What we have then in both the Hebrew and Christian scriptures is a both/and. A linear narrative thrust is combined with the laying of fragments side by side so that each fragment adds to and challenges the others. As Josipovici puts it, in writing of the Hebrew Bible:
"This is an extraordinarily simple and an extraordinarily flexible system, which can lead from what could almost be described as shorthand to rich elaboration … Each new element … helps to bring into focus prior elements which we would have overlooked had we not been alerted to them by what follows.”[1]
As Wilder noted the narrative thrust is essentially structure-legitimating, a pledge of the stability of the cosmic order, while, as Josipovici noted the laying of fragments side by side constitutes a refusal of closure (or, as Wilder, puts it “a very dense portrayal of the human experience and existence in all its empirical reality”[2]). Joel Rosenberg in describing the Torah coins the phrase, “a purposeful documentary montage”, which is a helpful summary of what has been set out above. [3]
This both/and is also the conclusion that Walter Brueggemann has reached in developing his theology of the Old Testament:
“A somewhat different ... dialectic is found in his proposed structure for understanding Old Testament theology - the dialectic between the majority voice that is creation-oriented, a voice that assumes an ordered world under the governance of a sovereign God and so serves to legitimate the structures of the universe, and a minority voice that is in tension with the legitimation of structure, a voice embracing the pain that is present ... in the world and protesting against an order that allows such to be. Brueggemann’s dialectical approach, which assumes an ongoing tension between voices “above the fray” and those “in the fray” is fundamental to his reading of the Old Testament”[4].
There is then an internal conversation within the Hebrew and Christian scriptures between the voices ‘above the fray’ and those ‘in the fray’, between structure-legitimation and the embrace of pain combined with lack of closure or pattern. This internal conversation is there not just in the content of the scriptures but in the very forms of the scriptures themselves. Conversation, then, is built in to scripture.
Brueggemann views the tension between the core- and counter-testimony as unresolved in the Old Testament and therefore views God as ambiguous, always in the process of deciding “how much to be committed to the common theology, how many of its claims must be implemented, and how many of these claims can be resisted”[5].
Brueggemann’s minority voice, the counter-testimony to the core testimony of the Old Testament, seems to equate to the protest in relationship that Sacks says characterises Judaism. It is a “radical probe of a new way of relationship that runs toward the theology of the cross in the New Testament and that runs in our time toward and beyond the Holocaust, as Elie Wiesel and Emil L. Fackenheim have seen so well”[6]. Weisel articulates the counter-testimony well when he says:
“I have risen against His justice, protested His silence and sometimes His absence, but my anger rises up within faith and not outside it ... the texts cite many occasions when prophets and sages rebelled against the lack of divine interference in human affairs during times of persecution ... If that hurts, so be it. Sometimes we must accept the pain of faith so as not to lose it.”[7]
[1] G. Josipovici, The Book Of God: A Response To the Bible (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1988), p. 68.
[2] Ibid., p. 54.
[3] Cited in Josipovitch, p. 17. Like Josipovitch, Rosenberg states that this montage “must be perceived as a unity, regardless of the number and types of smaller units that form the building blocks of its composition”.
[4] P. D. Miller, ‘Introduction’ in W. Brueggemann, Old Testament Theology: Essays on Structure, Theme and Text, Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1992, p. xvi.
[5] Ibid., p. 25.
[6] Ibid., p. 26. The reference to Fackenheim is to To Mend the World: Foundations of Future Jewish Thought, New York: Schocken Press, 1982, especially pps. 278 - 294.
[7] E. Wiesel, All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs, New York: Schocken Books, 1995.
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John Tavener - As One Who Has Slept.
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