11A. STORIES OF THE COVENANT

    The redactors who stitched stories from Israel's past into the text Christians appropriated as an Old Testament were motivated, at least in part, by a fear lest Israel's cultural and religious heritage be lost.  Wittingly or unwittingly, they used the Exodus- and Covenant themes to lend coherence to stories designed to process Israel's historical existence over the course of four centuries.  But the quest for coherence led them to interweave irreconcilable formulations of these themes into an over-arching narrative.

    For far too long, Christian theologians (Catholic and Protestant) have allowed Paul's assertion that the covenant between God and Israel was a covenant of law to mark a distinction between an Old Covenant of Law recorded in an Old Testament and a New Covenant recorded in a New Testament.  But a careful reading of the Jewish Scriptures (appropriated by Christians as the Old Testament) reveals that Paul's understanding of that covenant does violence to its earliest formulation in the Hebrew narrative tradition and to the metaphorical descriptions projected by Israel's great prophets.  (Paul's reading of that text reveals more about his youthful indoctrination in the Deuteronomic tradition than about the role of the covenant in this narrative tradition.)

     The Exodus- and Covenant-themes in the Yahwist's Stories 

    The Exodus theme first appeared in the Yahwist's story of Adam and Eve.  To set the stage for this story, the Yahwist posited a primordial state of existence in which Yahweh's prohibition imposed a power structure designed to preserve and protect the illusory sense of immediate presence, fullness and totality fostered by orality.  As the story unfolds, the narrative voice in the story offered glimpses into Adam's interiority by using the power-structure which condemned Adam to loneliness as the telling detail which sets the stage for the entry of Eve.  Then, when Eve's desire for a deepening person-to-person involvement with Adam evoked the same loneliness, she initiated the transgression of boundaries which not only ruptured orality's formative power, but replaced it with an eruptive self-consciousness that the Yahwist exploited in stories centered in interactions between an uncanny God and unique individuals endowed with unfathomable depths and a mysterious freedom.  -  Together, the rupture of the illusory sense of immediate presence, fullness and totality revealed that human existence was a perpetual journey into the unknown.

    The earliest formulation of the covenant-theme can be found in the Yahwist' story of a face-to-face encounter between Yahweh and Abram, son of Terah, in which words spoken by Yahweh sent Abram forth on a journey into the unknown as Abraham of Yahweh.  To assure Abraham of his continued presence on this journey, this Yahweh supplemented the assertion, "You will be my people, and I will be your God", with the promise that this presence would generate a recovery of the immediate presence, fullness and totality lost by the rupture.

    Two points need special commentary.  One, to formulate the promise of a fullness of life, the Yahwist invoked three poetic symbols: a land flowing with milk and honey, material prosperity, and offspring as numerous as the sands in the sea.  Tragically, Deuteronomic storytellers read these poetic symbols literally.  Two, as we will see, the categorical formulation of the covenant provoked the very different interpretations encoded in stories in the Deuteronomic tradition (in which the Law purportedly functions as a mediator between God and Israel) and in the concern with God's intensely personal involvement with individuals encoded in the metaphors of intimacy projected by Israel's prophets.

         The Covenant in the Deuteronomic Tradition

    In the redacted text, the foundational stories of the Deuteronomic tradition made the Israelites themselves responsible for the transition from the categorical form of Yahweh's covenant with Abraham to the conditional formulation of the covenant with Moses.  I.e., after wandering about in the desert for many years, the people who had followed Moses out of Egypt told Moses that they no longer wanted to be led immediately by God.  At their urging, Moses went to the peak of Mt. Sinai.  There, in face-to-face encounters with God, he received a timeless Law designed to define Israel's positive and distinctive identity as God's Chosen People, to relate the whole of life to God, to set Israel apart from her idolatrous neighbors, and, thereby, to guarantee Israel's security in the midst of a hostile world.  (NB:  Since these stories traced the Law to theophanies, the Law purportedly spoke with timeless authority.)

