46. WHOSE VOICE IS LANGUAGE?

  

        At first glance, the question, “Whose voice is language?,” might seem meaningless.  As a question implicit in the postmodernist critique of distinctions entrenched in everyday languages and of authority in any shape or form, however, it exposes the disguises which authority has assumed over the course of centuries, and it challenges honest searchers to forge a voice which reveals their own moral centers.

         (NB:  A prime example of distinctions entrenched in everyday languages:  Male - female.  Over the course of centuries, this distinction was mapped onto prevailing power-structures in ways that legitimated and perpetuated male domination.  In a broad sense, men who use this language to silence women seek to perpetuate their privileged roles in a political, economic or religious structure.  By exposing the hollow center of the distinction, the postmodernist critique demands that anyone who supports male domination must admit they are making a power-move which does violence to women and to themselves.

          In my use of the postmodernist critique of authority, the homophobic reaction of so many Christians to same-sex marriage reveals far more about their deeply rooted fears of sexuality (and, often, fears concerning their own sexual identity) than about homosexuality or homosexuals.  Their denominations may ignore the way that their acceptance of divorce undermines a supposedly natural institution of marriage.  But they hide behind the insistence that marriage is an institution validated by some natural order.  Presumably, they are thereby absolved of any need to voice vulnerable self-revelations of the turmoil the issue triggers in them.  And despite the insistence of Israel’s prophets that God’s moral will is heard in the cries of the oppressed and marginalized, they allow their prejudices to silence the cries of homosexuals who have suffered excruciating agony at their hands.

          Sadly, many Christians, Catholic and Protestant, invoke the authority of Scripture to justify their prejudices.  In so doing, they endow a patently biased interpretation of the gospel message with a spurious and even blasphemous authority.)

    A.  Answers to the question that have had significant play in the western literary tradition:

        1.  Language is the voice of reason:  Rationalism has functioned as the dominant strand in the western philosophical and scientific traditions.  For its god-term, it invokes a literary construct which weds the interrogatory stance inherent in the interiorization of literacy and a totalizing thrust of a language governed by the logic of continuous prose.  The detachment inherent in its uses of “reason” promises a god-like perspective on the interplay among language, experience and reality which is capable of penetrating the flux of experience in ways that reveal the dynamic interactions among underlying and enduring natural forces.

            In ancient Greece, this detachment first surfaced as a rupture of orality’s illusory sense of immediate presence, fullness and totality.  But once an interiorized interrogatory stance was wedded with the inner logic of continuous prose, Plato and Aristotle, in particular, assumed that the use of reason to generate and govern analyses of everyday languages would yield linguistic formulations capable of describing (or even presenting transparently) the workings of reality as a whole.  And in the Modern Era, the literary construct indebted to their reflections promised to replace orality’s illusory sense with a language which reasonable beings could use to predict future states of affairs, retrodict the primordial state which produced the present state of affairs, and enable them to transform nature into an environment conducive to the fulfillment of one’s wildest dreams.  (NB:  This pretense was fostered by the discovery that well-formulated questions could evoke answers from mute nature which conferred power over nature.)

            Summary:  Rationalists believe (1) that analyses of language and experience generated and governed by reason will ultimately yield a language consisting of clear and distinct ideas in a consistent, coherent, comprehensive and closed formal system, (2) that this language will reveal the whole of reality transparently, in depth and detail, (3) that this language can be consigned to a bounded text which is self-interpreting (because the language is consistent, coherent, comprehensive and complete) and self-referential (since it presents reality transparently).

        2.  Language is the voice of a rational and purposive Creator:  In his Summa Theologica, Aquinas wedded reason and revelation in his version of the medieval metaphor of the Two Books, the Book of Nature and the Judaic-Christian Scriptures.  To resolve issues of interpretation which threatened the traditional belief that the Scriptures spoke as the revealed word of God, he presented philosophy (reason) as the handmaid of theology (faith seeking understanding).  But the structure of the Summa imposed the rule of reason on his theological inquiries.

             First and foremost, the rule of reason (as the vehicle for the totalizing thrust of a language written in continuous prose) is evident in the supposition that a text could inscribe clear and distinct formulations of dogmas woven into a consistent, coherent, comprehensive and complete belief-system that revealed God’s activity in human history transparently.

              Secondly, Aquinas obviously believed that his account of the interplay between Aristotelian philosophy and Tradition would provide definitive interpretations of all passages in the Scriptures.  In this regard, carefully selected quotations from texts of the Fathers of the Church played a more prominent role in arguments designed to establish his authority over Tradition than quotations from the Scriptures.

             Thirdly, Aquinas’ account of the interplay among philosophy, Tradition and the Scriptures can be found in the argument he derived from the metaphor of the Two Books.  That argument can be succinctly stated.  God’s creative will can be read off the Book of Nature by the natural light of reason.  God’s saving will is revealed in the Scriptures.  And since there can be no conflict between God’s creative and saving wills, each Book can be used to guide readings of the other.

              Finally, the rule of reason over Aquinas’ thought is most evident in the conception of God he invokes to justify the juridical structure of the natural law theory which Thomists (and Pope Benedict) try to impose on Catholic moral theology to this day.  Succinctly stated, Aquinas’ argument asserts that, to be true to his own divine nature, a rational and purposive God would have to create a universe with a teleological structure which would enable human beings, made in the image of such a God, to read God’s moral will off of nature by a “natural light of reason.”  By extension, the language generated by this reading was the voice of a rational and purposive Creator.  (On any count, however, the natural law is not the language of love, since there is no formula for loving interactions between unique and complicated persons.)

        3.  Language is the voice of a just and merciful God who speaks in and through the Scriptures:  Aquinas situated traditional distinctions between faith and reason, reason and revelation, faith and works, nature and grace, Scripture and Tradition, and the sacred and the secular in the interplay of two books, the Book of Nature and the Scriptures.  Consequently, his Summa can be read as an extended commentary on the traditional belief that grace builds on nature.  To voice his protest against a hierarchically structured institution which presented itself as the guardian of Tradition, Luther transformed these distinctions into polar oppositions and filled the hollow center of these polar oppositions with the slogan, sola Scriptura (“Scripture alone”).

            As a child of his age, Luther proposed a metaphor depicting the relationship between the unique individual and the incomprehensible God without recognizing that the reach of any fruitful metaphor initially exceeds its grasp.  As the source of a rhetoric designed as a voice of protest, his belief-system voiced a rejection of both Tradition and the constrictive medieval belief-system as valid interpretations (readings) of Scripture.  In the empty literary space created by the rejection, it imposed a literal interpretation on the traditional metaphor which characterized the Scriptures as the word of God.  But the problem here is obvious.  If true believers grant that even a single passage in the Scripture requires interpretation, they can no longer insist that the Scriptures speak as the revealed word of God without ambiguity.  Whether they like it or not, they must answer the question:  Who determines which passages require interpretation and which passages voice God’s word clearly?

             Today, Christian fundamentalists who insist on the inerrancy of the Scriptures and who pretend that they read the Scriptures literally are the true literary heirs of the commitment encoded in Luther’s slogan, sola Scriptura.  To foster the pretense that the Scriptures speak as a self-interpreting and self-referential text which contains answers to all possible questions, they must regard language as the voice of a God who speaks immediately through the Scriptures.  (See the crazy efforts to legitimate Creationism as an intellectually respectable alternative to evolution.  From my perspective, a commitment to Scripture alone reveals a determination to maintain Luther’s doctrine of justification by faith alone at all costs.)

