October 24, 2013 / / 0 Comments
Muhammad Suheyl Umar
Iqbal Academy, Lahore, Pakistan
All the Abrahamic traditions agree that it is only man who, alone among earthly creatures, is made in the image of God [1] in a direct and integral manner. This is, however, no longer the underpinning of our prevelant view of man. Somewhere, during the course of its historical development, western thought took a sharp turn in another direction. It branched off at a tangent from the collective heritage of all humanity and claimed the autonomy of reason. It chose to follow reason alone, unguided by revelation and cut off from the Intellect that was regarded as its transcendent root. [2] Political and social realms quickly followed suit. Autonomous statecraft and excessive individualism in the social order were the elements that shaped a dominant paradigm that did not prove successful. [3] ? A few centuries of unbridled activity has led Western phi?losophy to an impasse. [4]
A similar situation could be discerned in the arena of politics, humanities, and social sciences. The impasse, though with different implications, was reached by the parallel paradigm of autonomous politics and social sciences which had refused to accept any “infusion” from a higher domain.
The need for a revision of the paradigm is being felt. The opinions about the nature and origin of the “infusions” that could rectify or change it for the better are, however, divergent. Some try to find an alternative from within the dominant paradigm. Others suggest the possibility of a search for these “infusions” in a different direction: different cultures, other civilizations, religious doctrines, sapiential traditions. SSR, true to its principle, has decided to look for it in the Scriptures, because the issue is just as important for the contemporary world as it was for the past, and we are often unaware that contemporary arguments continue in the same lines as earlier theo?logical debates. [5]
The basic assumptions of the dominant discourse and the prevalent world-view in this regard should be brought into question. [6] With this end in view I would like to make a probe into the viability or even authenticity and soundness of the underpinnings of the contem?porary mind-set and ask the inevitable question, “What is Man” according to the Scriptures? The other inevitable ques?tion, which dovetails with the earlier one, lurks in the wings, “What is the cosmos”?
“To be human means to be more than human,” St. Augustine recalled. What does this “more” indicate? The supra individual dimensions of human personality as well as the cosmic order is linked up with the concept of reality itself: reality as a multistory building or as a mansion that has no upper story. This in turn is connected to the microcosmic reality of the human self, of which we have two models. One regards the human self as the point of intersection where the Divine touches the human realm, and this view situates the human microcosm in a hierarchical relationship with other levels of being. This model and its governing concept of reality are the shared heritage of all the known spiritual, metaphysical and religious traditions of mankind. Lord Northbourne summarizes the two ap?proaches to the question, “What is Man?” in a simple and straightforward manner:
“Are you in fact a being created by God in His own image, appointed by him as his representative on earth and accordingly given dominion over it, and equipped for the fulfillment of that function with a relative freedom of choice in thought and action which reflects the total absence of constraint attributable to God alone, but at the same time makes you liable to err? Are you essentially that, and only accidentally anything else?
The second is a biological, evolutional model:
Or, alternatively, are you essentially a specimen of the most advanced product so far known of a continuous and progressive evolution, starting from the more or less fortuitous stringing together of a protein molecule in some warm primeval mud, that mud itself being a rare and more or less fortuitous product of the evolution of the galaxies from a starting point about which the physicists have not yet quite made up their minds?” [7]
In other words, the two models suggest that man could either be a Viceroy, Vicegerent or Pontiff or else a cunning animal with no destiny beyond the grave. [8] ? Regarding the former model, S. H. Nasr says:
“The concept of man as the pontiff, bridge between Heaven and earth, which is the traditional view of the anthropos , lies at the antipode of the modern conception of man which envisages him as the Promethean earthly creature who has rebelled against Heaven and tried to misappropriate the role of the Divinity for himself. Pontifical man, who, in the sense used here, is none other than the traditional man, lives in full awareness of the Origin which contains his own perfection and whose primordial purity and wholeness he seeks to emulate, recapture, and transmit …. He is aware that precisely because he is human there is both grandeur and danger connected with all that he does and thinks. His actions have an effect upon his own being beyond the limited spatio-temporal conditions in which such actions take place. He knows that somehow the bark which is to take him to the shore beyond after that fleeting journey which com?prised his earthly life is constructed by what he does and how he lives while he is in the human state.” [9]
There is a tremendous difference that separates the shared perspective of the Abrahamic faiths represented by the foregoing texts and the contemporary paradigm of progress and social development that Tage Lindbom has aptly described as “the kingdom of man.”? Given that the prevalent paradigm is losing its viability and there is a growing mistrust about its future, we are hardly in a position at this juncture to reject any alternative out of hand. “Infusions” from other domains hitherto considered alien to social development may be carefully examined, and we can ask ourselves, individually as well as collectively, which of the alternatives has a greater ring of truth. The message which this overall intellectual exercise conveys is not to underestimate the magnitude of the challenge presented by these now unfamiliar “infusions” and systematic claims of the Sriptures, past philosophies and sapiential doctrines. For what they say to the current thought and the contemporary mind-set is in effect “either accept this overall standpoint or do better by finding or inventing a superior system of thought.” The modern world, in all probability, does not have a superior system of thought that provides sufficient grounds for disregarding the traditional system.
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Every ‘revealed’ tradition is agreed upon the essential structure of the human psyche, of that invisible inner universe which is the properly human kingdom, from which we have ‘fallen’ into natural life. All hold our present state of consciousness as imperfect in relation to that which we essentially are: man as first created in the order of ‘origins’, by which a temporal beginning in the sense of the scientific evolutionists [10] is not of course meant, but rather the type, pattern, or archetype of the anthropos , ‘made in the image of God’. The ‘human’, according to tradition, is not, as for our own society, natural man but the archetypal perfect humanity, of whom every average man is a more or less obscured and distorted image. Our own secular society has sought to make everyone happy by taking as the norm ‘fallen’ man, Plato’s dwellers in the Cave; but flattery of our fallen, or forgetful condition can only superficially and briefly deceive us into believing that all is well, that we are all we should be, since each of us carries within ourselves, however obscured, the image of the anthropos . [11] The goal of human life is the total realization and attainment in our lives of this archetypal humanity, our true spiritual identity.
The metaphysical doctrine of man in the fullness of his being, in what he is, but not necessarily what he appears to be, is expounded in various languages in the different traditions with diverse degrees of emphasis which are far from negligible. Some traditions are based more upon the divinized human receptacle while others reject this perspective in favour of the Divinity in Itself. Some depict man in his state of fall from his primordial perfection and address their message to this fallen creature, whereas others, while being fully aware that the humanity they are addressing is not the society of perfect men living in paradise, address that primordial nature which still survives in man despite the layers of “forgetfulness” and imperfection which separate man from himself. [12]
And let us not forget that the image of man is always the image that man conceives of himself. The image bears back upon its author, who thus never quite frees himself from the spell it casts upon him. [13] In what follows I would try to have a look at the Islamic image of man preceded by a few remarks on the Jewish and Christian anthropology.
Expressions differ. But the children of Ibrahim share the basic insights that inform the concept of man common to all the three Abrahamic traditons. Other religious and metaphsical traditions of mankind also express the same vision though in a different mode of expression and in a different terminology but that is out of our purview at the moment. [14]
Dust and Divinity
Grappling with the most crucial element in human thinking, when the Jewish tradition tried to find meaning in human existence, it faced the self-directed question “what does it mean to be a human self?” Jews were intensely interested in human nature, but not for the brute facts of the case. They wanted truth-for-life. They wanted to understand the human condition so as to avail themselves of its highest reaches. They were acutely aware of human limitations. Compared with the majesty of the heavens, people are “dust”, [15] facing the forces of nature they can be “crushed like a moth”. [16] Their time upon the earth is swiftly spent, like grass that in the morning flourishes, but “in the evening fades and withers”. [17] Even this brief span is laced with pain that causes our years to end “as a sigh”. [18] Not once but repeatedly the Jews were forced to the rhetorical question: “What are human beings” that God should give them a second thought? [19] “Human beings … are only animals. For the fate of humans and the fate of animals is the same; as one dies, so dies the other”. [20] Here is a biological interpretation of the human species as uncompromising as any the nineteenth century ever produced. The significant point, however, is that this passing thought did not prevail. The striking feature of the Jewish view of human nature is that without flinching at its frailty, it went on to affirm its unspeakable grandeur. We are a blend of dust and divinity . The word unspeakable is not hyperbole. The King James Version translates the central Jewish claim concerning the human station as follows: “Thou hast made him a little lower than the angels”. [21] That last word, we are told by Prof. Huston Smith, is a straight mistranslation, for the original Hebrew plainly reads “a little lower than the gods [or God]. [22] Why did the translators reduce deity to angels? The answer seems obvious: It was not erudition that they lacked, but rather the boldness ? one is tempted to say nerve ? of the Hebrews. We can respect their reserve. Yet no amount of realism could dampen the aspiration of the Jews. Human beings who on occasion so justly deserve the epithets “maggot and worm” [23] are equally the beings whom God has “crowned with glory and honour”. [24] There is a rabbinic saying to the effect that whenever a man or woman walks down the street he or she is preceded by an invisible choir of angels crying, “Make way, make way! Make way for the image of God.”
We shall not have plumbed the full scope of its realism, however, until we add that they saw the basic human limitation as moral rather than physical. Human beings are not only frail; they are sinners: “I was born guilty, a sinner when my mother conceived me”. [25] The verse contributes something of great importance to Jewish anthropology. [26] Meant to be noble, they are usually something less; meant to be generous, they withhold from others. Created more than animal, they often sink to being nothing else. [27] Human beings, once created, make or break themselves, forging their own destinies through their decisions. “Cease to do evil, learn to do good”. [28] It is only for human beings that this injunction holds. “I have set before you life and death … therefore choose life”. [29]
Finally, it followed from the Jewish concept of their God as a loving God that people are God’s beloved children. In one of the tenderest metaphors of the entire Bible, Hosea pictures God yearning over people as though they were toddling infants. [30] Even in this world, immense as it is and woven of the mighty powers of nature, men and women can walk with the confidence of children in a home in which they are fully accepted.
What are the ingredients of the most creatively meaningful image of human existence that the mind can conceive? Remove human frailty ? as grass, as a sigh, as dust, as moth-crushed ? and the estimate becomes romantic. Remove grandeur ? a little lower than God ? and aspiration recedes. Remove sin ? the tendency to miss the mark ? and sentimentality threatens. Remove freedom ? choose ye this day! ? and responsibility goes by the board. Remove, finally, divine parentage and life becomes estranged, cut loose and adrift on a cold, indifferent sea. With all that has been discovered about human life in the intervening 2,500 years, it is difficult to find a flaw in this assessment.
The Christian tradition has seen a different unfolding of the concept [31] though it shares the original insight with regard to the basic meaning in human existence. ‘What is man?’ We find the question in the Book of Job, who asks, ‘ What is man, that thou shouldst magnify him ? and that thou shouldst set thy heart upon him ? [32] Job is quoting from a psalm (8:4) which reminds us of the paradox of human littleness and human greatness: [33]
When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; what is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thus visitest him? For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour. Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under his feet.
All these texts look back, finally, to the first chapter of Genesis, [34] where the creation of man is described: ” So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created He him .” The passage goes on to describe the dominion given to man over all living things on the earth.
When Job reminds God of his exaltation of man he does so in bitterness, complaining that man is a creature of dust who goes down to the grave unregarded. Nevertheless the theme which runs through the Bible, from Genesis to the Epistle to the Hebrews is man as the image of God, bearer of the divine imprint; Jesus, as the Son of Man, is the realization of the first-created humanity, the anthropos , as imagined by the Creator before the Fall. The Fall is the result of Adam’s ‘sleep’, a loss of consciousness or a ‘descent’, as the Greeks would say, from a spiritual to a natural mode of consciousness, with a consequent self-identification not with the spiritual but with the natural body; which is, as Job complains, a thing of dust.
Imago Dei ? God’s Vicegerent
Turning to the Islamic tradition we find that the Prophet of Islam also referred to this peculiar characteristic of human beings (a blend of dust and divinity ) when he repeated the famous Biblical saying quoted above ? a saying that has played an important role in Jewish and Christian understandings of what it means to be human: “God created Adam in his own form”( khlaqa Allahu al-Adama ‘ala suratihi ). Many authorities understand a similar meaning from the Qur’anic verse, “God taught Adam the name(s), all of them”. [35] That is, all things are present in human beings, because God taught them the names or realities of all things. [36]
The human being was created in God’s form, embracing all God’s attributes. The difference between the whole universe and the human being is that the signs are infinitely dispersed in the universe, while they are concentrated into a single, intense focus in each human individual.
God produces an inconceivably enormous cosmos with an infinite diversity of created things. If we investigate the creatures one by one the task can never be completed but if we speak in general terms, it is possible to classify created things into categories. The cosmos can be divided into two basic worlds, the unseen and the visible, sometimes referred to as “the heavens and the earth”, or “the spiritual world and the bodily world”. We have mentioned during our discussions that there is a third world that is both similar to and different from these two basic worlds, called the “world of imagination”. If these three worlds represent the general structure of the total macrocosm, the human being can be called a microcosm, since three parallel domains are found within each individual: spirit, soul, and body.
When we want to look at other bodily creatures; that is, those physical things that fill the visible universe we find inanimate objects, plants, and animals. What is interesting for our purposes is how these three kinds of creature manifest the signs of God, the divine attributes that become visible through them. Which attributes become visible in inanimate objects? Perhaps the best way to answer the question is to say that more than anything else, inanimate objects conceal God’s attributes instead of revealing them. They tell us what God is not rather than what He is.
In contrast to inanimate things, plants display several obvious divine attributes. It is easy to see that plants are alive, and life is the first of the “Seven Leaders”, the seven divine attributes that predominate in creation. Plants have a certain knowledge. They certainly have desire: they want water, sunlight, fertilizer, and they trace elements. If you treat them well and give them what they really desire ? like rich manure ? they even show their gratitude by producing enormous crops; they are not ungrateful truth?concealers. Plants have power and can destroy stones and concrete, but they need time. But all these divine attributes are found rather feebly within plants, so tanzih ?[incomparability; see note 47] outweighs tashbih [representation/nearness; see note 51].
In contrast, the divine attributes found in animals are much more intense. Moreover, animals add other attributes that are difficult to find in plants. The knowledge possessed by animals can be extraordinary, though it is always rather specialized. [37] The animal kingdom represents an incredible diversity of knowledge and skills, divided among a vast number of specialized organisms. Desire is also clearly present in animals, but each species desires different things, and thus a great natural harmony is created.
Both plants and animals represent a tremendous variety of specific signs. Each plant or animal species is a special configuration of divine attributes that is not reproduced in any other species.
Human beings are a species of animal, and they share many characteristics with them. But there is one remarkable characteristic that differentiates them from all other animals: Each animal is what it is, with little or no confusion. But human beings are unknown factors. Each species of animals is dominated by one or a few characteristics. The human being is infinitely malleable. What then is a human being? What brings about this fundamental difference between human beings and other animals? Muslims answer these questions in many ways. The easiest approach within our current discussion is to continue investigating the nature of the relationship between human beings and the divine attributes. Every creature other than a human being is a sign of God which reflects a specific, limited, and defined configuration of divine attributes. In contrast, a human being reflects God as God. In other creatures, some divine attributes are permanently manifest while others are permanently hidden. In human beings, all divine attributes are present, and any of them can become manifest if circumstances are appropriate.
When it is said that everything is within human beings, this is not meant in a literal sense. The principle here is easy to understand if we briefly look at the divine names. God created the universe as the sum total of his signs. The signs explain the nature of God inasmuch as he discloses and reveals himself. What does he disclose? He discloses his attributes, such as life, knowledge, power, and speech. The cosmos in its full temporal and spatial extension ? everything other than God ? illustrates all God’s manifest attributes. Hence the macrocosm is an image, or form, of God.
The concentration of the attributes within human being makes people God’s vicegerents, that is, creatures who can perform the same functions as God, with all due respect to tanzih . Human beings manifest all God’s attributes, but in a weakened and dim manner, demanded by the fact that, although they are similar to God in respect of having been created in his form, they are different in respect of spatial and temporal limitations. God remains infinitely beyond any human being.
God created human beings in his own form, which is to say that he taught them all the names. Adam had an actualized knowledge of these names, but he was still susceptible to temporary forgetfulness. The rest of the human race is born into a heedlessness that is more than temporary. The divine qualities are latent within them, but these qualities need to be brought out from latency and be embodied in people’s minds and activities.
God had created Adam to be his vicegerent. Vicegerency is the birthright of his children. However, they will only achieve the vicegerency if they follow the prophets. They must adopt the faith and practice given by God through the scriptures: “God has promised those who have faith and work wholesome deeds to make them vicegerents in the earth, even as He made those who were before them vicegerents”. [38] To be God’s vicegerent means, among other things, to manifest all the divine attributes in the form of which human beings were created. Only by embodying God’s own qualities can human being represent Him. But we know that most people do not live up to their potential. Even if they do have faith and work wholesome deeds, they never become dependable servants of God, because caprice and heedlessness often make them ignore or forget their proper duties.
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“God created Adam in His own form”. Likewise, man virtually has all the Divine Names engraved in the very clay of his being. It is because of this divine similitude that God has called him to be His khalifah , his ‘vicegerent’ on earth. “Vicegerency ( khilafah ) was assigned to Adam, to the exclusion of the other creatures of the universe, because God created him according to His image. A vicegerent must possess the attributes of the one he represents; otherwise he is not truly a vicegerent.” [39] But these two favours granted exclusively to man, his divine form and his governance, simultaneously expose him to the greatest danger of his existence: the illusion of sovereignty. As the Shaykh al-Akbar Ibn ‘Arabi points out on a number of occasions, being conscious of his original theomorphism leads man to forget that he was created from clay ? the most humble of substances and a symbol of his ‘ontological servitude’ ( ‘ubudiyya ). The power and the authority that his mandate grants him lead him to consider himself autonomous. He appropriates sovereignty, which rightfully belongs only to Him Whom he represents, and he betrays the oath of vassalage, actualization of the human theomorphic nature ( ta’alluh ), that he made when he replied to the question ” Am I Not your Lord? ” with ” Certainly, we are witnesses! ” [40]
When he refuses to assume his status as ‘servant of God’ ( ‘abd Allah ), he is henceforth unworthy of being ‘God’s vicegerent’ ( khalifah Allah ). “The homeland of man is his servitude; he who leaves it is forbidden to take on the Divine Names.” [41] To regain his original nobility, he must reactivate the divine characteristics inscribed in his primordial form; characteristics that his pretension and ignorance had covered up. “The Prophet said, ‘I have come to complete the ‘noble character traits.” He who lives in accordance with the ‘noble character traits’ follows a law of God even if he is not aware of it [?] To perfect one’s character means to strip it of all that tends to give it a vile status. Actually, vile characteristics are vile only by accident, while noble characteristics are noble by essence, for what is vile has no foundation in the divine while noble characteristics do have foundation in the divine. The Prophet perfected the noble character traits to the extent that he established the ways through which a character can maintain a noble status and exempt from vile status.” [42]
Underlying this passage is a major theme in Ibn ‘Arabi’s teaching: [43] It is by the strictest and most absolute observance of Divine Law that man is able to re-establish his original theomorphism. Every quality, including for example jealousy and anger, is noble in essence, since each has its root in a divine attribute. A quality becomes ‘ignoble’ and reprehensible only to the extent that it exists outside the limits imposed by the Law. Consequently, it is in conforming to the Prophet’s sunnah and to the Law that was revealed to him that man re-integrates in himself the divine characteristics that lie dormant deep within him.
