June 8, 2008
I began this reflection in the hope of
breaking out of a paralyzing case of writing block. I hoped to ease back into writing by
returning to the biblical themes that generated a language capable of evoking a
longing for a fully human and uniquely personal existence and, thereby, giving
voice to the longing of each of the three divine Persons to share intimately in
the everyday events in my personal history.
My early indoctrination in the Baltimore
Catechism did not evoke or foster this longing.
On the contrary, it obscured the role played by the Exodus- and
Covenant-themes in the dialogue among Hebrew authors who used stories to
process Israel's historical experience.
Consigned to texts over the course of four centuries, this dialogue
explored a vision which depicted the entry of an incomprehensible God into
human history at assignable places and times in intensely personal involvements
with unique individuals endowed with unfathomable depths and a mysterious
freedom. In this context, storytellers
composed sometimes diverging accounts of events in Israel's history designed to
promote traditions which offered very different understandings of the Covenant
first introduced in the Yahwist's story of the call of Abraham.
I suggest that this call, not a sin of
Adam, disrupted existence in a natural order.
Clearly, words spoken by Yahweh to Abram, son of Terah, ruptured his
ties to tribe and place, and the Covenant transformed him into Abraham of
Yahweh. In the Deuteronomic tradition,
however, storytellers tamed the Exodus-theme.
In place of the uncanny deity at work in the stories of the Yahwist and
the Elohist, they depicted Israel's God as a Lord, Lawgiver and Judge who
dictated a codified Law designed to relate the whole of life to God and to set
Israel apart from her idolatrous neighbors.
Implicitly, this Law would free the Israelites from future journeys into
the unknown and reduce the covenant between Israel's God and her patriarchs and
matriarchs to a contract framed by rewards for strict observance of the Law and
harsh punishments for those who disobeyed.
(Paul embraced this tradition in his tortured efforts to dramatize his
belief that an Old Covenant with Israel was both fulfilled and abrogated by the
New Covenant instituted by the life and death of Jesus Christ.)
From a structural perspective, the American
authors of the Baltimore Catechism adopted the Deuteronomic depiction of
Israel's God with a vengeance. For the
misleading format of this text, they accepted without criticism the traditional
appropriation of the Jewish Scriptures as the Old Testament and the use of this
appropriation to transmit the belief that one strand in the Catholic tradition
offered definitive answers to all significant questions.
In my case, the formative influence of this
Catechism was reinforced by the theological manuals used by my seminary
professors. Looking back, I wonder why
anyone let me into their lives in my early years as a priest. Though I meant well, I unconsciously
presented myself as a representative of a God who was Lord, Lawgiver and Judge
in my priestly involvement with people.
But that role-playing was shattered by wounded individuals who turned to
me in times of crisis. Hearing their
cries from the depths, I found myself in over my head again and again. Somehow, perhaps because I had no other
option, I began to trust that each of the three divine Persons had entrusted
these people to my care and, more importantly, longed to be involved with me
and them every step of our perpetual journeys into the unknown.
As I became excruciating aware of my own
longing for intimacy, I realized that I could not save or fix anyone (including
myself). But I began to realize that
everyday English offered linguistic formulations which enabled me to discern
the way that the indwelling Spirit urged me to be fully present, without
judgments or agendas, and to be at peace with the disconcerting fact that my
fidelity to the resulting quest would expose the tangled ways that my own
woundedness governed far too many of my responses to other wounded individuals.
(For a long time, I was filled with
shame whenever I recalled that the my responses in the Sacrament of
Reconciliation were governed by the illusion that I represented a God who was
Lawgiver and Judge. I came by this
illusion honestly. My theological
formation had led me to believe that I was to hear "confessions" as a
judge with the power to absolve or refuse absolution. But I soon discovered that I was an unwitting
accomplice to a theology which defined my role in a way that did not foster
personal encounters between penitents and Jesus or compassion in my response to
"sinners.")
Providentially, I was led, kicking and
screaming, into involvement with the charismatic movement. From the very beginning, I was uneasy with
open displays of emotion, and I was repelled by the belief of many charismatics
that the only way to be saved is to accept Jesus as one's personal Savior. Over time, however, I found myself mapping my
adherence to an incarnational theology onto an often amorphous yielding to the
movement of the Spirit within me and in the shared prayer that characterized
prayer meetings.