            4.  Language is the voice of thinking beings:  To subvert the hold of constrictive medieval belief-systems, Protestants framed the issue as a dispute between a commitment to Scripture and Tradition and a commitment to Scripture alone.  Descartes invoked the interrogatory stance at the core of a fictive voice of reason to legitimate his conviction that medieval belief-systems were edifices erected upon sand.  Transformed into a methodical doubt, this interrogatory stance stripped away “the hold of the dead hand of the past” as thoroughly as Luther’s rejection of Tradition.  And according to Descartes, all that remained were solipsistic thinking beings.  (According to Descartes’ geometrization of the universe, God wrote the Book of Nature in the language of mathematics, not the language of Aristotelian metaphysics baptized by Aquinas.  Thereafter, scientific inquiries were freed from the hold of the hierarchical and teleological structure of Aristotelian metaphysics.  And with this deconstruction of the foundations of Aquinas’s natural law theory, there was no longer any reason to believe that reason could provide analyses of experience which proved the existence of a rational and purposive Creator.)

             5.  Language is the voice of autonomous individuals:  Since Kant’s conception of the autonomous individual functioned as the centerpiece of the myth of Modernity, the philosophical position which regards language as the voice of such individuals calls for an extended commentary.

                 Historically, to avoid being dragged before the Inquisition, Descartes explicitly refused to explore the moral implications of the metaphor of individuality generated by his methodical doubt.  Equally explicitly, Kant wanted to rescue reason as the voice of authority from Hume’s empirical critique of rationalism.  Later, to show that his use of reason could resolve all moral issues, he offered an analysis of morality which replaced Descartes’ solipsistic conception of a thinking being with his own conception of the autonomous individual.

                 To endow this conception with moral authority, Kant interwove (1) Plato’s metaphorical depiction of the tri-partite soul, with its assumption that reason must rule disruptive passions and desires, (2) the central role played by internal turmoil in Augustine’s Confessions and Luther’s doctrine of original sin, (3) classical rationalism’s depiction of reason as a disinterested, dispassionate, god-like perspective on language and experience, (4) his own rejection of medieval references to  “the natural light of reason,” (5) Descartes’ thesis that thinking beings face one another across an unbridgeable chasm between subjectivity and objectivity, (6) Hume’s empirical critique of rationalism, (7) the assumption of Newtonian mechanics that, though we cannot know what gravity is, idealized Laws of Motion enable physicists to discover how gravity works and to use that knowledge to harness the motion of entities to human purposes, (8) Rousseau’s insistence that human beings are made unique and free by nature, not by God, and (9) his own use of Hume’s empirical critique to deprive Utilitarianism of moral authority.

                 The literary foundations for Kant’s analysis of morality can be found in his earlier Critique of Pure Reason.  This text introduced a chasm between nature and reason which replaced the supposition that reason is a natural trait of humans with the recognition that reason is a construct.  To support its argument that this construct could compel assent and consent to judgments, he invoked Newtonian physics as the paradigm example of a use of reason compatible with Hume’s empirical critique of classical rationalism.  To introduce categorical imperatives which functioned in a manner analogous to Newton’s Laws of Motion, he supplemented the thesis of the Critique of Pure Reason which depicted `reason’ as a construct designed to bridge the unbridgeable chasm between experience (subjectivity) and reality (objectivity) with the promise that this construct provides the only critical apparatus capable of making sense of experiences resulting from bombardment by constantly changing stimuli.

               In his application of the Critique to moral issues, Kant began with a radical distinction between descriptive and moral inquiries.  In this context, he used Hume’s critique of rationalism and his own reduction of passion and desire to purely natural motivations to replace the naturalist fallacy inherent in Aquinas’s argument that moral laws could be read off the impersonal operation of natural forces.  To formulate this replacement succinctly, he advanced the dictum, “`Is’ does not imply ‘ought’.”  Then, to counter Utilitarianism’s exclusive focus on the consequences of actions, he posited two maxims.  The first, a principle of universalizability, was designed to show how moral maxims function in a manner analogous to Newton’s Laws of Motion.  Subjected to the assertion that “is” does not imply “ought,” it served to deprive care and compassion for individuals of moral authority, since they violated the impartiality demanded by a detached perspective which reasonable beings could occupy interchangeably.  The second, “Always treat reasonable beings as ends in themselves, never merely as means,” was designed to show (1) that actions which used other individuals to gratify one’s desires, because they were urged by natural motivations, were inherently immoral, (2) that, in light of Hume’s empirical critique of rationalism, the Utilitarian focus on consequences could not generate authoritative moral judgments, and (3) that the resulting critique of Utilitarianism centered moral issues exclusively in the intention of the agent.

                 In truly important ways, therefore, Kant was the first philosopher determined to avoid grounding morality outside of human reality.  His argument can be succinctly stated.  In the modern world, unique individuals who face moral questions inherent in constantly changing conditions of life cannot predict or control the long-term consequences of any course of action or sort out the tangled motivations which incline them to act in a particular way.  To become free and to act with intellectual integrity, they must learn how to subject passions and desires to moral ends.  The process begins with their awareness of the inner turmoil so vividly evoked by Augustine’s inner turn and Luther’s doctrine of original sin and is brought to conclusion when the analysis of this inner turmoil governed by the two maxims noted above yields the experience which Kant referred to as a sense of duty (“oughtness”). But I cannot agree with his conclusion that only actions performed with the intention of doing one’s duty are moral. And this disagreement signals my critique of his thesis that the use of these maxims to process the experience of inner turmoil in a way that centers moral judgments in human reality yields categorical imperatives (not moral laws or lists of duties or virtues) which autonomous individuals dictate to themselves.

                 Since I frame moral discourse with a metaphor of intimacy rather than a metaphor of power and judgment, I view Kant’s argument as both a coherent configuration of the theses noted above and a conceptual quagmire.  Taken as a whole, the configuration endows reason with the power to compel the sort of assent and consent to judgments which generate categorical imperatives.  Presumably, because the analyses which yield such judgments are rational responses to an internal turmoil provoked by changing conditions of life, they escape the solipsism inherent in the metaphor of individuality generated by Descartes’ methodical doubt.  But the elimination of passion as a moral motivation devalues the personal dimensions of involvements between and among individuals, and this devaluation reveals how thoroughly the conception of the autonomous individual remains captive to the inner logic of Descartes’ conception of the solipsistic individual.

                 As an answer to the question, “Whose voice is language?”, therefore, Kant’s analysis of morality implies that language is the voice of the autonomous individual.

         6.  Language is the voice of the Absolute Spirit:  To impose his authority on the western philosophical tradition, Hegel began with the categorical assertion, “The real is rational, and the rational is real.”  To validate the literary origins of the use of reason implicit in this dictum, he grounded his secularization of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity in an ontological argument indebted to Descartes’s insistence that a mathematical intuition of the infinite revealed that the infinite was a positive notion rather than the product of the negation of a conception of the finite abstracted from the experience of finite entities.  Presumably, this ontological argument demonstrated the existence of an Infinite devoid of finite forms.  In his hands, it supported an all-encompassing vision of a course of history generated by an Absolute Spirit which operated exclusively as a negating force at the center of this otherwise empty Infinite.  From this perspective, the negation of a formless Infinite generated finite forms, worked within them to fully realize them, and then moved to negate the limits of any finite form in ways that generated other finite forms.  The conclusion is obvious:  The process will presumably continue until the Absolute Spirit has filled the empty Infinite with all possible finite forms, each fully realized, and the language which incorporates and transmits all these fully realized forms of life is the Word incarnate.  Language, then, voices the inexorable march of the Absolute Spirit through history.

        7.  Language is the voice of an all-pervasive will to power:  Nietzsche was determined to establish his authority over Hegel.  Hegel’s identification of the activity of the Spirit as a negating force implied that the Spirit used individuals ruthlessly to realize its purposes.  And though Hegel would never have used this term, the result would be an autonomous text, self-interpreting and self-referential.

