Wittgenstein's comparison of words to ropes
woven from many strands illuminates the workings of the language of
redemption. Here, I propose to sketch
the strands intertwined in that language.
Then, to indicate how the meaning of a word in any instance is
determined by its use in a form of life, I will compare these strands to the
strands interwoven in a language of love.
Etymologically, "redemption"
invokes a Latin term for "buying back" whose inner logic encodes an
economic model. Here, I propose to analyze
the theological discourse which accredited its use as a description of Jesus'
saving activity in human history.
(Remember: theology is a
second-level inquiry designed to lay bare the foundations of religious
discourse and to validate a religious response to life.)
In this archeology of knowledge, I begin
with the meta-narrative which still functions as the stage for the misplaced
debate between Catholic and Protestant theologians. This meta-narrative takes the harsh doctrine
of original sin which an aging Augustine abstracted from the story of Adam and
Eve as its starting point. According to
this violent misreading, Adam's sin severed a natural relationship between
Creator and creatures. In so doing, it
evoked an interplay between divine justice and divine mercy. Divine justice had to decree that only a
cruel and humiliating death of God's own Son on a cross could make fitting
reparation for Adam's sin and the sinfulness of his offspring, while divine
mercy urged the eternal Word to become incarnate to make such reparation and
repair or restore the severed relationship.
Since I daily experience the activity of a
God whose love is ever-faithful, I reject, categorically, the supposition (1)
that Adam's sin severed a relationship with God, (2) that any notion of justice
whatever would demand a decree that the eternal Word must embrace a cruel and
humiliating crucifixion, and (3) that the eternal Word would not have entered
human history if Adam had not sinned.
In a genealogy of morals aimed at
deconstructing a meta-narrative that attributes the crucifixion to a decree of
God, I find that the above suppositions are obscured by the use of many
biblical themes, metaphors and models.
Perhaps the most influential theme was drawn from Paul's violent
misreading of a sprawling text which included stories with wildly different
versions of the Covenant. The literary
framework for the first version can be found in stories which recorded the
entry of an incomprehensible deity into human history at an assignable place
and time in words spoken to unique individuals endowed with unfathomable depths
and a mysterious freedom. Within this
framework, the Yahwist composed a story which told of a face-to-face
interaction between Yahweh and Abraham in which God instituted a Covenant with
Abraham in categorical terms, "You will be my people, and I will be your
God" and promised a fullness of life to Abraham and his descendants. In effect, this formulation of the Covenant
promised that Yahweh would be personally involved with Abraham and his
descendants on their journeys into the unknown.
As such, it provided the literary space for the delightful stories in
which Abraham and Moses dared to instruct a wrathful God on the morality
befitting a being of such awesome power in his dealings with human beings.
But when the fulfillment of the promises
seemed to be constantly deferred, storytellers in the Deuteronomic tradition
re-formulated the Covenant in conditional terms: "If you obey the Law which mediate your
relationship with me, you will be my people, and I will be your God." Thus, to save Israel's belief in her
exclusive election as God's Chosen People in times of crisis, they transformed
a categorically asserted Covenant into a contractual relationship mediated by a
codified Law purportedly given to Moses in and through theophanies. In this version of the Covenant, God set the
terms of the relationship and surrounded them with sanctions to be inflicted
for non-observance of the Law's prescriptions and prohibition. Consequently, if the fulfillment of the
promises was deferred, it was Israel's fault, not God's.
This reduction of the Covenant to a
contractual relationship encoded a hierarchically ordered power-structure which
easily accommodated the belief that God rewards observance of the Law and
punishes transgressions. In so doing, it
bears witness to the influence of an economic model on Israel's determination
to take literally the promises to Abraham of a land flowing with milk and
honey, constant prosperity, and offspring as numerous as the sands in the
sea. In turn, this economic model
provided the literary space for themes drawn from early anthropomorphic
conceptions of God in the narrative tradition.
One such theme was the emphasis on sacrifices designed to make
reparation for sin and/or to placate a wrathful deity. Another was an emphasis on appeals for
mercy. Yet another emerged when
psalmists, in particular, insisted that Israel's God acted justly, not
wrathfully, in the punishments he inflicted on Israel for her infidelities.
In this context, Paul's violent misreading
of the narrative tradition not only obscured the fact that the Jewish
Scriptures report countless instances in which Israel's God entered covenants
with individuals, but also blinded Christian theologians to the incompatibility
between a categorically and a conditionally asserted Covenant. I suspect that Paul's tortured misreading was
motivated by a need to reconcile his conversion with his belief that God's
Covenant with Israel was irrevocable. At
any rate, he used it to insist that, with the sacrifice offered by Jesus
Christ, God's covenant with Israel was both fulfilled and abrogated. And this insistence provided the foundation
for the polar opposition between faith and works expounded in his Letter to the
Romans.
