The Bible - open or closed? (5)

Philip commented on my 'The Bible - open or closed? (4)' post that he was still not sure which parts of scripture I might regard as closed.

For himself he thought that it is what he had described previously as his understanding of the meta-narrative in scripture which is the proclamation that the risen Jesus is Lord and Messiah and the fufilment of the Old Testament scriptures. He wrote that he did not think scripture gives us the space to question this resolution of the story though he fully accepted that the story goes on from that pivotal revelation in what Wright describes as Act V. Thus he concluded that the conversations we had been discussing take place within or under that meta-narrative.

I would agree that what is closed is the development of the narrative that is found in scripture and which Wright has summarised as being like a five act play with Act 1 Creation, Act 2 the Fall, Act 3 Israel, Act 4 Jesus and Act 5 giving us the New Testament as its first scene together with hints as to how the play will end. It is worth noting however that this narrative has its open elements in the form of gaps in the narrative and different tellings of the same events which do not always fully cohere.

I would hesitate in calling this narrative a meta-narrative because it is threaded through the fragments which form the whole canon of scripture rather than over-arching them. At the same time it is not a micro-narrative because its full telling is not contained by any one of the books forming the whole canon of scripture. It may be that a new descriptor is needed for the kind of narrative that we find in scripture or it may be that we need to speak of a meta-narrative that emerges through the linking and interweaving of micro-narratives.

What I am clear about however is that this narrative subverts the micro-narratives from which it emerges. This can be clearly seen in the way in René Girard applies his understanding of mimetic desire to the interpretation of scripture.

Girard suggests that we act on the basis of mimetic desire leading to conflict and violence which we resolve by the expulsion or sacrifice of scapegoats. Girard claims that as a result societies and cultures are originally based on founding murders where this single victim mechanism is in operation. He points to Cain’s murder of Abel as being the Biblical story which reveals this basis to human culture:

“What has happened since the foundation of the world, that is, since the violent foundations of the first culture, is a series of murders like the Crucifixion. These are murders founded on violent contagion, and consequently they are murders occurring because of the collective error regarding the victim, a misunderstanding caused by violent contagion.”

Over time, Girard argues, this mimetic process is disciplined by ritual into sacrificial systems which repeat the founding murder.

In this scenario, after the Fall, God wishes to communicate his love his love to us, these same human beings intent on personal or group survival. As he has given us free will, he has to communicate in and through the social and cultural structures which we have now created (i.e. sacrificial systems) but, in order to reveal his loving self, in a way that engages in an internal dialogue and critique of these same systems. Accordingly, he gives his chosen people, who have recent and personal experience of being scapegoats and victims, a founding story in which human sacrifice is emphatically rejected in favour of animal sacrifice (Genesis 22. 1-19).

At Mount Sinai the Israelites are then given the chance to become a nation of priests enjoying the kind of intimate, direct relationship with God that Moses has. God wants to draw them as a whole into an intimate relationship with him where they can debate, argue and influence God and where they are not simply obeying an external set of rules but have internalised God’s framework for life and live freely within it (Jeremiah 31: 33 & 34). God sets out for the people his vision of their relationship with him (Exodus 19: 6). They are all to be priests and, therefore, in time will be able to come directly into his presence.

He also provides the tools to make this happen (Exodus 20: 1–17). Limits are what parents set while they are teaching their children how to respond to the situations with which life will confront them. When they have learnt, they no longer need the external limits because they have internalised and can utilise these lessons. An analogy is that of a child learning to cross the road. Parents firstly lay down strict limits on what the child can and cannot do. Then the child is taught how to cross the road in safety. But when the child has learnt how to judge distance and speed then s/he is free to cross the road wherever s/he judges it is safe to do so and is no longer restricted to recognised crossing places.

This developmental process seems to be what God intended for the Law as can be seen in the way that both the writing prophets and Jesus use the Law. What they consistently do is to emphasise the core/the spirit/the fulfilment of the Law, not its external application (see, for example, Amos 5: 21 - 24 and Matthew 5: 17 - 48). Girard gives us a clear example of this occuring in writing about the woman caught in adultery (John 8: 3 – 11):

“The Law of Moses provides for stoning in the case of well-defined offenses. Moreover, because the Law fears false denunciations, to make these more difficult it requires the informants, a minimum of two, to cast the first two stones themselves.

Jesus transcends the Law, but in the Law’s own sense and direction. He does this by appealing to the most humane aspect of the legal prescription, the aspect most foreign to the contagion of violence, which is the obligation of the two accusers to throw the first two stones. The law deprives the accusers of a mimetic model.

Once the first stones are thrown, all the community must join in the stoning. To maintain order in ancient societies, there was sometimes no other means than this mechanism of contagion and mimetic unanimity. The Law resorts to this without hesitation, but as prudently, as parsimoniously as possible. Jesus intends to go beyond the provisions for violence in the Law, being in agreement on this point with many fellow Jews of his time. However, he always acts in the direction and spirit of the biblical revelation and not against it.”

What we see here is a law that in its literal application is structure-legitimating being re-imagined in terms of an essence that embraces pain. This is, therefore, in Brueggemann’s terms, counter-testimony. The people of Israel, at Sinai, are offered the opportunity to live in the counter-testimony and in conversation with God to move beyond the literal and structure-legitimating application to the embrace of pain that is its essence and core. The people, however, refuse this deeper level of relationship with God whilst still promising to obey him (Exodus 20: 18 – 19). They ask that Moses enters into this intimate relationship with God on their behalf and report back.

