8-29-07
My visit this morning with a long-time
colleague, Gerry Etzkorn, has been a gift to me. Gerry brought up an intriguing question about
my book, Christian Ethics: An Ethics
of Intimacy. (That text would be
more readable if I had written it as an answer to his question.) The question:
My formulation of the ethics of intimacy seems to imply that we are
called to intimacy with everyone. Since
that is clearly beyond our reach, what do I mean to say?
My answer:
In that text, I argue that the three major strands of the western
literary tradition - literature, philosophy and theology - are generated and
governed by two foundational metaphors, the metaphor of power and judgment and
the metaphor of intimacy. I trace the
misplaced debate between the Catholic and Protestant traditions to the fact
that apologists in both camps were captive to a hermeneutical theory derived
from the metaphor of power and judgment.
(Hermeneutical theories promise definitive readings of a foundational
text.) In my re-reading of the biblical
and the theological traditions, I give full and fair voice to Scriptural
passages which depict God as Lord, Lawgiver and Judge. But I insist (1) that attention must be paid
to biblical metaphors which compare God’s involvement with Israel to a marriage
union and (2) that this understanding of the covenant reveals a passionate,
vulnerable, respectful and faithful involvement of the triune God in the lives
of individuals marked by every event in their personal histories. And if that is so, no one can pretend that
Scriptural references can be used to justify the pretense that the denomination
they embrace, Catholic or Protestant, alone preaches the full and true gospel
message.
In an arena governed by the rule of the
One, my ethics of intimacy provides a language which voices the longing of the
Father, the Word incarnate and Holy Spirit for intimate involvement with each
and every person. Most importantly, it
also incorporates a reading code which enables me to mine Scriptural passages
which reveal the willingness of each of three Person in the Trinity to be
involved with us passionately, vulnerably, respectfully and faithfully. (NB: A
vulnerable and respectful involvement is incompatible with judgments, sanctions
and manipulations in any shape or form.)
And since the language of intimacy is derived from a metaphor whose
reach initially exceeded its grasp, the implications of the linguistic
formulations it authorizes have been and continue to be subjected to the test
of experience.
For
me, the paradigm test involved subjecting the implications of the formula, “Love
one another as I have loved you”, to the implications of an incarnational
theology. And in every instance, I find
that my intensely personal involvements with other unique human beings invite
me to discern how each of the three Persons is involved with us in distinctive
ways.
Quite obviously, if I am to learn how to
love others as Jesus does, I must first experience Jesus’ involvement with
me. (It is not enough to work from my
image of Jesus, even if that image is scripturally based.) And to experience this intensely personal
involvement, I must have a language which enables me to process my everyday
experiences in ways that reveal Jesus’ longing for ever-deepening
person-to-person involvement with me and expose the woundedness that distorts
my ability to trust. I find biblical
warrant for such linguistic formulations in the Johannine tradition’s
insistence the we cannot pretend to love God if we do not love the flawed human
beings we encounter on our journey through life. To live in God’s love, therefore, we must
process our everyday experiences in ways which reveal that God’s intensely
personal love for us comes to us through one another. And these experiences reveal that God is
Love.
Equally obviously, an incarnate Word who is
passionately, vulnerably, respectfully and faithfully involved with each of us
differs radically from the Redeemer who, at the urgings of divine mercy, came
to offer fitting reparation for the sin of Adam. I suggest, therefore, that a meta-narrative
which attributed the Incarnation to an interplay between divine judgment and
divine mercy is quite incompatible with a meta-narrative which attributes both
creation and the Incarnation to an over-flowing, creative love.