(To this day, I am offended by
Charismatics who ask me whether I have accepted Jesus as my personal
Savior. I always hope that my life bears
witness to my fidelity to a commitment to Jesus as the Way, the Truth and the
Life. However, since the question voices
a sincere concern for my salvation, I have a stock reply designed to conceal my
irritation: "No, I haven't. Like it or not, I must confess that I
continually struggle with Jesus and that I recognize the issue between us. He wants to be intimately involved with me on
a quest for a fully human and uniquely personal existence for me and for all
the unique individuals who cross my path.
On my part, I enjoy many aspects of being human, and I am often
obnoxiously self-assertive. But I flee
from other aspects, and I often lie to protect my backside. And he continues to seek to love me into wholeness.")
Consequently, I am forever grateful to
charismatic Christians who introduced me in a living way to the indwelling
Spirit. But Sartre played an equally
fruitful role in my efforts to understand the dynamics of love because we
shared a starting point, yet moved in opposite directions. Like Sartre, I have been endlessly intrigued
by Augustine's dictum, "Our hearts are made for you, O Lord, and they will
not rest until they rest in you."
To bolster his proclamation that human existence is absurd and even
obscene, Sartre used the dictum to argue that, as passions for the infinite, we
are futile projects to be God. Working
backwards, he offered analyses of experience designed to show that passionate
involvements between unique individuals inexorably degenerate into
sado-masochistic interactions. Finally,
he used these analyses to support the thesis that love is an impossible
passion.
Since I was convinced that deepening
person-to-person involvements are possible, I was led to the insight that
Sartre defined intimacy in terms of identity.
Then, for the first time, I realized that the rationalist tradition was
grounded in a metaphor of power and judgment designed to accredit the rule of
the One. In this context, it was obvious
that the theology which called sinners to accept Jesus as their personal Savior
was also grounded in that metaphor of power and judgment. But it was equally obvious that this was
focused on the restoration of a severed relationship, not on an encounter with
the indwelling Spirit. And, finally, it
became obvious that a focus on a divine mercy which urged the Word to undergo a
cruel crucifixion as the price demanded by divine justice was incompatible with
the emphasis on the healing power of God's love in those charismatics who dared
to enter a journey into their tangled and murky inner depths.
(NB:
Charismatics who pretend to read the Scriptures literally have to adopt
an anti-intellectual stance. As a
result, they often assumed that, if they had sufficient faith, their prayers
would induce God to effect physical healings.
But the movement also sought to delineate a journey of inner healing
that would allow the love of the indwelling Spirit to heal the wounds inflicted
by events in an individual’s personal history in a way that freed them for
life-giving interactions with others.)
Today, my debt to the Charismatic Movement
is apparent whenever I am involved as a priest in the Sacrament of
Reconciliation. I now hope and pray that
I can be present in a way that contributes to a living encounter between the
wounded penitent and Jesus, the wounded Healer.
And I know, with absolute certainty, that any temptation I might have to
play judge or impose my personal agendas will be counter-productive.
In this vein, I use a passage in the first
chapter of Paul's Letter to the Romans to frame my understanding of the
dynamics underlying Paul's cry that the good he would do, that he did not do,
and the evil that he would not do, that he did.
This understanding can be encapsulated in a simple dictum: "We do not sin because we are wicked or
self-centered; we sin because we are
wounded."
At a critical point in my journey,
therefore, my engagement with strange bedfellows, Sartre and the charismatic
movement, gave form and direction to my search for an ethical theory capable
(1) of evoking a universal longing for an ever-more fully human and uniquely
personal existence and (2) of processing person-to-person interactions in a way
that transformed the longing into a realizable quest. Still, nothing fell into place until dialogue
with Alter's The Art of Biblical
Narrative [2nd edition published by Basic Books in 2011] enabled me to read
the series of stories authored by the Yahwist as literature, not history. This series carried the narrative strategy
forged in the story of Adam and Eve forward in stories about Abraham and in
stories which presented David as a tragic figure at a time when personal and
political issues became inextricably entangled.
Along with the stories told by the Elohist, they provided the literary
framework for a highly literary dialogue among authors who continued to use
stories to process Israel's historical experience.
