A key element in these revelations is the Bible which is, as we should by now expect, conversational in both its form and content. One interesting way into exploring this aspect of the Bible is to look at a statement about Judaism made by Jonathan Sacks in his fascinating series of Faith Lectures. Commenting on Midrash Raba, he states that:
“Abraham says: God, why did you abandon the world? God says to Abraham: Why did you abandon Me? And there then begins that dialogue between Heaven and Earth which has not ceased in 4,000 years. That dialogue in which God and Man find one another.” [1]
“Only thus,” Sacks says, “can we understand the great dialogues between God and Abraham and Moses and Jeremiah and Job … Dialogues which never ended in the Bible … [and which] were … accentuated in the midrashic and aggadic literature … the literature of lament of the mediaeval period, … in hassidic stories, … and … in the Holocaust literature.” “In other words,” he suggests, “that dialogue … has been a non-stop feature of Judaism from biblical times to the present …”. His claim is that this dialogue is unique to Judaism.
He is not alone in putting forward this point of view. Gabriel Josipovici develops a similar argument in relation to the Christian and Hebrew scriptures. He argues that:
“The Christian Bible leads to the end of time, to the fulfilment of time. When time is fulfilled everything will have been revealed … but by and large the Hebrew Bible chose a different path. It chose not to stay with the fulfilment of man’s desires but with the reality of what happens to us in life. We all long in our daily lives for an end to uncertainty, to the need for decisions and choices, with the concomitant feeling that the choices we have made may have been the wrong ones. Yet we also know that life will not provide such an end, that we will always be enmeshed in uncertainty. What is extraordinary is that a sacred book should dramatize this, rather than be the one place where we are given what we desire. But that is precisely what the Hebrew Bible does … What we have to say is that Christianity expresses profound desires and suggests that these can eventually be fulfilled. The Hebrew Bible refuses that consolation.”[2]
I disagree and suggest that Christianity has taken up both this dialogue and refusal of consolation that is a feature of Judaism and of the Hebrew Bible[3].
Protesting dialogue with God can be seen, for example, in the work of the poet-priests George Herbert and Gerard Manley Hopkins. In ‘Bitter-sweet’, Herbert says that if God is going to be contrary in his relationship with him then he will reciprocate and complain, praise, bewail, approve, lament and love:
“Ah my dear angry Lord,
Since thou dost love, yet strike;
Cast down, yet help afford;
Sure I will do the like.
I will complain, yet praise;
I will bewail, approve:
And all my sour-sweet days
I will lament, and love.”[4]
Hopkins’ poems of lament and protest have been called the ‘terrible sonnets’[5]. In ‘Carrion Comfort’ (which he described as ‘written in blood’) he wrestles with God, while a line from ‘Thou art indeed just, Lord’ - “Wert thou my enemy, O thou my friend,/How wouldst thou worse, I wonder, than thou dost/Defeat, thwart me?” - could be a concise summary of protest within relationship[6].
Christian theology has also taken up these prayers and cries. Karl-Josef Kushel, for example, consciously aims to do theology in the sphere of George Steiner’s ‘Easter Saturday’ and by paying attention to the art that arises in this sphere.[7] Kushel notes that, “the rebellion of human beings against God can be their form of prayer; quarrelling their form of saying yes; protest their declaration of love to God”[8]. The language of prayer should be the basis of theology, talk of God should come from talking with God but, he suggests, theology often does not reflect the disturbed nature of prayer:
“Have we ever perceived what has accumulated over millennia of the history of religion in the language of prayers ... the crying and the jubilation, the lament and the song, the despair and the mourning and the final dumbness? Have we perhaps orientated ourselves too much on a language of prayer which has been tamed by the church and liturgy, by the one-sided images from the biblical tradition? What about Job’s lament ‘How long?’ ... The Son’s cry of desolation, and Maranatha, as the last word of the New Testament? This language is far more capable of resistance, far less malleable and ready for use, far less forgettable than the language of platonism and idealism, in which theology is concerned about how compatible it is with modernity and with which it tests its perplexing firmness in the face of all catastrophes and all experiences of non-identity.”[9]
[1] J. Sacks, ‘Judaism, Justice and Tragedy – Confronting the problem of evil – 6 November 2000’ in Faith Lectures, The Website of the Chief Rabbi – www.chiefrabbi.org/faith/evil.html.
[2] Ibid., pp. 87 & 89.
[3] In making this point I am disagreeing with Sacks’ argument that dialogue with God is unique to Judaism but in doing so I do not wish to equate the scale of suffering experienced by the Church to those of the Jewish people. Nor do I wish to ignore the fact that the Church has not only experienced sufferings but has also inflicted it and, in particular, has inflicted it on the Jewish people both directly and by its silence. For both, genuine repentance is required from us, the contemporary Church. We must remember too that Paul’s imagery in Romans 11: 17 - 24 is of Gentile Christians being grafted in among the Jews as God’s chosen people not, in any way, of Gentile Christians replacing the Jews wholesale although this has often been underlying implication of the way in which the Church has acted.
[4] G. Herbert, The Poems of George Herbert, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961, p. 162.
[5] A comment on their content, not their quality.
[6] G. M. Hopkins, Selected Poems, Heinemann Educational Books Ltd, 1964, pps. xxv, xxvi, 64 and 75.
[7] Steiner has used the three central days of the Passion narrative to symbolise humanity’s current state: “But ours is the long day’s journey of the Saturday. Between suffering, aloneness, unutterable waste on the one hand and the dream of liberation of rebirth on the other. In the face of the torture of a child, of the death of love which is Friday, even the greatest art and poetry are almost helpless. In the Utopia of the Sunday, the aesthetic will, presumably, no longer have logic or necessity. The apprehensions and figurations ... which tell of pain and of hope, of the flesh which is said to taste of ash and of the spirit which is said to have the savour of fire, are always Sabbatarian. They have risen out of an immensity of waiting which is that of man.” G. Steiner, Real Presences: Is There Anything in What We Say?, London: Faber & Faber; Chicago: University of Chicago, 1989, pps. 231 - 232.
[8] K-J. Kuschel, The Poet As Mirror, SCM Press, 1999, p. 224.
[9] Ibid., p. 226, citing J. B. Metz, ‘Gotteskrise. Versuch zur “geistigen Situation der Zeit”’, in id. et al. (eds.), Diagnosen zur Zeit, Dusseldorf 1994, 84f.
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Bruce Cockburn - If I Had A Rocket Launcher.
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