Sadly, my appreciation of the
inseparability of an incarnational theology and an ethics of intimacy was long
in coming. Thus, if I had been open to
vulnerable self-revelations in my early years as a priest, I would have
utilized a narrative voice which oscillated between confessions laden with good
old Catholic guilt (which placed me in the role of the villain) and complaints
which cast me as the victim and God as the villain. Enmeshed as I was in a language intended to
assign responsibility to one rather than both of the participants in an event,
I disguised the harsh judgments I passed on myself and on God in self-talk
which echoed passages from Jeremiah, a constant complainer. In public, I often quoted Theresa of Avila’s
dictum, “Lord, no wonder you have so few friends, given the way that you treat
them.” But I was not yet ready to
question the deeply rooted beliefs and probe the emotional reactions that
prevented me from letting Jesus, fully human as well as fully God, accompany me
on a quest for a fully human existence, with its promise of more abundant life.
Long before I became aware of the
internalized judge responsible for the burden of guilt I carried, my habit of
casting God as a villain in my story was challenged by events in which I saw
how the Father’s love entered even tragic events in ways that brought new life
to others. Gradually, I began to see
that the Father was active in the same way in my life. Initially, that realization lent a semblance
of authority to the internalized judge who blamed me for everything that did
not turn out as I intended. But the rule
of this internalized judge was challenged when I encountered the Holy Spirit
during my mid-life crisis.
This crisis falsified the theological
foundations of the formation I had received beyond repair. Through an uneasy involvement with the
charismatic movement, however, I was able to see that the indwelling Spirit was
compassionately and respectfully active in the angry eruptions I tried so
desperately to suppress. Through people
who were more familiar with the inner journey than I was, I came to see that it
was the Spirit’s love for me that kept alive the pain, anger, anxiety and shame
that I tried to bury until I was ready to allow it to find new life in my
involvements with other wounded individuals.
Gradually, I became aware of the insidious ways that feelings I had
controlled by burying them alive were now controlling me in hidden ways. Then, as I entered a process of letting go
and letting each of the three divine Person’s work in my life, I did so, in
part, because I was ashamed of the ways I had used reactions of contempt,
frustration, sarcasm, silent disapproval, and the like to control potentially
angry outbursts. Somehow, the times when
I begged God to free me from these tangled reactions, I heard the voice of the
Spirit informing me that God was too respectful to change me without my full
involvement in the process. And as I
became capable of vulnerable self-revelations, I was able to trust that the
transforming power of divine and human love can to me in and through
interactions with others.
Once I could no longer cast God as the villain
in the story of my life, I began to hear the words of love spoken by the
indwelling Spirit. And as these words
resounded in my tangled depths, I realized that the repertoire of emotional
reactions I used to bury the pain experienced in wounding events in the past
had done violence to my deepest feelings, that the Spirit’s love for me had kept
these feelings alive, and that embracing them with honesty allowed each of the
three Persons to work in my life.
(I would gladly attribute the
following quote to its author, but I cannot remember where I read it. The quote:
“Any feeling that is buried will eventually become a weapon to be used
against somebody.” This quote is
empirically validated in interactions between married couples who have not
learned how to express anger vulnerably and respectfully. As a straightforward example, teasing which
was once warm, affectionate and playful soon has a barb in it, as buried anger
finds hidden expression. In a more
complex dynamic, if a mother was deeply wounded by a lack of care and concern
from her parents during childhood, she may be so determined that her children
will not suffer as she did that she transforms her concern into a smothering
care. Such examples can be multiplied
indefinitely.)
Today, I supplement my conviction that
there is no way through cross-situations except through them with the
insistence that the inner journey is a process, not a series of events. Once I yielded to the process, I discovered
that personal encounters with Jesus in everyday events were inseparable from
deepening involvement with the Father and the indwelling Spirit. And as I began to trust their love for me, I
found myself responding to other tangled individuals without judgment or
agenda. With some, the graced moment was
confined to a single encounter. In other
instances, an initial encounter called me to accompany wounded individuals as
they walked through the valley of death, with an empathic response to the
excruciating pain that tempted them to embrace the suicide-option. And in a few instances, I discerned a call to
a long-term commitment that would tap all my buried pain, anger, fear and shame
as well as my care and compassion. In
any instance, I became aware that I was called to let unique and complicated
individuals into my life, vulnerably and respectfully, without knowing how
deeply I was to be involved with them.
