Christ of Revolution and of Poetry

'Not from a monstrance silver-wrought
But from the tree of human pain
Redeem our sterile misery,
Christ of Revolution and of Poetry,
That man’s long journey
May not have been in vain.'

David Gascoyne

'The Spirit is flesh, I tell you
and God himself is eau de vie,
he who has joined him knows this,
he who has sipped is drunk of it.'

Benjamin Fondane

'Despair has wings
Love has despair
For shimmering wing
Societies can change'

Pierre Jean Jouve

“ The poet's job is to go on holding on to something like faith, through the darkness of total lack of faith ... the eclipse of God. - David Gascoyne ”

Gascoyne's biographer Richard Fraser writes that 'Nominally he remained an Anglican, but he had read and suffered his own way to religious understanding through an encounter with Christian Existentialism in the persons of Fondane and Chestov, and the pervasive influences of Kierkegaard and Heidegger.' Poems 1937-42, marked a shift in Gascoyne's work towards a more explicitly religious sensibility and Fraser suggests that 'The religious verse will probably outlast the earlier stuff because it addresses permanent questions.'

Niall McDevitt writes that 'Gascoyne’s Christianity is that of Blake, of Coppe, of the millenarians and Gnostics. ‘Christ of Revolution and of Poetry’ is the startling refrain. One really doesn’t get better crucifixion poems than this [Ecce Homo from the sequence Miserere]; it is the equal of a painting by an Old Master, yet it is updated to the Fascist era. The whole sequence Miserere is evidence of his religious existentialist quest, via friends such as Pierre Jean Jouve and Benjamin Fondane, as well as
the posthumously influential Kierkegaard.'

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David Gascoyne - Prelude to a New Fin-de-Siècle.

Maciej Hoffman: the collision of thoughts with reality

All the angst of the world seems spilled out in drips, splatters and gestural brushstrokes on the huge unstretched canvases of Maciej Hoffman's current exhibition at Walthamstow's Tokarska Gallery. The distressed surfaces depict equally distressed characters with existential Expressionist force and a seeming spontaneity of style.

'Disquiet', 'Powerless', 'Nameless', 'Confused', 'Agitator'; Hoffman's titles are accurate indicators of his content. These are grandiose dramatic works full of the tension and conflict by which Hoffman is frequently seized; the collision of thoughts with reality. Stress and fear flow from the problems of the everyday through the walls of his studio to rip apart the work. Almost all his days, he says, are accompanied by stress and the fear of danger, encircled, as he is, by a world in which a price is paid for each breath. 

The child of artists, Hoffman was antagonistic to following in his parents footsteps which resulted in a "troubled" childhood. He was a teenager during the beginning of martial law in Poland. Then came the fall of communism and his immersion in the birth of Polish “capitalism, post-communism”. For fifteen years he worked for one of the biggest Polish advertisement agencies yet this freedom to use art for commercial purposes combined with the unrelenting dominance of the profit principle came to seem as much of a trap and constraint as that which he had experienced under communism. 

Hoffman is interested in art as freedom. His sense is that our control systems for classification, measurement and supervision are narrowing our space for what is irrational, imperfect or disordered. Artistic creation remains the one real margin of freedom we can use. His fluid, gestural manipulation of paint on canvas is seemingly raw, random, unfinished, and yet the emotional impact of his angst is as great as the size of the works themselves. Soutine, de Kooning, Keifer are inspirations and references but Hoffman is assuredly his own man with his own tortured vision.

Maciej Hoffman's paintings are at the Tokarska Gallery until 6 October, Thur - Sat, 12pm - 7pm.

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Lou Reed - Sad Song.

Critiquing demythologization (3)

The issues listed in my previous post should be sufficient to indicate that, viewed on its own terms, there are significant issues with Bultmann’s approach. This is implicitly recognised by the fact that Bultmann’s followers either draw back from his position by starting a new quest for the Historical Jesus or take demythologization to its logical extreme removing all distinctive features of Christianity altogether. In addition, Bultmann’s approach was a response to a particular set of historical circumstances which have now passed. Significant changes in human understanding of knowledge have occurred which make Bultmann’s programme of demythologization unnecessary in addition to providing a further critique of it:

• Subjectivity and objectivity: The subjective nature of scientific knowledge is increasingly being recognised. Scientific methodology is based on assumptions that cannot be examined scientifically, reflects the perspective of the observer in experiment and observation and utilises metaphor and worldview in creating hypotheses. The divide between subjective and objective and between scientific and faith knowledge is increasingly redundant, with all knowledge beginning to be understood as involving both subjectivity and objectivity. Historical-criticism, therefore, can no longer be credibly viewed as objective while the assumptions that Bultmann and many New Testament scholars have made about the Early Church and the gospels are now open to question in a way that was not previously the case. As a result, scholars and theologians are increasingly working again with the whole received text of the Bible as opposed to a sole concentration on pericopes.
• Metaphor and history: Bultmann’s view that myth equates to human imagery of the divine and must be interpreted to be acceptable to contemporary culture screens out knowledge. No longer is metaphor viewed as a pretty husk that can be discarded or interpreted, increasingly it is being recognised as a vital component in knowledge. In deconstructing to the nth degree, scientific methodology has been reductionist and has often lost from its reconstructions the subtlety and nuances of the metaphors and myths being deconstructed or interpreted. The combination of history and metaphor in the Bible, Christian doctrine and Church tradition can again be valued equally while there is now also awareness of the different ways in which both need to be handled in order to be understood. There is also an additional challenge to that of understanding the resonances of these original metaphors. That is, of creating contemporary metaphors or metaphor systems that communicate and resonate in the same way that the original metaphors did within their culture.
• Worldview and knowledge: Worldviews are increasingly seen as the lens through which human beings view the world. As such, they are fundamental to human knowing. God’s self-revelation in history cannot be understood without understanding the worldviews within which God chose his self-revelation to occur. Nor can we truly know without an understanding of the worldview through which we view the forms and content of God’s self-revelation. However, worldviews are in dialogue with each other both within contemporary culture and throughout time and pose challenges to each other. For example, Lesslie Newbigin has argued that: “The community of faith makes the confession that God raised Jesus from the dead and that the tomb was empty thereafter … [and that this] statement … can be accepted as a fact only if the whole plausibility structure of contemporary Western culture is called into question”. Newbigin suggests that such “conflict between the two views will not be settled on the basis of logical argument [but on the basis of] [t]he view … that is seen to offer … the widest rationality, the greatest capacity to give meaning to the whole of experience”. It is this witness that is required of the Church within contemporary culture, not the acceptance of a contemporary worldview that underpins Bultmann’s demythologization programme.
• Dialectical theology: For Bultmann and Karl Barth dialectical theology was about the gap between God and human beings. However, for a contemporary Old Testament scholar such as Walter Bruggemann, dialectical theology has become about traditions held together in tension. This can be understood as symptomatic of scriptures that are both human and divine – as containing both, at the same time, human understanding of God and God’s partial self-revelation. Both then being in conversation, in tension and in relation with the other. Within this understanding there is no need to screen out the dialogue with history and science in the way that Bultmann attempts through demythologization because the essence of scripture is relation. However, this does not mean that both human understanding and divine revelation co-exists without challenge. The counter-testimony of the Old Testament is eloquent witness to the way in which God encourages and engages in debate with human beings while revelation, by its holistic nature, challenges the partialities and limitations of human understandings of God and of being.
• Whole and part: When the Bible is viewed as a whole and the form of this whole considered, it appears a very different document from that presented through form-criticism and demythologization. It can be seen as both a document formed through human historical, literary, sociological and theological processes and as the inspired, partial self-revelation of God. Seen as the former, it can be critiqued as can any human document. Seen as the latter it can be understood as normative, but normative in ways that respect its form. Its form can be understood from two perspectives. First, as a story moving through five acts – Creation, Fall, Israel, Jesus, and Church and second, as a series of fragments held in relation one to the other. The former provides a participatory fifth act in which we, the Church, continue the story within the parameters set by the previous four acts and at the prompting of the Holy Spirit. The latter is indicative of the style or language in which God self-reveals. A language or style “by which apparent contradictions might be held … [being] elusive, allusive, not didactic”. A language or style reveling in unities within diversity, revealing connection and pattern as much through the gaps between stories, genres, metaphors and what is not said (thereby maintaining God’s otherness), as by what is actually said.
  