Here another aspect of the same question may also be considered. The Qur’an is God’s Word, and God’s Word is his self-expression. [44] Likewise, the human being is God’s form ? therefore his self-expression. But the Qur’an takes oral and verbal form, while the human being takes spiritual and bodily form. The Qur’an’s outward form is fully manifest, in the sense that it was received once and for all and never changes. But no human being is fully present in this world at any time from birth to death. The Qur’an is all there, but none of us is all here. [45] The point of this comparison between the oral word of God, which is the Qur’an, and the embodied form of God, which is the human being, is to bring out the Islamic teaching that in the Qur’an we see God’s self-expression fully manifest. In the human being, we cannot see the whole because we are situated on a small segment of the historical unfolding of that whole, an unfolding that precedes our life in this world and extends beyond our death. The Qur’an is thus a full image of God, but we, at any given point, are partial and incomplete images. Made in God’s form, we have the potential to bring all God’s attributes into externalized and embodied existence through our activities. But in order to grasp what those divine attributes are ? attributes which comprise ourselves ? we need an external model. That model, for Muslims, is the Qur’an, which displays the image openly. Muslims must follow the Prophet so that the Qur’an? becomes their character and determines the way they think, feel, and act. This is not a closing down, but an opening up: [46]
whomsoever God desires to guide, He expands his breast to Islam; whomsoever He desires to misguide, He makes his breast narrow, tight.
Islam is to embody the Qur’an. It is an opening up because, through imitating the Prophet and gaining the Qur’an as their character, people come to establish real relationships with every attribute of Reality; that is, everything good, beautiful, positive, praiseworthy, and lovable. When people follow any other way ? or rather, any non-prophetic way ? they constrict themselves; they close down their personalities to many of the diverse dimensions of the divine form that make them what they are. To model themselves upon anything other than God is to fall into shirk: it is to be confused about their own reality; to think that they are this or that, or that they should be this or that, and to be unaware that God is not this or that, but the creator of every this and that. Likewise, his image cannot be limited to this and that, but embraces every this and that without being held back by any of them. The vision of human perfection that Islam offers is one of infinite possibility conjoined with total fulfillment, everlasting good fortune, and complete happiness.
The whole book, just as it expresses God, also expresses the perfected human substance of God’s foremost messenger. Muhammad is the actualized divine form who, for Muslims, stands above the other actualized divine forms, the prophets and friends of God from Adam down to the end of time.
Muhammad is a mortal like everyone else, the Qur’an says. He is a human being. [47] But remember that human beings were taught all the names, and the angels prostrated themselves before Adam. To be human is not exactly ordinary. It is a divine Trust, a special privilege, and very few people live up to it. [48] What distinguishes Muhammad from others is that he has lived up to the responsibilities of being human. [49] Yes, Muhammad is a mortal like other people. But no, he is not forgetful and negligent like them, refusing to carry the Trust. He has carried it, and the whole world benefits as a result. The qualities he manifests are not his own qualities. They are the divine names and attributes.
The downward journey of mankind in terms of human perfection needs also to be taken into consideration, and we shall turn to it shortly, but here some further remarks on the Islamic conception of human beings with regard to the idea of “trust” seem called for.
The Trust
It is impossible to understand Islam’s conception of prophecy without understanding its view of human beings; and likewise, we cannot grasp what a human being is until we grasp the role of prophets in human history.
The story begins with Adam, as it does in Judaism and Christianity, but the Qur’an’s depiction of Adam diverges in important details from that of the Hebrew Bible. The result is an explanation of human nature that can be surprising ? and even shocking ? to people familiar only with certain other interpretations of Adam’s fall.
The Qur’anic details of Adam’s creation are well known. [50] Here we can provide a few remarks that bring into focus Islam’s understanding of what it means to be human. We may remember that Adam is the first human being and the prototype for the whole race. What is said about Adam has something to do with the situation of everyone.
Human beings have specific characteristics that set them apart from other creatures. In one famous verse, the Qur’an refers to the sum total of these specific characteristics as “the Trust” ( amana ):
We offered the Trust to the heavens and the earth and the mountains, but they refused to carry it and were afraid of it. And the human being carried it. Surely he is very ignorant, a great wrongdoer (33:72)
In order to begin the task of understanding the sense of this verse, we have to remember that a trust is something precious that one person asks another person to hold for safekeeping. In this case, God has entrusted something to human beings, and they are to hold it for him. On the appropriate occasion, they will have to return it, as the word itself implies. The Qur’an says, “God commands you to deliver trusts back to their owners” (4:58).
What have human beings received on trust from God? Like all other created things, human beings have received everything they have from God. Nothing good belongs to them, since ” The good, all of it, is in Thy hands. ” They will have to give back everything that they have, sooner or later, simply through the natural course of events. However, all creatures are compelled to give this kind of trust back to God, and human beings are no different here from anything else. Creatures are all muslim and ‘abd in the most general sense of the terms, so they have no choice but to give back to God what belongs to Him. Hence, this compulsory trust is not at issue here, since choice does not enter into it. The verse of the Trust is apparently referring to some sort of free choice, and it clearly is talking about something that pertains exclusively to human beings.
The heavens, the earth, and the mountains refused to carry the Trust. The term “heavens” refers to the high and luminous things of the universe and “earth” to the low and dark things. “Mountains” seems to mean everything that is neither high nor low. These three terms can be understood as referring to everything other than human beings. Human beings are neither high like the angels, nor low like the minerals, nor in between like the plants and animals. Or rather, they possess all three qualities: They are high through their spirits, low through their bodies, and in between through their souls. As microcosms, they embrace the heavens, the earth, and the mountains.
Most authorities maintain that the Trust is God’s vicegerency. Only human beings are able to carry it because the vicegerency depends upon having been taught all the names. But it is not enough simply to be human to carry the Trust. People have to accept freely to be God’s servants before they can become his vicegerents. Hence, carrying the Trust involves human freedom. Compulsory muslims ? like the heavens, the earth, and the mountains ? cannot carry it. [51] One must be a voluntary muslim through accepting the guidance offered by God and putting it into practice. [52]
The verse of the Trust concludes by saying that the human being ” is very ignorant, a great wrongdoer! ” The most obvious interpretation of these qualities is that they refer to those children of Adam who do not live up to the Trust. All children of Adam have been given the Trust, but most of them pretend to be ignorant of the truth of their own situation, of the fact that they are, in essence; vicegerents of God. And they are wrongdoers; that is, they put things in the wrong places and overstep the bounds of what is true and right. They arrogate the power and prerogatives of the vicegerency to themselves. They do not treat the divine attributes that they have received from God as a trust. On the contrary, they act as if the attributes belong to themselves and can be used in any way they see fit.
Muslim thinkers have justified this Qur’anic picture of things in many ways, but we will limit ourselves to commenting on a single Qur’anic verse that they frequently cite in this context. Having created Adam, God wanted to make clear to him and to his children why they had been created. Hence, he gathered all the children of Adam together and spoke to them. The Qur’an reports what happened as follows: [53]
When your Lord took their offspring from the loins of the children of Adam and made them bear witness concerning themselves “Am I not your Lord?”-they said, “Yes, we bear witness!”
This verse indicates in mythic fashion that human beings, somewhere in the depths of their souls, have all borne witness to God’s Lordship. The Arabic word employed for “we bear witness” is the verb from which the word Shahadah (witnessing) is derived. The event referred to here is commonly called the Covenant of Alast , the word alast being the Arabic for “Am I not?” At this time, all human beings entered into a covenant with God by acknowledging Him as the one and sole Reality and agreeing to worship none but him. [54]
The verse of Alast continues by explaining God’s purpose in calling everyone to witness: [55]
Lest you say on the Day of Resurrection, “As for us, we were heedless of this, “or lest you say, “Our fathers associated others with God before us, and we were their offspring after them. What, wilt Thou destroy us for what the vain-doers did?”
Interpretations of this verse differ, but most authorities maintain that it means that on the day of judgment, people will be held responsible for recognizing the truth of God being the one and sole Reality, whether or not they have heard the message of a prophet. However, they will not be held responsible for the specific teachings of a prophet if such teachings have not reached them.
*****
To have a broader look at the question, by taking other traditions of mankind into consideration as well, the genesis of man, according to all traditions, occurred in many stages: first, in the Divinity Itself so that there is an uncreated aspect to man. That is why man can experience annihilation in God and subsistence in Him [56] and achieve supreme union. Then man is born in the Logos which is in fact the prototype of man and another face of that same reality which the Muslims call the Universal Man, which each tradition identifies with its founder. Next, man is created on the cosmic level and what the Bible refers to as the celestial paradise, where he is dressed with a luminous body in conformity with the paradisal state. He then descends to the level of the terrestrial paradise and is given yet another body of an ethereal and incorruptible nature. Finally, he is born into the physical world with a body which perishes but which has its principle in the subtle and luminous bodies belonging to the earlier stages of the elaboration of man and his genesis before his appearance on earth. [57]
The traditional doctrine of man, in general and non-theological terms, is based in one way or another on the concept of primordial man as the source of perfection, the total and complete reflection of the Divinity and the archetypal reality containing the possibilities of cosmic existence itself. Man is the model of the universe because he is himself the reflection of those possibilities in the principal domain which manifest themselves as the world. Man is more than merely man so that this way of envisaging his rapport with respect to the cosmos is far from being anthropomorphic in the usual sense of his term. The world is not seen as the reflection of man qua man but of man as being himself the total and plenary reflection of all those Divine Qualities whose reflections, in scattered and segmented fashion, comprise the manifested order.
Man’s actions have an effect upon his own being beyond the limited spatio-temporal conditions in which such actions take place. He knows that somehow the bark which is to take him to the shore beyond, after that fleeting journey which comprises his earthly life, is constructed by what he does and how he lives while he is in the human state.
*****
The image of man as depicted in various traditions has not been identical. Some have emphasized the human state more than others, and they have envisaged eschatological realities differently. But there is no doubt that all traditions are based on the central and dominant images of the Origin and the Center and see the final end of man in the state or reality which is other than this terrestrial life with which forgetful or fallen man identifies himself once he is cut off from a revelation or religion that constantly hearkens man back to the Origin and the Center.
That primordial and plenary nature of man which Islam calls the “Universal or Perfect Man” ( al-insan al-kamil ) and to which the sapiential doctrines of Graeco-Alexandrian antiquity also allude in nearly the same terms (except for the Abrahamic and specifically Islamic aspects of the doctrines absent from the Neoplatonic and Hermetic sources) reveals human reality to possess three fundamental aspects. The Universal Man, whose reality is realized only by the prophets and great seers since only they are human in the full sense of the word, is first of all the archetypal reality of the universe; second, it is the instrument or means whereby revelation descends into the world; and third, it is the perfect model for the spiritual life and the ultimate dispenser of esoteric knowledge. By virtue of the reality of the Universal Man, terrestrial man is able to gain access to revelation and tradition, hence to the sacred. Finally, through this reality which is none other than man’s own reality actualized, man is able to follow that path of perfection which will allow him to gain knowledge of the sacred and to become fully himself. The saying of the Delphic oracle, ” Know thyself ,” or that of the Prophet of Islam, ” He who knoweth himself knoweth his Lord ,” is true not because man as an earthly creature is the measure of all things but because man is himself the reflection of that archetypal reality which is the measure of all things. That is why in traditional sciences of man the knowledge of the cosmos and the metacosmic reality are usually not expounded in terms of the reality of terrestrial man. Rather, the knowledge of man is expounded through and in reference to the macrocosm and metacosm, since they reflect in a blinding fashion and in an objective mode what man is if only he were to become what he really is. The traditional doctrine of Primordial or Universal Man with all its variations ? Adam Kadmon , Jen , Purusa , al-insan al-Kamil , and the like ? embraces at once the metaphysical, cosmogonic, revelatory, and initiatic functions of that reality which constitutes the totality of the human state and which places before man both the grandeur of what he can be and the pettiness and wretchedness of what he is in most cases, in comparison with the ideal which he always carries within himself. Terrestrial man is nothing more than the externalization, coagulation, and often inversion and perversion of this idea and ideal of the Universal Man cast in the direction of the periphery. He is a being caught in the field of the centrifugal forces that characterize terrestrial existence as such, but he is also constantly attracted by the Centre where the inner man is always present.
It must be remembered that man, as first created, was fully endowed with intellectual intuition; in him the Fall had not yet obstructed the flow of remembrance from symbol to Archetype. There is consequently no fundamental difference between the Qur’anic doctrine that God taught Adam the names of things [58] and the verse of Genesis which tells us that God brought His creatures to Adam to see what he would name them. [59] The two scriptures differ simply inasmuch as Genesis is here the more fully informative in telling us that language came to Adam not by any outward revelation through the intermediary of an Archangel but through a no less Providential inward intellection. Both scriptures affirm, for Adam, a God-vouchsafed authority to give each thing its name, which amounts to saying that these names, far from being arbitrary, were the phonations that exactly corresponded to what they expressed, echoes or symbols of the verbal archetypes that are the means of celestial converse.
*****
Turning now to the downward journey of mankind we can observe that the image of man has undergone a drastic change, first in the West and then, through its all-pervasive influence, encroaching on the worldviews of other traditions. In the recent decades many attempts have been made to trace the stages of the “disfiguration of the image of man in the West” beginning with the first stages of the promethean revolt in the Renaissance, some of whose causes are to be seen already in the late Middle Ages, and terminating with the infra-human condition into which modern man is being forced through a supposedly humanistic civilization. In the history of the West, the decomposition and disfiguration of the image of man as being himself imago Dei came into the open with that worldly humanism which characterizes the Renaissance and which? is most directly reflected in its worldly art. But there are certain elements of earlier origin which also contributed to this sudden fall, usually interpreted as the age of the discovery of man at the moment when the hold of the Christian tradition upon Western man was beginning to weaken. [60]
The other elements which brought about the destruction of the image of pontifical man and helped the birth of that Promethean rebel with whom modern man usually identifies himself were mostly associated with the phenomena of the Renaissance itself and its aftermath or had their root in the late medieval period. These factors include the destruction of the unity and hierarchy of knowledge? which resulted from the eclipse of the sapiential dimension of tradition in the West. From this event there resulted in turn the emptying of the sciences of nature of their esoteric content and their quantification, the rise of skepticism and agnosticism combined with a hatred of wisdom in its Christian form, and the loss of knowledge based upon certitude, which was itself the result of reducing Being to a mental concept and a denial of its unifying and sanctifying rays. ???
At the Renaissance man began to analyse mental reflections and psychic reactions and thus to be interested in the “subject” pole to the detriment of the “object” pole of knowledge; in becoming “subjective” in this sense, he ceased to be symbolist and became rationalist since reason is the thinking ego. The transition from objectivism to subjectivism reflects and repeats in its own way the fall of Adam and the loss of Paradise; in losing a symbolist and contemplative perspective, founded both on an impersonal intelligence and on the metaphysical transparency of things, man has gained the fallacious riches of the ego ; the world of divine images has become a world of words. In all cases of this kind, heaven ? or a heaven ? is shut off from above us without our noticing the fact and we discover in compensation an earth long un-appreciated, or so it seems to us, a homeland which opens its arms to welcome its children and wants to make us forget all lost Paradises. It is the embrace of Maya , the sirens’ song; Maya , instead of guiding us, imprisons us. The Renaissance thought that it had discovered man, whose pathetic convulsions it admired; from the point of view of laicism in all its forms, man as such had become to all intents and purposes good, and the earth too had become good and looked immensely rich and unexplored; instead of living only “by halves” one could at last live fully, be fully man and fully on earth; one was no longer a kind of half-angel, fallen and exiled; one had become a whole being, but by the downward path. The Reformation, whatever certain of its tendencies may have been, had as an overall result the relegation of God to Heaven ? to a Heaven henceforth distant and more and more neutralized ? on the pretext that God keeps close to us “through Christ” in a sort of biblical atmosphere, and that He resembles us as we resemble Him. All this brought with it an apparently miraculous enrichment of the aspect of things as “subject” and “earth”, but a prodigious impoverishment in their aspect as “object” and “Heaven”. At the time of the Revolution of the late eighteenth century, the earth had become definitely and exclusively the goal of man; the “Supreme Being” was merely a “consolation” and as such a target for ridicule; the seemingly infinite multitude of things on earth called for an infinity of activities, which furnished a pretext for rejecting contemplation and with it repose in “being” and in the profound nature of things; man was at last free to busy himself, on the hither side of all transcendence, with the discovery of the terrestrial world and the exploitation of its riches. He was at last rid of symbols, rid of metaphysical transparency; there was no longer anything but the agreeable or the disagreeable, the useful or the useless, whence the anarchic and irresponsible development of the experimental sciences. The flowering of a dazzling “culture” which took place in or immediately after these epochs, thanks to the appearance of many men of genius, seems clearly to confirm the impression, deceptive though it be, of a liberation and a progress, indeed of a “great period”; whereas in reality this development represents no more than a compensation on a lower plane such as cannot fail to occur when a higher plane was abandoned.
Once Heaven was closed and man was in effect installed in God’s place, the objective measurements of things were virtually or actually lost. They were replaced by subjective measurements, purely human and conjectural pseudo-values, and thus man became involved in a movement of a kind that cannot be halted, since, in the absence of celestial and stable values, there is no longer any reason for calling a halt, so that in the end a stage is reached at which human values are replaced by infra-human values, up to a point at which the very idea of truth is abolished. [61]
*****
All the great religious traditions have been attempts to cultivate the human soul. Our materialist civilization has concerned itself with the well-being of the naked apes, with food and shelter and the learning of the skills necessary to the survival of the body; but any attempt to bring order to the inner worlds, to nourish the specifically human, has gone by default. Not altogether so, of course, for the past is still powerful and two thousand years of Christendom and all the wisdom of the Greek and the Hebrew traditions before that are still there; or at least with the educated sections of society, who are less at the mercy of current ideologies. Pythagoras continues to impose upon the soul the order of the diatonic scale through such music as is still composed according to its laws. [62]
Let me remind you that we are still considering the question ‘What is man?’ Man is, in truth, not a mortal worm but a spiritual being, immaterial, immeasurable, who is never born and never dies, because spirit is not bounded or contained within the categories of the material world of time and space, of duration and extension. In this sense, we are immortal, eternal, boundless within our own universe. Yet of the kingdom that is truly ours, specifically human, we have realized very little.