    The stories which embellished this conditional formulation of the covenant emerged as a response to the seemingly endless deferral of the fulfillment of the promises attached so categorically to the covenant with Abraham.  Thus, when Israel's very existence was threatened, storytellers addressed the crises in faith experienced by true believers in stories which addressed the fear that Israel's God lacked the power to fulfill his promises, that the gods of Israel's neighbors were more powerful than her god, or that a wrathful God had arbitrarily abandoned her or was punishing her transgressions harshly.  In so doing, they situated their understanding of the covenant in a metaphor of power and judgment whose logic could then be used to trace the endless deferral of the fulfillment of the promises to the refusal of the Israelites to observe the Law slavishly. 

    To absolve God of all blame for the crises faced by his Chosen People, however, these storytellers had to inscribe the metaphor of power and judgment in a formula which depicted God as Lord, Lawgiver and Judge.  The results were disastrous.  The rule of this god-term reduced a categorically asserted Covenant to a contract imposed by a God who rewarded the good and punished the evil.  In so doing, it implicitly re-instated the reservation of the definition of good and evil to God which was implicit in Yahweh's prohibition against eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  Thereafter, Abraham's offspring would never experience Abraham's call to embark on a journey into the unknown, since their existence would be fully and totally defined by the prescriptions and prohibitions of the Mosaic Law.

             The Covenant in Micah, Hosea and Isaiah

    The response of Micah, Hosea and Isaiah to the crises of faith experienced by individual Israelites differed radically from the response of storytellers in the Deuteronomic tradition.  In their return to oral proclamations, the prophets framed their utterances with the Yahwist's (and Elohist's) vision of a God who interacted in intensely personal ways with Israel's patriarchs and matriarchs.  In and through their utterances, they sought to assure their audiences that God was speaking to each of them immediately.

    In this vein, Micah, 6 illustrates the stark contrast between the Deuteronomic and prophetic traditions.  To set the stage for this utterances, Micah depicts God as a Lord, Lawgiver and Judge who allows himself to be judged by Israel.  To express his pain and bewilderment in a way that would support his case in a court of law, God points to all his mighty deeds on Israel's behalf in the past.  Shamed, those who had complained about God's failure to fulfill the promises made to Abraham ask what they are to do.  God's response still echoes across the centuries.  "You know, O Israel, what you are to do:  Live justly, love tenderly and walk humbly with your God."

        (NB:  In this passage, Micah anticipates Jesus' use of parables which begin with the apparent embrace of the belief of his audience in order to stand this belief on its head.  E.g., the parable of the good Samaritan clearly stands the doctrine of exclusive election on its head through the answer it gives to the question, "Who is one's neighbor?")

     At approximately the same time, Hosea proposed a metaphorical definition of the Covenant which translated the categorical form of the covenant with Abraham into a vision centered in the ever-faithful love of God for human beings whose finite existence condemned them to a perpetual journey into the unknown.  Intriguingly, but not surprisingly, the metaphor which framed this vision issued from the depths of the woundedness which Hosea experienced in his involvement with Gomer, his wife.  To set the stage for his definition of the Covenant as a marriage-union between God and Israel, Hosea confessed that he went through a process in which he was first tempted to punish Gomer for her repeated infidelities, to harden his heart against her, and even to exclude her from his life.  But this grieving process evoked a profound awareness that he loved her still.  And from this experience, he realized that God's everfaithful love for Israel had urged him to enter a virtual marriage-union with a stubborn and stiff-necked people. 

    Approximately two decades later, First Isaiah responded to anguished questions concerning the power of Israel's God with a magisterial vision depicting God as the creator of all.  (NB:  In the Yahwist's stories, Yahweh is a potter working with a material already at hand, and the creation-account preserved in Genesis 1 was composed at least a century and a half later as a response to the dualism enshrined in the beliefs of Israel's Babylonian captors.)  Consciously or unconsciously, First Isaiah countered the doctrine of exclusive election implicit in the belief that the Law was designed to set Israel apart from her idolatrous neighbors with a proclamation of God's all-inclusive love.  In so doing, he interpreted the fact that Israel was the first people to discern God's intensely personal involvement with unique individuals as a commission which called Israel to spread the awareness of God's all-inclusive love to people everywhere. 

    Many decades later, Second and Third Isaiah explicitly invoked Hosea's comparison of the covenantal relationship between God and humanity with a marriage-union defined by an everfaithful love.  In and through their recorded utterances, they implicitly replaced the metaphor of power and judgment which framed the stories of the Deuteronomic tradition with a multitude of pregnant metaphors of intimacy.  In so doing, they encoded the categorical form of the covenant with Abraham in an experiential language which centered the promises of that covenant in God's everfaithful love for each human being.