To drive home the point at issue: Pope Benedict explicitly embraces the
detached voice of reason forged by the rationalist strand in the western
philosophical tradition. It is hardly
surprising, therefore, that he dismisses postmodernist critiques without a
hearing. But his most tragic failure
lies in his embrace of a false promise which devalues the use of a narrative
voice. And any promise of a detached and
god-like perspective has that consequence, since a narrative voice acknowledges
the limited perspective of the narrator and the historicity of experience.
In this context, my hermeneutical theory is
framed by Ong's imaginative reconstruction of the transition from orality to
literacy as the foundation of western culture.
Admittedly, this reconstruction functions as a meta-narrative which
subverts traditional distinctions between faith and reason, reason and
revelation, and faith and works. But on
a positive note, it is far more fruitful than the unfulfillable promise of a
god-like perspective that reasonable beings can occupy interchangeably. And on a critical note, it can be used to
show that the rationalizations generated by a conception which enshrines the
rule of the One virtually silence the cries of the most vulnerable inhabitants
of prevailing cultures.
Recently, my awareness of my debt to the
Yahwist was enhanced when the priest assigned to celebrate the week-day
Eucharist in the University chapel failed to appear. Since I reflect on the readings of the day
each morning, I was hardly unprepared to comment on Mark's version of the
question that evoked the formulation of the two great Commandments in the
Synoptic Gospels. These accounts of
contentious encounters between Jesus and the religious leaders in Jerusalem
always remind me that the author of John’s Gospel is the only evangelist to
replace the commandment to love one's neighbor as oneself with the call to love
one another as Jesus loves each of us.
As a result, my comments on Mark's account were complicated by my immersion
in analyses of language and experience designed to probe the empirical
implications of the call to love others as Jesus loves them.
(ASIDE:
Anyone who respects the details in the story of Adam and Eve must see
(1) that Yahweh is depicted as a potter, i.e., as a craftsman rather than a
creator, and (2) that Yahweh's first attempt to alleviate Adam's loneliness by
sharing power (over animals) with Adam was a miserable failure. In the same vein, the later story of Sodom
and Gomorrah allows Abraham to instruct Yahweh on the morality which ought to
govern the actions of a being of awesome power in his dealings with human
beings. Here, I must resist the temptation
to follow the insight that the inner logic of this depiction of the involvement
of God in human history leads to the belief that the eternal Word became fully
human (while remaining fully God) to walk with us on the quest for a fully
human and uniquely personal existence.
In short, when he called Judas to be his disciple, the eternal Word could
not have known that Judas would betray him if he was willing to share the
anguish experienced by individuals who are betrayed, abandoned or violated by
spouses whom they trusted.)
As I wrestled with the question of how to
proclaim the gospel message at this Eucharistic celebration, I initially
reacted in typical fashion. Intrigued as
I am between the distinction between a call and a command, I wanted to point
out the way that the description of the call to love God with our whole mind,
heart, soul and strength as a "commandment" had set me up for
failure. I can never love God or any
human person in that way. And in my on-going
argument with the juridical perspective favored by Pope Benedict and the Curia,
I wanted to insist that no one (not even God) can command the impossible. As the day progressed, however, my passionate
rejection of the pretense that a doctrinal definition of God's saving activity
can be extracted from the Scriptures was replaced by reflections informed by
Wittgenstein's insight that the meaning of any word is its use in a form of
life. And this reminded me that, as I
reflected on the documents of Vatican II, my initial readings had left me with
nothing to replace my rejection of the theology encoded in the Baltimore
Catechism and theological treatises grounded in the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas.
For some time, I had been intrigued by the
fact that these documents had to speak for themselves since Pope John XXIII
refused to engage in a search for timeless or infallible proclamations. Over the course of several years, they forced
me to admit that the theological doctrines which had governed my priestly
involvements trapped me in a self-perpetuating form of life and that this form
of life muted the assertion attributed to God in Deuteronomy, "Life and
death is set before you: choose life."