            To validate his triumph over Hegel, Nietzsche encoded his critique of rationalism in two distinctive literary forms, the archeology of knowledge and the genealogy of morals.  The archeology of knowledge generated a code capable of exposing the arbitrariness and pretensions enshrined in the supposition that reason provides a god-like perspective.  The genealogy of morals generated a code which exposed the ways that the use of reason generated rationalizations designed to legitimate the claim to authority voiced by the powers-that-be.  In sum, the judgments they licensed were little more than thinly disguised exercises of a hidden will to power.

            Consequently, though the gurus of the postmodernist movement pretended to speak from nowhere, their insistence that no one can escape entirely from the formative power of everyday language echoes Nietzsche’s conviction that the hermeneutical code derived from the literary forms he forged revealed the operation of an all-pervasive will to power in nature and in the western literary tradition.  Presumably, this code generated re-readings of the texts which were kept alive in the transmission of the western literary tradition which, in the final analysis, revealed that language is the voice of this all-pervasive will to power.

        8.  Language is the voice of Being:  Before their disillusionment with the promises of the myth of Modernity, continental intellectuals were scornful of the hermeneutical theory which Nietzsche used to present himself as the prophet who announced the imminent arrival of supermen who would live beyond good and evil.  As a result, his deconstruction of the literary foundations of traditional metaphysical, epistemological, methodological and ethical inquiries awaited Heidegger’s determination to wrest the mantle of prophecy from him.

            To lend authority to his appropriation of Nietzsche’s hermeneutical code, Heidegger addressed the revolutionary question inherent in Nietzsche’s re-reading of the western literary tradition:  “What does an understanding of the workings of the western literary tradition reveal?”  To answer the question, he adopted the notion of Being projected by the pre-Socratics as the god-term in a hermeneutical theory designed to reveal workings of an all-pervasive creative and gracious Being rather than an all-pervasive will to power.

             In the inter-textual dialogue among the pre-Socratics, Being functioned as a detached perspective on the workings of a literary language which was taking on a life of its own at a time when significant distinctions among language, experience and reality had not yet emerged.  In Heidegger’s hands, Being functioned as the framework for analyses of ways of being human in the modern world which privileged a participative existence over relationships among solipsistic or autonomous individuals and replaced methodologies governed by the rule of reason with an existential stance toward Being.

            To frame his analyses of the workings of language, Heidegger insisted that unique individuals (dasein) are linguistic, not rational, and passionate, not detached.  In short, if we were not linguistic, we could not learn everyday languages which sort out experiences and carve up reality in very different ways.  And since Heidegger did not share the fashionable fascination with the promise of an ideal language, he supplemented Nietzsche’s insistence on the textuality of languages generated by literary traditions with a metaphor which depicted language as the vehicle for the revelation of the meaning of Being.

             In this context, languages which had taken on the status of “things-in-themselves” bridged the Cartesian chasm between subjectivity and objectivity which had such pernicious implications for the rationalism generated by Descartes’ methodical doubt.  And as revelatory vehicles, they replaced philosophical –isms. In its own right, it clearly replaced rationalism’s suggestion that language is the voice of solipsistic or autonomous individuals with the use of Being as the god-term in a hermeneutical theory designed to expose the workings of the western literary tradition.

              Like Hume’s empirical critique of rationalism, Heidegger’s existentialist critique is simple and direct:  Empirical evidence that supports the awareness that, as we strive to express even the most uniquely personal visions, insights or cries from the depths, we find ourselves searching for words.  Consequently, we are not masters of literary languages which have taken on lives of their own or of the formative power of everyday languages on our thought and aspirations.

             In a late essay, Heidegger supplemented the depiction of language as the vehicle for the revelation of the meaning of Being with a metaphorical depiction of everyday language as “an abode in which we dwell suspended over an abyss.”  From this perspective, everyday language effectively bridges the Cartesian chasm over continental rationalism.  As the voice of a creative and gracious Being, however, everyday languages both reveal and conceal.  Consequently, analyses of language and experience must be framed by a hermeneutical code which privileges glimpses of the workings of an open-ended process over rationalizations which, by imposing closure on questioning, pretend to offer authoritative interpretations of texts and analyses of experience.

        9.  Language is the voice of a hermeneutics of suspicion:  Neither Nietzsche nor Heidegger escaped entirely from the rule of reason.  Both filled the hollow center of their hermeneutical theories with god-terms (the will to power and Being), and both were determined to assert authority over past, present and future readings (interpretations) of the intertextual dialogue which constitutes the western literary tradition.

             In the middle of the twentieth century, an originally amorphous movement now referred to as postmodernism took Nietzsche’s and Heidegger’s readings of the western literary tradition one step farther,  Its adherents agreed with Nietzsche’s exposure of the workings of a will to power in any claim to speak with authority, but were horrified by Nietzsche’s fascination with violence.  Many took the Holocaust as an unspeakable obscenity which revealed that both the myth of Modernity and Heidegger’s call for open responsiveness were unable to produce what they promised.

              As the movement evolved, it coalesced around a hermeneutics designed to subvert authority in any shape or form.  Certain contenders for the mantle of authority were easily targeted:  (1)  The supposition that reason spoke with authority because its god-like perspective on the interplay among language, experience and reality was capable of liberating individuals from the formative power of everyday language;  (2)  Rationalism’s promise of an ideal language which, because it presented reality transparently, could be inscribed in a self-interpreting and self-referential (autonomous) text;  (3)  The myth of Modernity, with its promise that autonomous individuals could create their own unique identities, co-author an ideal society, harness nature to their purposes, and thereby become lords of history and arbiters of their own destinies;  and (4) The promise that a hermeneutical theory or a theory of literary criticism could yield a definitive interpretation of a text.

               To expose (deconstruct) the literary foundations of these positions, the gurus of the movement appropriated critical apparati indebted to the resurfacing of the interrogatory stance at the core of reason whenever the rule of the totalizing thrust of language became oppressive.  In their desire to avoid becoming merely another -ism, they wove these critical apparati into a hermeneutics designed to subvert authority without re-inscribing authority in their own texts and utterances.  To that end, the hermeneutics of suspicion personifies (1) the interiorization of literacy as an interrogatory stance which licenses endless question, (2) Descartes’ methodical doubt, but without the myth of pure beginnings it generated, (3) strategies for reading texts, cultures and textured experiences derived from the literary forms forged by Nietzsche, the archeology of knowledge and the genealogy of morals, (4) the elimination of metaphors of individuality encoded in Heidegger’s dasein,  (5) Derrida’s strategy of putting god-terms “under erasure” as a means to evoke a creative tension between the discourse generated by the rule of any god-term and suspicion of its promises, (6) the use of this strategy to replace the role played by “bracketing” in Husserl’s phenomenological method for analyzing data of consciousness with a focus on discourse rather than consciousness, and (7) a code designed to expose the arbitrariness of distinctions, rupture the continuity promised by the logic of continuous prose, and transgress boundaries of any sort.

             In sum, the suspicion embraced by postmodernist critics encodes a critical apparatus which subverts any and all efforts to fill the hollow center of interiorized interrogatory stance with a god-term.  As a result, this code authorizes readings without re-inscribing authority in them.  As a by-product, however, it denies a voice to a longing for deepening person-to-person involvement which generated a distinctive literary code, the prose narrative, which enables individuals to learn how to speak in their own voices.  To bolster that denial, it supplements the exposure of the impossibility of a god-like perspective on language, experience and reality with the charge that everyday language is a repository of violence.