(ASIDE: I long believed that my judgments voiced a
refusal to be vulnerably involved with other persons until they changed. But a reflection written by Marianne Parker
exposes the violence enshrined in judgments far more eloquently than anything I
could say: “Judgment is not interested
in seeing its captive change. Its
demands, criticisms, protests and objections are not designed to re-direct,
teach or guide. Its function is to break
one’s spirit and confidence. Its
livelihood is strengthened by the weakness of its prey, and its victory lies in
the shattered hopes that gradually, yet inexorably crumble from the burden of
its uncompromising weight.”)
Literary
Origins of My Hermeneutical Theory
My understanding of the workings of
hermeneutical theories is more indebted to the hermeneutical theory encoded in
Nietzsche’s archeology of knowledge and genealogy of morals than to the
critical apparatus forged by the dominant strand in the Catholic theological
tradition.
Versed in the critical apparatus that
governed scholarly discourse in German Universities, Nietzsche was aware of the
work of German Protestant biblical scholars.
To support the Protestant commitment to Scripture alone, they had
replaced the metaphysical and methodological inquiries favored by medieval
theologians (and by Thomists today, including Pope Benedict XVI) with inquiries
designed to yield a reading of the Scriptures which eliminated human
interpretation from the translations and readings of the Scriptures, since this
sprawling text had to be both self-interpreting and self-referential if it was
to speak as the immediate Word of God in any age or culture.
Nietzsche, of course, had a more ambitious
aim than the Protestant biblical scholars.
Quite obviously, he believed that his Genealogy of Morals offered
a definitive reading of the literary, biblical, philosophical and theological
strands in the western literary tradition.
That belief underlies his confident proclamation that this tradition as
a whole was propelled by an all-pervasive and impersonally operating will to
power. By his use of two distinctive
literary forms designed for that purpose, he emerged as the first philosopher
of the western literary tradition.
And in and through the reading code derived from these forms, he shifted
the traditional focus on metaphysical, epistemological, methodological and
ethical inquiries to analyses designed to reveal how experiences are textured
by languages generated by this tradition.
(I am certain that he also sought to assert his authority over the
effort by Protestant biblical scholars to present the Judaic-Christian
Scriptures as a self-interpretative text and a self-referential Word of God.)
Since the Scriptures often speak to me as a
living word, I gladly recognize that the early Protestant biblical scholars
accepted the challenge voiced by Descartes’ methodical doubt. As literary heirs of a well-developed
critical apparatus, they hoped to devise a theory capable of exposing the
violence done to the gospel message by theologies ground in an interplay
between the metaphysical inquiries privileged by Aquinas’s baptism of Aristotle
and a discourse which presented Tradition as an authorized interpreter of the
Scriptures. However, since they assumed
that definitive readings of a text or a textual tradition were possible, they
remained captive to the conception of an autonomous text generated by the rule
of reason which was foreign to the authors of the texts stitched together in
the Judaic-Christian Scriptures.
Nonetheless, since even a bad theory is
better than no theory at all, their willingness to begin with a categorical
belief that the Scriptures were self-interpreting proved fruitful in ways they
did not anticipate. Thus, on the one
hand, they recognized that, since the Scriptures preserved texts written in
different literary genres and supplemented by a wide range of literary
conventions, the redacted text could not be read literally. And on the other, their efforts to use an
understanding of the inner logic of a literary genre and the workings of
literary conventions to show that the text was self-interpreting revealed
instead that their project could not produce what it promised.
In effect, their project collapsed from
within, in a manner akin to the collapse of the ideal language program advanced
by Logical Positivism. And that failure
exposed the impossibility of reading any text without interpretation and, by
extension, of regarding any text as an autonomous text.