Our definition of homo sapiens being deiformity? which makes of him a total being, hence a theophany ? it is only logical and legitimate that, from the point of view of Islam, the final word on anthropology is conformity to celestial norms and movement towards God; or in other words, our perfection in the likeness of concentric circles and centripetal radii; both of which are disposed in view of the divine Center.
Our materialist secular society altogether fails to help educate the human soul, the invisible humanity, to flourish in its deformity. It has all to be remade; reconstructed piece by piece. This re-discovery, re-learning, is a long, hard task ? a lifelong task for those who undertake it; yet it is the most rewarding of all tasks since it is a work of self-discovery which is at the same time a universal knowledge, ‘knowledge absolute’ as the Vedas claim.
On earth the divine Sun is now veiled; as a result the measures of things become relative, and man can take himself for what he is not, and things can appear to be what they are not. Once the veil is torn, at the time of that birth that we call death, the divine Sun appears; measures become absolute; beings and things become what they are and follow the ways of their true nature!
“You were heedless of this ? therefore We have removed from you your covering, and your sight today is piercing” [63]
ENDNOTES
[1] The Biblical expression says “in the image of God”. In the Islamic tradition it appears in the following Hadith report ” khalaq Allahu ‘l-adama ‘ala suratihi” . See Bukhari, Al-Sahih , “Istidhan”, 1; Muslim, Al-Sahih , “Birr”, 115, “Jannah”, 28; Ahmad bin Hanbal, Musnad , Vol. II, 244, 251, 315, 323. Also see Ibn ‘Arabi, Al-Futuhat al Makkiyyah , Dar Sadir, Beirut, n.d., Vol. II, p. 124, p. 490. For an illuminating exposition of the the implications of the statement in terms of the Divine Attributes see Murata and Chittick, The Vision of Islam , Suhail Academy, Lahore, 2000, p. 120.
[2] See Martin Lings, “Intellect and Reason” in Ancient Beliefs and Modern Superstitions , rpt. ( Lahore: Suhail Academy, 1988), 57-68; F. Schuon, Gnosis Divine Wisdom London: J. Murray, 1978), 93-99; S. H. Nasr, “Knowledge and its Desacralization” in Knowledge and the Sacred (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981), 1-64; Huston Smith, Forgotten Truth (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1992), 60-95. Also see his Beyond the Post-Modern Mind, ( Wheaton: Theosophical Publishing House, 1989).
[3] See Ren? Guenon, “Individualism” in Crisis of the Modern World, (Lahore: Suhail Academy, 1981), 51-65. Also see Social Chaos” in the same document.
[4] Commenting upon the situation, Huston Smith remarked, “the deepest reason for the crisis in philosophy is its realization that autonomous reason ? reason without infusions that both power and vector it ? is helpless. By itself, reason can deliver nothing apodictic. Working, as it necessarily must, with variables, vari?ables are all it can come up with. The Enlightenment’s “natural light of reason” turns out to have been a myth. Reason is not itself a light. It is more than a conductor, for it does more than transmit. It seems to resemble an adapter which makes useful translations but on condition that it is powered by a generator.” (Huston Smith, “Crisis in Modern Philosophy”, in Beyond the Post-Modern Mind, ( Wheaton: Theosophical Publishing House, 1990), 137.) The nature and direction of these “infusions” is still being debated.
For a few more representative writings that indicate this situation, see “Scientism, Pragmatism and the Fate of Philosophy, Inquiry , No. 29, p. 278, cf. Huston Smith, Beyond the Post-Modern Mind , loc. cit. p. 142; Hilary Putnam, “After Empiricism” in Behaviorism , 16:1 (Spring 1988); Alasdair MacIntrye, “Philosophy: Past Conflict and Future Direction,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association , Supplement to 16/1, (September 1987); also see Proceedings of the American Philosophical Association , Vol. 59 (1986), and Kenneth Baynes et al., Philosophy : End or Transformation ? (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987).
[5] Take, for example, the issue of free will and predes?tination, a central bone of contention among the schools of Kalam. This debate, which has also been important in Christian civilization, lives on in modern secular society, though it is no longer posed in terms of God. For example, many contemporary scholars ? biologists, psychologists, sociologists, philosophers, political scientists ? are actively involved in the discussion of nature versus nurture. The basic question is simple: Does nature determine human development, or can people change themselves substantially by means of training and education? Free will and predestination, like nature and nurture, is merely a convenient way to refer to one of the most basic puzzles of human existence.
[6] “Basic assumptions” are used here in a broader sense than regulating con?cepts. For a description and telling critique of the assumptions of the contemporary world, see Tage Lindbom, Tares and the Good Grain (Lahore: Suhail Academy,1988). On another level these assumptions are challenged by S. H. Nasr’s Knowledge and the Sacred, op. cit.
[7] Lord Northbourne, Looking Back on Progress (Lahore: Suhail Acad?emy, 1983), 47.
[8] On the traditional conception of man, see G. Eaton, King of the Castle, Islamic Texts Society, 1993; “Man” in Islamic Spirituality, ed. S. H. Nasr, vol. I (New York: Crossroad, 1987),? 358-377; Kathleen Raine, What is Man? (England: Golgonoza Press, 1980); S. H. Nasr, “Who is Man…”, in The Sword of Gnosis, ed. Needleman (England: Penguin, n.d.), 203-217; S. H. Nasr (ed.) The Essential Writings of Frithjof Schuon (New York: Amity House, 1986),? 385-403.
[9] S. H. Nasr, Knowledge and the Sacred, op. cit., 161-162.
[10] We have conciously avoided comment on evolutionism and evolutionists’ positions though all these debates have a direct relevance to the disfiguration of the image of man. It could have taken us too far from our subject. A separate review may be in order on an other occasion.
[11] Called by the Hindus the Self, by the Buddhists the Buddha-nature, by the Jews Adam Kadmon, by the Christians Jesus the Christ, by Blake the ‘Divine Humanity’ etc.
[12] This is a specifically Islamic image, since Islam sees the cardinal sin of man in his forgetfullness ( ghaflah ) of who he is although he still carries his primordial nature (al-fitrah) within himself, the man as such to which infact the Islamic message addresses itself. See? F. Schuon, Understanding Islam , pp. 13-15.
[13] The whole course of European art, with it increasingly accelerated phases of action and reaction, is mainly a dialogue between man and his image. Islam banished all this ambiguous play of psychological mirrors at an early stage, thus preserving the primordial dignity of man himself.
[14] Of special importance in this regard is Ren? Guenon’s Man and his Becoming According to the Vedanta (Delhi: 1990), which presents the concept of man in Hindu terminology, which, nevertheless, is shared by the other traditions as well. Also see his The Great Triad , (Quinta Essentia, 1991), pp. 65-81 for an exposition of the concept of man from the point of view of the Far Eastern traditions. For a representative sampling of? the Hindu view of the human self see the following extract:
The Hindu doctrine of the human self postulates that the human self is a layered entity?. First and most obviously, we have bodies. Next comes the conscious layer of our minds. Underlying these two is a third region, the realm of the individual subconscious. This has been built up through our individual histories. Most of our past experiences have been lost to our conscious memory, but those experiences continue to shape our lives in ways that contemporary psychoanalysis tries to understand. With these three parts of the self, the West is in full agreement. What is distinctive in the Hindu hypothesis is its postulation of a fourth component. Underlying the other three, less perceived by the conscious mind than even its private subconscious (though related to it fully as much), stands Being Itself, infinite, unthwarted, eternal. “I am smaller than the minutest atom, likewise greater than the greatest. I am the whole, the diversified-multicolored-lovely strange universe. I am the Ancient One. I am Man, the Lord. I am the Being-of-Gold. I am the very state of divine beatitude.”?if only we could dredge up portions of our individual unconscious-the third layer of our being-we would experience a remarkable expansion of our powers, a vivid freshening of life. But if we could uncover something forgotten not only by ourselves but by humanity as a whole, something that provides clues not simply to our individual personalities and quirks but to all life and all existence, what then? Would this not be momentous? (Huston Smith, The World Religions, pp. 42-43).
[15] Psalm 103:14.
[16] Job 4:19.
[17] Psalm 90:6.
[18] Psalm 90:9.
[19] Psalm 8:4.
[20] Ecclesiastes 3:18-19. Considering the freedom of Israel’s thought and her refusal to repress doubts when she felt them, it is not surprising to find that there were moments such as this.
[21] Psalm 8:5.
[22] The number of the Hebrew word ‘elohim , is indeterminate.
[23] Job 25:6.
[24] Psalm 8:6.
[25] Psalm 51:5. It is totally false to claim this verse for the defense of either the doctrine of total human depravity or the notion that sex is evil. These are both imported notions that have nothing to do with Judaism.
[26] The word sin comes from a root meaning “to miss the mark,” and this people (despite their high origin) manage continually to do.
[27] Yet never in these “missings” is the misstep required. Jews have never questioned human freedom. The first recorded human act involved free choice. In eating Eden’s forbidden fruit, Adam and Eve were, it is true, seduced by the snake, but they could have resisted. The snake merely tempted them; it is clearly a story of a human lapse. Inanimate objects cannot be other than they are; they do what nature and circumstance decree.
[28] Isaiah 1:16-17
[29] Deuteronomy 30:19
[30] ??????????? It was I who taught Ephraim to walk,
?I took them up in my arms;
I led them with cords of human kindness,
with bands of love.
I was to them like those who lift infants to their cheeks.
How can I give you up, Ephraim?
How can I hand you over, 0 Israel ?
My heart recoils within me,
my compassion grows warm and tender (Hosea 11:3-4,8).
[31] S. H. Nasr, “Man, Pontifical and Promethean”, in Knowledge and the Sacred , pp. 160-188; G. Durand, On the Disfiguration of the Image of Man in the West , (Ipswich, U.K., 1976).
[32] Job 7:17.
[33] St. Paul quotes this psalm in his Epistle to the Hebrews, in order to present to the Jews, familiar with the scriptures, the new concept of Jesus as the divine humanity incarnate.
[34] Genesis 1:27.
[35] Qur’an, 2:31.
[36] Genesis also tells us that God brought His creatures to Adam to see what he would name them (II:19).
[37] Bees can tell their hive-mates exactly where to find the best honey, but they don’t know much about vinegar. Monarch butterflies know the precise location of their valley in Mexico, but they cannot be trusted to take you to New York City.
[38] Qur’an 24:55.
[39] Al-Futuhat al-Makkiyah , I, p. 263.
[40] Qur’an 7:172.
[41] Al-Futuhat al-Makkiyah , I, pp. 362, 367.
[42] Al-Futuhat al-Makkiyah , II, p. 562.
[43] For a detailed exposition of Ibn ‘Arabi’s views see W. C. Chittick, Sufi Path of Knowlwdge ; Self-Disclosure of God .
[44] One can point out parallels in other religions. For traditional Jews, the Torah, in its widest sense, plays the same sort of role; and for traditional Christians, it is Jesus, the Word made flesh, who is the all-pervasive reality of the tradition.
[45] Our infancy has passed, and our old age has not yet arrived. It is difficult to imagine that the infant and the decrepit old man are the same in any real sense, but they are ? in some way that is difficult to formulate. But where, you might wonder, in the midst of this (hopefully) long lifetime is the real you? In fact, an embodiment of the real you is found at every point on the trajectory of life, but the real you itself remains a mystery that correlates with the divine spirit, about which the Qur’an? says:
They will ask you about the Spirit. Say., ‘The spirit is at the command of my Lord, and of knowledge you are given but little.” (17.85)
[46] Qur’an 6:125
[47] To understand the Islamic view of Muhammad, we have to begin by looking at him in the light of incomparability ( tanzih ) the fact that God is real and everything other than God is unreal. From this perspective, all good belongs to God. Muhammad is other than God and hence, like all other created things, he is nothing compared to God. In human terms, Muhammad is a mortal like everyone else.
But there is still a major difference between the Prophet and other people. First, the Prophet is God’s perfect servant. Everything in the universe is God’s servant, but human beings, having carried the Trust, have to choose freely to be God’s servant in order to live up to their potential. This free submission of self to God is the outstanding quality of Muhammad’s character. Hence the Qur’an? refers to him as “God’s servant” and the Muslim consciousness pays this title the highest respect.
But this is not the whole story of Muhammad. As God’s perfect servant, he is also God’s perfect vicegerent. Having fully actualized tanzih , he also embodies tashbih . The Qur’an? illustrates these two sides of Muhammad’s humanity in the verse, “Say: ‘I am but a mortal like you; it has been revealed to me that your God is one God'” (18:110, 41:6). Many commentators in modern times have paid attention only to the first half of this verse and ignored the implications of the second half.
[48] ” Verily ,” concludes the verse of the Trust, the human being is “very ignorant, a great wrongdoer” (33:72).
[49] He has done so ? with God’s guidance, of course ? such that God has chosen him to be a mercy for the whole world: “We have not sent thee save as a mercy to all the world’s inhabitants” (21:107). The second half of the previous verse “It has been revealed to me that your God is one God”- is all important, because it shows that Muhammad is the recipient of revelation. If there was any thought that he is just as imperfect as the rest of us, this thought is removed by the statement that he alone was chosen to receive the Qur’an .
[50] For an excellent narrative of the account of Adam’s creation and fall with all Qur’anic refrences see Murata and Chittick, The Vision of Islam , (Suhail Academy, Lahore, 2000), p. 92-3, 120-21, 134-44.
[51] A good deal of evidence could be cited from the Qur’an? and the Hadith to prove human superiority. The prostration of the angels before Adam is a point at hand. The Prophet is reported to have said, ” On the day of resurrection, no one will be greater than the children of Adam.” The people wondered at this and someone asked, “O Messenger of God! Not even the angels ?” He replied, ” Not even the angels. They are compelled like the sun and the moon .” The angels have no freedom of action. They could not disobey God if they wanted to. Hence, they can be only what they are. But human beings can overcome their own limitations and move from distance ( tanzih ) to nearness ( tashbih ), from servanthood to vicegerency. Another hadith makes a similar point: ” God created the angels from intelligence, the beasts from appetite, and human beings from both intelligence and appetite. When a person’s intelligence overcomes his appetite, he is higher than the angels, but when his appetite overcomes his intelligence, he is lower than the beasts .”
[52] On the four significations of the word islam see Murata and Chittick, The Vision of Islam , p. 4-7.
[53] Qur’an, 7:172.
[54] It needs to be stressed that this intuitive knowledge of all human beings is the knowledge of tawhid , not the knowledge of the shari’ah , “right way and open road” that is specific to the prophetic teachings of Islam. In other words, it pertains to the domain of the first Shahadah , not to that of the second Shahadah , which embraces specific instructions brought by the prophets. The first Shahadah is known by everyone, although they usually have to be reminded about it. In contrast, the truths embraced by the domain of the second Shahadah have to be learned through a divine message.
[55] Qur’an, 7:173.
[56] the al-fana and al-baqa of Sufism.
[57] Likewise, the Quran speaks of man’s pre eternal ( azali ) covenant with God when he answered God’s call,” Am I not your Lord?” with the affirmative, “Yea,” the “Am I not your Lord?” ( alastu birabbikum ) symbolizing the relation between God and man before creation and so becoming a constantly repeated refrain for all those sages in Islam who have hearkened man to his eternal reality in divines by reminding him of the asrar-i alast or the mysteries of this pre-eternal covenant. This reminding or unveiling, moreover, has always involved the doctrine of the elaboration of man through various states of being.
The genesis of man and his prenatal existence in various higher states of existence is expounded in great detail in Jewish esoterism too. See L. Schaya, “La genese de I’homme” Etude Traditionnelles , no 456-57 (Avril-Septembre 1977): 94-131, where he discusses the birth, descent, loss of original purity, and the regaining of man’s original state according to Jewish sources concluding that, “N? de Dieu, l’?tre humain est destin?, apr?s see multiples naissances et morts, ? rena?tre en Lui, en tant que Lui” (p. 131); and idem, The Universal Meaning of the Kabbalah , pp. 116ff. see also F. Warrain, La Teodic?e de la Kabbale , Paris, 1949, pp. 73ff.; and G. Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism , Jerusalem, 1941, lectures 6 and 7.
[58] Qur’an, 2: 31.
[59] Genesis, II:19
[60] One of the element is the excessive seperation between man as the seat of consciousness or the I and the cosmos as the “non-I” or a domain of the reality from which man is alienated. This attitude was not unrelated to the excessive seperation of the spirit from the flesh in the official Christian theology even if this chasm was filled by the Heremetic tradition, especially its alchemical aspect, and affected even the daily life of the medieval community through the craft guilds. The “angelism” of medieval theology, althrough containing a profound truth, considered only one aspect of the traditional anthropos, allowing the rebellion against such a view by those who thought that in order to discover the spiritual significance of nature and the positive significance of the body, they had to deny the medieval concept of man. The Renaissance cult of the body, even if by some freak of history it had manifested itself in India, could not have been opposed to Hinduism in the way that it was opposed to Christianity in the West.
[61] The mitigating circumstances in such cases ? for they are always present, at any rate for every new fall, the order then existing shows a maximum of abuse and corruption, so that the temptation to prefer an apparently clean error to an outwardly soiled truth is particularly strong.
[62] Christian art continues to remind of the celestial hierarchies of angels, of the lives of saints lived in accordance with the laws not of nature but of the spirit; of the Christian myth of the birth of the divine principle into the world of generation.
[63] Qur’an 50:22.
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Yamina Mermer
Indiana University
In Islam the ?testimony? ( shahaada ) to the truth of the unity of divinity ( tawhid ), [1] i.e. to bear witness that ?There is no deity save God,? is central to faith. In the definition of islam (surrender to the divine Will as it is conveyed by the divine Word), the shahaada is the first act required of muslims. It also defines the content of faith, whose primary element is faith in God. The one who surrenders ( muslim ) [2] himself to the truth is supposed to actually observe [3] how every thing in the observable world, the world of testifying (? alam al-shahaada ), indicates this truth of tawhid, and consequently testifies to the truthfulness of the Qur?anic message. The Qur?an [4] refers very often to the universe and to the things and events in it and describes them as symbols, indicators or signs ( ayat ). [5] It invites the addressee to ponder [6] over the meaning of those signs in order to testify to the veracity of the teachings of the Qur?an. But it also mentions stories of prophets and of their miracles, which are obviously not observable. What is their significance? How is it possible to ?testify? to the truth of something that cannot possibly be observed? In order to answer these questions we need some indispensable knowledge of the principles of Qur?anic hermeneutics. After setting up some basic rules, I will briefly apply them to a few examples. It turns out that those stories of the prophets and their miracles are particular events but they are signs that point to universally observed principles. They are like the tips to general laws that can be observed and experienced here and now . Hence, although those events themselves cannot possibly be observed, their truth can nevertheless be confirmed.
