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.
______________