In its own right, the rhetorical
distinction between faith and works was surely designed to erase all traces of
the economic model encoded in a Covenant of Law and to replace them with a
proclamation that all is gift. To
justify the elevation of a distinction into a polar opposition, Paul had to
assume that a language of works implied that God's love could somehow be
merited. As Luther's doctrine of
justification by faith alone, however, the emphasis on faith merely moved the
economic model from the question of the authentic human response to God to a
reading of the gospel stories of Jesus which centers his saving activity in the
crucifixion. And, whether Catholic or
Protestant polemicists admit it or not, a meta-narrative which implies that the
eternal Word would not have become incarnate if Adam had not sinned centers the
saving power of Jesus in the crucifixion.
In sum, the language of redemption makes
sense if and only if a meta-narrative which centers God's activity in human
history in two events, an original sin and the crucifixion of Jesus, makes
sense. I can make no sense of the
supposition that God decreed the crucifixion of the Incarnate Word as the price
of restoring relations severed by Adam's sin.
I suggest, therefore, that, to distract attention from this component of
the meta-narrative, theologians invoked a cluster of beliefs, themes,
metaphors, models and conceptions, including the assumption that a
power-structure governed the relationship between God and humans, Augustine's
violent misreading of the story of Adam and Eve, a conditional formulation of
God's Covenant with Israel, a doctrine of exclusive election, the economic
model supporting the belief that God rewards the good and punishes the wicked,
a sin-centered theology which validates the belief that sacrifices can make
fitting reparation for sin, Paul's polar opposition between faith and works, a
conception of justice indebted to the Deuteronomic tradition's desire to show
that Israel's God was not capricious or wrathful in the punishments he
inflicted on a stubborn and stiff-necked people, pleas for mercy in response to
apparently fierce and implacable judgments, and a belief that sacrifices could
make fitting reparation for sins.
If any of these strands is suspect, the
language of redemption (and the theology of transcendence which frames it) is
an edifice erected on sand. And, at the
very least, the language of love raises penetrating questions about many, if
not all, of them. The core of these
questions can be found in the fact that references to divine justice are
meaningful only in a language centered in a detached relationship mediated by a
contract. Since social contracts are
designed to govern such relationships, justice can function as a fruitful moral
notion in that context. But its
application to person-to-person involvements has pernicious consequences. There is a world of difference between a
relationship and an involvement.
One further comment: Though I may seem to be straying far afield,
I cannot shake the conviction that Pope Benedict XVI realizes that the
Tridentine Mass ritualizes this meta-narrative accurately and that the
liturgical reforms introduced by Vatican II will soon undermine the theology of
transcendence he espouses. Here, as
elsewhere, he fights a rearguard action.
To illustrate the point at issue, I need only refer to the theology of
the Eucharist taught by the Baltimore Catechism and the theological manuals
used in courses designed to prepare me for ordination to the priesthood. This theology referred to the ritual
re-enactment of the Last Supper as the "sacrifice of the Mass" and
legitimated accepting stipends to offer Masses in reparation for the deceased
in the confident belief that this renewal of Jesus' sacrificial death on the
cross would make reparation for sins which still confined them to
Purgatory. A communion rail served as a
concrete line of demarcation between the ordained priest and the simple laity,
and the priest performed the ritual with his back to the people. By definition, he was a mediator between them
and Jesus, the mediator between God and humans.
And since he performed the ritual in Latin, it presumably worked like a
magical formula understood only by the celebrant and by God. And since it worked ex opere operato, it applied the sanctifying grace merited by
Jesus' sacrificial death to those who may have been saying the rosary rather
than participating actively in the ritual.
Consequently, I grieve over the number of
Catholics who welcome the restoration of the Tridentine Mass here in
Quincy. They clearly prefer a
spirituality which bolsters their smug assurance that they are among the elect
to one that gives voice to the demanding implications of an incarnational
theology.
The Language of Love
The language of love incorporated in
everyday English is profoundly indebted to the foundational stories in the
Hebrew literary tradition. These stories
portray interactions between an incomprehensible deity and unique individuals
endowed with unfathomable depths and a mysterious freedom. They set the stage for the use of stories to
process the experiences through which individuals become more deeply involved
with each other on a journey into the unknown.
The meta-narrative which frames an
incarnational theology situates the history of God's involvement in human
history on this stage. Since creation
was an out-pouring and overflow of divine love, the eternal Word was central in
the act of creation and, therefore, central in the unfolding of human history
and in the lives of unique individuals.