         Mediate vs Immediate:  A Structural Analysis

   

    The Deuteronomic and prophetic traditions resolved issues introduced in the Yahwist's story of Adam and Eve in radically divergent ways.  To appreciate the diverging descriptions of the Covenant in the Hebrew tradition, we do well to analyze the narrative strategy forged by the Yahwist in and through this story.  The analysis will show that this strategy gave form and direction to a series of stories, especially the story of the call to Abram which introduced the early formulations of the Exodus- and Covenant-themes.  And since the strategy emerged as the response of a literary virtuoso to literacy's challenge to the rule of orality. its workings can be seen in the diverging ways that Israel’s narrative tradition and the metaphors of the prophets responded to literacy's rupture of orality's illusory sense of immediate presence, fullness and totality.

    To set the stage for the story of Adam and Eve, the Yahwist placed Adam in an imaginary garden which evoked a nostalgic remembrance of orality's illusory sense of immediate presence, fullness and totality.  To enhance that starting point, he added the sort of face-to-face encounters between Yahweh and Adam that had characterized oral-aural communication.  However, to evoke the felt experience of literacy's challenge to orality, the story had to address the emerging issue of authority.  To formulate this issue, the Yahwist placed a prohibition which reserved moral discourse entirely to himself in the mouth of Yahweh.

    Structurally, this prohibition imposed a hierarchical structure on the relationship between Yahweh and Adam whose inner logic (1) laid the foundation for the metaphor of power and judgment invoked by the Deuteronomic tradition and (2) assigned the prohibition a role as mediator between Yahweh and Adam.  Almost immediately, however, the narrative voice implanted in the story added details which indicated that the prohibition imposed a power-structure condemning Adam to loneliness.  Then, in ways that are ignored by readings which present Eve as a seductrix, this voice included a desire for wisdom in the motives which led Eve to transgress the prohibition.  On any reading that pays careful attention to details in the story, this juxta-position of loneliness of Adam and Eve's transgression of the prohibition in a way that involved Adam suggests that the eruption of self-awareness accompanied by an awareness of being naked was evoked by Eve's awareness that she must transgress the prohibition if she hoped to communicate with Adam in a way that fostered a deepening person-to-person involvement.  (The ways that power-structures require participants to live on the surface is apparent in the ways that they foster self-deception.)

    Here, then, I suggest that the narrative strategy forged in the story of Adam and Eve framed later stories whose narrative structure was centered in intensely personal interactions between an incomprehensible God and unique individuals endowed with unfathomable depths and a mysterious freedom.  And I also suggest that these stories provided the literary framework for the prophetic delineation of the sort of covenant which would promote the quest for a fully human and uniquely personal involvement between and among individuals who longed to share a journey into the unknown. 

        NB:  From this perspective, the Yahwist's stories must be read as efforts to process two inter-related issues: the anxiety of authorship and the issue of authority, at a time when the displacement of orality by literacy was well advanced.  In the story of Adam and Eve, the Yahwist evoked the felt experience of this anxiety through their awareness of being naked.  In so doing, he forged a metaphor which dramatized the vulnerability of those who experienced the eruption of self-consciousness inherent in the interiorization of literacy.  And on its part, this eruption signaled the irreversible rupture of the illusory sense of immediate presence, fullness and totality fostered by orality.  To anyone tempted to question this focus on an eruptive self-consciousness, I recommend a careful re-reading of the seminal stories in which Abraham and Moses dared to instruct Israel's God on the behavior becoming a being of such awesome power in his dealings with human beings.

                         ________

    The Israelites who rationalized the violent extermination of the inhabitants of the "promised land" as a command from God were unaware of the so-called Mosaic Covenant.  The stories they told to process their experience depicted a fierce democracy in which both individuals and the community were led immediately by signs from a wrathful God.  The failure of this theocracy was later exploited by court theologians determined to center Israel's existence in the rule of a Davidic dynasty.  To counter the rhetoric which endowed the offsprings of David with the power to resolve emerging issues of authority, storytellers who embraced the emerging Deuteronomic tradition advocated a rule of law.  But they retained the totalitarian thrust of the metaphor of power and judgment in their protest against a theology which centered Israel's identity as God's Chosen People in a monarchical form of government purportedly established by God.