             Sadly, though the postmodernist depiction of human existence echoes the metaphors of Israel’s great prophets which locate morality in the cries of the oppressed, marginalized, silenced and outcast in any society, those who pretend that a hermeneutics of suspicion enables them to speak anonymously can only speak in a hollow voice of prophetic protest.

        10.  Language is the voice of the longing for a fully human and uniquely personal existence and for intimate involvements with loved ones:  Many philosophers and theologians ignore the challenge inherent in the postmodernist hermeneutics of suspicion rather than address its charge that they endow the god-term they espouse with authority in ways which inscribe and rationalize a hidden will to power.  On my part, I welcome Derrida’s call to put these god-terms “under erasure,” since it recognizes that forms of life and distinctive moral discourses generated by the metaphor of power and judgment are full of both promise and peril.  On the one hand, they have contributed to the quest for a fully human and uniquely personal existence.  On the other, when they are used to legitimate moral judgments, they sow seeds of violence.

             In this context, my answer to the question, “Whose voice is language?”, is indebted to the form of life generated by the metaphor of intimacy.  This form of life encodes a language capable of processing person-to-person interactions in ways that transform a longing for deepening intimacy into a realizable quest.  But its promise that passionate, vulnerable, respectful and faithful interactions will foster trust stands in polar opposition to a postmodernist celebration of suspicion (and irony).  (The fidelity which fosters trust is essential in an involvement in which vulnerable self-revelations are the only sort of interactions which yield deepening person-to-person involvements.)

             An analysis of the workings of this form of life reveals that a committed quest for intimacy is the only way to fulfill the longing for a fully human and uniquely personal existence and the longing for intimacy.  The dynamics can be succinctly sketched.  Genuinely person-to-person involvements plunge us into a journey into the unknown.  As the involvement deepens, interactions tap buried tangles created by a pervasive process of socialization and events in our personal histories.  At this time, couples who committed themselves to a shared journey into the unknown discover that they married a stranger and that they are strangers to themselves.  Implicitly, they realize that they do not know how to speak in their own voices.  But an involvement which calls for vulnerable self-revelations is a constant invitation to sort out the tangles and place them respectfully and faithfully in each other’s care.  And in and through such self-revelations, both begin to be able to speak honestly in their own voices, and both learn how to co-author the story of their shared journey into the unknown.

            Since ethical analysis is designed to show how a purpose is realizable, there is an ethics of intimacy.  This ethics analyses experiences of those who commit themselves to the quest for intimacy.  And this analysis reveals that passionate, vulnerable, respectful and faithful interactions are the only path to deepening person-to-person involvements and that any recourse to exercises of power or judgment aborts or distorts the quest. In Kant’s terms, this analysis supports a hypothetical rather than a categorical imperative.  I.e., if you want to be intimately involved, you must listen to the call for passionate, vulnerable, respectful and faithful interactions, and you must avoid disguised recourse to judgment and power.  But any pretense that an individual is compelled to seek intimacy violates the call for vulnerability and respect.

           As the bottom line, therefore, the language of intimacy can evoke the longing and show how to transform the longing into a realizable quest.  But the calls it voices do not pretend to speak with authority, since they can only speak for themselves.

                    ____________________   

45A. CO-AUTHORS OF THE STORY OF THE INCARNATE WORD?

    To make sense of tragic situations in their own lives or the lives of others, Christians often assure themselves that the tragedy in question plays a role in the fulfillment of God's plan.  In their elaborations on this them, they may insist that God has a purpose in allowing a tragedy to happen or that there must be a reason for it.

    As a philosopher of religion, I cringe whenever I hear such efforts "to justify the ways of God to men."  The references to purpose and reason depend on a conception of God derived from the metaphor of power and judgment.  Reference to a plan reduced the understanding of human history as a story, to a deterministic unfolding of an already written script.  (From an analytic perspective, talk of "God's plan" invokes a vision of God's dominion over all which is only slightly less objectionable than the vision encoded in Calvin's doctrine of eternal pre-destination.)

     I also cringe when I hear hybrid rhetorics which virtually reduce human history to the story of Jesus.  These rhetorics seem to echo the vision inscribed in the Prologue of John which places the eternal Word at the center of the whole of creation, of human history and of the lives of individuals, but they map the vision onto a meta-narrative which describes the Incarnation as a response to an original sin which severed the natural relationship between Creator and creatures.  In this meta-narrative, the incarnate Word simply submitted to the plan of salvation (or justification) dictated by an interplay between divine justice and divine mercy.  In turn, this submission to the dictates of a God of power and judgment won for Jesus the role as the sole mediator between God and sinful humans once and for all.

    The doctrine of exclusive election implicit in this meta-narrative has particularly malignant implications.  Presumably, Jesus' saving (justifying) activity in human history ended with his sacrificial death on the Cross.  Thereafter, if we are Protestants, we enter the story of Jesus by accepting justification by faith alone, and if we are Catholics, we enter the story by meriting the sanctifying grace merited by Jesus' sacrifice.

   

    Two questions cry out for attention.  (1)  "Do we enter the story of Jesus as bit parts in an already written script or as co-authors of a never-ending story?"  And (2)  "Do we rely on literary conventions derived from the metaphor of power or literary conventions derived from the metaphor of intimacy to process our everyday experiences?" 

    The answers to these questions are intertwined.  The critical apparatus generated by the metaphor of power and judgment promises the sort of closure which implies that the script of the story must be in place, timelessly.  In marked contrast, the critical apparatus generated by the metaphor of intimacy implies that the incarnate Word longs to interact passionately, vulnerably, respectfully and faithfully with each and every human being throughout the course of human history.  And in and through these interactions, the incarnate Word reveals to us that the involvement of the Father and the Holy Spirit in our lives is motivated by the same longing and enlists us as co-authors of his story.

    My thesis here is quite straightforward:  In an incarnational theology, the three divine Persons in the triune God find ingenious ways to invite us to be co-authors of the story of Jesus.  This proclamation questions the central issue in the misplaced debate between Catholic and Protestant theologians.  In this debate, both sides embrace a hierarchically structured relationship between the Creator and sinful human beings;  they simply fill its hollow center in divergent ways.  The Protestant position insists that the incarnate Word is the sole mediator between God and the offspring of Adam and calls individuals to stand naked before God, confessing their utter sinfulness.  (Today, many Protestants argue that Catholics are not truly Christians, since Catholics do not seek to foster an intensely emotional encounter with Jesus or insist that Jesus is the sole mediator between God and sinful human beings.)  In marked contrast, Catholics believe that Jesus' love comes to us through one another.  (Today, many Catholics argue that the encounter with Jesus fostered by Protestant evangelists is superficial.)

    From the perspective offered by an incarnational theology, however, the Protestant protest targeted a questionable definition of how Jesus' love comes to us through one another.  This definition can be found today in pronouncements of Pope Benedict XVI and officials in the Roman Curia who supplement the hierarchical structure of Thomistic theology with a juridical-bureaucratic model that implies that God's love comes to us through a clerically structured institutional Church and through Sacraments defined as rituals which confer sanctifying and actual grace.  I reject this model of the Church as vehemently as any Protestant, but my rejection does not condemn me to the Protestant position, since the use of the prophetic metaphor of intimacy to process my everyday experiences is centered in the Sacramental system, not a hierarchically structured institution, and offers a very different understanding of the Sacraments.

      I.e., the sacramental theology generated by this metaphor asserts that Jesus instituted the Sacraments as rituals intended to express his commitment to be intimately involved with us at critical moments in our journeys into the unknown.  Here, the Sacrament of Marriage provides a paradigm example.  In the exchange of vows which initiates a marriage in Christ, couples commit themselves to person-to-person involvements with one another and with Jesus.  The form of their vow is given in Jesus' call, "Love one another as I have loved you."  If they are realistic, they are aware that they cannot yet imagine how intimately Jesus loves each of them, but they will have experienced intensely personal interactions which offered glimpses of the ways that Jesus' love for each and both of them comes to them through one another.