According to the Qur?an, the verses of the Qur?an as well as things and events are signs ( ayat ). God speaks through Qur?anic signs as well as cosmic signs. The cosmos with all its activities is a kind of speech. Each being, each event, each change is like a word and their being in constant motion is like speech. It is as though the universe has been made to speak with constant change and renewal. [7] In the words of the Qur?an, ? They will reply: God, Who gives speech to all things, has given speech to us (as well).? (41:21) That is, just as the Qur?an is God?s speech with words, the cosmos is God?s speech with act. This situation led the Muslim scholar Said Nursi to define the Qur?an as ?the eternal translator of the mighty book of the universe and the interpreter of the various tongues reciting the verses of creations.” [8] He explains that from one point of view the Qur?anic signs translate the cosmic signs according to our understanding and make them speak; i.e. the meaning of the Qur?an unfolds in the cosmic signs. The Qur’an actually explains how every being or event is a sign pointing to the existence of God and making Him known with all His names and attributes of perfection. Nursi asserts that each Qur?anic verse encompasses all the other verses and contains all of the aims of the Qur?an because it is the word of One Who encompasses all. [9] God, in His infinite mercy has included the whole in the parts, like a hologram, so that man with his limited capacity may grasp the meaning of the whole Qur?an in each of its parts. The same is true for the cosmic signs: each being, each thing or event is related to all the others and has meaning only within that web of relationships. For instance, an eye is an ?eye? and sees only when it is in the head, which is part of the body, which is ultimately part of the cosmos. Hence the maker of the eye can only be the maker of the head, the body, and the whole cosmos because the eye can only exist together with all of them. [10] The crucial point is that the Qur?anic ayat (verses/signs) and the cosmic ayat (signs/verses) are accessible to human understanding precisely because of their aforementioned characteristic. Accordingly, although man cannot comprehend the whole, he can reach universal understanding by focusing on universal particulars.
From another perspective, it can be said that the cosmic signs disclose the reality of Qur?anic signs. That is, God creates as he ?speaks? the Qur?an. For instance, He creates food and at the same time, He says in the Qur?an that He is the merciful and generous sustainer. He describes His acts of creation to both ?eye and ear?; He describes His act while performing it, and explains his gifts of mercy as He bestows them. [11] Thus, with the Qur?an, word and act are combined: the creation is made to speak through the Qur?an. That is, just as God makes His existence and presence known and perceptible through deeds, He also communicates His presence through speech. [12] The response of muslims to God?s speech is to learn by listening. [13] Accordingly, in order to understand and confirm the truth of Qur?anic signs we need to ?keep an eye? on the cosmic signs, i.e. on things and events, and if we want to comprehend the cosmic signs we should ?keep an ear? on the Qur?an. In other words, we are supposed to observe the universe while listening to the Qur?an and vice versa, for just as the universe is the Creator?s speech through deed; the Qur?an is His speech through word.
Another rule of usul al-tafsir (methodology of Qur’anic exegesis) is that speech derives its power of meaning from four sources: the speaker, the form of the speech, the addressee, and the purpose of the speech. [14] If for instance, speech is in the form of command or prohibition, it looks to the speaker?s will and authority, in accordance to his position. Consider a commander who utters the words ?Forward, march.? These words represent a command and are binding if the addressees are subject to the authority of the speaker. If the same words are uttered by a soldier for example, we may conjure that he is joking; in any case, no one would take his words as a command. So although the two statements are the same in form and content, they are different in meaning. That is both the speaker and the addressee are crucial in determining the meaning of speech.. In the case of the Qur?an, since the claim is that it is the word of God, then I need to consider it as the word of God if I don?t want to alter its meaning. Indeed, ?who the speaker is? determines the meaning of the content. It would be methodologically inappropriate to assume that the Qur?an is the word of a man while it claims to be the word of God, because that assumption would modify the alleged meaning. For instance the Qur?an says, Whenever We will anything to be, We but say unto it Our word ?Be!? and it is? (16:40). [15] In order to understand this ?verse? it is important to know who the speaker is and who he is addressing and what its purpose is. The Qur?an says that it is the Creator of all things speaking to created human beings in order to teach them the cosmic reality of tawhid and its relevance to the human condition.. Now if I read it as the word of the messenger who brought it, i.e. Muhammad, then I would be reading something other than the Qur?an, a product of my own imagination. Yes, the content would be the same, but it would not be the same message.
Methodologically, we [16] are supposed to consider a document as it claims to be unless proved otherwise and read it accordingly. Now the messenger who brought the Qur’an never claimed to be its author; he asserted that it was revealed to him by God. The Qur?an itself professes to be an address of the Creator of the heavens and the Earth. [17] Consequently, we will regard each verse of the Qur’an as the word of God. But if after that it does not make sense; if it is inconsistent in itself or in relation to the universe to which it often refers, then we will have the right to suspect its claim. If however from the beginning we reject the claim that the Qur’an is God’s word, then what we will read will not be the ?Qur’an? [18] , anymore, but some text allegedly written by Muhammad. And Muhammad would no longer be the messenger of God but an impostor who lied in the name of God. [19]
????? In addition, it should be noted that the Qur’an condemns blind imitation. It repeatedly condemns the blind following of the tradition of forefathers, But when they are told, ?Follow what God has bestowed from on high,? some answer, ?Nay, we shall follow that which we found our forefathers believing in and doing.? Why, even if their forefathers did not use their reason at all, and were devoid of guidance? ?. Deaf are they, and dumb, and blind: for they do not use their reason (2: 170-171) The Qur?an persistently says, ?So will you not think?? and refers what it says to reason. It invites those who refuse to consider its proposition as reasonable on its merits to ?produce an evidence for what they claim.? [20] The believer is over and over invited to think and ponder over the evidences in the universe in order to confirm his iman (belief) in the truth of the Qur’anic message.
It is also important to realize that the messenger Muhammad, who was also the first teacher of the Qur’an, taught that God speaks to everybody, at all times through the Qur?an. [21] It addresses the most common people and the elite; all may listen and benefit from its teachings. Nursi likens it to ?a repast at which thousands of different levels of minds, intellects, and spirits find their nourishment. Their desires are fulfilled and their appetites are satisfied.? [22] Surely, if the Qur’an is God?s universal address to all humanity as it claims to be, it should transcend time and space and it should make sense to everyone, at all time. It should speak to its addressee here and now . As to the main goal of the Qur?an, according to the consensus of the scholars of Qur?anic exegesis, it is the major pillar of faith, i.e. tawhid (divine unity). In other words, the Qur?an?s most important aim is to teach its addressee how to ?translate? the language of the cosmic signs in order to testify to the truthfulness of divine unity. Tawhid does not simply refer to belief in one God as opposed to two or three. The Qur’an asserts that human beings have been created in such a way that they innately recognize the existence of one Creator. [23] It narrates the Prophet [24] Abraham’s search for his Lord in celestial bodies (stars, moon, and sun), his recognition that transient created things could not be gods and eventually his seeking for God’s guidance; Then when he beheld the moon rising, he (i.e. Abraham) said, “This is my sustainer!”- But when it went down, he said, “Indeed, if my Sustainer does not guide me, I will most certainly become one of the people who go astray!” (6:77). As he understood and admitted his limitations, he was made to realize the transcendent and comprehensive existence of God. By doing so he became the locus of God’s love, and ” a good paradigm ” (60:4) for the believers as the Qur’an states, And who could be of better faith than he who surrenders his whole being unto God and is doer of good withal, and follows the creed of Abraham, who turned away from all that is false – seeing that God exalted Abraham with His love? (4:125). [25] Because Abraham surrendered himself wholeheartedly, he attained a state of receptivity to revelation and hence revelation was bestowed unto him.
According to the Qur’an, man knows intuitively that there must be a Creator and he understands what the Creator is not, but in order to know Him, he needs revelation. The Muslim scholar Ibn ‘Arabi (1165-1240) explains that the only knowledge about God that we can acquire through rational means is the knowledge of the existence of God and of what God is not. That is, we can grasp God’s incomparability as illustrated in the story of Abraham, but we cannot gain affirmative knowledge of God. Only revelation can inform us about what God is rather than what he is not. [26] ? Furthermore since the Qur’an instructs man to strive to know God when he already knows His existence, it must be referring to another kind of knowledge that exceeds man’s acquired knowledge. [27] That is, revelation does not just state the obvious; it teaches what cannot be learned without having recourse to its teachings. If, for instance we understand divine unity as meaning no more than ‘there is only one God,’ then we can rightly conclude that Divine revelation is superfluous and unnecessary. The point however, is that the Qur’an teaches who that God is and what his purposes in creation are; it teaches how to know God with all his names and attributes of perfection and hence to love and worship nothing beside Him. [28] In other words the purpose of the Qur’an is to teach that all that is lovable and valued in things and beings proceeds from the Divine attributes of perfection; they all belong to their Enduring Creator alone and not to the transient created things themselves by means of which they are made manifest in this world. In other words, all created things point, beyond themselves, to the meanings of the divine attributes of perfection. They are signs speaking of their Maker.
When we reflect upon this reality of the created world and testify to its truth in our life (as the Qur’an bids us do), then our love for the world and the things in it is transformed into love for their creator, [29] and that is the core of tawhid (divine unity) as it is expressed in the Qur?anic verse, God, there is no deity (i.e. there is nothing worth worshipping and loving) save Him, indeed to Him alone belong the attributes of perfection (20:8). The Muslim scholar Said Nursi (1886-1960) compares beings in the universe to a huge orchestra celebrating the Divine names. With their very mode of existence, they act as mirrors to the Divine attributes of perfection in many respects: they declare their maker?s power though their intrinsic weakness, His riches and grace through their inherent neediness and poverty, and His everlastingness through their ephemerality. Each being, each event proclaims that nothing possesses deity but He, and attest that the Qur?anic truths are not mere metaphysical ideals but cosmic realities. [30] Every thing is like a mirror reflecting the divine attributes of perfection and thus making its Maker known and glorifying Him. [31]
In order to participate in this glorifying, one needs to acknowledge that his existence is dependent on a ?wholly other? and that the continuance of his existence is due solely to the creativity of that other. Then he realizes that everything else also owes its existence to that same creator. That is, he sees the weakness and neediness of all things to the extent he admits his own weakness and neediness; and as a result he becomes aware that all grace and mercy, all attributes of perfection – reflected on himself or on beings – belongs to that creator alone. This awareness is the beginning of ?glorifying? God and concurrently the beginning of ?understanding? the reality of existence, for they are related in accordance with the Prophet Muhammad?s saying, act upon what you know and God will teach you what you do not know. That is, as he purifies his ego following the teachings of the Qur?an and realizes that he is not the real master in his sphere of disposal, i.e. as he gives up the illusion that his existence is essential and independent, the meaning of revelation starts unfolding itself to him as it is alluded in the following verses, Behold, it is a truly noble discourse (Lit. qur?an) (conveyed unto man) in a well-guarded writ (kitab) which none but the pure can touch (56:77-79). [32] That is to say, to testify to the truth of tawhid, the foremost aim of the Qur?an, entails the authentication of its reality in the universe, [33] a task that can be accomplished to the extent one participates in that cosmic reality and experiences tawhid in his own life.
Let us consider the following Qur?anic verse, He taught Adam the Names, all of them (2:31). According to the above rules of exegesis, this verse addresses us here and now and teaches us how to testify to the cosmic reality of tawhid and as a result to the truth of the Qur?anic message. It is not just narrating the story of a prophet called Adam, for the Qur?an does not claim to be a book of history and the Prophet Muhammad did not read it as such. In fact the Qur?an reduces the stories of the prophets to their essential features precisely because it does not want the addressee to get drowned in unnecessary information and deviate from the aim of the message taught in those verses. But how is the teaching of the names to Adam mentioned in this verse relevant to my situation here and now ?? Moreover, given that the Qur?an instructs the readers to use their reason, how is it possible to understand this incident rationally? And lastly, what is the wisdom in the Qur?an?s mentioning particular events like this? The answer is in the Qur?an itself, in accordance with a very fundamental principle that I have applied so far but without spelling it explicitly. This is that all of the Qur?anic ?statements and ordinances are mutually complementary and cannot therefore be correctly understood unless they are considered as parts of one integral whole.? [34] Hence in order to understand what ?Adam? and ?names? refer to, we need to consider them within the Qur?anic context. [35]
???? In verse 2:31, ?Adam? refers to the whole human race as is clear from the preceding verse 2:30, where Adam is referred to as ?one who shall inherit the earth? and as one ?who will spread corruption on earth and will shed blood.? More important, however, is verse 7:11. In the verses following 2:30, the Qur?an mentions how all the angels prostrated before Adam except Iblis (Satan). [36] In 7:11, it recounts the same event but with definite reference to all mankind as the preceding verses clearly demonstrate, O( people) We have given you a (bountiful) place on earth, and appointed thereon means of ivelihood for you: (yet) how seldom are you grateful! (7:10). We have created you, and then formed you, and then we said unto the angels, ?prostrate yourselves before Adam!?- Whereupon they prostrated themselves, except Iblis (7:11). From this aya , it is obvious that the name Adam symbolizes the whole human race as all commentators on the Qur?an have unanimously agreed. So when the Qur?an says that He taught Adam the Names (al-asma?), all of them, it is actually saying that all human beings have been taught all the Names. But what are these names? The Arabic for ?names? is asma? , and its singular form is ism . The term ism primarily denotes the intrinsic attributes of a thing under consideration. In other verses (7:180; 17:110; 20:8 and 59:24), the term asma? has been combined with the term al-husna which is the plural form of al-ahsan (that which is best or most goodly). The combination al-asma? al-husna , a term reserved in the Qur?an for God alone, is often rendered as ?the attributes of perfection,? [37] e.g. And God?s (alone) are the attributes of perfection (al-asma? al-husna); invoke Him, then, by these, and stand aloof from those who distort the meaning of His attributes ( asma? ) (7:180).
Thus the names refer to the divine attributes of perfection that constitute the reality of all things as indicated above. The ?teaching of the names? alludes to man?s comprehensive disposition in learning countless sciences and acquiring knowledge about the Creator?s attributes and qualities through those sciences, all of which are signs to the Divine Names. Nursi writes that ?All attainments and perfections, all learning, all progress, and all sciences, each have an elevated reality which is based on one of the divine Names. On being based on the Name?the sciences and the arts find their perfection and become reality. Otherwise they remain incomplete and deficient.? [38] Accordingly, medicine for instance, finds its perfection and becomes reality when it relies on the divine name Healer and sees ?its compassionate manifestation in the vast pharmacy of the earth.?
So in fact, the minor event of the teaching of the names to Adam is actually the tip of a universal observed principle namely the teaching of all the attainments with which mankind has been inspired. Nursi asserts that ?through this minor event, the Qur?an expounds a universal principle which is essential instruction in wisdom for everyone at all times.? [39] This verse teaches that this ability and the resulting attainments are to be consciously used to ascend to the divine Names, which are the realities and sources of those attainments. In Nursi?s view, the verse says:
Come on, step forward, adhere to each of the names, and rise! But your forefather was deceived one time by Satan, and temporarily fell to the earth from a position like Paradise, Beware! In your progress, do not follow Satan and make it the means of falling into the misguidance of ?Nature? from the heavens of the divine wisdom. Continuously raising your head and studying carefully my attributes of perfection (or My divine Names), make your sciences and your progress steps by which to ascend to those heavens. Then you may rise to my Names, which are the realities and sources of your science and attainments, and you may look to your sustainer with your hearts through the telescope of the names. [40]
Therefore although verse 2:31 mentions the miracle of Adam, an event that the addressee has not seen, it is possible for him to testify to its truthfulness and confirm it because it refers to a universal truth that he can observe in the universe and experience in his life. This is how the cosmic signs help the Qur?an?s addressee witness to the truthfulness of the Qur?anic verses (signs), which interpret and expound the cosmic signs. The same analysis may be applied to different verses of the Qur?an related to the stories of the prophets.
R.W.J. Austin states that ?the Koran places the prophets outside history, within the framework of the Unitarian message of Islam; it speaks in both general and universal terms, as it were.? [41] The central theme in the Qur?anic reference to the stories of the prophets is the teaching of the reality of tawhid . In accordance with the Prophetic tradition, the different prophets correspond to various spiritual types and consequently, to different ways to reach knowledge and love of God. [42] For instance, the miracle of the staff of Moses, is referred to in the verse 2:60, And We said, strike the rock with your staff. Nursi reminds us that the roots of plants and trees spread through hard rock and earth just as easily as branches spread in the air. He says, ?Like the Staff of Moses, each of those silken rootless conform to the command of, And We said, strike the rock with your staff, and split the rock.? [43] This way Nursi plays off the fact that revelation and creation witness to each other: the observed facts show that the miracle of the Staff of Moses points to a universal law, and the verse tells us that those observed facts are not ?natural? events that happen haphazardly but rather ?miracles? [44] of Divine power and mercy. Nursi also mentions how delicate and fine green leaves retain their moisture for months even when it is extremely hot, as in the summer. It is as though those leaves recite the verse, O fire be coolness and peace for Abraham! (21:69) against the heat of the sun, like the limbs of Abraham did against fire. Again the cosmic signs are juxtaposed to the Qur?anic signs/ verses. [45]
From the above principles of Qur’anic exegesis, it is clear that understanding the Qur’an entails that the interpreter engages the Qur’anic signs as well as the cosmic ones. Understanding is given to him to the extent he succeeds in internalizing the meaning those signs convey. This process however is not arbitrary. It has been taught by the messenger Muhammad to whom the Qur’an was first revealed and as a matter of fact by all the prophets as the Qur’an teaches. [46] In the Qur’anic context, the messenger Muhammad epitomizes the excellent Man ( al-insan al-kamil ) in the sense that he realized his createdness at the highest level and admitted his inherent weakness and neediness before His Creator and consequently became receptive to Divine revelation . He evinced a tawhid journey that reaches its apogee through purification of the ego from its false claims of existing by itself and from itself, and of conceiving of itself as a source of perfection including true understanding of the world. As one purifies one?s ego and surrenders himself to the reality of his createdness, he can share in the cosmic reality of tawhid and therefore testify to its reality in his own life.
Subsequently, the muslim (the one who surrenders himself) may say like the prophet of islam (surrendering), ? I only follow whatever is being revealed to me by my Sustainer: this (revelation) is a means of insight from your Sustainer, and a guidance and grace unto people who believe. Hence, when the Qur?an is read, hearken unto it, and listen in silence, so that you might be graced with (God?s) mercy ? (7:203-204). ?Silence? has been traditionally understood to refer to the fact that none other than the Creator knows the reality of creation, hence when God speaks in the Qur?an, the wisest stand is to give up prejudices and preconceptions as much as possible and listen so that ?true understanding? ? which is also mercy ? may be bestowed upon one. The Sustainer?s favor and mercy dwells in the purification of the ego that yields proper listening and relying on the dynamic of gift of everything including understanding of the true meaning of the divine speech. The same law of ihsan (munificence and gift) is at work in the domain of divine creativity i.e. both in nature and in revelation. Divine mercy and all other attributes of perfection manifest themselves in the form of a beautiful fruit or a drop of water and also in meaningful words. All are divine speech, all are signs and symbols whose meanings are disclosed to us when we listen rather than merely project our ?understanding? onto them. It seems therefore that listening is an important rule of Qur?anic reasoning (QR). In order to practice QR one needs to trust the Qur?anic text, listen to it, and allow it to disclose its reasoning to him. Otherwise if he simply ?plays? with the text he may end up reading himself rather than the Qur?an. QR is certainly not merely cogitation but a living interaction with the scripture for it has a fundamental ontological element that makes it more than just experiential or historical in the sense that it can at least be generalized if not universalized.
