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.