the very first appearance of anything we would call life. Death of the organism through senescence ---programmed death----- makes its appearance in evolution at about the same time that sexual reproduction appears.

Professor William R. Clark, Sex & The Origins of Death, p. 54.​

Although Professor Clark's statement perfectly recapitulates the ontogeny of biological death as found in the book Moses wrote thousands of years before Professor Willliam Clark's, Sex & The Origins of Death, a concept found in the writings of Sigmund Freud, specifically, Civilization and Its Discontents, lends itself to the hypothesis that not only is the book of Genesis the embryo of modern biological science, but, if we appreciate Sigmund Freud's great insight, the first chapters of Genesis are even more importantly an anthropology for God himself.

Mankind can be understood through the combination of modern science and Moses' first book as the embryo and birth of God: the scientific development of a man, from cradle to grave (specifically the genesis, i.e., the first seven days, months, or years), recapitulates God's own development and birth into the world he created as that remarkable birth and growth is hidden beneath the labia and membrane of Abraham and Moses' scroll (specifically Genesis) until the ritual uncovering (brit milah) is subjected to a scientific scalpel in order to reveal the person of God to one and all on the eighth day of human history (now).

From rabbinic texts . . . we actually learn of the view hypothesized as a genuine Jewish theologoumenon. Some of the Rabbis read circumcision as a necessary preparation for seeing God, the summum bonum of late-antique religious life (Boyarin 1990a). . . That is, circumcision here is not the sign of something happening in the spirit of the Jew, but it is the very event itself --- and it is, of course, in his body. Moreover, as I have argued elsewhere, for the rabbinic formulation, this seeing of God was not understood as the spiritual vision of a platonic eye of the mind, but as the physical seeing of fleshly eyes at a real moment in history.

Rabbi Daniel Boyarin, A Radical Jew, p. 126 .​

Now.



John