ENDNOTES
[1] The term tawhid is a verbal noun, the gerund form of the root w ?h-d (to unite). It carries the connotation of a continuous, dynamic process rather than to a static state of being. Thus, although it is usually translated as ?unity,? it is better rendered as ?unification.? (NB: Most Arabic words stem from roots that consist of three or less often four consonants. Thus the meaning of any one word is related at its root to many other words.)
[2] The term muslim is the active participle of the verb aslama (to surrender). Aslama is the fourth derived form of the root s-l-m (to be safe, secure ). Note that theverbal noun i.e. gerund of the first form salima is salaam (peace, peacefulness).
[3] In Arabic the words ?observe? or shaahada and ?testimony, testifying, witnessing? or shahaada are semantically related. Shaahada (to observe) is the third derived form of the root sh-h-d , while shahaada is the verbal noun (gerund) of the first form i.e. shahida (to witness).
[4] The Arabic term qur?an is a verbal noun, the gerund form of the root q-r-?. It thus carries the meaning of a continuous reading, a message that is repeatedly recounted. It may be translated as ?recitation? or even ?teaching.?
[5] In lisan al-?Arab (the Tongues of the Arabs),the lexicographer Ibn Manzur (d.1311), defines aya as ?alama (sign), a term which is etymologically related to the verb ?allama (to teach). This corresponds to the teaching of the Qur?an that the purpose of these divine signs, whether Qur?anic signs or cosmic signs, is to teach the nature of the divine reality.
[6] The verb ?aqala (to use one?s reason/intellect) appears 47 times in the Qur?an, e.g.
And He has made the night and the day and the sun and the moon subservient (to His laws, so that they be of use) to you; and all the stars are subservient to His command; in this behold, there are signs (ayat) indeed for people who use their reason! (16:12)
And in the succession of night and day, and in the means of subsistence which God sends down from the skies, giving life thereby to the earth after it had been lifeless, and in the change of the wind; (in allthis) there are signs (ayat) for people who use their reason (45:5).
The verbs fakkara and tafakkara (2 nd and 5 th forms of the root f-k-r ) both meaning to ponder, reflect, and think, appear 18 times in the Qur?an; e.g.
Verily, in the creating (creation) of the heavens and the earth, and in the succession of night and day, there are indeed signs (ayat) for all who are endowed with insight (and) who remember God when they stand and when they sit and when they lie down, and (thus) reflect on the creation of the heavens and the earth : ?O our Sustainer! You have not created this without meaning and purpose. Limitless are You in Your glory!” (3:190-191)
And it is He who has spread the earth wide and placed on it firm mountains and running waters, and created tereon two sexes of every (kind of ) plant; ; (and it is who) causes the night to cover the day. Verily, in all this are signs (ayat) indeed for people who think ! (13:4)
[7] Bediuzzaman Said Nursi,?The letters,? in Risale-i-Nur Collection (Istanbul: Sozler Publications, 1994), 339-340; Risale-i Nur Kuliyati , 481.
[8] Bediuzzaman Said Nursi, ?The Words? in R isale-i- Nur Collection (Istanbul: Sozler Publications, 2002), 376- 377.
[9] Nursi, The Words , 454.
[10] Nursi, Th e Words , 577.
[11] Nursi, The Words , 444.
[12] Bediuzzaman Said Nursi, The Supreme Sign (Berkley; Risale-i-Nur Institute of America, 1979) Trans. H. Algar, 49-50.
[13] The Qur?an encourages its addresses to ?listen to God?s ayat (verses/signs) when they are recited,? and to not ?become arrogant, as though (they) had not heard them.? (45:8)
[14] Nursi, The Words , 443-444; Risale-i-Nur Kuliyati , (Istanbul: Nesil basim yayin, 1996), 2019.
[15] Note again the close relationship between speech and deed: ?We say ?Be? and it is?! Deeds are a manifestation of speech.
[16] ?We? here refers to those interpreters of the text who do not wish to impose their understanding on the text but rather to allow it ?to speak for itself? as Toshihiko Isutzu says. (T.Isutzu, Concepts in the Qur?an , (Montreal: McGill Unversity Press, 1966), 3.
In the modern academic study of religion, there are two dominant positions: The so-called hermeneutics of charity, which in the social sciences is identified with Max Weber, and the hermeneutics of suspicion which is identified with the tradition of Emile Durkheim. Here ?we? refers to none of them because in either of these two approaches a choice needs to be made whether to listen to the self-description of the object of study (here the Qur?anic text) or to ignore it in favor of models provided by academic theory. The hermeneutics of charity is not, as it is often assumed, inherently aligned with emic discourse. Often it appropriates the other as material for modern Western academic theories. The attempt to understand often turns into colonial eisegesis. [See K. Patton, A Magic Still Dwells : Comparative Religion in the postmodern Age (Berkeley: Univ. California Press, 2000), 2.] Also the bracketing of the subjective required in the hermeneutics of suspicion does not necessarily challenge emic discourse.
[17] The Qur’an says, ” Or do they say: He himself has composed this (message)”? Nay, but they are not willing to believe! But then,(if they deem it the work of a mere mortal,) let them produce another discourse like if- if what they say is true! (52:33-34).
[18] See footnote 34.
[19] And who could be more wicked than he who attributes his own lying inventions to God or gives the lie to His signs? Verily such evildoers will never attain to a happy state (6:21).
[20] And yet they choose to worship (imaginary) deities instead of Him! Say: ?Produce an evidence for what you are claiming: this is a reminder (unceasingly voiced) by those who are with me, just as it was a reminder (voiced) by those who came before me.? But nay, most of them don?t know the truth, and so they stubbornly turn away (from it) (21:24).
[21] Hundreds of verses of the Qur?an point to this fact; they start with ?o people? or end with ?these are examples for people who think.? For instance,
O people! Worship your Sustainer, who has created you and those who lived before you, so that you might remain conscious of Him, who has made you the earth a resting place for you and the sky a canopy, and haas sent down water from the sky and thereby brought forth for you sustuneance: do not, then, claim that there is any power that could rival God, when you know (2:21-22).
And among His wonders is this: he displays before you the lightning, giving rise to (both) fear and hope, and sends down water form the skies, giving life thereby to the earth after it had been lifeless: in this, behold, there are signs indeed for people who use their reason ! (30:24).
Also in the hadith, the prophet Muhammad is reported to have said that ?Every prophet was sent to his own people; but I am sent to all mankind? ( bu?ithtu li?l-nasi kaffa ). See Bukhari, Tayammum , 1.
[22] Nursi, The Words , 402.
[23] Verse 30:30 says, And so, surrender your whole being steadfastly to the ever-true faith, turning away from all that is false, in accordance with the disposition (fitra) which God has instilled into people: for not to allow any change to corrupt what god has thus created ?this is the (purpose of the) ever-true faith; but most people know it not.
?The term fitra rendered here as ?disposition?, connotes in this context man?s inborn, intuitive ability to discern between right and wrong, true and false, and thus, to sense God?s existence and oneness? (it) consists in man?s instinctive cognition of God and self-surrender (islam ) to Him? (M. Asad, The Message of the Qur?an (Gibraltar:Dar al-Andalus, 1980), 621).
[24] “We should point here that the words ‘prophet’ and ‘Prophecy’ may not convey precisely the same ideas in the three monotheistic religions. ?According to the Koran, each prophet, including Christ, is a messenger sent by god to a particular people. This view ?presumes that the prophet has reached the spiritual heights of human nature and that he is, like Adam, “God’s representative on earth.? The Koran places the prophets outside history, within the framework of the Unitarian message of Islam; it speaks in both general and universal terms, as it were. Its prophets run the gamut from Adam to Mohammad and include not only the prophets and patriarchs of the Old Testament, but also an indefinite number of messengers sent by God to ancient Arabic and non-Arabic nations. The Bible stories linked to various prophets reappear in part in the Koran , but reduced to their essential features and, as it were, crystallized into symbolic accounts” (R. W. J.Austin in the introduction to his translation of Ibn’Arabi’s The Bezels of Wisdom (NJ: Paulist Press, 1980), xii).
[25] Literally, “God chose Abraham to be His beloved friend ( khalil ).”
[26] W.C. Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn al-‘Arabi’s Metaphysics of Imagination ( Albany: SUNY Press, 1989), 159.
The Qur?an points to this fact, How could it be that He who has created all should not know all when He alone is unfathomable in His wisdom, all-aware! 67:14. The Qur?an also says, Hence, place your trust in the Living One who dies not, and extol His limitless glory and praise: for none is aware of His creatures?s sinsas He- He who has created the heavens and the earth and all that is between them in six aeons, and is established on the throne of His almightiness: the Most Gracious! Ask, then, about Him, the One who is truly aware (25:59). That is, ask God Himself since He alone is aware of the mysteries of the universe. This is usually understood that ?it is only by observing His creation and listening to His revealed messages that man can obtain a glimpse, however distant, of God?s Own reality.? Asad, The Message of The Qur?an , 557.
[27] S.Hakim, “Knowledge of God in Ibn ‘Arabi” Ed. S. Hirtenstein and M. Tierman, Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi: A Commemorative Volume (USA: Elements, Inc, 1993), 270.
[28] Nursi, The Words , 299-300.
Nursi explains that only revelation can teach true unity of God ( tawhid), “which is to see the stamp of His power, the seal of His Lordship ( rububiya ); it is to open a window directly onto His light from everything and to confirm and believe with the certainty of seeing it that every thing emerges from the hand of His power and in no way has He any partner or assistant in His Godhead or in His Lordship or in His sovereignty, and thus to attain a sort of perpetual awareness of the divine presence.” Nursi, The Words , 300.
[29] ?The heart loves whatever the source of loveliness is? B. S. Nursi, Risale-i-Nur Kulliyati , 611.
[30] Nursi, The Words , 342-343.
[31] The Qur?an says , He is God, the Creator, The Maker who shapes all forms and appearances! His alone are the attributes of perfection; all that is in the heavens and on earth extols His limitless glory: for He alone is almighty, truly wise! (59:24) There are many other verses that teach that all beings glorify their Maker with praise. See for instance, 17:44; 58:1; 59:1 etc.
[32] The commentators understood that from one perspective, this verse means that ?only the pure of heart can truly understand and derive benefit from the Qur?anic revelation.? Note also that the word ?Qur?an? refers to God?s address to humanity and cannot be confined between the folds of a scroll or the covers of a codex. As Daniel Madigan explains in his work, The Qur?an?s Self-Image: Writing and Authority in Islam?s Scriptures (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), from the Qur?an?s refutation of the proof value of written texts, as well as from the absence of a significant role for written material in the early history of the Qur?an and in Islamic ritual, it can be inferred that scrolls and codices were not perceived as evidently important, and certainly not as constitutive of the authority of scripture. Madigan construes that the notion of kitab (scripture or writ) as evidenced in the Qur?anic discourse exhibits an extraordinary elusiveness, which makes it impossible to understand scripture as a fixed, closed corpus. For once a book is produced, it exist independently of its author. The Muslim community however, has always had a lively sense that the Qur?an?s author remains engaged with his audience. The appeal of tradition to kalam Allah (speech of God) as the key to understanding revelation is probably a means to avoid the term scripture , which is often associated with the mushaf (codex). It is significant to note that although scripture occupies a central position in the faith and practice of Muslims, their approach to scripture is almost totally oral. Furthermore, the evidence indicates that they coalesced around the Qur?an while it was still oral, still in process as the pledge of God?s relationship of guidance to them rather than as a clearly defined and already closed text.
According to Madigan, the Qur?an refuses resolutely to behave as an already closed and codified text since its role is to address people and situations as they arise. It insists on remaining open and responsive and makes it clear in its form and statements that it prefers to function as the voice of God?s continuing address to humanity. Madigan presents a compelling semantic analysis of the Qur?an?s self-awareness. He argues that the Qur?an views itself not as a completed book, but as an ongoing process of divine writing and re-writing; as God?s active engagement with humanity. In fact the Qur?an does not identify itself with the kitab (scripture or book) , to which it refers in the third person when proclaiming, defending, and defining it. Yet it does not speak of the kitab as something already fixed and separate but primarily as a symbol, for the Qur?an (discourse) is the very mode by which the kitab is made manifest and engages with humanity.
The Qur?an presents itself and is conscious of itself in a distinctive manner: it is not so much interested in writing as a mere description of the form of the divine word as in the source of its composition, authority and veracity. The Qur?an?s claim to being a kitab is a symbol for God?s knowledge and authority rather than a simple statement about its eventual mode of storage. As kitab , it intended to be the locus of continued guidance. The Qur?an?s kitab cannot be mistaken for a book since it has no fixed boundaries: it is not made completely clear whether this text, i.e. the Qur?an, is the whole kitab or part of it, one of several kutub (plural form of kitab ) or the only one. As a matter of fact, the implicit claim to totality and completeness contained in the word ?book? may lead to the identification of the limits of the God?s kitab with the boundaries of the text. Such understanding may become perilous for it opens the possibility of ?possessing? the kitab and claiming hegemony over understanding it rather than listening to it and relying on the givenness of understanding.
[33] The antithesis of tawhid is shirk or ascribing partners to God not only in His godhead but in all His attributes of perfection. Shirk is defined in another verse as ascribing the attributes of perfection to things and beings themselves, And God?s alone are the attributes of perfection; invoke Him, then, by these and stand aloof of those who distort the meaning of His attributes (by applying them to others); they shall be requited for all that they were wont to do! (7:180). Hence to ascribe power and creativity to causes, to Nature, etc is, by the Qur?anic criterion of tawhid, shirk and idolatry.
[34] Asad, The Message of the Qur?an , 261.
[35] Nursi says, ?Seek the meanings of the Qur?an in its luminous words, rather than those gimmicks and artifices you sneak in the back-pocket of your mind.? Nursi, Risale-i Nur Kulliyati , 1989.
[36] And When We told the angels, ?Prostrate yourselves before Adam!?- they prostrated themselves except Iblis . 2:34.
[37] M.Asad, The Message of the Qur?an , 231
[38] Nursi, The Words , 270.
[39] Nursi, The Words , 254.
[40] Nursi, The Words , 270
[41] R.W.J. Austin, Introduction to Ibn ?Arabi?s Bezels of Wisdom (NJ: Paulist Press, 1980), xii.
[42] Ibid.
[43] Nursi, The Words , 17.
[44] The Arabic word for ?miracle? is ?mu?jiza? . It does not refer to a ?marvelous event that is attributed to a supernatural cause. Mu?jiza is derived from the root ?a-j-z , which means ?to be incapable.? Something is a mu?jiza in the sense that all causes, all things are incapable (? ajiz ) of making it. Thus it is not used only for the miracles of the prophets. Since, the Qur?an holds that for one single thing to be, the whole universe must be there, i.e. it exist only within the universe and therefore to make one thing is equivalent to making everything. The creator of one thing can only be the creator of all the universe. Causes themselves are being made and they cannot create. As far as creatorship is concerned, they are all ? ajiz , , but as far as being made is concerned they are all mu?jiza or miracle.
[45] Nursi, The Words , 17.
[46] The Qur?an refers to all prophets as paradigms to be followed in reaching knowledge of God. Each one of them represents a different aspect of divine wisdom and as such their paths are relevant to man in different situations of his life. He can identify with their ways at various moments of his life. See also note 11.
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October 24, 2013 / / 0 Comments
Abdulaziz Sachedina
University of Virginia
Muslims regard the Qur’an as God’s Speech ( kalam allah ). God speaks to humanity through His prophets, providing them with universal as well as particular guidance to direct human life in order to achieve the divine goal on earth. Whereas the universal guidance in the form of innate reason aims to provide directives that can touch all humans qua human, the particular guidance in the form of scriptures provides prescriptive directions to organize both the spiritual as well as temporal affairs of that specific community under the leadership of God’s envoy, the prophet. Accordingly, from the time the Prophet Muhammad presented the Qur’an as the Book of God ( kitab allah ), it has remained the source of religious reflection ( tadhakkur ) and intellectual appropriation ( tadabbur ). In other words, the message of the Qur’an is intimately linked to the expressions of personal piety as much as intellectual search for the meanings of the Divine Speech. Both these aspects – religious reflection and intellectual appropriation – have led the Muslims to interact with the Qur’an as the main proof for God’s existence and concern for humanity. The search for the divine purposes for humankind in the Qur’an has functioned as the most dynamic source for scriptural reasoning in order to reflect on human actions and determine whether they are in conformity with God’s will.
Muslims have always approached the Qur’an as a living source of prescriptive guidance for the community’s well-being. Accordingly, Muslim scholars sought solutions to the concrete problems under given circumstances by applying the rules derived from the Qur’anic precedents. The Qur’anic cosmos was thoroughly human, profoundly anchored in human experience as humanity tried to make sense of the divine challenge imparted in the revelation to create the ethical order on earth. As long as the belief about establishing an ideal order on earth remained the major component of the living community’s faith and active response to the divine challenge, there remained the need to clarify the Qur’anic impetus in order to promulgate it at each stage of the community’s drive towards its ultimate destiny.
Hence, the history of Muslim community provides a creative and fertile ground for an ongoing interpretation of the divine purposes indicated in the Qur’an. However, due to innumerable factors impacting upon a commentator, the representation of the Qur’anic goals for humanity has not received adequate treatment faithful to the text of the scripture. Undeniably, scholarly pretext [1] plays a significant role in the explication of particular circumstance of the text and its denotation. It is within this interpretive realm that an insightful investigator can discern the authorial pretext of the earlier commentators that led to the distortion of the otherwise objectifiable context of Muslim existence. In addition, it is through the investigation of such distorted explications of the context of the Muslim community that a Muslim exegete today is able to recontextualize the Qur’an and afford a fresh understanding of the divinely ordained Muslim community.
The Challenge to Reflect
The most challenging aspect of the Qur’an is its invitation to humankind to reflect on the meanings of God’s essentially universal message given to different prophets at various times in history. The purpose of this divine message, according to the Qur’an, is none other than to complement the innate reason in human beings, in order to seek right guidance for establishing an ideal society on earth that would reflect God’s will for humanity. The divine message, in this sense, seeks appropriation and implementation by human beings through a divinely bestowed gift of reason – the “light” by means of which human ignorance can be turned into redemptive knowledge. [2] The key to human prosperity is the interaction between God’s revelation in scriptural mode and the processes of human reasoning that endeavor to unlock the divine mysteries in nature and revelation. In this sense, there has been an ongoing relationship between reason seeking to uncover universal guidance related to the innate nature – the fitra – created by God in humankind, and the particularity of the revelation given to specific community to correlate the common goals of reason and revelation in Islam.