Quite obviously, the incarnation was not a response to the sin of
Adam. But a recognition of this fact
awaited the gradual displacement of orality by literacy as the foundation of
Israel's existence as a distinctive people.
Concretely, storytellers in ancient Israel
were indebted to authors of the Babylonian epics which projected an empty
literary space between a realm of deities and a domain of natural forces. Over the course of four centuries, they
filled this space with stories designed to process Israel's historical
existence as God's Chosen People. The
earliest stories in this narrative tradition depicted immediate encounters
between an incomprehensible God and unique individuals endowed with
unfathomable depths and a mysterious freedom.
Later stories introduced a conditional formulation of God's covenant
with Abraham as the literary expedient needed to insert a codified Law as a
mediator between God and a people ruled by collective responsibility. Intentionally or not, this Deuteronomic strand
fostered a doctrine of exclusive election which did violence to the import of
the early stories in the narrative tradition.
At the time of the Exiles, however, prophets projected metaphors of
intimacy which enriched the vision in the early stories with formulations
giving voice to a longing on the part of God to be intimately involved with
human beings.
These metaphors exploited the glimpses of
unfathomable depths encoded in the early stories. In a radical contrast with a covenant
mediated by the Mosaic Law, Hosea and Second and Third Isaiah used the metaphor
of a marriage union to define God's intensely personal involvement with
individuals as well as with Israel. In
and through this metaphor and other metaphors of intimacy, the prophets called
for a sympathetic imagination capable of discerning God's moral will in
inarticulate cries from the depths voiced by the oppressed, the dispossessed,
the marginalized, the silenced and the outcast.
Over time, the metaphor defining the
covenant in terms of a marriage union generated an understanding that love
called for a passionate, vulnerable, respectful and faithful involvement, and
this understanding, in turn, transmitted a vision which described God's love as
both all-inclusive and ever-faithful. In
turn, this vision would not allow Jewish commentators to read the story of Adam
and Eve as the history of an original sin which evoked a judgment that Adam's
transgression irreparably severed a natural relationship between God and human
beings. In the same vein, it undermined
the widespread belief in a doctrine of exclusive election.
Tragically, in the polemical works in which
Christian apologists appropriated the Jewish Scriptures as the Old Testament,
the doctrine of exclusive election resurfaced in theologies designed to present
the authorized version of the special way that God was active in and through
Jesus of Nazareth. And when Augustine's
misreading of the story of Adam and Eve prevailed, the starting point for a
meta-narrative which traced the Incarnation to an interplay of divine justice
and divine mercy entered the tradition with a vengeance.
But this meta-narrative could not prevent
the prophets from using the vision of God's personal involvement with Israel's
patriarchs and matriarchs as the literary framework for metaphors of
intimacy. And whenever those metaphors
entered the dialogue among those who proclaimed the gospel message, the way was
prepared for a competitor which invoked the Prologue in the Gospel of John as
biblical warrant for an incarnational theology.
In sum, as later theologians read the
Prologue though a reading code derived from the metaphor of intimacy and a
developed doctrine of the Trinity, they traced the Incarnation to an outpouring
of divine love. From this perspective,
in becoming fully human, the eternal Word revealed a longing to be intimately
involved in the lives of every human being.
And as this insight was developed, this longing of the eternal Word
revealed a willingness to be passionately, vulnerably, respectfully and
faithfully involved with us, even when the agony in the Garden revealed to him
the pain he would share in if he was willing to share the pain that human
beings inflict on one another.
At this point, an incarnational theology
takes seriously an assertion attributed to Jesus: "He who sees me sees the
Father." In this vein, his
involvement with us reveals also the love of the Father and Spirit for us. And as a result, theologians in the
Franciscan tradition sought to formulate a language capable of discerning the
distinctive activity of each of the three divine Persons in our lives.
To belabor the contrast between a theology
of transcendence and an incarnational theology:
An incarnational theology rejects a theory of divine motivation which
asserts that divine justice had to require fitting reparation for disobedience
to the Law of Moses or to a natural law inscribed in the structure of the
universe by a rational and purposive Creator.
It also implies that Luther's doctrine of justification by faith alone
voices an illusory promise of instant intimacy to those who stand naked before
God, confessing an inescapable sinfulness and accepting the justification of a
severed relationship with God. By
extension, it traces Paul's distinction between faith and works to Paul's
compulsion to justify his conversion from a commitment to a strict observance
of the Law to a commitment to Jesus as the Christ. And it suggests that the metaphor which
compares God's involvement with us to a marriage-union generates a language
which dismisses this polar opposition as simply irrelevant.
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