       Sadly, the standard theology of marriage does little to make spouses aware of the ways that the Father's providence is at work in events in their shared journey and the urgings of the indwelling Spirit seek to teach them how to live in a way that responds to Jesus' call to love one another as he loves them.  But when I focus on an understanding of the Sacrament informed by a metaphor of intimacy, I find that engaged couples are stunned by the awareness that this call speaks to the deepest longing of their heart.  It is easy, then, to help them understand how deepening intimacy will trigger emotional reactions which reveal that they cannot yet imagine how intimately Jesus, the Father and the Holy Spirit are involved in their lives or how to realize the deepening person-to-person involvement that they long for so urgently.

      In sum, as spouses become more deeply involved, not less, events will reveal that they do not know how to be fully human and uniquely themselves.  E.g., they will discover that their responses to one another are distorted by fears of revealing themselves and of not knowing how to respond to each other's cries from the depths.  Hopefully, as they realize that the incarnate Word became fully human in order to urge us on in that quest, they will discover that the compassion of the Wounded Healer comes to them through each other's compassion in their uniquely personal interactions.

    In sum, fidelity to marriage vows informed by Jesus' call, "Love one another as I have loved you," evokes experiences which reveal Jesus' willingness to invite us to co-author his story.  Though this call may be addressed to all of us, we have neither the opportunity nor the energy to be as intimately involved with everyone as Jesus is.  In a marriage in Christ, however, two unique individuals say to each other:  "I long to become as intimately involved with you as Jesus is.  Often, I will not know how.  Often, my woundedness will evoke buried pain, anger, fear and shame that tempts me to hide from you or to control interactions between us.  Often, when we are struggling, I will pretend to tell the authorized version of any event that taps my woundedness.  But I will listen to your version with a sympathetic imagination.  And I will be grateful to God that, through these vulnerable self-revelations, I will experience a multitude of graced moments in which your compassion frees me from captivity to long-buried woundedness, your fond delight in me enables me to hope that God might delight in me, and your willingness to work through cross-situations in ways that involved us more deeply in each other's tangled depths helped me to understand the process of forgiveness.

    I must confess that I have known more couples who lapsed into separate lives than couples who shared a journey into the unknown passionately, vulnerably, respectfully and faithfully.  Consequently, I sometimes wonder if my understanding of the Sacrament of Marriage is influenced too much by long-term involvements with couples engaged in cold or hot wars and couples who fail to understand why their love has grown so dim and dull.

    In these involvements, many couples came to talk because the husband did not know how to respond to the desperate loneliness voiced by his wife.  Though the wife would not believe his protestations, he genuinely wanted to make her happy.  With a desperation equal to hers, he would ask both of us:  "What do you want me to do?".  And it would become apparent that he was unable to understand that she was crying out for vulnerable self-revelations of his deepest feelings, including feelings for her and feelings about situations he faced.

     Quite obviously, individuals who cannot acknowledge and embrace a longing for intimacy cannot resonate with the proclamation that Jesus loves them passionately, vulnerably, respectfully and faithfully.  They have interiorized an arsenal of emotional reactions designed to defuse cries of loved ones that would tap deeply buried feelings.  Since no one had involved them as co-authors of a journey to deepening intimacy prior to marriage, they could hardly talk with Jesus or with their wives about passionate responses they could not identify, feel or own as their own.  And in many cases, they feared intimacy as a journey into the unknown which would reveal how unlovable they were.  A journey of separate lives was much safer.

     Undoubtedly, these experiences contributed to my conviction that we cannot know how Jesus longs to love us into wholeness until we experience the love of someone who longs for an ever-deepening person-to-person involvement with us.  Jesus loves the husbands who fear the interior life as a foreign and hostile terrain, but they do not and cannot yet let that love touch them.  And in their woundedness, they cannot know that Jesus suffers what they suffer because he is intimately involved with them until they dare to co-author a perilous journey to intimacy with a loved one.

     But my own experiences have also evoked an awed awareness of Jesus' willingness to welcome me as a co-author of his never-ending story.  I often kick against the goad, but I am also grateful that the story of the involvement of the eternal Word in the lives of unique individuals would be different without my quest for intimacy with others and with him.

    In sum, Jesus is not involved with us as the sole mediator between God and sinful humans.  The misplaced debate between Catholic and Protestant theologians places the point at issue in the hollow center of a hierarchical structure legitimated by the Hellenic metaphor of power and judgment.  The meta-narrative framed by this metaphor is subverted by the incarnational theology which presents each of the three divine Persons as lovers who seek to be intimately involved with finite human beings on their quest for an ever-more fully human and uniquely personal existence.  And this theology is framed by a metaphor which defines a loving involvement as the call for passionate, vulnerable, respectful and faithful interactions.

45. CATHOLIC-PROTESTANT POLEMICS: A MISPLACED DEBATE

     The theological discourse forged by medieval theologians enshrined a critical apparatus designed to wed faith and reason.  The role played by reason is particularly evident in the metaphor of the Two Books which framed their controversies.  In its paradigm instantiation, the rule of reason was inscribed in the metaphor which implied that the Book of Nature authored by a rational and purposive Creator could be read by the natural light of reason.  In this context, the interplay between Books which revealed God's creative and saving wills would yield a doctrinal system which satisfied the dictates of reason.

     At the dawn of the Modern Era, the metaphor of the Two Books trapped Catholic and Protestant apologists in a misplaced debate that persists to this day.  In short, the conception of reason it enshrined fostered the belief that theological arguments will ultimately yield a single authoritative reading of a sprawling text which had previously been subjected to multiple misreadings.  But this belief centered the debate in a polemical structure derived from a metaphor of power and judgment.

     On the foundational level, the workings of the metaphor of power and judgment can be seen in the meta-narrative shared by Catholic and Protestant polemicists.  For its starting point, this meta-narrative enshrined the harsh doctrine of original sin that Augustine extracted from the Yahwist's story of Adam and Eve.  In this violent misreading of a wild and wonderful story, Yahweh's prohibition of moral discourse imposed a power-structure on his relationship with Adam.  From a detached perspective, Augustine could easily embrace this interpretation, since the role played by the power-structure in the story recurs in the passage in which Yahweh seeks to alleviate Adam's loneliness by granting him power over the animals while reserving authority over moral discourse to himself.  As the story continues, however, when this well-meaning effort fails, Yahweh forms Eve as a help-mate to Adam.  To deny Eve the role of a prophet who must protest against the violence inherent in a prohibition of moral discourse, Augustine asserted that Eve was seduced by the devil (appearing as a serpent) and, in turn, seduced Adam.

    At this point in Augustine's misreading, judgment enters with a vengeance.  As a just Judge, the Creator had to decree that Adam's sin ruptured the natural order irreparably, corrupted human nature, and severed the natural relationship between Creator and creatures.  (Note the emphasis on the sense of corporate responsibility characteristic of the participative existence fostered by orality.)

         (A note in passing:  My critique of Augustine's reading is indebted to Ong's analysis of the transition from orality to literacy as the foundation of the biblical tradition.  First and foremost, Augustine read the story as an accurate historical account of an event in a primordial past.  Since I read the story as literature, I understand the prohibition of moral discourse as a rhetorical ploy which allowed the Yahwist to evoke the felt experience of a transition from orality to literacy as the foundation of Hebrew culture.  In my reading, therefore, Yahweh speaks as the guardian of orality's illusory sense of immediate presence, fullness and totality which was being subverted by the detachment inherent in writing and reading, while Eve functions as the personification of the eruption of a self-consciousness that offers glimpses of unfathomable depths and a mysterious freedom.