Gradually, I came to realize that the formative power of the language
enshrined in Aquinas' Summa and the
Baltimore Catechism had blinded me to the incarnational theology of the
Franciscan tradition. In my usual
fashion, I sought to deepen my understanding of how God was active in my life
by finding significant points of difference between the ways that Aquinas's
theology of transcendence and the incarnational theology of Franciscan
tradition envisioned the Triune God's involvement in the personal histories of
unique individuals. (The thesis of my
book Christian Ethics: An Ethics of Intimacy: "The Christian gospel proclaims an
incarnational theology which implies an ethics of intimacy. If either the incarnational theology or the
ethics of intimacy is distorted, the other suffers . . .")
In the process, I found that I had been
dwelling simultaneously in irreconcilable forms of life, a form of life
acquired in childhood and the form of life encoded in Francis of Assisi's
response to the Gospel call. The import
of this discovery was heightened once I compared the roles assigned to priests
in Benedict's (and John Paul II's) hierarchically structured ecclesiology and
in a participatory ecclesiology dictated by an incarnational theology.
(NB:
As a theological discipline, Ecclesiology explores alternative visions
of the structure of the institutional Church.
Like other specialized disciplines, it pretends to formulate inquiries
capable of yielding an authoritative (intellectually compelling) answer to the
question: "Which of these
alternatives was decreed by God?"
In much the same vein, soteriology is a theological discipline which
promises an authoritative description of role played by Jesus Christ in God's
saving work. Both disciplines trust that
theological inquiries governed by a conception of reason which accredited the
rule of the One can resolve all issues.
But this assumption does violence to the literary construction at the
center of the Hebrew narrative tradition.
This construction calls for a narrative voice which immerses unique
individuals in vulnerable self-revelatory communications and ensures that
Christians co-author the story of Jesus with him.)
Quite obviously, I trust the way that
Francis of Assisi read the Scriptures more than the hermeneutical code which
governs Pope Benedict's theological reflections. (1)
Francis's spirituality was centered, inseparably, in the crib, the cross
and the Eucharist. Over time, it
generated a language which enables those who long for deepening intimacy with
each of the three divine Persons to discern the distinctive action of each in
the lives of all human beings.
Benedict's theology is centered in the cross. As a result, it privileges a promise of
salvation from sin rather than a longing for a fully human and uniquely
personal existence. (2) Francis's understanding of the gospel call
was shaped by his response to Jesus' invitation to leave all and come and
follow him, and his way of following Jesus was urged by a longing to share
intimately in Jesus' sufferings and joys.
Benedict's reading of the Scriptures defines the call as a command, and
his presentation as a mediator between God and humans implies that Christians
follow from afar.
In short, since the hermeneutical code that
guides my reading of the Scriptures is derived from an incarnational theology,
I must question Pope Benedict's belief that the wedding of faith and reason was
divinely pre-ordained. Clearly, his
ecclesiology and soteriology are framed by the hierarchical structure first
encoded in Plato's Allegory of the Cave.
In his appropriation of Plato, however, Benedict replaces Plato's
timeless, placeless realm of ideal Forms with Aquinas's depiction of God as
Lord, Lawgiver and Judge. (Augustine had
previously located Plato's realm of ideal Forms in the mind of God.) On his part, Plato appealed to a metaphorical
fall to explain the flux of everyday experience without assigning
responsibility for a flawed existence.
To frame his theological inquiries, Benedict replaces this metaphor with
Augustine's harsh doctrine of original sin,
In so doing, he clothes his theology of transcendence with the authority
of both Plato and Augustine, and he apparently presumes that the wedding of the
two authorities justifies (1) the assumption that his theology is free of the
dualism encoded in both Plato's Allegory of the Cave and Augustine's harsh
doctrine of original sin and (2) the rejection of the ways that Luther wove
that doctrine into his own abstract doctrine of justification by faith
alone.
