Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

For paradise to be possible either the lion must lose his nails, or the lamb must grow his own.  HANS BLUMENBERG  Before setting out to Moriah, where he intends to obey God’s command to sacrifice his son, Abraham loads the wood into Isaac’s arms and carries the burning torch and a sharp knife himself. On the way his son asks, but where is the lamb for a burnt offering? The question is devastating, as is Abraham’s answer: My son, God will provide himself a lamb. It is a scene of unspeakable cruelty. (The murder of Abel is a crime statistic by comparison.) For Isaac is doubly innocent. Unaware of God’s command, and presumably too inexperienced to beware fathers bearing torches, he is psychologically innocent. And since he has presumably done no wrong, he is morally innocent as well. All this weighs on Abraham, and it is meant to. He has agreed to be the hand by which innocence is extinguished.  There are other mythical traditions in which a father might kill a son without qualms, whether to gain divine favor or to assure a military victory. But the Hebrew Bible is a different sort of book. Its God is a test giver who keeps an eye on the moral spectator. Isaac turns out to be just a prop in a drama revolving entirely around his father. Once Abraham has proven his infinite resignation before God — without, in the end, committing the unspeakable — nothing more is required of the human lamb and the incident is not mentioned again. The real test for Isaac will come later, when he becomes an adult and is saddled with two difficult sons. One wonders if he ever thought back to that strange afternoon. He certainly would not have been encouraged to dwell on it. In Judaism there is no cult of the innocent white lamb.  In Christianity there is. The Gospels rewrite the Abraham drama and present a divine Father who for mankind’s sake willingly sacrifices his divine-human Son, who just as willingly offers himself up. In this version, the Father is the prop and the innocent Son is the story. This focus on sacrificed innocence explains why lamb imagery suffuses the Christian imagination and shows up so often in scripture, theology, and the arts. But it is an ambiguous symbol. In the Gospel of John, Jesus announces, I am the good shepherd: the good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep. Early Christian iconography relied heavily on this metaphor, beginning with catacomb paintings showing the Redeemer with one lamb draped over his shoulders while two others accompany him. The image implies that to be a good Christian is to be a good lamb, harmless and willing to be led by someone who knows the way.  John the Baptist had something different in mind when he declared, on first seeing Jesus, Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world. Now we are asked to think of Jesus not as a wise caretaker but as an innocent victim allowing himself to be beaten, lashed, spat upon, and crucified. A self-immolating Isaac. This image of a passive redeemer would leave a far deeper impression on the Christian imagination than that of the Good Shepherd. But as a symbol it leaves something to be desired. The God of the Hebrew Bible is a fearsome God, leading His people out of the wilderness in a pillar of cloud to the lands they will conquer. A suffering Christian can surely identity with the suffering Lamb of God. But where is the solace, where is the guidance, where is the hope of gaining protection?  The other John, author of the Book of Revelation, provided one answer. As his revelation begins, we are introduced to a repulsive exterminating beast with seven horns and seven eyes who has been sent to settle every divine score. Like Oedipus solving the riddle of the sphinx, or King Arthur extracting Excalibur from the stone, the lamb confronts a challenge that others cannot meet: opening the Book of the Seven Seals, which will bring about the end times. As the lamb breaks the first four seals, the four horsemen of