Ultimately, where Bultmann emphasises individual encounter with God only within the immediate present, these approaches envisage relation – within God, between God and human beings, between the varying voices and stories within Scripture, within the Church throughout the ages, between worldviews within time and history, and within the interpretive community. Foundational to these approaches is the idea of God in relation within himself as Trinity, the ‘ideas of ideas’ from which the transcendentals identified by Colin Gunton – relationality, substantiality and perichoresis – derive to underpin all pattern and connection within the created order. Jesus’ death and resurrection reverses separation of human beings from God, from each other and from the created order and sets up a new community able to begin exploring within the unfinished fifth act, the style and substance of the pattern and harmony that God originally set within the world in creation. As Jesus said and as the Early Church demonstrated such love is the true and effective testimony to the reality of the encounter with God.

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Bob Dylan - Sweetheart Like You.

Critiquing demythologization (2)

Before moving on to critique demythologization, it is again worthwhile to pause and focus on the positive aspects of Bultmann’s aim and programme. What Bultmann wants to do through demythologization is to clear the ground for encounter with God in the present. He is aiming to enable contemporary people to actually experience God in the here and now. While this emphasis on experience is another aspect of his thought that clearly derives from Liberal Protestantism and from Schleiermacher in particular it is, nevertheless, an emphasis that he shares in the twentieth century with the very different traditions of the Pentecostal and Charismatic movements and also with the long history of Christian mysticism. This is a vital emphasis and one that must not be lost sight of in all the talk of history, metaphor and worldview that follows as part of the critique and conclusion to this essay. The arguments that will be made are made not for their own sake but to ground the very real encounter with the person of Jesus through the Holy Spirit in the present.

Conservative critiques of Bultmann have commonly started from the view that Bultmann is fitting Christianity to Existentialism and, therefore, allowing contemporary philosophy to shape Christianity rather than releasing Christianity to shape or challenge contemporary thought. This argument completely misunderstands Bultmann’s intention (whatever one thinks of the results) and therefore is not a useful place from which to begin a critique. An examination of Bultmann’s forms is a more constructive (and unusual) place from which to begin such a critique. Form-criticism tends to be an approach applied to texts or traditions other than those of the author and, therefore, those using it as part of their argument are commonly unaware of the contradictions inherent within the forms they themselves use.

Using this approach, Bultmann’s demythologization programme can be critiqued in the following ways:

• Acceptance of scientific methodology: Bultmann’s desire is to free the Word of God from scientific investigation yet his use of form-criticism, in understanding the Bible, is firmly grounded in this methodology. Science maintains that nothing can be accepted as true unless it is clearly and distinctly perceived. To achieve this perception what is being examined must be broken down into the smallest possible component parts. Science then reconstructs from the basis of the simplest idea. Form-criticism breaks down the whole text of the gospels into their smallest units (pericopes) examining each in the context of the Early Church in order to identify those considered original to Jesus. From the relatively small number considered original a picture of the Jesus of History is reconstructed. It is on the basis of such historical inquiry that Bultmann argues that little can be said about the Jesus of History. There is then a fundamental contradiction at the heart of Bultmann’s approach. He wants to maintain both the priority of God’s Word over scientific methodology and the value of scientific methodology in the understanding of God’s Word.
• Subjective versus objective: The above contradiction came be seen most clearly when Bultmann’s approach is considered in terms of subjectivity and objectivity. On the basis of objective historical-criticism Bultmann considers the gospels subjective (i.e. the interpretations of the Early Church, not historical fact). As a result, the gospels do not communicate clearly to a contemporary culture that accepts as objective scientific methodology. But when Bultmann selects what he considers to be an appropriate methodology for communicating the Gospel within contemporary culture he does not select an objective methodology. Instead, in selecting Existentialism he selects a subjective methodology. If objectivity is the issue then why is Bultmann selecting Existentialism for his approach and, if subjectivity is a meaningful means of encounter for contemporary culture, why are the gospels being discounted?
• Whole versus part: Form-criticism works with the smallest component parts of the text and, in doing so, categorises some pericopes as authentic and others as inauthentic to Jesus. Therefore, the form-critic is unable to approach the actual received text as a whole and there must, as a result, be a significant question mark over the extent to which the form-critic actually engages with the received text at all. This tendency is also apparent in demythologization where by interpreting the text in existential terms both the history and imagery in the received text are removed. As a result, the text that is encountered is not the whole received text but something less.
• Mythology and worldview: Mythology is a notoriously difficult term to define and, therefore, there is no real agreement about the extent to which the Bible contains mythology or is mythological. Bultmann defines mythology as “the use of imagery to express the otherworldly in terms of this world and the divine in terms of human life, the other side in terms of this side”. However, this definition can be challenged by other approaches and Bultmann, himself, is not consistent in his use of the term. As a result, there is no agreement on what needs to be demythologized or on how far demythologization should go. In addition, Bultmann has an implicit, uncritical and unexamined acceptance of the contemporary Modernist worldview which then leads him to an arrogant dismissal of the first century Jewish worldview. A dismissal which is actually based on two naïve assumptions. First, that he, himself, can stand outside a worldview altogether and second, that first century Jewish metaphor was understood literally.
• Visual versus lingual: In interpreting the text in existential terms Bultmann is converting images and metaphors that work visually into non-visual explanations. Metaphors work by analogy. They hold disparate objects or ideas together in order to reveal connections. As a result, ambiguity is necessarily built into metaphor. The connection or comparison between objects or ideas must be close enough to be meaningful but not so close as to be exact or the objects/ideas would be the same. This ambiguity is the creative core of metaphor maintaining the otherness of the objects/ideas and teasing the viewer with the possible extent of connection. However, when visual imagery is interpreted through language it is precisely this ambiguity that is lost. In interpretation meanings are closed down through definition instead of being opened up through relation.