Scriptural reasoning in the Muslim community has arisen in response to the need to implement the prescriptive commandments of the Qur’an and the necessity to reflect upon the difficulties facing the community in realizing the ideals set forth therein. The major criticism leveled by the traditionalist scholars [3] of the Qur’an against the modernist discourse on the Qur’an is the tendency of the modernists to ignore the cumulative wisdom of the exegetical tradition in their scriptural reasoning. The modernists claim to appropriate the Qur’an on its own terms, without any reference to the classical exegetical literature, because they want to resolve immediate problems faced by the community about which the inherited tradition has little to say. In other words, the modernists [4] find the inherited cumulative tradition stifling fresh reading of the substance of the revelation. The traditionalists retort by pointing out the historical specificity of the revelation given to Muhammad, the Prophet, which cannot be fully comprehended without first engaging in an investigation of the inherited exegeses of the Qur’an.
The traditionalist scholars of the Qur’an have a point here. The exegesis of the Qur’an is essentially founded on a historical method in which the sources that provide evidential documentation are examined thoroughly to ascertain their reliability. Each piece of evidence is further analyzed for its internal consistency before it is admitted as a valid argument in support of a particular thesis. It is unthinkable for the community to accept the modernist mode of reflection over the meanings of the revelation, whether that revelation is the directly revealed Qur’an or the paradigmatic tradition of the Prophet, the Sunna. Muslims regard both the Qur’an and the Sunna as God’s complete revelation to guide the community. As such the Sunna is an inseparable part of the revelation from God. Hence, any scriptural reasoning that ignores the totality of the revelation, that is, the Qur’an and the Sunna, cannot produce the necessary confidence in the community that treats the centrality of divine guidance through the entire body. As a normative source for Muslim life, scriptural reasoning must undertake a comprehensive understanding of the Qur’an in its linguistic-lexical as well as its historical modes.
In this paper, I will provide an overview of the exegetical tradition in Islam and demonstrate the mode of scriptural reasoning that has been set forth in classical as well as modern works of Qur’anic exegesis. Muslim scholars needed to explain the historical setting of the revelation so as to uncover the principles that were applied in the development of Muslim society and its ever-expanding legal and ethical scope. In this intellectual process of providing exegetical principles for reflective reasoning, these scholars stand within a long and creative history in the development of the Qur’anic exegesis in Islam. Their approach has been to search for historical precedents and for extracting doctrinal and juridical principles from precise references in the Qur’an that are relevant to contemporary situations.
Historical Method in Scriptural Reasoning
From the time the Qur’an appeared on the stage of history in the seventh century there have been numerous commentaries that have ventured to make sense of this classical document. Historical method of interpretation that requires that the text be interpreted in accordance with the rule of grammar and of the meaning of words has had a long and creative history in the development of the Qur’anic exegesis. It is remarkable that even when a majority of the commentaries were guided by dogmatic prejudices, Muslim commentators paid close attention to the historical setting of the Qur’anic language out of which the text appeared.
The fact that every text speaks in the language of its time required Muslim interpreters to engage in conveying the relationship of the message to the social exigencies and other human conditions through the knowledge of historical conditions of the language and those who spoke it. There was an implicit recognition of the actuality that understanding the Qur’an required understanding of the history in which Muhammad emerged as the Prophet of God and launched his mission to establish the ideal public order. The assessment of the historical forces connected with the Qur’an gave rise to the divergent interpretations of the “occasions of revelation” ( asbab al-nuzul ), which, in turn were related to the distinct views held by the individual exegete engaged in formulating specific lines of inquiry into the meaning of the text.
To be sure, the inherently subjective nature of any historical enterprise, stemming from an inevitable relation between an interpreter’s presuppositions and the substantive assessment of the written documents, was the major factor in the continued interest among Muslim scholars to unfold the preunderstanding of the earlier commentators of the revelatory text by a fresh understanding. Additionally, although the text of the Qur’an was fixed soon after the Prophet’s death, if not earlier as maintained by some recent studies on the history of the text, [5] without the continued presence of the only authoritative interpreter of the message, namely, the Prophet himself, any claim to a definitive understanding of the Qur’an on the part of the community was necessarily out of question. Furthermore, the constant need to expound the historical setting of the revelation in order to discover practical rules for deducing judicial decisions became part of the intellectual groundwork of Muslim legal scholarship.
Scriptural reasoning among Muslims today is dependent upon cultivating truth by weeding out seemingly endless errors of interpretation and unacceptable distortions of the context in the previous Qur’anic exegeses. This intellectual process leads to providing an explication of explication by creating a less troublesome and better suited vocabulary that will improve the prospects of rational assessment of the explicit sense of scriptural language. It is an ongoing engagement with the revealed text in reformulating better questions about the intended meanings and their contextual significance to uncover improved hermeneutical principles that will enhance the essential meaning of the Qur’anic text, irrespective of historical context or exegetical rationale provided by previous exegetes. In other words, rather than closing the gates of further rational inquiry into the lexical and grammatical usages of the Qur’an in the past works of exegesis, cumulative exegetical tradition must provide necessary templates for the reformulation and reappropriation of intertextual hermeneutics to make the terms of the scripture relevant in today’s living community. Hence, for instance, no rationally interpreted scriptural solution to the problems arising from the inferior status of religious minorities living under the Muslim nation-state in the classical juridical corpus can be resolved merely by following the mode of scriptural reasoning employed by the classical or medieval exegetes. In the final analysis, intellectual engagement with the Qur’an must lead a Muslim commentator to assert with confidence the validity of beliefs about the timeless nature of the Qur’an as the most important source of guidance in the modern times.
It is important to underscore the necessary confidence in the tradition of scriptural reasoning in order to recognize the evolving intellectual process in understanding the revelation that would enable the commentator to search for the real intention and contextual significance of the recontextualized exegesis of the past commentators. Such recognition in the evolving clarity of meanings also equips the commentator to engage in his own hermeneutics without discarding some variant readings and ensuing interpretations, which are critically and painstakingly surveyed for their historical value in as much as they reveal the true meaning of the text. Moreover, these conflicting and sometimes confusing interpretations put forward by representatives of particular theological or legal factions enable the commentator to propose a correct interpretation through elimination of the far-fetched and constrained meanings of the passage under scrutiny. Without pretending to have captured the essential meaning of the Qur’anic revelation, the commentator simply brings his interests and purposes to bear upon the reformulated exegetical intention and contextual significance of the Qur’an. It is this intellectual process that makes a commentary a fresh and creative attempt at discovering the meaning of the Qur’an.
Intra-textual Hermeneutics in Qur’anic Scriptural Reasoning
Muslim exegetes at all times have resorted to intra-textual hermeneutics in order to explain one part of the Qur’an through another. The method also demonstrates inexhaustible layers of meanings the verses possess. This methodological preoccupation goes to demonstrate the infinite potentiality of the Qur’an and its ongoing relations to broader levels of context as its existence in history lengthens. It, moreover, demonstrates the need to go beyond the course of traditional interpretation to confront aspects of human self-understanding through intellectual development in every instance of making sense of authentic existence.
This method of the interpretation of the Qur’an begins with the Prophet himself. Different parts of the Qur’an were revealed to the Prophet during the twenty-three years of his mission on earth. Explication of the divine intention of the revelation was among the functions that the Qur’an assigned to the Prophet. The Prophet functioned as the projection of the divine message embodied in the Qur’an. He was the living commentary of the Qur’an, intricately related to the revelatory text. Without the Prophet the Qur’an was incomprehensible, just as without the Qur’an the Prophet was no prophet at all.
Following the Prophet’s death a number of prominent disciples involved themselves in interpreting the prescriptive aspects of the Qur’an in order to provide rulings for specific situations in the community’s social and political life. The result of this endeavor formed the groundwork for legal methodology in Islamic juridical studies. The main aspects that characterized the explication of the Qur’an at this stage included:
- Analysis of literary and linguistic aspects of the revelation;
- Determining historical context of the revelation;
- Clarification of the meanings through intra-textual reference; and,
- Explanation of the passages by using the materials that were transmitted in the form of hadith -reports attributed to the Prophet as the commentator and teacher of the Qur’an.
Of all the four above-mentioned methods of explicating the revelation, it was the exegesis based on the hadith -reports that found more acceptance in the community. The hadith , as the community came to believe, captured the essential meaning of the text under discussion as the Prophet had taught. However, such confidence in the hadith -reports without first scrutinizing them for their reliability proved to be most damaging in discovering the reasoning behind the apparent sense of the revelation. Some of these commentaries also exhibited suspicious attitudes to any opinion that was based on the apparent sense of the passage because such an approach was regarded as founded upon rational presumptions about the language and its ordinary usage in the Arab society. Investigation about the ordinary language of the Arabs was fundamental to the discussions of grammatical points, semantics or customary application of linguistic conventions — the discipline that proved to be indispensable for establishing the authoritativeness of the apparent sense of the Qur’anic passages in the works that dealt with the legal principles and rules.
The hermeneutics founded upon ordinary usage of the language of revelation undertakes to accomplish an even more complicated task of establishing general rules of intra-textual hermeneutics. How to relate sometimes different parts of a single chapter of the Qur’an which appears to the non-specialist reader to be an atomistic compilation of disparate themes and discontinuous narratives? In other words, how to present coherence in the present structure of the text to demonstrate its miraculous quality of being a masterpiece in itself? These two lines of inquiry have led a number of modern commentators to engage in explication of the Qur’an by the Qur’an ( tafsir al-Qur’an bi al-Qur’an ), that is, intra-textual hermeneutics.
Accordingly, four major prerequisites have been recognized to accomplish intra-textual hermeneutics:
- The commentator should not pre-formulate his opinion about the passage under consideration. If he does have an opinion, he should not impose it on the text, seeking its confirmation externally.
- Lexicographical investigation must be thorough enough to acquire the most comprehensive sense of a term and its properties.
- Intra-textual investigation must be based on not merely comparison of verses on similar topic. It should undertake to distinguish and determine the general from the specific; the absolute from the conditional; the literal from the apparent; and the explicit from the implicit senses of the texts being compared.
- Careful attention should be given to the method that was employed by the Prophet to interpret the verse by another verse, just as ‘Ali b. Abi Talib, a prominent disciple of the Prophet and an eminent exponent of the Qur’an states: “One part of the Book of God explains another,…. and one part serves as a witness to the other.”‘ [6]
A Paradigm for Exegesis in the Twenty-First Century
The paradigm that I wish to propose is derived from the above-mentioned methodological prerequisites. As a rule, the exegesis of each chapter has to begin by an exposition ( bayan ) which identifies its central theme. Such an introduction facilitates the subsequent commentary which follows the order in which the verses of the chapter appear. However, some kind of thematic unity has to be maintained in the way the verses are grouped. As the general flow of exegetical discourse proceeds the commentator must provide further expository sections that treat each segment as a thematic unit. Throughout no opportunity to convey the thrust of the message as a unified discourse must be lost. Meticulous interrelating of the different parts of the chapter (the opening, the end, and the main body) and demonstrating its coherence through intra-textual hermeneutics provide the necessary unity of revelatory exposition.
The next stage of exegetical discourse is to be achieved by undertaking to support the exegesis by engaging in “discourse on the traditions,” “philosophical discourse,” or “social discourse” on the set of verses. In all this endeavor to explicate the divinely inspired text, a commentator pays attention not only to the grammatical points, semantics, and lexical meanings of words in their historical setting; he explores ideas and individual events connected by the succession of cause and effect as they relate to the salvation history of the Qur’an. Through the elaboration of life-orientational dimensions of the divine communication with humanity, the commentator as a believer becomes a participant in this encounter of the sacred with history.
The other methodological consideration that must guide this paradigm is its being source-oriented exegesis, drawing upon the rich resources to support particular hermeneutical positions without treating this past heritage as a closed discourse. Source-oriented exegesis demonstrates comprehensive treatment of the Islamic exegetical tradition, by juxtaposing varying opinions held by major Sunni and Shi’i commentators, [7] and revealing their congruency or lack of it. Ambiguous passages must be taken up syllogistically in order to explain their meanings through inter-textual references to more explicit verses. This method of using one part of the Qur’an to explain the other permits the commentator to avoid the pitfalls of reason-based exegesis with its far-fetched and incongruent explications. More importantly, this approach to the Qur’an in more than one way avoids the errors of the past exegetical tradition in that the commentator ensures that his conclusions are in conformity with his overall expository stance adopted at the beginning of each chapter.
Besides being encyclopedic in preserving the extensive discourse on the understanding of the divine speech, this method provides a thorough and highly sophisticated critique of other exegetical works. This critique is not limited to any particular aspect that touches upon the Qur’an. It includes topics connected with misunderstood grammatical and lexical points; frivolous juridical and doctrinal resolutions; distorted historical contextualization of certain verses; and, unwarranted use of modern scientific data in the sufficiently explicit verses dealing with supernatural phenomena.
Some examples from the Qur’an will demonstrate the application of the above paradigm.
Natural-Supernatural in Scriptural Reasoning
There are a number of verses in the Qur’an that speak about the religious truth based on an interaction between natural and supernatural realms of human existence and treat these statements of declaration as given in the faith. These passages also show the need to adopt intra-textual hermeneutics for making sense of the sacred text without imposing external, rationally-inferred criteria for their claim to supernatural verity.
For example, consider interpretation of Q. 2:127 which recounts the history of Ka’ba when it was completed by Abraham:
And when Abraham, and Ishmael with him, raised [the walls of the Ka’ba] on the foundations of the House, [and prayed:] ‘Our Lord, accept this service from us; You are the All-hearing, the All–knowing.’
On the interpretation of this verse one can take issue with the author of a modern, rationalist exegesis of the Qur’an, entitled al-Manar fi tafsir al-qur’an. In this commentary the exegete Muhammad ‘Abduh criticizes the past commentators for narrating unreliable hadith -reports about the prehistoric origins of the Ka’ba and considering the institution of the pilgrimage as going back to the first human on earth, namely, Adam, while maintaining the heavenly origin of the Black Stone.
The scope of ‘Abduh’s apologetic criticism goes beyond the ostensible sense of the passage under consideration: How can one bring in the question of the reliability of the reports about the prehistoric origins of the Ka’ba or the heavenly origin of the Black Stone when such considerations are not part of the immediate sense conveyed by the verse? Does the verse go beyond simply stating the fact that the Ka’ba was built by Abraham and Ishmael? The information that the transmitters of the hadith -reports compiled to support the supernatural origins of the Ka’ba have nothing to do with the declaration of the Qur’an that Abraham and Ishmael built the house of worship. What appears to be the real issue in ‘Abduh’s conclusion is the subjective approach and the preunderstanding of the author who, because of his rationalist stance in theology, disapproves supernatural elements that are invoked to explain the contextual aspects of the Ka’ba narrative. Moreover, charges of incongruity between the traditions and the Qur’anic information stem from the commentator’s knowledge of natural sciences. How can one corroborate religious truth through the prism of material or non-material sciences?
The scope and function of natural sciences is to explicate matter and its properties, just as the scope and function of social sciences revolves around social events. However, any attempt to go beyond matter and its relation to non-material supernatural events is beyond the scope of cognition founded upon sensory perception and empirical facts. That which the natural sciences can say about the Ka’ba can include natural and human component of the building and material property of the structure. That which social science can undertake to explicate is social events surrounding the emergence of Ka’ba in the Arab society, such as the history of Hagar, Ishmael, Tahama, the arrival of Jurhum in Mecca and so on. As for the knowledge about supernatural events connected with the Black Stone and its heavenly or any other origin, that knowledge is beyond the scope of both these areas of human inquiry.
It is not clear how these commentators who are interested in giving a materialistic twist to religious truths would deal with description of the Paradise with its gold and silver promised to the faithful as their reward. Whereas gold and silver are mentioned because of their precious value and dearth on earth, what does accumulation of wealth mean in Paradise when its relative importance is meaningless if seen without its social context?
At this crucial juncture one needs to raise the critical question in religious epistemology: is there any rational method of interpreting these religious truths except that there is the concealed world of faith behind them which both the natural and social sciences are incapable of scrutinizing?
In interpreting such verses a religious scholar needs to bear in mind the nature of religious truths and their meaning for the faithful, for whom these truths are based on more firm foundations than those recognized in natural and social sciences. The Qur’an, for instance, uses the similitude of the good “words” that go “upward” toward God (Q. 14:24) and “piety” from human beings that “reaches” the Divine (Q. 22:37 in a figurative sense. And, although “words” denote human agency and have a concrete existence, and “piety” is nothing but an action or a description thereof, can one undertake to interpret such figurative references in the Qur’an through the prism of empirical sciences?
In conclusion, the methodological predilection of explaining the Qur’an with the help of the Qur’an itself, that is, interpreting a verse with another verse, is the legacy of the Prophet’s own method of scriptural reasoning. Since the Qur’an did not exist in the form that we know today, the Prophet naturally used earlier passages to explain the later message revealed to him, relating them in a unified theme or subject under consideration.
Text and Context in Scriptural Reasoning
The second example for the proposed paradigm comes from the verse that deals with the fate of those who engage in usurious commercial transactions. The subject of this particular verse has been widely discussed in all periods of the Qur’anic exegesis. In fact, it still remains unresolved because many religious-minded Muslims regard the practice as forbidden by God. The verse provides an interesting case of the way scriptural reasoning operates beyond the context of all areas of human knowledge about psychology, economics, and eschatology. Here is the verse (Q. 2: 275):
Those who devour usury [and resort to sophistry in order to justify their wrongdoing] shall not rise again unless it be like madman whom Satan has rolled in the dust and the mud; only them, completely abased shall they rise. This is because they claim that usury is simply another form of trade.
The subject matter of Q. 2:275 has much wider implications than merely threatening those who are engaged in exploiting others with a severe punishment in the hereafter. The terms of this passage extend to psychology, economics and eschatology. It speaks about the condition of those who “devour usury” that “they shall not rise [on the Day of Judgment] but like a man possessed of a devil and demented.” The social-economic context of the threat serves to lay emphasis on the prevailing injustices in Mekkan society as much as to warn the people of the grave consequence the act carries both now and in the future. At the time that the Prophet emerged in Mekka, transactions with a fixed time limit and payment of interest ( riba ), as well as speculations of all kinds, formed an essential element in the highly developed regional system of trade in Arabia. A debtor who could not repay the capital (money or goods) with the accumulated interest at the time it became due was given an extension of time in which to pay, but at the same time the sum due was doubled. The practice was prevalent during the early part of the Prophet’s mission in Mekka before he migrated to Medina in 622 CE, where he denounced it. Like other social reforms the Prophet introduced into his growing community, the prohibition against interest was introduced in stages in the Qur’ an. It began with a caution: “O believers, devour not usury ( riba ) doubled and redoubled, and fear your God.” (Q. 3:110) Later, the prohibition was proclaimed in no uncertain terms, as the verse Q 2:275 shows. This latter verse speaks about the hereafter, which is established only through faith. However, the way hereafter translates into the situation of being “possessed of a devil” is as palpable as any phenomenon whose veracity depends on sensory perception.
