Interestingly, this both/and is also the conclusion that Walter Brueggemann has reached in developing his theology of the Old Testament. Patrick Miller explains: “A somewhat different ... dialectic is found in [Bruggemann’s] 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”.[i]
It seems, then, that there is an internal conversation within the Bible between the voices ‘above the fray’ and those ‘in the fray’, between structure-legitimation and the embrace of pain, between a narrative thread and a lack of closure. This internal conversation is there not just in the content of the scriptures (witness the great dialogues between God and Abraham, Moses, Jeremiah and Job) but in the very forms of the scriptures themselves. Conversation it seems is in-built into scripture and opens up to us the real-life reconciliation that is inherent in the structure and content of scripture.
The Bible can 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 why the life, death and resurrection of Jesus is finally so decisive. Jesus lives fully in the counter-testimony, the conversation with God which embraces pain and imagines possibility, and he then enables humanity to consistently enter in to that conversation too.
Rene Girard has described 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 moulded or affected by the spread of Christianity.”[ii]
In both the Art we have considered and in our discussion of Biblical form and content we have seen the holding together of fragments in ways that enable conversations to occur between these fragmentary ideas and images. This is, I think, what Nicholas Mosley meant when he called for a revival of religious and artistic languages that are “elusive, allusive; not didactic,” dealing not just with facts and units of data but also with “the patterns, connections, that such data, together with the minds that observe them, make.” By this, we can perhaps see that, “apparent contradictions might be held,” “seeming opposites held from a higher point of view” and “errors accepted as the purveyors of learning rather than traps.”
[i] P. D. Miller, ‘Introduction’ in W. Brueggemann, Old Testament Theology: Essays on Structure, Theme and Text, Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1992, p. xvi.
[ii] J. G. Williams, ‘Foreword’ in R. Girard, I see Satan fall like lightning, Orbis Books, 2001, pp. x & xix.
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John Tavener - Song for Athene.
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