6B. INVOLVEMENT VS RELATIONSHIP

    Augustine's doctrine of original sin plays a central role in the polemically structured debate between Catholic and Protestant theologians.  In its own right, this doctrine inscribes a narrative which asserts that Adam's sin severed the natural relationship between Creator and creatures.  Situated in a language of redemption, it contributes to their shared belief that only a sacrificial death of the eternal Word could make the sort of reparation required to restore that relationship.

    As one who reads the stories in the Hebrew narrative tradition as literature rather than history, I have been stunned by the violence this doctrine does to the story of Adam and Eve.  In particular, I cannot understand how theologians fail to note irreconcilable differences between a reading of that story which reduces Yahweh's relationship with Adam to a natural relationship between Creator and creatures and the Yahwist's stories which depict Yahweh's intensely personal involvement not only with Adam and Eve, but with Israel's patriarchs and matriarchs.

        (Addendum:  I suspect that theologians ignore telling details in the Yahwist's stories because they embrace distinctions among (1) a primordial state of nature, (2) God's entry into human history through a Covenant of Law imposed on Israel, and (3) the new and everlasting Covenant signed and sealed by Jesus' bloody sacrifice on the Cross.)

    Here, as elsewhere, I employ a reading code derived from the way that Wittgenstein's analysis of the workings of everyday languages, including the insight that the meaning of any word depends on its use in a form of life.  From this perspective, it is hardly surprising that uses of "relationship" and "involvement" can overlap.  E.g., generically speaking, person-to-person involvements are a specific sort of relationship, but there are also relationships which exclude such involvements.

    In this context, the metaphor which governs uses of "relationship" posits a purely formal framework as the empty literary space occupied by entities separated from one another by a bridgeable distance.  Since this framework is a product of the rule of the One, its structure has a hollow center which language-users concerned with relationships between and among detached individuals can fill master-terms ranging from indifference through competition to person-to-person involvements.  (Most commonly, this formal framework is home to theories which center interactions between self-standing entities in a single factor.  Newtonian physics offers a prime example.)

    In marked contrast, the metaphor of intimacy centers analyses of language and experience in intensely personal interactions.  Over the course of centuries, it generated a critical apparatus capable of sorting out these interactions in terms of the effects they have on all dimensions of a shared existence.  In its own right, this critical apparatus supports a participative framework which, in turn, ensures that analyses begin in the middle.  As a result, the analyses of language and experience which it generates sort out person-to-person interactions in terms of what is conducive to and what obstructs a shared journey to deepening involvements.

     Read through a code derived from Ong's reconstruction of the gradual triumph of literacy over orality as the foundation of western culture, I must view the immediate consequence of Eve's transgression of the prohibition against moral discourse as a rupture of the illusory sense of immediate presence, fullness and totality fostered by orality.  By definition, Eve enters the story as the personification of the eruption of self-consciousness inherent in the detaching power of the interiorization of literacy.  The story, then, is the first linguistic formulation to locate the journey into the unknown encoded in the Exodus-theme in an eruption of self-consciousness that still plunges us into the same sort of journey.  On its part, the use of this linguistic formulation to process everyday experiences reveals that we are naked pronouns in search of metaphors which liberate us from arbitrarily imposed or socially legitimated boundaries.  And those of us who dare to embrace the anxiety of authorship inherent in this vulnerable nakedness soon realize that the eruption invites us to be honest searchers who use the language at hand to process everyday experiences in a way that promotes the quest for a fully human and uniquely personal existence.

    I suggest, therefore, I suggest that Israel's great prophets were indebted to literary conventions encoded in details in Yahwist's story for the metaphors of intimacy whose reach initially exceeded their grasp.  As I argue elsewhere, it required centuries in which the implications of these metaphors were tested in everyday experiences to operationalize the glimpses into tangled human depths in a language capable of promoting the human quest.  But the prophets drew two revelatory conclusions.  One, they replaced the doctrine of exclusive election at the center of the Deuteronomic definition of God's covenant with Israel with utterances which assured their hearers that God's love is everfaithful and all-inclusive, and they voiced an insight into the workings of moral discourse which revealed that God's moral voice speaks in and through the cries of the oppressed, dispossessed, marginalized, silenced and outcast.  (The latter insight exposed the will to power at the core of efforts to exclude these cries from moral discourse by the powers-that-be who use any means at hand to protect their privileged positions by controlling the workings of everyday language.  In effect, these powers-that-be echo the Deuteronomic tradition's insistence that a codified law can relate the whole of life to God and set a chosen people apart from idolatrous neighbors.  In point of fact, they seek to perpetuate an idolatrous conception of a God who is massively pleased by their self-righteous rationalizations of his moral will,)