    The point at issue can be succinctly formulated.  In the story of Adam and Eve, the detached perspective encoded in Yahweh's prohibition against human efforts to forge a moral discourse conducive to the quest for a more fully human and uniquely personal existence introduced an early version of the metaphor of power and judgment.  To insulate the hierarchical structure implicit in this metaphor from questioning, authors in the Deuteronomic tradition forged literary conventions designed to present their stories as historical records of events in which God communicated a codified Law designed to relate the whole of everyday life to God and set Israel apart from her idolatrous neighbors.  Presumably, prescriptions and prohibitions dictated to Moses in a series of theophanies would replace Yahweh's prohibition of moral discourse with a Law which functioned as a divinely ordained mediator between God and Israel.  As an added bonus, the conditional form of this covenant could be used to validate the promise that a strict observance of the Law by all would repair the rupture which triggered the lost sense of fullness and totality. 

        (NB:  This tradition contributed in subtle ways to the conception of collective responsibility which is central to the doctrine of original sin which Augustine extracted from the story of Adam and Eve.)

                          _______

    To this day, the Christian tradition has been plagued by Paul's replacement of the early stories depicting immediate encounters between Israel's God and her patriarchs and matriarchs with the insistence that God's involvement with Israel was mediated by a covenant of Law.  And the tragedy persists to this day in the misplaced debate between Catholic and Protestant theologians.

                   ----  Aquinas  ----

    Historically, the wedding of a traditional theological formula and the Aristotelian metaphysical system in Aquinas' Summa Theologica provided the stage for this misplaced debate.  In this text, Aquinas used his baptism of Aristotle to explore the distinction marked by the formula, "Grace builds on nature."  To appropriate Aristotle for his own purposes, he formulated an argument designed to demonstrate that God created the universe out of nothing.  In this context, he used the hierarchical and teleological structure of Aristotelian metaphysics to replace the Deuteronomic assumption that God had spoken through theophanies.

    The argument is quite straightforward.  The Creator of an hierarchically and teleologically structured cosmos must be both rational and purposive, and such a Creator would obviously inscribe his moral will in an autonomous Book of Nature authored by his spoken word.  Specifically, a purposive Creator would also inscribe a teleological structure in the human nature of all unique individuals made in the divine image and likeness.  (Genesis 1)  And since they would also be rational, they could read the natural law inscribed in the Book of Nature by a natural light of reason.

    Through this argument, Aquinas replaced the Deuteronomic insistence on observance of a Law dictated to Moses in theophanies with a moral discourse calling for conformity to a law inscribed in the natural order and in human nature by a rational and purposive Creator.  And when this argument was woven into the formula which suggested that the creative and saving wills of God are in harmony, this natural law supposedly functioned as a mediator between God and human beings.

    Five points merit special notice.  (1)  Aquinas did not forge the abstract conception of an autonomous text implicit in the metaphor of the Two Books, an autonomous Book of Nature and the Scriptures which spoke definitively as the word of God.  In his Summa, however, he assumed that the wedding of philosophy and theology would generate a consistent, coherent, comprehensive and closed belief-system consisting of clearly formulated and tightly integrated doctrinal formulations.  If successful, then, the Summa would be an autonomous (self-interpreting) text.  (2)  In sum, through his embrace of Aristotle as simply the Philosopher, he assumed the Summa would speak for itself and present the whole of reality truthfully.  (3)  If the Summa was both truth-telling and bounded, the Book of Nature must itself be bounded, and, since the creative and saving wills of God were in harmony, readings of this Book by the natural light of reason could be used to interpret ambiguous passages in the Scriptures.  Concretely, the moral will of the God depicted in the Scriptures as incomprehensible would be clearly formulated.  (4)  Since God authored the Book of Nature, the natural law inscribed in the teleological and hierarchical structure of the natural order called for conformity, not for a perpetual journey into the unknown.  In sum, it promised that conformity to a divinely instituted hierarchical order would yield the fullness and totality of knowledge and life.  (5)  In ways that are seldom acknowledged by Thomists, the moral discourse generated by Aquinas' uncritical use of the metaphor of power and judgment to frame the Summa added a juridical dimension to its hierarchical and teleological structure.  (Aquinas came from a family of jurists.)