        Since I read this text as a story rather than a historical account, I trace the intention of the author to a desire to evoke in readers an identification with a felt experience.  In any case, the story inscribed a tension between orality and literacy that re-appears in the mediation of a text implicit in the Deuteronomic strand in the narrative tradition and the return to orality inscribed in the prophetic metaphors of intimacy.  And in that foundational role, it introduced literary conventions and a narrative strategy which, over the course of centuries, generated a distinctive literary form, the prose narrative, which provided conventions which the prophets interweave in inexhaustible, yet focused metaphors of intimacy.  Finally, from the interplay between this literary form and the metaphor of intimacy, biblical scholars can derive a hermeneutical theory (a reading code) which differs radically from that of Augustine and, through him, of Aquinas, Luther and Calvin.)

    To appreciate the authority acquired by Augustine's doctrine of original sin, we do well to note the interplay between the anxiety of authorship and the issue of authority.  Thus, authors who seek to communicate through texts risk being misunderstood with no way to address the misinterpretation.  To minimize that risk, they tend to utilize literary conventions with which their absent audiences are familiar.  In so doing, they grant authority to the texts of the authors whose conventions they adopt.  Over the course of centuries, theologians who utilized literary conventions encoded in Augustine's texts allowed him to define God's entry into human history as a response to the sin of Adam.  In so doing, they presented a meta-narrative which implied that the eternal Word would not have become incarnate if Adam had not sinned as the authoritative reading of the Judaic-Christian Scriptures.

    In this meta-narrative, God's response to an original sin is ruled by justice and mercy, not informed by an everfaithful and all-inclusive love.  In short, since Adam sought to usurp the authority of an infinite Being, divine justice had to declare that the natural relationship between Creator and creatures was severed beyond repair, but divine mercy devised a solution to an otherwise intractable problem.  Fully God, the eternal Word could make fitting reparation by becoming fully human and undergoing a cruel and humiliating death on the Cross as a sacrifice that could make fitting reparation and restore the severed relationship.

         (Note in passing:  Historically, Augustine's theology of redemption differed significantly from that of his literary heir, Luther.  The pregnant phrase which summarized his understanding of the workings of God's activity in human history referred to Adam's sin as a "happy fault," since the saving activity of Jesus both restored and elevated human nature.  In effect, he retained the creative tension implicit in the dictum, "Grace builds on nature."  But he also laid the literary foundation for the meta-narrative which situated theological inquiries between two events, Adam's sin and Jesus' sacrificial death on the Cross.  And he was largely responsible for the authority of a language centered in references to redemption ("buying back"), expiation, and reparation ("paying a price for sin").)

    The rule of the metaphor of power and judgment inscribed in this meta-narrative reduced the relationship between God and Israel to a contract.  This reduction echoed Paul's reading of God's covenant with Israel as a covenant of Law.  It is also present, if hidden, in the assumption that a restoration of a relationship severed by the sin of Adam required fitting reparation.  (Luther's rejection of the traditional tension between faith and works is little more than a rhetorical sleight of hand.  In and through his doctrine of faith alone, he rejects the traditional belief that salvation must be merited through works, but he frames this rejection by an insistence that Jesus performed the saving work for us.)

    In understandable ways, Luther's protest again "works" was designed to replace the supposition that God's love could be earned or merited with an insistence on the sheer gratuity of salvation.  In his own life as an Augustinian priest, the futility he experienced in his desperate efforts to merit God's love magnified the hold of Augustine's harsh doctrine of original sin.  To escape from that futility by embracing it, he emphasized that, because of Adam's sin, we are utterly and inescapably self-centered.  From this starting point, he could (1) insist that God had imposed a covenant (contract) of Law on Israel to reveal the futility of works and (2) reduce the New Covenant to pure gift by re-inscribing the contractual model of the Covenant in the supposition that God had to require the sacrificial death of God's own Son as the only way that fitting reparation could be made to divine justice.

 

    Since I believe that intimacy is the deepest longing of the human heart (including Luther's), I suggest that this meta-narrative has tragic implications.  First and foremost, Luther's doctrine of justification by faith alone forced him to use a conception of God dictated by the metaphor of power and judgment as the god-term in his hermeneutical theory.  But an analysis of the distinctive form of life which can transform the longing for intimacy into a realizable quest reveals that recourse to power or judgment in person-to-person involvements aborts the quest for deepening intimacy and does violence to all concerned.

    In effect, Luther used the doctrine of justification by faith alone to support a promise of instant intimacy.  Presumably, to receive the pure gift of justification, one had only to stand naked before God in and through a confession of utter and inescapable sinfulness and to believe that Jesus had made fitting reparation for human sinfulness.  But the flight from intellectual integrity did not end there.  Since this doctrine was hardly self-evident, Luther's followers had to insist that the Scriptures spoke as an autonomous (self-interpreting) text which spoke immediately as the word of God and that his extraction of the doctrine from a sprawling text was devoid of interpretation.

    As I noted in the previous reflection, this insistence forced his Protestant offspring to endow a text with power to speak as an immediate word of God.

Summary:  The Metaphor of Power and Judgment

    I trust that the above sketch indicates the way that the rule of reason, the conception of the autonomous text and the metaphor of power and judgment provided the stage for a misplaced debate between Catholic and Protestant polemicists.  For the sake of economy, I pass over the controversies concerning Jesus' role as mediator in a relationship framed by a metaphor of power and judgment and by the Catholic insistence that a hierarchically structured institution is a divinely constituted interpreter of Scripture and Tradition.  I also resist the temptation to show that Calvin's harsh doctrine of eternal predestination takes the metaphor of power and judgment to its logical extreme.  I do so because my thesis can best be supported by a sketch of the violence done to the biblical tradition by this misplaced debate.

The Biblical Tradition

    The triumph of literacy over orality in both ancient Greece and ancient Israel involved a revolutionary restructuring of thought and inquiry, but the authors with very different understanding of human existence were forced to construct very different literary forms as the means to focus analyses of language which illuminated the experiences which they adopted as paradigmatic.  In this context, the Hellenic and Hebrew literary tradition forged distinctive literary forms designed to illuminate very different experiences.  Consequently, any reading of the Judaic-Christian Scriptures through the code which governed the western philosophical tradition does violence to the biblical tradition.

    Thesis:  The misplaced debate between Catholics and Protestants was framed by the literary form of the autonomous text and a metaphor of power and judgment.  The biblical tradition was framed by a distinctive literary form, the prose narrative, and by a metaphor of intimacy.

    Five factors played critical roles in the restructuring of the workings of language in the biblical tradition.  (1)  The Hebrew literary tradition used stories to process Israel's historical experience.  (2)  Though Hebrew storytellers sought objective descriptions of how Israel's God was active in her history, they could not have imagined the sort of historical inquiries that the rule of reason demands.  (3)  The redactors (Scribes) who stitched together stories composed over the course of four centuries during the Babylonian Exile were clearly motivated by a fear that Israel's cultural and literary heritage was being lost.  (4)  Here, a major difference between the philosophical and the biblical traditions becomes obvious.  The philosophical tradition transformed the interrogatory stance inherent in the interiorization of literacy into inquiries designed to penetrate the flux of experience in ways that sorted out interactions among impersonally operating forces of nature.  The biblical tradition sought truth-telling descriptions of a process conducive to deepening person-to-person involvements.  (5)  For this reason, storytellers in the biblical tradition forged a distinctive literary form, the prose narrative, which enabled them to process the Israel's historical experience through the lens of the belief that an incomprehensible deity was involved in intensely personal ways with unique individuals endowed with unfathomable depths and a mysterious freedom.

