What follows is my inadequate attempt to describe briefly why I think the ideas of the seven writers I listed in my previous post are so significant. Taken together aspects of their ideas enable us to see the work of Christ as opening up, for human beings, a conversational partnership with God which embraces pain and imagines possibility.
Gabriel Josipovici has suggested, that the scriptures work “by way of minimal units laid alongside each other, the narrative being built up by slotting these together where necessary” (G. Josipovici,
The Book Of God: A Response To the Bible, Yale University Press, 1988). This form then affects the content because “events are laid out alongside each other, without comment, and we are never allowed to know whether the pattern we see emerging at one point is the true pattern”.
But Josipovici also identifies a narrative thread that holds together the disparate fragments which form the Bible:
“It’s a magnificent conception, spread over thousands of pages and encompassing the entire history of the universe. There is both perfect correspondence between Old and New Testaments and a continuous forward drive from Creation to the end of time: ‘It begins where time begins, with the creation of the world; it ends where time ends, with the Apocalypse, and it surveys human history in between, or the aspect of history it is interested in, under the symbolic names of Adam and Israel’. Earlier ages had no difficulty in grasping this design, though our own, more bookish age, obsessed with both history and immediacy, has tended to lose sight of it. Neither theologians nor biblical scholars have stood back enough to see it as a whole. Yet it is a whole and quite unlike any other book.”
What we have then in the scriptures is a both/and. A linear narrative thrust combined with the laying of fragments side by side so that each fragment adds to and challenges the others. The Bible’s narrative thrust is essentially structure-legitimating, a pledge of the stability of the cosmic order, while the laying of fragments side by side constitutes a refusal of closure.
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 [Brueggemann’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” (P. D. Miller, ‘Introduction’ in W. Brueggemann,
Old Testament Theology: Essays on Structure, Theme and Text, Augsburg Fortress, 1992).
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. As a result, 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” (J. G. Williams, ‘Foreword’ in R. Girard,
I see Satan fall like lightning, Orbis Books, 2001).
N.T. Wright has written of the Bible’s narrative thread in terms of a play:
“Among the detailed moves available within this model … is the possibility of seeing the biblical story as itself consisting of five acts. Thus: 1-Creation; 2-Fall; 3-Israel; 4-Jesus. The writing of the New Testament – including the writing of the gospels – would then form the first scene in the fifth act, and would simultaneously give hints (Romans 8, 1 Corinthians 15, parts of the Apocalypse) of how the play is supposed to end. The fact of Act 4 being what it is shows what sort of conclusion the drama should have, without making clear all of the intervening steps. The church would then live under the ‘authority’ of the extant story, being required to offer an improvisory performance of the final act as it leads up to and anticipates the intended conclusion. The church is designed, according to this model, as a stage in the creator’s work of art: as Paul says in Ephesians 2.10, autou gar esmen poiema, we are his artwork” (N. T. Wright,
The New Testament and the People of God, London, SPCK, 1997).
It is in the scope that the Church is offered for improvisation in Act 5 that the possibility arises of humanity working in partnership with God. Nicholas Mosley’s novel
The Hesperides Tree is a fictional exploration of this possibility. His central character, while delving in a library, comes upon the writings of the ninth-century monk John Scotus Erigena who “said that it was in this life that one could if one chose have an experience of God; of God and humans going hand in hand, creating what happened hand in hand”. His understanding of Scotus is that:
“In this world God was dependent on humans for what He and they did, to them He had handed over freedom: He remained that by which their freedom could operate, so of course they were dependent on Him too. But what could be learned, practised, of freedom except through exposure, risk – through trying things out by casting oneself on the waters as it were and discovering what the outcome would be after many days. But John Scotus’s way of seeing things had for a thousand years been largely ignored, and freedom had been taken into custody by Church and State” (N. Mosley,
The Hesperides Tree, Vintage, 2002).
But how is it in any sense possible that human beings could work in partnership with God? Wright’s idea of improvising under the authority of the extant story provides us with one means by which this could become possible. Paul Ricoeur and Colin Gunton provide us with two more.