In this vein, Nietzsche’s reach exceeded
his grasp. His insistence that the
western literary tradition was propelled by an all-pervasive will to power
cannot accommodate the fact that this tradition generated a distinctive form of
life which enshrined intimacy as a realizable purpose. Nonetheless, readings generated by his
hermeneutical theory expose (1) the violence licensed by appeals to reason and
(2) the arrogance of anyone who pretends that a text or language presents the
whole of reality transparently.
(FN:
One might say that Nietzsche used his hermeneutical theory to subvert
the authority of any belief-system but his own.
In the Genealogy of Morals, he framed his conviction that the
western literary tradition was propelled by an all-pervasive will to power with
an evolutionary theory. In this theory,
he simply replaced the god-terms which lent coherence to competing
interpretations of the history of the western literary tradition with his own
conception of an all-pervasive will to power.)
Decades later, Heidegger attempted to
rescue the western literary tradition from Nietzsche’s worship of naked power
by replacing Nietzsche’s god-term with a notion of Being forged by the
so-called pre-Socratics. This substation
enabled him to insist that an authentically human stance called for open
responsiveness to the workings of a creative and gracious Being. On one level, his use of the pre-Socratic
notion of Being as a god-term implied that truth lies in beginnings. On another level, however, it replaced the
search for definitive readings with an invitation to inhabit texts or textual
traditions in ways that allowed their boundaries to function as horizons.
Structurally, this reformulation encoded
the Exodus-theme in a way that would forever subvert any pretense that an
objective moral order could generate the creative responses called for by a
journey into the unknown. More
importantly, as a response to the rationalist strand in the philosophical
tradition he inhabited, Heidegger was the first to realize that Nietzsche’s
hermeneutical theory deconstructed the literary foundations of the arena in
which rationalists had contended with one another for a prize to be awarded to
the theory which triumphed over all contending theories.
Once I read a number of Heidegger’s texts
as sincere efforts to set forth ways of being human in a culture dominated by das
Man (the One), I became less critical of his penchant for amorphous
generalizations. This, I suspect,
prepared me to take seriously his use of a notion of Being projected prior to
the emergence of significant distinctions among language, experience and
reality as the god-term in his hermeneutical theory. Once I did so, I found that the role he
assigned this notion of Being enriched my appreciation of Ong’s work on the
irreversible restructurings of thought
that accompanied literacy’s triumph over orality as the foundation of western
culture and Wittgenstein’s analysis of the workings of everyday language.
Regarding WITTGENSTEIN: In my analyses of the workings of everyday
English, I find repeated confirmations of Wittgenstein’s insight that everyday
language incorporates myriad forms of life designed to realize distinctive
purposes. As a fruitful point of entry,
this focus on human purposes differs radically from Aristotle’s correspondence
theory of truth, Nietzsche’s fascination with the impersonal operation of an
all-pervasive will to power, and Heidegger’s insistence that an
all-encompassing Being is the signified of all signifiers. Moreover, it provides a literary framework
for my suggestion that the dominant forms of life generated by the western
literary tradition are grounded in two foundational metaphors, a metaphor of
power and judgment and a metaphor of intimacy.
To supplement Wittgenstein’s analysis,
I sometimes invoke Heidegger’s dramatization of the ways that cultures enamored
with power and judgment do violence to the longing for a uniquely personal
existence. But Heidegger centered his hermeneutical
theory in a distinction between Sein (Being), on one pole, and dasein
(a bare “being there”), on the other, and dasein encodes a hollow
metaphor of individuality which cannot generate a language capable of
transforming the longing for a shared journey to deepening person-to-person
involvements into a realizable quest.
Consequently, as my disagreements with
Nietzsche and Heidegger crystalized, I saw more clearly that everyday English
can generate linguistic formulations which can be used to process experience in
ways which promote that quest and expose the will to power and judgment
enshrined in forms of life which abort or distort it. And since I was searching for a moral
discourse without foundations, the realization that everyday analyses of
experience revolve around questions concerning realizable purposes accredited
my conviction that everyday English transmitted a form of life capable of
evoking the elusive longing for intimacy and of transforming that longing into
a realizable quest.