                       ---- Luther ----

    Luther's tortured version of immediate presence, fullness and totality targeted foundational doctrines in the constrictive belief-system encoded in Aquinas' Summa Theologica.  To frame his protests against practices licensed by the hierarchical structure of this belief-system, he forged a meta-narrative centered in two doctrines, the doctrine of original sin indebted to Augustine's reading of the story of Adam and Eve and the doctrine at the core of the language of reparation and redemption.  Intriguingly, both these doctrines were offspring of the metaphor of power and judgment, but Luther promised that this meta-narrative would rescue the immediacy implicit in the prophetic metaphors of intimacy from the traditional insistence that the institutional Church functioned as a mediator between God and sinful humans.

    Thus, the language of reparation and redemption which Luther embraced without reservation was generated and governed by the metaphor of power and judgment, not the metaphor of intimacy.  In and through his reliance on this language, Luther retained the vision of a hierarchically structured relationship between God and human beings, but hoped that his protests against the way that the Catholic tradition supplemented that hierarchical structure would reveal a hollow center which could be filled with a doctrine which asserted, categorically, that Jesus is the sole (exclusive) mediator between God and sinful humans.

    Here, however, Luther's desire to subvert the foundations of the theology he rejected complicated protests whose meaning initially depended on the doctrines they targeted.  To transform these protests into a single positive proclamation, he extracted his doctrine of justification by faith alone from Paul's Letter to the Romans.

        (NB: In the first four chapters of Romans, Paul offers a tortured argument designed to justify his supposition (1) that God's covenant with Israel was a covenant of Law, (2) that the demand for strict observance of the Law, by condemning human beings to failure, was designed to convict them of a sinfulness they could not escape on their own, and (3) that the Incarnation, by fulfilling the covenant, effectively abrogated the demands of the Law for those who were justified by faith.  On a broader canvas, Paul's argument provoked the commentary on the distinction between faith and works found in the Epistle of James.  To invoke Romans as the biblical warrant for this own doctrine of justification by faith alone, Luther had to exclude James from the Canon.)

    To bolster the pretense that the Scriptures contained a clear formulation of his interpretation of Paul's references to justification by faith, Luther transformed the traditional distinctions between faith and works, faith and reason, revelation and reason, grace and nature, Scripture and Tradition, and the sacred and the secular into polar opposites.  This move retained the medieval metaphor of the Two Books, but consigned the Book of Nature to the realm of the secular and situated his reading of the Judaic-Christian Scriptures in a literary framework defined by the slogan, sola Scriptura. 

    As his polemical treatises reveal, Luther addressed three implications of this slogan, (1) that, as an autonomous text, the Scriptures spoke as an immediate word of God which could be read and heard without interpretation and (2) that, if any passage needed interpretation, all were questionable, and (3), if all were questionable, the Scriptures could not speak as an immediate word spoken by God to individuals.  Faced with the need to show that his doctrine of justification by faith alone was devoid of interpretation, he derived a code designed to offer a coherent reading of the Old and New Testaments from (1) Augustine's harsh doctrine of original sin as a literal reading of an historical account of Adam's transgression of the prohibition attributed to Yahweh in the story of Adam and Eve, and (2) Paul's reference to God's covenant with Israel as a covenant of Law as divinely inspired.  Clearly, he believed that readings governed by this code revealed (1) that God had designed the covenant of Law in order to force human beings to acknowledge their inescapable sinfulness and (2) that his addition of "alone" to Paul's references to justification by faith was implicit in the doctrine of exclusive election implicit in Paul's anguished judgment that God had rejected the Jews who refused to undergo the conversion that had transformed his own life.

