1970 Geloof en Wetenschap : Orgaan van de Christelijke vereeniging van natuur- en geneeskundigen in Nederland - pagina 120

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FROM TERRITORIAL IMAGE TO CULTURAL ENVIRONMENT

effort to maintain a (tribal) territorial rule. Let no stranger trespass! These efforts of maintaining some of the old order led to social pollution (witness the agonies of Israel during most of the reign of the Kings and the Prophets). The rigid tribal concept with an absolute and exclusive dominance hierarchy progressively deteriorated and was in shambles at the time Christ started to preach. Christ presented man with the freedom to replace his spontaneous, deterministic submission and dominance behavior with deliberate choices. („Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's." (Matthew 22 : 21) Christ said; „No one puts a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old garment.. . neither is new wine put into old wineskins." (Matthew 9 : 16) and thereby established the idea of . . . relative dominance hierarchies, in which a man can play different roles. The incorporation of these flexible images of dominance were made possible by Christ saying that they would remain valid regardless of place or time, e.g.: „Where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I . . . " (Matthew 18 : 20), or „I have other sheep that are not of this fold" (John 10 : 16) and „In my Father's house are many rooms." (John 14 : 2). Again, it is interesting to note that the successors of Christ, especially the Romanized Jew St. Paul, tried to maintain some of the lost images of one general hierarchical order in later elaborations, by replacing the Jewish concept of the „chosen people" with the Christian Church, which, even if it expressly professes not to be, is just as excluding in practice. The vestigial remains of the absolute, nonflexible group-imposed dominance order, suppressed man's newly conceptualized freedom. Overzealous adherence to formal laws and rules, originally intended to ensure man's sense of security regarding the obsolete parts of his spontaneous behavior, led to formation of a church hierarchy with dominance over all matters of life and death. The resulting social pollution was most important in the Middle Ages, when politically motivated Crusades were disguised in images of establishing God-blessed dominance, and scholastic-academic disputes about miracles and angels prevented social reform. With the Renaissance came the necessary reaction, but the images of dominance hierarchy evidently have more resilience than the images of territory. Instead of incorporating humanitarian ideals, our

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