One of the ground rules to which a commentator must adhere is to rid oneself of the preunderstanding that one has about a concept. That is accomplished by investigating the wording of the verse for its lexical and literary significations and comparing it with other similar occurrences in the text. By doing so one avoids imposing preformulated meanings on the text to seek their confirmation. Thus, in responding to the questions about the meaning of “usury” one can explain the concept in its lexical sense as “giving a thing and later on taking back a similar thing plus an increase,” and relate it to its concrete cultural usage by citing an example of a case in which a person devouring usury accumulates wealth at the expense of others. Such an exploitation of others intrudes upon the balance and equilibrium that a society aims to achieve under the divine guidance.
The next exegetical move is to analyze the problematic phrase about being “possessed by a devil” as a punishment for devouring usury. To that end one needs to undertake an extensive investigation of the exegetical traditions and opinions offered by other scholars. Furthermore, one needs to critically evaluate their opinions and demonstrate the underlying problem that some of them have overlooked the necessity to contextualize the punishment of being “possessed by a devil.” The verse implicates in the punishment only those who have voluntarily chosen not to differentiate between “trade and usury,” the former being permitted and the latter prohibited.
The parable of a person devouring usury to the one confounded by a devil refers to the confused state of the mind of that person whose choice to devour usury is the result of his muddled thinking. Hence, “possession by a devil” does not refer to the involuntary convulsions of epileptic attack or some state of lunacy, as maintained by some commentators.
The next exegetical shift is to clarify the purpose of the parable by critically evaluating the past commentaries that mention “rising” as being a reference to “rising from the grave” at the time of resurrection. Some commentators take the parable to serve as a reminder that those who are entangled in the love of wealth and ultimately become enslaved by it, in this life. These individuals have abandoned the legitimate ways of earning, and have instead concentrated on earning money through money only. This preoccupation with wealth has caused them to deviate from the path of moderation, leading them to lose equilibrium in their lives. It is in this aspect that the actions of a person devouring usury and the “disorganized movements” ( al-takhattub ) of the one possessed by a devil have a common factor, namely, that both have lost a sense of balance. Obviously, a person muddled in his thinking and disoriented in his movements could be said to be in a state of psychological abnormality. The verse is, in fact, describing the state of abnormality and ensuing conduct when it declares: “That is because they say trade is like usury.”
The above two examples demonstrate intra-textual hermeneutics in which the goal is to let the Qur’an resolve existing differences of opinion among the Muslim exegetes by making rational acceptance of what is denoted conceivable by the Qur’an itself. Indeed, intra-textual hermeneutics vindicates the coherence of the Qur’anic message, without ignoring the contribution of the extensive traditional exegetical sources, meticulously sifted and selectively utilized in providing the ultimate “balance of judgment” to which the Qur’an invites in understanding the Book of God.
Sectarianism in Scriptural Reasoning
How does one resolve sectarian exegesis, ridden with polemics and theological exclusivism? The Muslim community was not spared from this divisive approach to the scripture. The third example in this paradigm provides an opportunity for a corrective approach to conflict in intra-faith exegesis.
The Q. 33:33 is one of those verses in which Sunni and Shiite interpreters have focused their peculiarly sectarian interpretations:
People of the House ( ahl al-bays ), God only desires to put away from you abomination and to cleanse you.
The subject of the ahl al-bayt (People of the House, i.e., the family of the Prophet) and the attending belief in their being free from any “abomination” and “pollution,” in this verse has enormous theological ramifications for the Muslim concept of leadership.
Following the intra-textual method one can begin one’s explication by analyzing the explicit sense of the verse. The restricted sense of the divine assurance in the verse is understood by the context in which the adverbial clause with which the verse addresses the desire on the part of God to cleanse the “people of the house,” that is, the family of the Prophet, appears. In fact, the verse asserts that it is only the “people of the house” from whom God “desires to put away abomination.” Who is intended by the “people of the house?” Does the phrase include the wives of the Prophet who are the subject of severe admonition in the preceding two verses? From the point of grammatical rules, the object pronoun that is used for the “people of the house” is in second person, masculine, plural form ( ‘ankum ). Whereas for the verse to be specifically addressed to the wives of the Prophet, the rule requires a feminine, plural ( ‘ankunna ), form. Hence, the reference to the “people of the house” could not be for them specifically at the exclusion of others.
Some Sunni exegetes have maintained that the phrase refers to the “people of the Sacred House,” that is, the sacred mosque of Mekka, who are the god-fearing ones in accordance with the statement in the Qur’an that “His friends are none other than the god-fearing.” Others are of the opinion that it expressly refers to the “people of the Prophet’s household.” These customarily consist of his wives and close kinsmen; or that it simply includes the Prophet and his wives. ‘Ikrima and ‘Urwa, among the early transmitters of the Qur’an, have restricted the phrase to the Prophet’s wives only.
In any case, if the meaning of “putting away abomination” or “freeing from pollution” refers only to the religious piety by means of which a person is enabled to avoid acts of disobedience and carry out the acts of obedience, then God certainly does not do more than putting to advantage the guidance in the matter of the obligations for them, and only desires to remove abomination and pollution from them in the way He states: “God would not place a burden on you, but He would purify you and would perfect His grace upon you that you may give thanks.” (Q. 5:6) This latter sense does not agree in any way with the previously considered meanings of the phrase “people of the house” because of its obvious incongruity with the general sense accorded to the phrase to include all Muslims obliged to carry out the requirements of the religion.
On the other hand, if “putting away abomination” or “freeing from pollution” means profound, mature piety, and if this piety in the obligations pertains to the wives of the Prophet, as mentioned in the preceding verses, then such a sense cannot be deduced from the nature of the address, which is more general than that. Moreover, reference to the decrease in the reward or punishment, ensuing from the omission or commission of acts of obedience respectively, does not benefit God, rather it frees those who are being addressed from “abomination” and “pollution.” The message applies to the wives of the Prophet and others, after it has been specifically addressed to them, as evinced in the preceding verses. Moreover, the general sense of the address is not applicable to the wives and to other women, because others do not share with them the severity of the obligations and the decrease of the reward or punishment.
The last part of this exegesis that needs to be pointed out is that if the meaning of the phrase “putting away abomination” or “freeing from pollution” through Divine will is without any precondition, then such an inference is incongruent with the stipulation regarding their high standing in piety. How can such an endowment be made without aiming at rewarding ordinary or extraordinary performance of religiously imposed obligations? It is inconsistent with the divine will, whether expressed in the form of legislation or through creation of order of nature, to presume that it is the absolute divine will to remove admonition and pollution specifically from the family of the Prophet, whoever they happen to be.
The foregoing discussion leads the commentator to produce the ultimate evidence for that which has been reported as the historical “circumstances of the revelation” for this verse, namely, that the verse was revealed specifically regarding the Prophet, Fatima (his daughter), ‘Ali (her husband and the Prophet’s son-in-law), al-Hasan and al-I lusayn (their son and the Prophet’s grandsons), and no one else shared this honor with them.
Here one needs to examine the hadith -reports and see if there is any evidence to support the claim that ahl al-bayt in the verse are none other than the immediate family of the Prophet. Both Sunni and the Shi’ite sources mention these traditions. Those transmitted by the Sunnis relate these traditions on the authority of Umm Salima and ‘A’isha, among the wives of the Prophet; Abu Sa’id al-Khudari, Ibn ‘Abbas, Thawban and others among his companions; and, ‘Ali, al-Hasan bin ‘Ali among his immediate family members. The Shiite sources transmit these traditions from their Imams and other early personages like Umm Salima, Abu Dharr, Abu Layla, Abu al-Aswad al?Du’ali, Sa’d b. Abu Waqqas, and so on.
Most of these traditions, especially the ones reported on the authority of Umm Salima, in whose house the verse was actually revealed, state explicitly that the reference in the verse was distinctly to them, i.e. the ahl al-bayt , without including the Prophet’s wives among them.
The final exegetical tool available to the commentator requires paying attention to the Qur’anic convention ( ‘urf al-qur’an ). In the Qur’anic usage the phrase ahl al-bayt has become a proper noun for the immediate family of the Prophet (his daughter, et. al.) and does not apply to anyone beside them. This is so even when there are his close kinsmen, who, in accordance with the customary Arab usage of the phrase, it would be correct to include among the “people of the house.”
The next hermeneutical maneuver is to see whether “taking away abomination” is actually endowing the ahl al-bays with al-‘isma , that is “protection from committing any sinful act or error of judgment.” ‘Isma is the direct and necessary corollary of removing “abomination” ( rijs ) which includes erroneous belief and sinful deviation. Accordingly, endowment of ‘isma empowers the person to discern the truth in belief and action. This endowment is the direct result of the divine will in the order of nature, and not in the order of legislation, which aims at providing guidance for the fulfillment of religious obligations for a believer, without any concern for the position a person holds. In other words, God continues to fulfill His will by endowing them with ‘isma by removing from the ahl al-bayt erroneous beliefs and the impact of evil acts and by offering them that which will enable them to remain in this state of purity of faith and action. This is al-‘isma .
This third example of intra-faith exegesis demonstrates the theological method, rooted in the lexical and grammatical analysis of the text, assisted by the traditions. It also illustrates a sectarian dimension and its critical status in seeking doctrinal rationalization of Sunni-Shi’ite stance from the Qur’an. Adoption of such a hermeneutical posture by a Sunni or a Shi’ite is understandable in the light of the commentator’s own theological and creedal faithfulness to the Sunni or Shiite tradition. What is, however, important is the absence of polemical tone in this approach to the Sunni or Shi’ite sources. Critical evaluation of the documents presented by early sources with a clear bias towards Sunni or Shi’ite position has to be treated in a scholarly manner to expose their authoritativeness or lack of it in relation to the evidentiary nature of the literal sense derived from the Qur’anic reference. The ultimate judge is the meticulously researched linguistic and lexical aspects of the intra-textual Qur’anic analysis in its contextual setting and not the hadith -reports conditioned by ideological considerations.
Concluding Remarks
The contextual exegesis of the Qur’an, founded on its major ethos as a “living” guide for the believers, was quite often overshadowed by the restrictive traditions ascribed to the Prophet, in which the ability of human reasoning to discover the philosophy of divine legislation was circumscribed by an insistence of authoritative traditions to reveal divine purposes for humanity. For the jurist-theologian deeply rooted in the study of legal theory in which reason played a significant cognitive role in distinguishing objective good and evil, it was obvious that contemporary juridical deliberations to illuminate the divine intention in legislation were bound to be deficient without a creative interpretation of the evidential function of the Qur’anic text in its most immediate sense.
Of all the traditional sources used to interpret the Qur’an, Muslims found that the exegesis based on the traditions ( hadith ) that recounted the explanations of specific passages of the Qur’an was most acceptable because it seemed to recapture the essential meanings of the text under discussion. However, what the Prophet taught was not always easy to determine because quite often there existed various contradictory interpretations of the same passage. The traditions represented various political and theological trends in the community. The Sunnis accepted only those reports related on the authority of certain narrators who were regarded by them reliable; by contrast, the Shiites admitted only those who represented their own viewpoint. No opinion was accepted as an authoritative documentation for the specific exegetical opinion on the Qur’an if it did not meet the ideological-sectarian criterion. Consequently, in the history of the Qur’anic exegesis, the interpretation based on the traditions was most prone to factional considerations and prejudices. Ironically, it is the inherently subjective nature of any historical enterprise that underscores the major factor in continual interest in unfolding the understanding of earlier commentators of the verses that deal with many disputed judicial decisions in the area of interhuman relationships. There is a constant need to explain the historical setting of the revelation so as to uncover the principles that were applied in the development of Muslim society and its ever-expanding legal and ethical scope. In this intellectual process of providing exegetical principles for searching for historical precedents and for extracting the doctrinal and juridical principles from precise references in the Qur’an that are relevant to contemporary situations, rational reflection on the relevance of the scripture for the living community has ushered in a period of revitalization of the Qur’anic exegesis in Islam.
The community that sets out to establish its own public order that reflects the divine will cannot take its scriptures lightly. The role of the scripture as the sole provider of the life-orientational directives is even more critical in the post-empire period of Muslim history. More importantly, if the legitimacy of a nation-state depends upon Islam, then it has to institutionalize the role of scripture in formulating its policies covering all the aspects of human existence. It is here that the revelation and reason need to reinforce each other in providing substantial solutions to the pressing problems of day to day operation of the government. Muslim scholars have throughout their social and political history developed hermeneutical principles to direct their interaction with the revelation, that is, the Qur’an and the Sunna, in order to find ways of generating confidence that God is the ultimate guide of the community.
But in this journey to establish God’s kingdom on earth, Muslims have also stifled their rational-reflective abilities in fear of introducing innovation in matters derived directly from the revelation. That hesitation in confronting the challenges of rethinking has also resulted in treating the inherited cumulative tradition, propounded and expounded by past Muslim scholars, as as sacrosanct as the revelation itself, thereby depriving themselves of approaching the Qur’an afresh through their own contemporary experience of living in a changed time and place.
ENDNOTES
[1] The question of ‘authorial pretext’ or ‘author’s intentions’ and contextual significance and their relation to broader context in historical understanding of a text is taken up by Jeffrey Stout in his article “What Is the Meaning of a Text?” in New Literary History: A Journal of Theory and Interpretation, Volume XIV (1982?83), Number 1 , pp. 1-12.
[2] The Qur’an speaks about a light that shines into the heart: “God is the light of heavens and earth …. God guides to His Light whom he wills” (24:35). Once this light has shone into the heart, no darkness can ever overcome it.
[3] I use “traditionalist” to indicate the kind of education received by these scholars in the madrasa (seminary) in preparation for becoming jurist-theologians in the community. The curriculum in these institutions of Islamic learning is based on classical Arabic texts dealing with exegesis, traditions, and jurisprudence.
[4] These are the modernly-educated scholars with or without seminary curriculum. Their training in classical tradition is generally weak, leaving them open to sometimes serious mistakes in their interpretation of the scriptural sources like the Qur’an, its exegesis and the Sunna – the Tradition – attributed to the Prophet.
[5] Such is the opinion of Abu al-Qasim al-Khu’i in his al-Bayan fi tafsir al-Qur’an (Beirut, 1974), Volume 1. This opinion has been adopted and critically examined in the light of the earlier works by the Western scholars of the Qur’an by John Burton, The Collection of the Qur’an (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), Chapter 10.
[6] Nahj al-balagha , ed. Muhammad ‘Abduh (Beirut: Dar al-Ma ‘rifa, n.d.), Vol. 2, p. 17.
[7] There are a number of standard commentaries that are used by the Sunni scholars as important. These include, among others: Tabari, Tafsiral-Qur’an ; Zamakhshari, al-Kashshaf Baydawi , Anwar al-Tanzil ; Ibn Kathir, Tafsir ; Razi, Tafris al-Kabir ; ‘Abdu, al-Manar ; Sayyid Qutb, Fi zdal al-Qur’an . Among the Shi’ites, following are standard commentaries, in addition to the all the Sunni works on the Qur’an, they use: Tusi, al-Bayan ; Tabarsi, Majma’al-bayan ; Tabataba’I, al-Mizan . Besides Sunni-Shi’I, one can also classify these commentaries in accordance with the theological positions (e.g., pre-determinist, rationalist, traditionalist, and so on) adopted by the exegetes in their interpretation of the Qur’an.
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October 24, 2013 / / 0 Comments
Steven Kepnes
Colgate University
Devarim – Deuteronomy
Chapter 6: 1-11
1 Now this is the commandment– the laws and the rules– which The LORD your God commanded, to teach you, that you might do them in the land that you are about to cross over to, to possess–
2 So that you might fear The LORD your God, to keep all His statutes and His commandments, which I command you–you, your child, and your grandchild– all the days of your life; so that your days may be lengthened.
3 Hear therefore, O Israel, and beware to do it; that it may be well with you, and that you may increase mightily, as The LORD, the G-d of your fathers, hath promised you–a land flowing with milk and honey.
4 Hear, O Israel: The Lord Our God, The Lord Is One.
5 And you shall love The LORD your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.
6 And these words, which I command you this day, shall be upon your heart;
7 And you shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise up.
8 And you shall bind them for a sign upon your hand, and they shall be for frontlets between your eyes.
9 And you shall write them upon the doorposts of your house, and upon your gates…
10 And it shall be, when the Lord your God shall bring thee into the land which He swore unto thy fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give you–great and goodly cities, which you did not build,
11 and houses full of all good things, which you did not fill, and cisterns hewn out, which you did not hew, vineyards and olive-trees, which you did not plant, and you shall eat and be satisfied.
One of the challenges of learning and teaching scripture is to hear it anew and teach it so that it can be received anew. Both teacher and learner need to break open presuppositions about the meaning of the scriptures that have been built up by repetitive hearings in houses of prayer and by a variety of “scientific” approaches to this texts. Franz Rosenzweig and Martin Buber saw this as a major challenge in their attempt to translate the Hebrew Bible into German.? They came up with a peculiar German that was consciously laced with Hebraisms in the hope that readers could “place themselves anew before the renewed book.” [1] The Society of Scriptural Reasoning affords us another type of opportunity for new hearing, new learning and teaching, as we see and hear our scriptures through the eyes and ears of others for whom our own texts are truly new. The act of teaching and learning the Torah as Jews, along with Muslims and Christians, necessarily places the texts in a different light.? Learning the well-known text along-side and with others, the meaning of a verse of Torah suddenly is no longer so clear. New questions and problems arise, one alternatively becomes embarrassed and proud, and thus the text that formerly was so familiar, is again foreign and opaque. Like all real symbols, the meaning of scripture then becomes as Peter Ochs following C.S. Peirce has described it, “indeterminate” and ? “vague.” ?? And we as scriptural reasoners come together as a new ? “interpretant,” an interpretive community that is called to renegotiate what the text might mean for the present context. [2] ? Since we are reading scripture, we want to retain some sense that the text has a normative priority for us.? Given this priority, which is at once moral and spiritual, we must address the question of how we can use the text in our lives. How can the text be a source of healing for us as Jews, Christians, and Muslims?? And how can it bring hope to our conflict-ridden world?
For this, our first SSR session in the regular program of the AAR, I have assigned myself the task of rereading one of the most well known texts for Jews. ? Deuteronomy 6 includes the Shema , ? “Hear O Israel” (6:4) prayer that has been called the “doxology of Judaism.” This prayer, which is a statement of God’s oneness, is said twice a day in communal worship.? It is recited before going to sleep and its words are to be the last that are uttered before death.? The words of the Shema are written on parchment and placed in the tefillin or phylacteries that are worn in morning prayer. The words are also placed in small boxes , mezzuzot , so that they can be attached to the doorpost of every Jewish home as a signifying marker–here lives a Jew. The verses that follow the Shema, the v’ahavtah , which demand love of God, are almost as well known as the Shema as they are said immediately following the Shema and are also placed in the tefillin and mezuzah .?? Given the ubiquity of the Shema and the v’ahavtah in Judaism, I have chosen them as a test case to see if and how the SSR might allow me and our other Jewish participants to find new meaning and new applications for the words today.? I also hope to see how the words resonate in the ears of Christian and Muslim participants in our SR session.?? Beyond this, the Shema and the v’ahavtah specifically address our theme of teaching and learning scripture and thus they pick up on themes that were introduced by Mike Higton in his discussion of the Gospel of Mark and Vincent Cornell in his discussion of the Qur’an.???