    Luther needed Augustine's harsh doctrine of original sin to integrate the insistence that Jesus was the sole mediator between God and sinful humans with the focus on Jesus' crucifixion implicit in the language of reparation and redemption.  I.e., Augustine's assertion that Adam's transgression of Yahweh's prohibition against moral discourse severed the natural relationship between Creator and creatures provided the bridge to the central role of the language of reparation in Luther's doctrine of justification by faith alone.  In this doctrine, Luther echoed the juridical structure of Aquinas' theological discourse as warrant for the insistence that divine justice had to decree that no mere human could make fitting reparation for the transgression by a finite creature of a decree issued by an infinite Creator.  If divine mercy had not entered, there was no way that the severed relationship could be restored.  Presumably, divine mercy found a way of placating the wrath of divine justice by urging the Son to become human in order that a divine Person could make fitting reparation for human sinfulness.  In Luther's meta-narrative, however, divine justice had to decree that only the sacrificial death of his own divine Son on the Cross could make fitting reparation.  By definition, then, Jesus' cruel and humiliating death was the defining moment in the history of salvation.

    At this point, Luther used the polar opposition between faith and works to present justification by faith alone as a gift which could not be merited.  As the only alternative, individuals hoping to receive the gift won for them by Jesus's sacrifice must place themselves naked before God through a confession of utter and inescapable sinfulness, believe that Jesus sacrificial death on the Cross paid the price for their sinfulness, and accept justification by faith alone.

    On my part, I can only conclude that the doctrine of justification by faith alone is a literary construction, not a reading of the Scriptures devoid of interpretation.  But the doctrine remains an intriguing effort to recover the lost sense of immediate presence, fullness and totality fostered by orality.  First and foremost, the slogan, sola Scriptura, endows a sprawling text with a fullness and totality.  (Though Lutheran theologians may be unwilling to identify with Protestants who advocate a doctrine of biblical inerrancy, they must see that this doctrine still takes the slogan seriously.)  In the same vein, the confession of utter sinfulness offers glimpses of an unmediated relationship with God severed by original sin, and this experience presumably prepares those whose confession is sincere to hear the incredible message that Jesus' death on the cross made the sort of reparation to divine justice which can justify (rectify, restore) the severed relationship for those who believe that God's mercy sent God's own Son to die for our sins.  Here, fullness and totality enter through the description of the process enshrined in Luther's dictum, "Totus simul justus et peccator" [editor’s translation: “the human person totally justified and totally sinful at the same time.”]  Under any reading, this dictum implies that those who accept this gift are totally justified, yet remain fully sinful.  As a result, the rule of the metaphor of power and judgment in the notion of divine justice which demanded this cruel sacrifice reduces the implicit metaphor of intimacy to a promise of instant intimacy.

        (In the reflection on process and event, I dramatize the fact that Luther encoded his longing for an immediate encounter with God in the assertion that a single event, Jesus' sacrificial death on the cross, defined his role as the sole mediator between God and sinful humans once and for all.  From the perspective offered by his doctrine of justification by faith alone, immediate presence was achieved through the confession of utter sinfulness, while fullness and totality were restored though the leap implicit in the doctrine of justification by faith alone.  In unacknowledged ways, however, Luther grounded his assumption that the Scriptures could be read as a self-interpreting text in the medieval metaphor of the Two Books authored by God, the autonomous Book of Nature and the Scriptures as the revealed Word of God.  But the pretense that a privileged reading of the Scriptures can eliminate the formative power of "Tradition" is intelligible only to those who embrace the Lutheran "Tradition".)

              A Return to the Prophetic Tradition

    Like Paul, Luther insisted that the new covenant both fulfilled and abrogated the covenant of Law transmitted by the Deuteronomic tradition.  Like Aquinas, he regarded the Book of Nature as an autonomous text which bore witness to a natural law inscribed in the depths of all human beings by a rational and purposive God, but he offered a very different version of God's purpose.

    Aquinas assumed the conformity to this law would yield a fully human existence.  Luther worked from a belief that the sin of Adam condemned his offspring to a self-centered existence.  In this context, he saw clearly that conformity to prescriptions and prohibitions could never produce the fullness of life promised by law in any shape or form.  And he used this insight to support his assertion that a purposive God designed these prescriptions and prohibitions to expose the inescapable sinfulness at the core of all human beings.

    In their search for a language capable of enhancing the quest for a fully human existence, Israel's prophets formulated metaphors of intimacy which anticipated the statement attributed to Jesus in John:  "I have come that you might have life and have it more abundantly."  In and through these metaphors, they insisted that a moral discourse dedicated to the promotion of a quest for a more fully human and uniquely personal existence must be centered in the cries of those who were being dehumanized and depersonalized by the prevailing power-structures.