    The workings of the prose narrative can be seen in the centuries-long dialogue among storytellers preserved in the sprawling text stitched together by the Scribes in Babylon.  To transmit Israel's historical existence, these anonymous authors used literary conventions derived from the Exodus- and Covenant-themes encoded in the stories of the Yahwist and the Elohist.

    In this context, the stories generated by the Exodus-theme depict human existence as a perpetual journey into the unknown.  As a more detached perspective, the Covenant-theme centered the journeys in question in intensely personal interactions between Israel's God and her patriarchs, matriarchs and their offspring.

    Though the Exodus-theme was inscribed in the story of Adam and Eve in a rudimentary way, its clearest formulation can be found in the story which recorded words purportedly spoken by Yahweh which sent Abram, son of Terah, forth on a journey into the unknown as Abraham of Yahweh.  These words gave form and direction to the series of stories centered in intermittent encounters between Yahweh and Abraham, including the introduction of the Covenant-theme in the passage in which Yahweh asserted categorically:  "I will be your God, and you will be my people."

    For centuries thereafter, the interplay between the Exodus- and Covenant-themes revolved around the promises of land, prosperity and many offspring associated with this categorically asserted Covenant.  As literary conventions, these concrete promises signified the promise of a fullness of life.  Taken literally, they generated the Deuteronomic strand in the literary tradition which read the covenant through a code derived from the metaphor of power and judgment inscribed in the Yahwist's story of Adam and Eve.

    The literary foundations of the Deuteronomic strand can easily be exposed.  If the promises attached to Yahweh's Covenant with Abraham were taken literally, their fulfillment was constantly deferred.  To save the vision, storytellers in this strand reformulated the categorically asserted Covenant as a conditional contract.  From this perspective, they could answer questions concerning the power or fidelity of Israel's God with a rhetoric which blamed Israel' failure to observe the Law for that deferral.

The Story of Adam and Eve

    Here and elsewhere, I read the story of Adam and Eve as a provocative articulation of the tensions evoked by literacy's gradual encroachment on a domain previously ruled by orality.

    In this story, the Yahwist introduced the metaphor of power and judgment through the prohibition which reserved authority over moral discourse to himself.  As the author of the prohibition, Yahweh speaks as the custodian and protector of orality.  As the story unfolds, however, the Yahwist used passages telling of the bemusement experienced by Yahweh when he noticed that Adam was lonely to expose the dehumanizing and depersonalizing effects of a power-structure, and he added emphasis to this insight in passages detailing the futility of Yahweh's attempt to assuage the loneliness by endowing Adam with power over the animals.

    References to Adam's loneliness suggested an emerging awareness of interiority on the part of Adam.  But Eve entered the scene as the archetypal bearer of an eruptive self-consciousness indebted to the interiorization of literacy.  In and through Eve's transgression of Yahweh's prohibition, the Yahwist offered glimpses of the unfathomable depths and mysterious freedom of human beings which would play a crucial role in the metaphors of intimacy projected by Israel's great prophets.  (In sum, the reference to Eve's desire for wisdom introduced a seminal formulation of the longing for ever-deepening person-to-person involvement evoked by vulnerable encounters.)

    Note well:  I do not pretend that my reading offers the authoritative reading of the story.  If anything, it implies that an authoritative reading of any story is quite impossible.  I do insist, however, that the narrative structure of the story generated diverging retellings of Israel's historical existence by both the Deuteronomic storytellers and Israel's great prophets.  From a critical perspective, therefore, the role it played in the Hebrew narrative tradition differed radically from the role played by the interplay between an interrogatory stance and the totalizing thrust of language in the Hellenic philosophical tradition.

    In the biblical tradition, the story of Adam and Eve functioned as the repository of an interplay between a rudimentary metaphor of power and judgment and an eruptive self-consciousness which evoked a longing for deepening person-to-person involvements.  In myriad responses to the tensions articulated in the story, the tradition gradually wove conventions which gave form and direction to the dialogue among storytellers into a distinctive literary form, the prose narrative, as the only literary form capable of framing a dialogue capably of probing a mystery without lapsing into mystification.

    The difference between the narrative structure of this literary form and the structure of the autonomous text can be succinctly stated.  The structure of the autonomous text is centered in a principle of logical identity designed to impose closure on questioning.  In marked contrast, the narrative structure ensures that any account of an event can generate retellings which offer pregnant insights into the roles played by unique individuals in the event in question.  This structure requires storytellers who seek to tell the authorized version of an event to (1) set a scene, (2) populate it with memorably unique individuals, (3) assign these individuals roles in the story, (4) focus on the interaction of these agents in a concrete situation, and (5) indicate the short-term and long-term consequences of any individual's action or reaction.

    Logically, this narrative structure enables storytellers who seek to challenge some prevailing authorized version to (1) set the scene in a more distant past or add telling details to the original setting of the scene, (2) introduce additional characters, (3) assign roles to the agents in question which attribute different motivations and purposes to all concerned, (4) sort out the factors which produce the event in different ways, and (5) re-assess or re-envision the outcome of the event.  In sum, the narrative structure ensures that any telling of an event invites endless retellings in a way which guarantees that no one can pretend to tell the authorized version of an event or a course of human history.  But it also fosters a dialogue among storytellers who wish to formulate a language capable of illuminating intensely personal interactions among unique individuals in depth and detail.

        (Addendum:  From an analytic perspective, the narrative structure implies that immediate interactions are inherently superficial.  The most intense among them may foster the illusion of instant intimacy.  But the empty center of an eruptive self-consciousness engenders a rupture of orality's illusory sense of immediate presence, fullness and totality as radical as the rupture introduced by the interiorization of literacy as an interrogatory stance.  I suggest, therefore, that a biblical discourse generated by a narrative structure exposes Luther's illusory promise of instant intimacy.)

    The literary form of the prose narrative generated the multi-dimensional language which served as the medium for the prophetic metaphors of intimacy.  Intriguingly, the prophets returned to face-to-face encounters with questioning audiences.  In some passages, they speak as messengers of a God of power and judgment.  But in and through their metaphors of intimacy, they recover the early vision of a God who is involved in intensely personal ways with unique individuals.  And over the course of centuries, these metaphors generated the form of life which reveals that the journey to intimacy calls for passionate, vulnerable, respectful and faithful interactions and that judgments and strategies generated by a metaphor of power and judgment do violence to all concerned.

     Here, we do well to note that a willingness to engage in the vulnerable self-revelations conducive to the quest for deepening person-to-person involvement requires a willingness to learn how to speak in a narrative voice.  Like the voice of reason, this narrative voice is a literary construct.  But certain differences are obvious.  The voice of reason promises a dispassionate, disinterested perspective which individuals can occupy interchangeably.  Historically, its proponents disguise its depersonalizing import by equating objectivity with the power to re-produce the event always and everywhere.  In marked contrast, the narrative voice assumes the historicity and textuality of experience.  It implies that my perspective on and analysis of any person-to-person interaction is indebted to my response to events in my personal history and to the formative power of the language I use to process the experience.  Consequently, if I pretend to tell the authorized version of a shared event, my story reveals as much or more about me than about the interaction in question, and if I can listen to versions of the same event offered by loved ones with a sympathetic imagination, I become more honest about my own tangled depths and more aware of the formative events in their personal histories.

    In the New Testament, the vision centered in intensely personal interactions between an incomprehensible God and unique individuals endowed with unfathomable depths found its voice in the Prologue of the Gospel of John.  This Prologue places the eternal Word at the center of the divine life of a Triune God, the act of creation, the course of human history, and the lives of each and every human being.  Its depiction of a Christocentric universe implies that the Word would have become incarnate whether or not sin entered the human world.  And on a positive note, it provides biblical warrant for an incarnational theology which assures wounded individuals that each of the three divine Persons is passionately, vulnerably, respectfully and faithfully involved with them.