Quite obviously, this focus on realizable
purposes differs radically from traditional efforts to ground moral discourse
outside of human reality, in a single facet of human reality, or in the
idealist and naturalist conventions forged by Plato and Aristotle. As a matter of fact, forms of life designed
to realize distinctive purposes remain alive in everyday language if and only
if language-users use the linguistic formulations they generate to process
their everyday experiences. And this is
particularly true of the quest for intimacy, since no one can be forced to
engage in vulnerable and respectful self-revelations.
As I probed this insight, I became aware
that Wittgensteinean analyses of language and experience show, on the one hand,
that the quest for a fully human and uniquely personal existence requires the
ability to realize many purposes and, on the other, that judgments and
strategies designed to realize purposes derived from the metaphor of power and
judgment which serve one well socially do violence to interactions between
individuals who have committed themselves to co-author a shared journey into
the unknown.
As a code for reading the Scriptures,
therefore, a hermeneutical theory indebted to Wittgenstein’s insights into the
workings of everyday languages raises two distinguishable yet inseparable
questions. First and foremost, its focus
on purpose evokes the question, “What was God’s purpose in creating the
universe?” Secondly, if the vision of an
incomprehensible God who entered human history in and through intensely
personal initiatives toward unique individuals frames the Hebrew narrative
tradition, the question concerning the response of individuals to God’s
activity in their lives can be formulated as follows: “Is there a distinctive form of life which
enables believers to discern God’s initiatives?”
In my search for answers to those two
questions, my early readings of the Jewish Scriptures were dominated by the
answers encoded in the metaphors of intimacy projected by Israel’s prophets,
not the violent misreading of the story of Adam and Eve inscribed in Augustine’s
harsh doctrine of original sin.
Gradually, I became aware that the reformulation of the Second Great
Commandment in the High Priestly Prayer in John, “Love one another as I
have loved you”, echoed these metaphors of intimacy in ways that enriched the
proclamation in the Prologue which attributed creation to an out-pouring of
divine love. Finally, I began to see
that clear answers to both questions were inscribed in the meta-narrative which
frames the incarnational theology indebted to Scotus. And working backwards, I formulated the
thesis which runs through runs through Christian Ethics: An Ethics of Intimacy, namely, that an
incarnational theology requires an ethics of intimacy, and vice versa.
Now, in my personal life, I use a language
generated by the interplay between an incarnational theology and an ethics of
intimacy to discern how the Father’s providential activity is at work in my
interactions with those I encounter on my journey into the unknown, how the
Spirit moves in my tangled depths, and how both the Father and the Spirit seek
to lead me to encounter Jesus as the way, the truth and the life. But I also confess that I will never
understand why the Father, Word incarnate and Holy Spirit long to be intimately
involved with me. I only know that
conversing with each of them concerning my joys and sorrows, my moments of
near-despair and of ecstatic gratitude evokes transforming moments in my life
and in the lives of individuals whom I let into my life. For I have learned that intimacy with these
divine Persons, as with the tangled human beings in my life, can only deepen if
I am honest with them and with myself about what I feel and think, real or
imagined and that I cannot approach loving others as Jesus loves them if I am
not willing to be passionately, vulnerably, respectfully and faithfully
involved with them, as Jesus is.
In sum, an incarnational theology defines
God’s creative purpose as a longing to share the intimate life shared by three
divine Persons with human beings and defines the Incarnation as the full
expression of that purpose.
Consequently, an ethics of intimacy provides a language capable of
discerning the activity of each of the three divine Persons in the lives of all
human beings and of voicing a call for a response in kind. Quite obviously, since that activity is often
hidden in confusing events, we need a language capable of discerning it. Equally obviously, the call voiced by that
language must speak for itself. When it
does, it can evoke the deepest longings of the human heart and expose the urge
to closure inherent in codes derived from metaphors of power and judgment which
depict God as a Lord, Lawgiver and Judge.