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King Crimson - 21st Century Schizoid Man.

Critiquing demythologization (1)

Rudolf Bultmann was an influential twentieth century New Testament scholar and a pioneer in the use of the form-critical method but is most well known for the programme of demythologization that he began in his 1941 essay New Testament and Mythology.

In his work Bultmann had two main concerns. The first was to let God be God and the second was to allow the Word and scandal of the cross to be experienced and known in twentieth century Western culture. In critiquing Bultmann’s ideas it is necessary to keep his positive aims at the forefront of our thinking, in order not to demonize a man who genuinely wished to see Christ preached and received by faith in his time.

Bultmann saw the damage that scientific methodology as applied in the historical-critical method had done to faith in the Christian God during the nineteenth century. The search for the Historical Jesus had eventually led to a position in which, because the gospels were considered primarily the interpretive work of the Early Church, the Bible (the authoritative word of God) was viewed as historically inaccurate.

Bultmann accepted, as a New Testament historian, historical-critical methods and, therefore, the position that very little could be said about the Jesus of History. In addition, he understood that, as a result, many did (or would) view Christianity as essentially disproved by a combination of science and history. Viewing this methodology as correct but also wishing to defend Christianity and to present the Word and the cross to his contemporaries with power, he faced a considerable dilemma.

Liberal Protestantism supplied him with an answer to his dilemma. This was, that the Bible contained a timeless message concealed under the cloak of a time-bound worldview. However, Liberal Protestantism had tied this idea to the Quest for the Historical Jesus. The Quest, it had been thought, in uncovering the Jesus of History would also clarify the timeless message of Christianity that had been obscured by the mythology the Early Church had created about Jesus. Bultmann now considered that this was not possible for the reasons noted above. Therefore, what he needed to do was to detach this timeless message from the Quest and from all historical inquiry in order to reveal its timeless nature and through this, the transcendence of God. God, he needed to argue, cannot be investigated by historical or scientific methods. In fact, this Word calls science itself into question by calling man out of all man-made security.

He found the means to do this in Existential philosophy. Existentialism emphasises the extent to which human knowing is conditioned by personal participation in being and argues that, as human beings are the only creatures to possess self-understanding, knowledge of being must begin with personal being. The effect is an emphasis on subjectivity and personal encounter within time. On this basis, science and historical-criticism (based on scientific methodology) cannot be a starting point for knowledge of being. Bultmann, therefore, can argue not only that nothing significant can be known of the Jesus of History but also that this does not matter because knowledge of being does not come through objective analysis of history but instead through personal encounter with God in time. For Bultmann, this personal encounter comes through the contemporary preaching of the Word.

What is needed then, Bultmann argues, is for the kernel of the gospel to be clearly preached in such a way that the scandal of the cross challenges individuals to personal encounter with God. To do this the husk has to be cleared away but need not be simply discarded as Liberal Protestantism aimed to do. Instead the husk needs to be interpreted in existential terms so that once this is done no hint of mythology remains. This is, then, Bultmann’s programme of demythologization.

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Woody Guthrie - Jesus Christ.