On a different issue, a theology of
transcendence blurs crucial distinctions among (1) command, with its suggestion
of immediate face-to-face interactions, (2) law, a conception which assumes
that linguistic formulations can have universal import, and (3) call or
invitation. These distinctions were
literally inconceivable in primary oral cultures. Historically, then, the language of command
emerged when the detachment inherent in literacy enabled individuals to seize
power over others. Versions of the rule
of law arrived later on the scene. Thus,
in the Hebrew narrative tradition, the early stories in the Hebrew narrative
tradition simply assumed that God's spoken word accomplished what it signified,
while later storytellers in the Deuteronomic tradition encoded norms and
practices designed to define Israel's positive identity in a timeless Law which
God had supposedly dictated to Moses in and through theophanies. Meanwhile, in ancient Greece, a centuries'
long fascination with forms of governance yielded the notion of a rule of law
in which all citizens had a voice in the formulation of laws and were equal
under the law. Centuries later, Aquinas
forged a meta-narrative which asserted, categorically, that a rational and
purposive Creator inscribed his moral will in a system of universally binding
natural laws which reasonable beings could read off of the natural order. And centuries later, Kant sought to rescue
the rule of reason from Hume's empirical critique by fusing law and command in
a process designed to yield categorical imperatives which individuals impose on
themselves.
(FN:
Kant seeks to prove that a detached, disinterested, dispassionate and
god-like perspective can generate categorical imperatives which enable
individuals to master the natural necessity of passion and desire and, thereby,
to become free. To do so, they must
understand how Newton's Laws of Motion work.
These laws posit an ideal state which is never found in nature. Nonetheless, they enable physicists to learn
how undetectable forces work by recording deviations from the ideal. In this vein, to discover how passion and
desire work, individuals must be willing to will the maxim underlying any moral
judgment as a universal law, though the law would never be binding since the
precise conditions which evoked the categorical imperative would never recur
again.)
Quite obviously, a moral discourse whose
authority rests on a metaphor of power and judgment has no room for a language
of invitation, Thus, in Aquinas's
constrictive belief-system, Augustine's doctrine of original sin implies that
Adam's sin darkened the natural light of reason in his offspring. In insidious ways, the dualism at the core of
this metaphorical darkening too easily supports an ecclesiology in which the
Pope (and the curial officials appointed by Pope John Paul II and by him) can
pose as a divinely anointed spokesmen for this God. The resulting vision of an imperial Papacy
implies that the doctrinal, liturgical and moral decrees of the Curia are
divinely authorized and accredited, as are the judgments of the Pope and Curial
officials on anyone who disagrees with them.
And for anyone willing to take this position to its logical extreme, it
can be made to support the meta-narrative which presents the Incarnation as a
response to Adam's transgression of a primordial prohibition. Pope Benedict's
embrace of a voice of reason derived from a metaphor of power and judgment is
evident in the passages in his Regensburg Address in which he presented himself
as the defender of both reason and faith.
And since Scotus's critique of the constrictive belief-systems of his medieval
predecessors exposes the will to power at their core, Pope Benedict must try to
discredit him.
Historically, Scotus's critique of the
belief that a moral law could be read off a teleologically structured natural
order provided cover for Descartes' insistence that the Book of Nature was
written in the language of mathematics.
Somehow, the Pope seems blithely unaware that this geometrization of the
universe liberated modern science from the supposition that the scientific
method is framed by an Aristotelian metaphysical system. Ironically, he accuses Scotus of privileging
a voluntarism which generated Nietzsche's celebration of a naked will to power
without being aware that his use of reason to ground moral discourse in a
conception which depicts God as Lawgiver and Judge disguises a hidden will to
power.
Sadly, most American Bishops appointed by
Pope John Paul II find the juridical structure legitimated by this conception
of God congenial. As a result, few among
them are prophets capable of discerning the signs of the time, i.e., signs of
where the movement of the Spirit is leading the Church. Since this will affect the American Church for
decades, I cringe when I read that Pope John Paul II will soon be
canonized. Indeed, I dare to suggest that
those who literally idolize John Paul II remember the insistence of the Hebrew
prophets that any idol has feet of clay.
And I obviously agree with critics who insist that Pope John Paul II's
feet of clay are evident in the way that he limited appointments to positions
in the hierarchy to clergy who would acquiesce in his determination to bind the
future in the name of protecting an unhistorical reading of Tradition. In that vein, I would also add that this
practice reveals his inability to recognize the hidden will to power that is so
obvious to those who suffer from it.