    By extension, this incarnational theology insists that God's love is everfaithful and all-inclusive.  Several implications of this description of divine love regarding the misplaced debate between Catholic and Protestant theologians are worth noting:  (1)  This description of God's love cannot be reconciled with the supposition that divine justice had to demand a sacrificial death of the eternal Word on the cross as the only sort of reparation capable of restoring a severed relationship between God and human beings.  (Only a theology grounded in a metaphor of power and judgment could license a meta-narrative in which justice trumped love.)

        (2)  Paul's characterization of God's covenant with Israel as a covenant of Law implied that a new covenant centered in Jesus Christ both abrogated and fulfilled the earlier covenant.  But Paul obviously read the Jewish Scriptures through a code derived from the Deuteronomic strand in the Hebrew narrative tradition.  This strand insisted that the prescriptions, prohibitions, norms and practices encoded in the Law could relate the whole of life to God and set Israel apart from her idolatrous neighbors.  As such, it clearly encoded an understanding of fullness and totality which was constantly subverted by changing conditions of life.  In this context, Paul's tortured reflections on his previous commitment to a covenant of Law ignored changing conditions of life in favor of a desire to replace the impersonality of conformity to laws with a law of love written in the hearts of all.  Consequently, one can only wonder how he would have formulated his gospel message if he had respected the import of stories which depicted God's intensely personal involvement with Israel's patriarchs and matriarchs and of the comparison of the covenant between God and Israel to a marriage union in Hosea and Second and Third Isaiah.

        (3)  Scholars in the history of religions agree that the Israelites were the first people to replace the structure of myth and epic which grounded culture in a primordial past to a vision of an uncanny deity who entered human history in words spoken to unique individuals at assignable places and times.  As the Deuteronomic strand in the narrative tradition shows, however, whenever the call to a perpetual journey into the unknown immersed the Israelites in perilous situations, they experienced the anxiety encapsulated in the dictum, "It is a fearsome thing to fall into the hands of the living God."  To escape that anxiety, the Deuteronomic tradition defined Israel's positive and distinctive identity in terms of a codified set of prescriptions, prohibitions and practices.  Deliberately or unwittingly, the storytellers who applied the foundational stories of the tradition to historical events fostered a doctrine of exclusive election which is incompatible with a belief that God's love is all-inclusive.

            Addressing fearful, angry believers at times when Israel's very existence was threatened, the prophets rejected the doctrine of exclusive election.  A clear example of that rejection can be found in First Isaiah's insistence that the gift which allowed the Israelites to discern God's personal involvement with them voiced a commission to bear witness to God's involvement with all human beings.

        (4)  The Yahwist's story of Adam and Eve introduced a vision of an uncanny God involved in intensely personal interactions with human beings whose immersion in orality's illusory sense of immediate presence, fullness and totality denied them the means to discern that activity.  Over the course of centuries, the displacement of orality by literacy as the foundation of culture generated variations on themes encoded in this story in stories designed to reveal calls to a perpetual journey into the unknown hidden in God's initiatives and the flights from intimacy provoked by perils encountered on the journey.  The paradigm example of such flights can be found in efforts of Deuteronomic storytellers to center Israel's positive and distinctive identity in a Law purportedly dictated to Moses in theophanies on Mt. Sinai.  But such flights were exposed by insights encoded in both the foundational stories of the narrative tradition and the prophetic metaphors of intimacy which provide a literary perspective for an incarnational theology.

        (5)  An incarnational theology is centered in the belief that the incarnate Word was both fully human and fully God.  As fully human, the Incarnate Word fulfills the promise of immediate presence, fullness and totality inscribed in the symbolic promises of land, prosperity and many offspring which supplemented the categorically asserted covenant between God and Abraham.  In an assertion attributed to Jesus in John, the Word became fully human that we might have life and have it more abundantly.  From this perspective, the Incarnation which occurred in the fullness of time was the fulfillment of God's intensely personal involvement with all human beings from the beginning of time.  It did not initiate a radically different covenant which abrogated God's covenant with Israel.

        (6)  An incarnational theology views the covenant as a commitment on the part of God to share intimately in the lives of human beings, not as a conditional (contractual) relationship.  It assumes that even God could not share human existence fully without becoming incarnate.  From this perspective, the conception of Jesus in Mary's womb sealed the covenant.  In sum, it expressed the commitment to the sort of intimate involvement with all human beings encapsulated in Jesus' statement, "Whatever you do to the least of my brothers and sisters, you do to me."  And in this context, the crucifixion and resurrection reveal Jesus' willingness to bear all the pain that human beings inflict on one another.  As such, the cross-resurrection theme bears witness to the fact that even the Agony in the Garden and the cruel crucifixion had no effect on the commitment to an ever-faithful and all-inclusive love on the part of each of the Persons in the Triune God.

        (7)  In the Catholic tradition, the understanding of the covenant as a commitment on the part of the Triune God finds a pregnant expression in the Sacramental system.  The Eucharist provides the clearest example.  When Jesus instituted the Eucharist as the Last Supper, he anticipated the resurrection.  In an awesome way, he assured his disciples that, despite the denials of Peter and the abandonment by all but John, his everfaithful love would continue to be active in their lives.

                      ----------------

         (Addendum:  Paul was largely responsible for the distinction (1) which reduced the Jewish Scriptures to an Old Testament which bore witness to a Covenant of Law imposed by God on Israel, (2) which led later authors to suppose that the texts accepted into the Christian canon as a New Testament bore witness to a new Covenant signed and sealed by the sacrificial death of God's own Son on the Cross in reparation for human sinfulness, and (3) which was later used to argue that the New Testament contained a code which legitimated readings of the Old Testament which asserted that God imposed the Covenant of Law to expose the futility of efforts to make reparation for an inescapable sinfulness induced by original sin through works commanded by the Law.

         Regarding the third point, above:  Paul's distinction was solidly entrenched in Tradition at the dawn of the Modern Era.  On his part, Luther attempted to use the distinction to eliminate Tradition as a code for reading the Scriptures.  The "Tradition" in question was limited to a dialogue of text with text which located authority in those who could enter the dialogue on its own terms.  (In effect, it limited authority to those who knew how to play the game.)  Consequently, on a positive note, Luther recognized that such an understanding of Tradition subjected the religious experience of the faithful to the authority of contemporary Scribes and Pharisees.  Sadly, however, he centered his protest in a slogan, sola Scriptura, which retained a conception of the autonomous text indebted to a meta-narrative framed by a metaphor of power and judgment.

          I.e., to read the Judaic-Christian Scriptures as a single text, Luther embraced the readings of the Jewish Scriptures governed by the depiction of the God who imposed the Law as a God of power and judgment.  In this context, he could frame his suggestion that God imposed the Covenant of Law in order to expose the futility of "salvation through works" with the depiction of God in Paul's understanding of God's covenant with Israel as a covenant or Law and in Augustine's harsh doctrine of original sin.  But this argument forced him to pretend that the reading of the Scriptures which yielded his doctrine of justification was devoid of interpretation.

            As the god-term in Luther's theology, this doctrine presented justification as a pure (unmerited) gift.  By extension, sinful humans could know of the gift only if God revealed it clearly in an enduring text.  But the doctrine implicitly silences the call for an intensely personal response to God's activity in every event in one's life.   It stands, then, as yet another desperate flight from the perils of passionate, vulnerable, respectful and faithful responses to each of the three divine Persons and to loved ones.    

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