26. INTIMACY AS A FORM OF LIFE

    To make a point, I insist that I do not believe in God, and I suggest that a Kierkegaardian "leap of faith" violates personal and intellectual integrity.  With all sincerity, I have often stated that I encounter the immediate and distinctive activity of the Father, Jesus and the Holy Spirit in innumerable events in my daily life.  And though I usually take everything personally, I am not offended when my assertion is greeted with condescension by rationalists who suggest that I have not out-grown a childish need for imaginary friends.  But a compulsion to live with intellectual integrity motivates me to subject my everyday experiences to critical analyses.

                      Forms of Life

    When Wittgenstein undertook the analysis of the assumptions of the ideal language program in his Tractatus Logico Philosophicus, he was bewitched by the assumption that language was a formal system subject to the rule of reason.  When he recognized the sterility of an ideal language intended to picture reality precisely and comprehensively, he concluded this text with a passage which indulged his mystical bent:  "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."

    In the following years, Wittgenstein wrestled with the realization that everyday language could say more precisely and comprehensively what an ideal language was supposed to say.  To explore a working assumption that ordinary language is all right, he replaced the supposition that language is a formal system with the suggestion that everyday languages incorporate many distinctive forms of life, each designed to transform a longing, insight, or aspiration into a realizable quest.

    From a philosophical perspective, this focus on realizable purposes differed radically from the focus of Aristotle's correspondence theory of truth, science's promise of certain knowledge, and Nietzsche's insistence that these versions of classical rationalism were propelled by a hidden will to power.  From a practical perspective, it replaced the picture-theory of language encoded in the Tractatus with an implicit analysis of the workings of metaphors.

    In this context, Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions applied Wittgenstein's insight in a way that revealed the role played by metaphors whose reach initially exceeded their grasp in the history of science.  On my part, a fascination with the workings of intimacy as a form of life with a realizable purpose have led me to see that the process whereby a form of life first enters moral discourse as a metaphor which attracts adherents willing to subject its implications to tests in everyday life.  The languages which survive this extensive testing can then be used to process everyday experiences in ways which enable language-users to realize the purpose in question.  And they are effective because they enable those who dwell within a form of life to sort out the stimuli which confront them in ways that enable them to overcome obstacles to the realization of this purpose.

    As a form of life generated by a longing for deepening intimacy, however, it functions as a moral discourse without foundations.   The reason is obvious.  An understanding of the workings of the languages which transmit distinctive forms of life explains why any form of life lives or dies depending on its ability to attract individuals who value the purpose it is designed to realize.

             Intimacy as a Form of Life

    Over the course of centuries, the metaphors of intimacy projected by Israel's prophets generated a distinctive form of life which transforms an elusive longing for deepening person-to-person involvements into a realizable quest.  As the linguistic medium for these metaphors, the prophets drew on a language indebted to a distinctive literary form forged by authors who used a dialogue among stories to process Israel's historical experience.

    This literary form, the prose narrative, centered analyses of language and experience in interactions between an incomprehensible deity and unique individuals endowed with unfathomable depths and a mysterious freedom.  The metaphors of intimacy supplemented this vision with pregnant insights into moral discourse.

    The Deuteronomic strand of the narrative tradition insisted that the Mosaic Law functioned as a mediator between Israel's God and Israel.  To support this vision, storytellers invoked the power-structure implicit in Yahweh's reservation of authority over moral discourse to himself in the story of Adam and Eve.  Implicitly, the embrace of this power-structure was designed to lend authority to a moral discourse framed by a metaphor of power and judgment.  In marked contrast, the prophets replaced the belief that the Law functioned as a mediator with assurances that Israel's God was intimately involved with unique individuals.

    From an analytic perspective, the metaphors of intimacy replaced the Deuteronomic insistence that definitive answers to moral issues had been given by God in theophanies with a passionate insistence that God's moral voice spoke in and through the cries of the oppressed, dispossessed, marginalized, silenced, outcast and stranger.  As a result, they fostered an awareness that tangled moral issues lie, inextricably, at the core of every human action and assertion, and, in turn, this awareness subverted the assumption that prevailing norms and practices could yield definitive moral judgments.  But they themselves did not speak in a hollow voice of prophetic protest.  Instead, the protests they validated revealed that intimate interactions were the only way to transform the longing for a fully human and uniquely personal existence into a realizable quest.

    In sum, these metaphors utilized the inner logic of seminal stories in the Hebrew narrative tradition which readings governed by a code derived from a metaphor of power and judgment ignore.  Thus, in the story of Adam and Eve, though Yahweh insists on reserving authority over moral issues to himself, he clearly does not understand human reality.  He is puzzled by Adam's loneliness.  His first response—to retain power over moral discourse while giving Adam power over animals—betrays a complete failure to understand that power-structures abort the longing for intimacy. His second response—the formation of Eve—was almost comic.  It indicates a dawning awareness that Adam longed for intimacy with another human being, but sets the stage for Eve's realization that, if she desired intimacy with Adam, she had to transgress the prevailing power-structure. 

    In Augustine's violent misreading of this story, Adam's transgression severed the natural relationship between Creator and creatures and no merely human being could offer the sort of reparation that would restore the relationship.  In marked contrast, the Hebrew narrative tradition used the covenant-theme introduced in the Yahwist's story of the call to Abraham to explore Yahweh's willingness to remain involved with Adam and his descendants.  In this vein, the story of Sodom and Gomorrah depicts Yahweh as an oriental potentate subject to eruptions of wrath.  And though Abraham approaches Yahweh with trepidation, he nonetheless dares to instruct him on the morality befitting a being of such awesome power in his dealings with human beings.  In Exodus, however, the categorical form of God's covenant with Abraham was replaced with a conditional form which virtually reduced the covenant to a contract laden with promised rewards and threatened punishments.  But when God threatens to destroy Abraham's offspring and begin again with Moses, Moses persuades him to change his mind by flattery, warnings that Israel's neighbors might judge him harshly, and a reminder of the irrevocable covenant with Abraham.

    At the very least, metaphors of intimacy utilize the inner logic of these stories to replace a rule of Law with the suggestion that God can speak in and through the cries from the depths of wounded individuals because he is passionately, vulnerably, respectfully and faithfully involved with them.  And this is the way that an incarnational theology describes the intimate involvement of Jesus, fully human as well as fully God, with each and every human being.