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Tuesday 8 January 2008

Divine dialogues - part 3

Now, if it is possible to find this kind of dialogue with God within Christianity, suggesting that it is not unique to Judaism, it is necessary to explore how and why this is so, especially when Sacks and Josipovici see there being a much more radical divide.

Josipovici’s arguments are based on both the form and content of the Bible. On form, because, for example, while in the Christian scriptures the Old Testament ends with a Messianic thrust linking the story of both Testaments, the Hebrew scriptures end flatly “with a collection of miscellaneous ‘writings’”.[1] Similarly, he suggests that the Hebrew scriptures work “by way of minimal units laid alongside each other, the narrative being built up by slotting these together where necessary”.[2] This form then affects the content because “events are laid out alongside each other, without comment, and we are never allowed to know whether the pattern we see emerging at one point is the true pattern”.[3] The Hebrew Bible accepts, he suggests, that “we all have need of such patterns” but then places them in the larger context of reality “where there are many revelations, but they are, at best, only partial” and where “God appears, to order, guide, promise, and argue – but never to explain, to make everything clear”.[4]

It is possible to critique Josipovici’s argument from two angles. First, by highlighting the narrative thrust within the Hebrew Bible. Amos Wilder, for example, finds “one or another kind of overarching plot from beginnings to fulfilment” in the narrative cycles of the Old Testament:

“The oldest such cycle (taken up into the later Pentateuch) runs from the creation and the patriarchs through the Exodus from Egypt to the conquest of the Promised Land, all looking to the goal that the nations should be blessed through Israel’s vocation. This graph of destiny is later enlarged so that its elements of myth and saga constitute the antecedents for the providential greatness of the reign of David … In the later Deuteronomic history, the epic of the people is again rehearsed, by means of the farewell discourses put in the mouth of Moses. Here the birth of the nation and its basic covenants are memorialized at a juncture between the great disasters to the northern and southern kingdoms. Only narrative, it seems, could serve the necessary self-understanding of Israel as the horizon opens beyond the recent apostasies and catastrophes to end with a call for the renewal of the covenant in a restored Jerusalem.”[5]

Wilder argues “that the employment of the narrative mode – a combination of myth, saga and history – provided not only orientation in the mysteries of time and existence, but therewith the structures of a human order against chaos, and of meaningfulness against unreason”. In this sense, he suggests, “language constituted a “house of being””.

Just as Josipovici’s argument about the Hebrew Bible can be reversed so can his argument about the Christian Bible. Riddell, for example, describes the Bible as “a collection of bits”[6] assembled to form God’s home page while Mark Oakley uses a more poetic image when he speaks of the Bible as “the best example of a collage of God that we have”[7]. Riddell and Oakley both develop their images of the Bible from the recognition that the whole Christian Bible contains, as Oakley says, “different views, experiences, beliefs and prayers” drawn “from disparate eras, cultures and authors” which are not systematic in their portrayal of God. As Riddell states:

“The bits don’t fit together very well – sometimes they even seem to be contradictory. Stories, poems, teachings, records, events and miracles rub up against each other. They come from all over the place, and span at least 4,000 years of history.”[8]

This is not surprising when there are four Gospels not one, when there are at least two different accounts of Paul’s conversion and ministry, and when the principal form of the New Testament – the letter – is the form of long-distance, written conversation.

The Christian Bible, then, does not move forward in the smooth linear style of, for example, a nineteenth century novel, an academic thesis, a sermon or a systematic theology. Reading the Bible in terms of linearity or chronology is a stop-start process involving multiple perspectives on the same key events or characters and extensive wastelands where little or nothing of significance happens or is recorded. We can learn about the Church in Ephesus, for example, from Acts, Ephesians, 1 Timothy, Revelation and, possibly, the Johannine letters but nowhere do we find a full, chronological telling of the story of that Church. The same can be said of all the Churches which Paul founded, including the Church at Corinth. The founding of this Church is recorded in Acts and the story then jumps to Paul’s letters to this Church. These letters are a debate or conversation (not a story) between Paul and the members of the Corinthian Church about issues of concern to Paul and matters on which the Church had written to Paul for advice. We don’t have the letters which Church members wrote to Paul or all the letters which Paul wrote to the Corinthian Church so the conversation as we have it is a little one-sided and incomplete, although we can infer some of the points made by the Church members from Paul’s record of and response to them.

To ignore the disparate nature and form of the Christian Bible is to run significant risks as Riddell warns us:

“ … let us be aware that the assembled parts of the Bible are collected in a somewhat haphazard fashion. To push them into chronological order requires a great deal of scholarship, and runs the danger of doing violence to the material.”[9]

[1] G. Josipovici, The Book Of God: A Response To the Bible (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1988), p. 47.
[2] Ibid., p. 68.
[3] Ibid., 85.
[4] Ibid., pp. 85, 86 & 88.
[5] A. N. Wilder, Jesus’ Parables and the War of Myths: Essays on imagination in the scriptures (London, SPCK, 1982), pp. 54 & 55.
[6] M. Riddell, God’s home page (Oxford: The Bible Reading Fellowship, 1998), pp. 24 & 25.
[7] M. Oakley, The Collage of God (London: Darton, Longman and Todd Ltd, 2001), p. 21.
[8] Neither Riddell or Oakley are claiming that the Bible is an entirely random collection though. They both argue that the disparate materials are held together. Riddell says that, “what holds all these bits together is the fact that they somehow represent the continued involvement of God with the world in general and humanity in particular”. Oakley suggests that “held together, they form a colourful and intriguing picture that draws us into its own landscape” and which enables Christians to “glimpse something of the divine being and his life in the world” and to find “a vocabulary for the Christian life”.
[9] M. Riddell, God’s home page (Oxford: The Bible Reading Fellowship, 1998), pp. 24 & 25. Yet this is what both the Evangelical and Liberal wings of the Church have tended to do: Evangelicals, by harmonising every detail of the text into one systematic and chronological process; and Liberals, by going behind the text to identify what is perceived to be a consistent historical core underlying the diverse surface materials. Walter Brueggemann, in speaking of historical criticism, has argued that such approaches render the text voiceless by explaining away “all the hurts and hopes that do not conform to the ideology of objectivity” and thereby “eliminating its artistic, dramatic, subversive power”. W. Brueggemann, The Bible and Postmodern Imagination: Texts under Negotiation (SCM Press Ltd., 1993), pp. 64 & 65.

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