Ricoeur suggests that humanity is made in the image of God because we enjoy the power of creativity: “… according to Ricouer, human being is possibility: “it does not yet appear what we shall be” (1 John 3: 2). Human existence is “forward-orientated,” constantly projecting itself in front of itself towards a possible way of being. Possibility is therefore intimately connected to the imagination which projects it, and to time, specifically the future. Human being, then, is not limited to the here and now, that is, to actuality … there is a “surplus of being” to human existence, and this surplus of being is nothing other than possibility. We are not as we shall be. Thanks to this surplus of being – possibility – humanity can hope” (K. J. Vanhoozer,
Biblical Narrative in the Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur: A Study in Hermeneutics and Theology, Cambridge University Press, 1990).
Kevin Vanhoozer notes that: “In his essay “The Image of God and the Epic of Man,” Ricoeur suggests that humans are in the image of God because they too enjoy the power of creativity. Thus the image of God, creativity, gives rise to the images of man, in the sense of the images that man makes. These images constitute “the sum total of the ways in which man projects his vision on things.”” Ricoeur suggests that through our imagination we can determine (God created) possibilities and define the (God created) essence of all that is around us. It may be that this is what is meant by the story of Adam naming the creatures in Eden (Genesis 2. 18-24).
Possibilities are, Ricoeur argues, real, although unactualised and it is through imagination that actualisation occurs and with it self-understanding:
“The point of phenomenology is to describe the meaning of “lived experience” rather than its factuality. Husserl calls the meaning of a thing its “essence” (eidos). We come to know the essence of a thing by exploring its various possibilities. These possibilities are explored in the workshop of the imagination. Ricoeur notes of phenomenology that “its favourite technique is the method of imaginative variations. It is in varying the possible realizations of the same essential structure that the fundamental articulation can be made manifest.” Husserl’s example of the meaning or “essence” of a table is helpful. By “free imaginative variation” we can alter its form, its color, its material. By then looking to see what there is in common among the various examples, we can determine its essence. We can also imagine possible uses of a table: we can eat a meal on it; we can write letters or do a jigsaw puzzle on it; we can stand on it to fix the lightbulb etc. These variations are not present, but they are imagined as possible. Phenomenological description is thus closely related to fiction and the realm of as if. As far as phenomenology is concerned, we may define the meaning or “essence” of something as the imagined ensemble of its possibilities”.
Colin Gunton then gives us a third means by which humanity can work in partnership with God. Gunton works with the idea that God is in relation within himself as Trinity. The Trinity is, he argues, the ‘ideas of ideas’ from which open transcendentals – relationality, substantiality and perichoresis – derive to underpin all pattern and connection within the created order:
“Personal beings are social beings, so that of both God and man it must be said that they have their being in their personal relatedness: their free relation-in-otherness. This is not so of the rest of the creation, which does not have the marks of love and freedom which are among the marks of the personal. Of the universe as a whole we should conclude that it is marked by relationality rather than sociality. All things are what they are by being particulars constituted by many and various forms of relation. Relationality is thus the transcendental which allows us to learn something of what it is to say that all created people and things are marked by their coming from and returning to God who is himself, in his essential and inmost being, a being in relation. And it is a transcendental which at the same time enables us to incorporate the insights gained from the discussion of the other two transcendentals, perichoresis and substantiality.
Accordingly, of both God and the world it must be said that they have their being in relation. In the case of God, the transcendentals are functions of the eternal and free relations of the persons, each of whom has, in inseparable relation to the others, his particular manner of being and acting. This does not mean that we have a private view into the being of God, but that the general characteristics of God’s eternal being, as persons in relation, communion, may be known from what he has done and does in the actions that we call the economy of creation and salvation. In turn, the doctrine of God derived from the economy enables us to see that the creation bears in different ways the marks of its making, so that the transcendentals qualify people and things, too, in a way appropriate to what they are. In sum, the transcendentals are functions of the finitely free relations of persons and of the contingent relations of things” (C. E. Gunton,
The One, The Three And The Many: God, Creation And The Culture Of Modernity, Cambridge University Press, 1998).
For more on the idea of Christianity as a five-act drama see April, May and June's post at
the journey home.