In my rare charitable moments, I try to
excuse Pope Benedict's embarrassing ignorance of the import of the
postmodernist movement by recognizing that he is captive to four questionable
implications of the meta-narrative he espouses, (1) that the sin of Adam
severed and corrupted a natural relationship between Creator and creatures, (2)
that this natural relationship was not designed to evoke an elusive longing for
the sort of intimate involvements which convey a fullness of life and love, (3)
that the eternal Word would not have become incarnate if Adam had not sinned,
and (4) that, as a result, God's involvement with human beings since their
emergence on the earth must be understood as a response to sin rather than an
over-flowing love which longed to share the intimate interactions among Father,
the eternal Word and the Spirit with human beings made in the image of God.
Given his failure to understand the
dynamics of intimate interactions, I cannot help but believe that Pope Benedict
glories in references which describe him as a world-class theologian. Presumably, as a theologian, he speaks from a
detached, disinterested and dispassionate perspective. But his role as a theologian does not silence
questions concerning the personal motivations which urge him to issue the
linguistic formulations he crafts. In
this context, critics familiar with his personal history attribute his passage
from a reformer to a critic who views Vatican II with suspicion to the hissing
of students which drove him from Bonn.
(Ironically, to present him as a
theologian who speaks as a person without a navel, his supporters must invoke
Aquinas's synthesis of philosophy and theology.
And this is particularly true if they regard his caricature of Scotus as
a valid assessment of the role that Scotus played in the western philosophical
tradition.)
Scotus, of course, did not say the final
word anymore than Aquinas did. As a
child of his age, he was unable to explore the metaphor of intimacy inscribed
in the biblical tradition. On the one
hand, even his critique of Aquinas's natural law theory of ethics could not
escape from the Hellenic tradition's suspicion of passion and desire and its
fascination with form. As a result,
though he rejected Aquinas's supposition that a rational and purposive God
inscribed his moral will in an autonomous Book of Nature, he lacked the sort of
distinction between the personal (command) and the impersonal (law or principle)
which could lead him to question his willingness to endow "right
reason" with moral authority. But
on the other hand, he succeeded in formulating an incarnational theology
designed to discern the distinctive activity of each of the three divine
Persons in the everyday events of the lives of unique individuals.
At this point, I an tempted to explore how
a theology centered in the intimate involvement among three divine Persons and
a theology centered in the conception of a just, yet merciful God generate
diverging spiritualities. Instead, I
merely note that, by tracing creation to an outpouring of divine love, Scotus's
incarnational theology generated the belief that each of the three divine
Persons is passionately, vulnerably, respectfully and faithfully involved in
the lives of all human beings. In
effect, though Scotus never succeeded in subjecting the biblical metaphor of
intimacy to philosophical analysis, he inscribed it in his incarnational
theology, albeit in a rudimentary form.
And once the implications of that theology were unpacked, the
spirituality in question challenged individuals to see the activity of each
divine Person as a call or invitation, not a command or law-like formula.
In sum, this focus on the immediacy of the
triune God's intensely personal activity fosters a language of discernment, not
a pretense that a language abstracted from a revealed text can present God's
living word transparently.
(In this vein, Protestants who insist
that Adam's transgression of a primordial prohibition condemned his offspring
to an inescapably corrupt existence supplemented Augustine's harsh doctrine of
original sin with a decree that the only escape from eternal damnation lay in
the acceptance of a doctrine of justification by faith alone. Clearly, that God acted in this way could be
known only if God had revealed it and if and only if that revelation was
inscribed in an enduring, changeless text which could be read without
corrupting human interpretations.
Clearly also, the doctrine enshrines an interpretation which devalues
Jesus' focus on the Two Great Commandments as the path to intimacy with God.)
On a positive note, Wittgenstein's insights
into the workings of everyday languages contributes in significant ways to the
hermeneutical code for my readings of stories generated by the Hebrew narrative
tradition. This code reveals the
recurring role played by the Exodus-theme in the Judaic-Christian Scriptures
and the way that the prophets transformed Israel's desire to read the promises
of land, prosperity and many offspring literally into the promise of a fullness
of life. And since the latter
transformation is indebted to Hosea's comparison of the covenantal relationship
between God and Israel with a marriage-union, it shows how and why the impersonality
inherent in a form of life which promises that laws can relate the whole of
life to God aborts the quest for intimacy with the triune God and other human
beings. And that matters, whether the
law in question is the Mosaic Law or the natural law espoused by Aquinas (and
Pope Benedict).