Instead of the counter-testimony, they choose a structure-legitimating, contractual relationship saying to Moses, “Speak to us yourself and we will listen. But do not have God speak to us or we will die” (Exodus 20: 19). This then becomes the pattern for God’s relationship with the people of Israel throughout the Old Testament. The people relate to God legalistically and through individual mediators (whether prophets, judges or kings) within a relationship that is fundamentally one of gift/grace. This is the tension of the Old Testament. Not that, at base, the relationship between the people and God is not of grace but that the people refuse to follow through on the logic of this and enter into the intimate relationship with God where they can internalise and utilise his pattern for life as a whole people.

The Bible can then be seen as the record of a conversation between God and a human race which has, as a whole, rejected this conversation but which, in a remnant (mainly Israel and the Church), continues to oscillate between dialogue and independent rejection. This is, finally, why the life, death and resurrection of Jesus is so decisive. As we have seen, Jesus lives fully in the counter-testimony, the conversation with God which embraces pain and imagines possibility, and he enables humanity to enter that conversation too.

Girard describes this radical reversal in terms of God first taking the side of the victim and then, in Christ, becoming the victim:

“The desire that lives through imitation almost always leads to conflict, and this conflict frequently leads to violence. The Bible unveils this process of imitative desire leading to conflict, and its distinctive narratives reveal at the same time that God takes the part of victims. In the Gospels the process of unveiling or revelation is radicalized: God himself, the Word become flesh in Jesus, becomes the victim … The New Testament Gospels are the starting point for a new science or knowledge of humanity. This new knowledge begins with faith in Christ the innocent victim, and it becomes the leaven that will work itself out and expand to the point that the concern for victims becomes the absolute value in all societies molded or affected by the spread of Christianity.”

Gerd Theissen sets a similar understanding of Christ’s revelation in the language of science by writing of Jesus as an ‘evolution against evolution’:

“In an evolutionary perspective religion has often been simply one of the social mechanisms by which control, and hence the continued survival of the strong, is established; but in these two cases [the increasingly monotheistic faith of ancient Israel and in the life, teaching and death of Jesus of Nazareth] religion takes an unprecedented turn, and becomes instead an agency of healing for the wounded. In the religion of the prophets, and in the religious commitment for which Jesus lived and died, we see the distillation of faith in a God who is on the side of the downtrodden rather than their oppressors, and who seeks to bring a new, supernatural order of justice and peace out of the natural laws of selection and mutation which spell death for the weak and powerless.”

James Alison also describes this same process as it is revealed in three key biblical moments: Elijah on Mount Horeb, the Exile and the conversion of Saul. The story of Eiljah on Mount Horeb is "the story of the un-deceiving of Elijah" in which he learns "not to identify God with all those special effects which he had known how to manipulate to such violent effect [on Mount Carmel]:"

"The still, small voice says much more than it seems to: it says that God is not a rival to Baal, that God is not to be found in the appearances of sacred violence."

Then in the Exile we see: "all the structures of group belonging, of personal, family and tribal belonging, in the dust. The whole imaginative within which Yahweh was worshipped, torn to shreds." The process of recovery "gave rise to a religion of texts, and of interpretation of texts, with the Temple, the cult and the monarchy relegated to second place . This means the reinvention of a new form of Yahwist life, where Yahweh is disassociated from many of the things which had seemed immutable and indispensable elements of his worship."

Finally, something similar occurs in Paul following his conversion experience:

"All of Paul's preaching, all of his theology, is characterised by the process of the collapse of a certain sacre structure, and by the slow discovery of the perspective given by a new focus on Yahweh, the Pauline equivalent of Elijah's still, small voice. Paul's whole argument about the Law is nothing other than the attempt to make it clear that, from the moment when the rsurrection makes present the crucified one as a constant hermeutical companion in our living of the religion of Yahweh, even that which had seemed sacred and untouchable in that religion, the very Torah of God, is desacrilised. It has to be understood according to whether it contributes to the sacrifice of other victims within a sacred order, or whether it is interpreted in such a way as to deconstruct the world of sacrifices and sacred orders."

Alison argues that the narrative of scripture leads us into a space where we understand that God has nothing to do with the "sacred forms of the past, with all their violence and their victims" and "where we learn, precisely in the midst of the deconstruction of all that, new ways of speaking words of God, so as to participate in the new creation."

Alison therefore sees the development of the narrative of scripture as deconstructing or subverting the understandings of God articulated in the initial stages of that narrative. In this way, the story told in scripture is one that is in dialogue with itself where the development of the story goes together with a developing revelation of God. This narrative and conversation he sees as leading us to a place where we can learn "new ways of speaking words of God", a phrase that reminds me of some words of Rowan Williams from Christ on Trial:

“All human identity is constructed through conversations, in one way or another. The gospel adds the news that, in order to find the pivot of our identity as human beings, there is one inescapable encounter, one all-important conversation into which we must be drawn. This is not just the encounter with God, in a general sense, but the encounter with God made vulnerable, God confronting the systems and exclusions of the human world within that world – so that, among other things, we can connect the encounter with God to those human encounters where we are challenged to listen to the outsider and the victim.”

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16 Horsepower - For Heaven's Sake.