    Amos, a compatriot of Hosea, provides an intriguing example of this departure from the Deuteronomic vision.  From a structural perspective, he stood for the dominion of God over all which echoed the metaphor of power and judgment.  Loner that he was, Hosea [Amos?] derived his prophetic protests from a belief in God's dominion over all that rivaled the doctrine encoded in Calvin's doctrine of eternal predestination.  But the protests he derived from this emphasis on God's dominion over all targeted dehumanizing and depersonalizing practices enshrined in the cultures of Israel's neighbors and of Israel.  Consequently, his utterances contributed significantly to the prophetic insistence that the moral will of the Creator spoke in and through the cries of the oppressed, dispossessed, marginalized and outcast who had no moral status in a moral discourse too easily appropriated by the powers-that-be.  At the very least, it contributed to the gradual subversion of the doctrine of exclusive election at the core of the Deuteronomic tradition.

    The metaphors of intimacy formulated by Micah, Hosea and Isaiah voiced this insight in ways that Amos never could.  On the foundational level, they signaled a radical departure from efforts to recover a lost sense of immediate presence, fullness and totality.  In their own right, they replaced the desire for authoritative or definitive moral judgments with a recovery of the Exodus-theme which delineated human existence as a perpetual journey into the unknown in which honest searchers can discover that tangled moral issues lie, inextricably, at the core of their actions, intentions and assertions.

                         Summary

   

    Aquinas and Luther were blissfully unaware that the code which governed their readings of the Scriptures and their analyses of everyday experiences was derived from a metaphor of power and judgment.  Both, however, contributed to the displacement of orality by literacy as the foundation of western culture through writings that formulated the issues addressed in the misplaced debate between Catholic and Protestant theologians that persists to this day.

    Both assumed that, if the Scriptures were to speak as the word of God, the stories they preserved had to be reliable histories and the repository of doctrines.  I read the Scriptures as the word of God.  But I am also convinced that, if they are to speak a living word to me, I must read them as literature.  Consequently, the contending interpretations of the biblical tradition espoused by Christian denominations force me to decide:  "Will I read the Scriptures through a code derived from a metaphor of power and judgment or a metaphor of intimacy?"  And, by extension:  "Will I accord authority to the dictates of the fictive voice of reason at the core of the metaphor of power and judgment or the call to nurture a sympathetic imagination voiced by the metaphor of intimacy?"

             Addendum:  Seeing the Face of God

    In the early stories of the Hebrew narrative tradition, Israel's god enters human history in and through face-to-face conversations with her patriarchs and matriarchs.  In the foundational stories of the Deuteronomic tradition, however, the people who followed Moses out of Egypt no longer wanted to be led immediately by God.  Since they wanted to be a nation like every other nation, they sent Moses to the pinnacle of Mt. Sinai where, in face-to-face encounters, he received a Law designed to function as a mediator between God and his Chosen People.

    The delineation of human existence as a perpetual journey into the unknown in the Exodus-theme evoked an anxiety which found expression in a dictum, "It is a fearsome thing to fall into the hands of the living God."  In this regard, the promise that the Law related the whole of everyday life to God and set Israel apart from her idolatrous neighbors tamed the anxiety evoked by the Exodus-theme.  Intriguingly, the role assigned to the Law as mediator between Israel and her God transformed the early dictum into a categorical assertion that no one can see the face of God and live.

    To support my conviction that the Jewish Scriptures must be read as literature rather than history or theology, I invoke a comic story which dramatizes the transition from the rule of orality to the textualization which led to the characterization of adherents of Judaism as the People of the Book.  In the redacted text, this story was inserted in the midst of stories of Moses' face-to-face encounters with Israel's God and the stories informed by the belief that no one can see the face of God and live.  In it, Moses asks to see God's face, and God responds with the belief in question.  In a sort of compromise, God tells Moses to stand in a crevice in the rock.  As God passes by, he lifts his garments and shows Moses his backside.  In contemporary terms, God moons Moses. For the life of me, I cannot imagine how anyone could suppose that this story is an accurate record of an historical event.  I can imagine Christians determined to read the Scriptures as an immediate word of God can read all sorts of esoteric meanings into the story.  From my perspective, these interpretations would be little more than desperate efforts to save a theory. 

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