For my analysis I will follow our general procedure in SSR. This means that we start with a presentation of the ” pshat ” or plain sense of the text. I will then attempt to open a space for the second level of interpretation in which we form a hermeneutical community and discuss, collectively, the meanings of the text for us. ? There are, of course, many ways to discuss the pshat.? We could employ philological analysis, historical criticism, form criticism, or traditional exegesis.?? What I try to do however, is to map out the implicit form of reasoning that I find in the text itself with an eye to its place in what George Lindbeck has called the “cultural-linguistic system” of Judaism. [3] This will involve me in a largely “intratextual analysis” of the text of the Shema and v’ahavtah , first in the context of Deuteronomy 6 in which it appears in the Torah and then in the context of Jewish liturgy where the text is regularly recited.? Throughout this analysis, I will pause and, through the use of capital letters, set off a second order of comments and questions for us as the SR community of interpreters.? Here I will attempt to raise questions and open spaces which I hope we, as a collective group, will explore for our practice of group study. ??
An Intratextual Analysis of the Shema and V’Ahavtah with Suggestions for Scriptural Reasoners
Deuteronomy 6 is about a series of “crossings over,” a series of transformations. ? Following our theme of learning and teaching the chapter maps a movement from ignorance to knowledge, from knowing to doing, from learning to teaching. Deuteronomy 6 is about a kind of knowing that is placed on and within the mind, body and soul, so that the teaching not only becomes a form of life but that life itself becomes a kind of sign or teaching or witness.? Deuteronomy 6 is about a special kind of knowing that is also a kind of joy. This joy extends life and spirit and therefore brings concrete bodily rewards. Deuteronomy 6 is about God. It includes a scriptural theology through which God appears as feared commander, as teacher, as lover, as beloved, as parent, but also as utterly transcendent and unique. So in this piece of scripture God too is dynamic and consistently transformed and this is the clue to our own transformation.
In this first line of Deuteronomy 6 we have the major themes of the chapter. ?
Now this is the commandment?the laws and the rules?which The LORD your God commanded, to teach you, that you might do them in the land that you are about to cross over to, to possess.
There is a bit of unclarity about the meaning of “the commandment,” ha-mitsvah. ? Given in the singular, it is perhaps a metonymic expression for all mitsvot, all the “laws and rules;” but it could also refer to the central commandment of the chapter, which comes in line 5?”You shall love the Lord your God…” It is interesting and important too, that the commandment comes first and then the teaching. This seems to say that whether Israel; has understood or not, Israel is first commanded.? Thus, Israel responds when it first receives the Torah in Exodus ” naaseh v nishmah ,” we will do [first] and [then] understand (Ex 24:3).
We have taken this as one of the procedural methods of Scriptural Reasoning. We start by doing Scriptural Reasoning and move toward understanding what we did as we recollect, reflect upon, and organize what already happened. The issue of sequence is addressed further in the verse, so let us now attend to it.
The sequence is: command, teach, do, cross over, possess.?? I am particularly interested in the relation of teaching and doing because this relation seems to me to be the central directive of scriptural pedagogy. ? Scripture sits at the nexus of teaching and action and its task is to bring to two together. Like wisdom sitting daily at the gates (Proverbs 8:35 ), scripture cries out to both the mind and body: you must come together around and through me.? But why does scripture cry out and command this? Why does it repeat the message to bring wisdom and action together incessantly? It must be because learning to do [ lilmod laasot ] what is good is not easy.
[As Paul says, “For I do not do the good that I want” – Romans 7:19.]
It is indeed, the hardest “crossing over” or transformation that Israel is called to do.?? But the verse assures that it is worth it because the reward is real and concrete. ? When learning and doing come together the reward is a crossing over to the promised land. And this reward is not a fleeting thing but a concrete reality that can be possessed!
But reading Deuteronomy 6:1 with Muslims and Christians today leads me to pause over the meaning of th ereward of “The Land” and the meaning of “possessing it.” This reference is clearly one of many biblical warrants that Jews look to establish their claim to the land of Israel. Yet it is interesting how the claim is couched in relation to the doing of mitzvot and to fear of God. Also beginning with verse 6:3 a dynamic arises where the land becomes idealized as “flowing with milk and honey.” This theme is pushed in 6:10-11 so that the land is not earned as a reward for doing mitzvot or as the result of the human work of building, but becomes a pure gift which Israel receives despite the fact that she did no work, no building, hewing, planting, etc.! Is this the grace that Paul will make so much of? Is there a parallel in the Qur’an?
But to return my pshat reading…let us look at verse 6: 2. Here, it seems that the sequence: command, teach, do, crossover, possess, is now interpreted toward a theological meaning. Thus the text seems to say you must learn to do the commandment… “So that you might fear the LORD your God.” ??? Verse 2 calls Israel back to the beginning of the process; what it is that God as teacher is teaching. And it is restated well in Proverbs. “Fear of the Lord is the beginning of Wisdom (1:7)”??
We might well pause now to consider what the meaning of “fear of God” is, especially since our modern interpreters so quickly want to dispense with the term by transforming it into awe or respect or reverence (see Jewish Publication Society Tanakh translation).
A plain sense reading of the consequences of “fear of the Lord” seems to be that it leads to a broadening and intensification of the sequence in verse one.? Thus, Israel must “Beware,” sh,mor, or, be careful to do it.? And the reward is children and grandchildren, a lengthening of days, (v 2) and a “mighty increase” both in descendents of the people Israel and the land now described as “flowing with milk and honey.”
Hear therefore, O Israel, and beware to do it; that it may be well with you, and that you may increase mightily, as The LORD, the God of your fathers, hath promised you–a land flowing with milk and honey.
There is much that could be said about the admittedly difficult term “fear of God” but picking up on the Proverbs image of wisdom who sits at the gate, I would suggest that the “Fear of the God” is a passage that must be traversed and a teaching that must be learned. For only from here can we begin the next even more difficult task and that is to approach the realization of the Lord’s oneness and to come to the gate of? “love of God.”
So now we are here at verse 4, perhaps the central verse of all of Torah. ? The verse referred to in Judaism by its first word: “Shema” or Hear!” We already had this word in verse three, so the repetition of the term tolls out like a bell. As if to startle and shake Israel up, the scripture calls out “HEAR!” “Hear O Israel” For the problem is that Israel hears but does not really listen.
Hear O Israel, The Lord Our God, The Lord Is One.
This is the fundamental statement of Torah. It declares first that the Lord is “our” God, thereby bringing God closer to the people Israel and then declaring God’s oneness. The Rabbi’s understand the oneness of God to mean not only one in the numerical sense, but more importantly, in the sense that the Lord is unique, set apart, alone, unlike anything else. And this thereby establishes again God’s distance from humans.? But from this distance the one God commands what seemingly cannot be commanded, love. Fear, respect, reverence can be commanded, but love? And the type of love that God demands is not simple but unconditional, total. ??
And you shall love The LORD your God with all your heart, and with all your?soul, and with all your might.
Here, the unique one makes himself vulnerable. v’ahavtah: Love me! Here, the utterly transcendent one asks us for what is most intimate and personal. ? The infinite distance collapses to be replaced by an infinite demand for what is most close. The unique one makes his aloneness a detriment; emptiness, a loneliness that requires and demands that the finite and mortal ones, fill it with the only claim humans have to infiniteness, their ability to love.? But God’s infinite demand for our love leaves us with a great question and a greater challenge. How? How do we love you?? Here scripture moves in to provide an answer.
And these words, which I command you this day, shall be upon your heart; And you shall teach them diligently unto your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise up.
Place the words of the Shema and v’ahavtah in that spot between your mind and heart (for the Hebrew word ” lev ” is equally mind and heart) and think with your mind and heart about the words. Let them be there constantly, tolling within you like the beating of your heart. Become a teacher of these words.
Here, we have a crossing over from God as teacher in verse 1 to humans as teachers. And scripture seems to be saying what we, as teachers, know– that we only really come to know a thing when we teach it! Before teaching it, knowing is abstract, as we teach it, we come to know it more deeply.
But whom are humans told to teach the words of the Lord’s oneness and love of God to? “Teach these words to your children.” Knowledge of the love of God is a certain kind of knowledge, a knowledge that needs to be taught with and through love.
Mike Higton suggests that the giving of this knowledge requires the relationship of discipleship. This seems to be a logical extension of the parent-child relationship. But Scripture seems to both include disciples and students and yet go well beyond them to everyone we meet “on our way.”
… And you shall talk of them [the words “The Lord is One…Love God”] when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise up.
Let us pause here to consider this commandment. Let us reflect on how difficult it is. Here, Torah asks humans to speak of the Lord’s oneness and love of God at virtually all times. Here, Torah multiplies the notion of Mitzvah as fulfilling a positive commandment [eating Matzah] or refraining from doing a negative commandment [not eating leaven bread[ to a vague and infinite requirement to repeat [shinantem] words of the Lord’s oneness and love of God continually. Like many of the parables that Mike points us to and the very meaning of the presence of Jesus on earth, the meaning of the command to “talk of the words” is hard to assign. I could quote Mike directly here. “It does not consist in any kind of learning as accumulation. It does not consist in any kind of learning as acquisition of a skill…” Is fulfilling this commandment gained by teachign of the words of Scripture in general? Isn’t all Scripture finally boiled down to “The Lord is One, Love God?”
Without trying to compromise the infinite demand of the commandment, it will behoove us to look at what the Rabbis do with the commandment. Like any social group when faced with a vague rule, the Rabbis interpret and shape the rule so that it is useful and productive for their society. Thus, the commandment to speak of and teach the words of the Shema and the v’ahavtah are interpreted liturgically. And Israel then recites/ sings these words twice a day, at night (when you lie down) and in the morning (when you rise up). And the commandment “you shall bind them for a sign upon your hand, and they shall be for frontlets between your eyes” also is interpreted liturgically or ritually.? For the words of the Shema and the v’ahavtah are written on parchment and placed in the Tefillin or Phylacteries and worn on the arm, hand, and head of the worshippers as they say the words in morning prayers. Finally, placing the words in small containers, mezzuzot , and affixing them to doors of buildings and city gates fulfill the command “you shall write them upon the door-posts of your house, and upon your gates”. In this way communal space in which the words “The Lord is One…Love God” are continually uttered are marked out and doors and gates become themselves beacons and signs of the Lord’s oneness and the love of God.
The liturgical rendering of the command to say and teach the Shema and v’ahavtah at once tames and renders humanly useful the infinite commandment.? In the confines of the community and the set apart sacred space of worship, the statement of the Lord’s oneness and the love of God can take flight in the communal chant. ? The liturgical moment allows for concentration and reflection on the words. The architecture, the garments of prayer, the ambiance of serenity and seriousness, help to keep away distractions and allow for focus. The liturgical recitation of the words brings them into the mind and heart of the worshipper. The beauty of the melodies and eros of the communal singing brings the Shekhinah , the presence of God, close and opens up a path for love of God. Wearing the Tefillin places the words on the body so that the body becomes itself a marker, a sign of the Shema and a display of the v’ahavtah : The Lord is One…You shall love God….
Having uttered the words in liturgy, have been marked by the words on her body, the worshipper now walks out through the door that is marked by the words “The Lord is One, Love God” into the space whose gates are also marked by the words. ? Walking about in this space according to the way to walk given by the halakhah becomes a matter of doing the commandment to love. The words of scripture are thus both inside and outside, the person and the world are transformed through signs of God that are everywhere.
The Lord is One; Love God…The Lord is One, Love God. The Lord is One, Love God… “And you shall eat and be satisfied.” (6:11).
What is the meaning of these words to us as Scriptural Reasoners? Are these words appropriate only to the liturgical context? Are the words of the Lord’s Oneness and Love of God appropriate to the world outside of our own religious communities? Knowing the destructive history of missionizing and holy wars, can we speak these words in the public sphere without destroying the openness and freedoms that modernity has sought to win? Isn’t it modernity’s gift of the open public square that allows for SR’s open dialogue to occur in the first place?
Can we see our own SR interpretive process as a kind of liturgical practice that transforms us and has transformative implications for our own religious and academic communities? Is there a way to bring the words of Scriptural Reasoning outside of our own tents of meeting into the larger world? And what abotu the AAR, or professional organization for the academic study of religion, what place do words of scriptural reasoning have here?
ENDNOTES
[1] Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, Scripture and Translation , Lawrence Rosenwald and Everett Fox Trans and Eds. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994) 7.
[2] Peter Ochs, Peirce , Pragmatism and the Logic of Scripture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
[3] George Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1984).
October 24, 2013 / / 0 Comments
Kathy Ehrensperger
University of Wales Lampeter
1 Introduction: Paul and Scripture
That there is an inherent relation between Paul’s writings and the Scriptures of Israel is a recent scholarly recognition following on from earlier insights. [2] Most of these recent studies concentrate on Paul’s ‘use’ of the Old Testament/the Scriptures and its relevance for explaining and defending his ‘doctrine’ of faith. The Scriptures for Paul are perceived merely as a ‘witness to the gospel’ or theological proof texts for his doctrine. [3] Significantly, along with such an emphasis on Paul’s ‘use’ of the Scriptures goes a denial of any significance of the Scriptures for Paul’s guidance of his communities in matters of practical life and ethical conduct. [4] Such an approach implies a certain duplicity, in fact a split mentality in Paul’s ‘use’ and appreciation of Scripture—there are the more spiritual parts which refer to the prophetic promises, whereas other parts deal merely with the material aspects of life, and ethical conduct. [5]
Whilst some of the more recent studies concentrate predominantly on the explicit citations of Scripture by Paul, such as Christopher Stanley in his Paul and the Language of Scripture [6] , others find Echoes of Scripture (R. B. Hays) [7] , or structures of specific parts of Scriptures as the underlying pattern of one particular letter or sections of it. [8] Despite the divergence of these studies, they seem to share to some extent a perception of the relation of Paul and the Scriptures which stresses the and in this phrase in a way that puts some distance between the two entities, Paul and the Scriptures, rather than combining them. Though emphasizing the importance of the Scriptures for Paul, the relationship is described as one between two separate entities— there is Paul and the gospel he is proclaiming on the one side and there are the Scriptures of Israel on the other. The Scriptures are seen as providing the language, providing support, providing proof texts for Paul’s ‘Christian’ arguments in his letters. Paul is seen as ‘using’ the Scriptures as a sort of quarry to serve his own purpose.
Though emphases such as those on the thorough analysis of the citation technique, and those on the echoes of Scriptures in the Pauline letters are invaluable, this is not what is meant by ‘Scriptural Reasoning’. ‘Scriptural Reasoning’ does not seek to investigate exactly how Paul cites the Scriptures nor whether or not echoes can be heard in his ways of thinking but rather presupposes such references and relations to the Scriptures. It also does not perceive Paul’s ‘use’ of Scripture as serving him to support or prove an argument which has its roots elsewhere. It can rather be seen as an approach which has similarities with Rosner’s approach who concentrates in his study not on the ‘use’ of Scripture in a technical sense but ‘in its wider sense to include not only explicit use of Scripture but also what might be called implicit or instinctive use of Scripture.’ [9]
Scriptural Reasoning also does not depict the Scriptures and Paul’s gospel which he is proclaiming as two separate entities that might punctialliarly be related to each other in Paul’s ‘use’ but, apart from this ‘use’, basically have nothing to do with each other.
Rather, as Campbell, Nanos, et al, have emphasized, the Scriptures are seen as the symbolic universe within which Paul lives, within which he is rooted in his thought and life before as well as after his call. [10] Thus he is perceived as living, thinking and acting from within this symbolic universe whilst working out the implications of life in Christ for his gentile communities. The authority of the Scriptures as that which shapes his perception of the world is thus presupposed in this perception of Paul’s way of reasoning.
Having indicated what ‘scriptural reasoning’ is not, before we go on to describe how we perceive ‘scriptural reasoning’ as that which informs the dynamics of Paul’s theologising, we want to give a brief description of ‘Scriptural Reasoning’ as a discourse which is emerging in the wake of postmodernity, more precisely in the wake of postcritical theology.
2 What is ‘Scriptural Reasoning’?
The term ‘Scriptural Reasoning’ has come to prominence in postcritical theologies as expressed in the series Radical Traditions: Theology in a Postcritical Key edited by Peter Ochs and Stanley Hauweras. [11] What is being proposed is a return to scriptural traditions, ‘with the hope of retrieving resources long ignored, depreciated, and in many cases ideologically suppressed by modern habits of thought.’ [12] It is in the first instance a movement that began as an offshoot of the study of Judaism but parallel to this movement of Jewish thinkers there has now developed a movement that invites Jewish, Christian and Islamic theologians back to the texts of their respective traditions, recovering and rearticulating modes of ‘scriptural reasoning’. The movement is driven by questions concerning the place of theology and, more specifically, of scriptural faith in contemporary life. Significantly, the participants of this discourse locate themselves at home both within their respective faith communities as well as in Western universities.
The move towards Scriptures does not imply a naive return to some ‘original’ pure text or original truth, but neither is it an uncritical application of so-called ‘rational’ forms of thinking and reasoning in the Western philosophical tradition. The movement finds significant affinities between Jewish forms of reading and reasoning and postmodern thought. It challenges the notion of there being just one single discourse of reasoning and rationality, that is, that of Western science and logic, as the valid model for the ‘right’ way of thinking. As Peter Ochs describes this ‘…they (scriptural reasoners) criticize the efforts to adopt certain academic disciplines as universal standards of rationality, as if rabbinic (or Christian, or Muslim, or Sanskrit) texts were to be deemed ‘rational’ only in so far as their claims were reducible to the terms of the latest academic science.’ Such efforts are perceived as expressions or tendencies of Western imperialism. Ochs continues ‘They presume, instead, that indigenous practices of text-reading represent indigenous practices of reasoning, and that one task of contemporary Jewish thought is to find terms, categories and logics through which such indigenous modes of rationality can be identified and discussed across the borders of different text traditions.’ [13] This does not exclude in any way the openness of such scriptural traditions to contemporary practices of reasoning. Scriptural reasoners do not see themselves as foundationalist, they tend to affirm and reform the practices of scriptural traditions as well as modern rationality. It is significant that participants in this discourse describe their activities as a movement. They thereby emphasize the relational and social dimension of what is described here. It is a thinking in relation with others rather than being performed by isolated scholars in their ivory towers. It is a thinking with and around texts in dialogue with other thinkers — what Rosenzweig has called ‘speech-thinking’ or ‘thinking with an ‘and’, and which for Buber was labelled dialogic thinking. It is a thinking of a community, a communal act, in relation to the Scriptures, to God and to each other. ‘Scriptural reasoning’ is a social enterprise. The autonomous modern self is decentred in this enterprise. It is integrated into a specific community and tradition through this dialogic process. As such, rather than being a mere intellectual theory, scriptural reasoning is a form of practising philosophy and theology which, as a communal enterprise, generates new ways of reading and new ways of reasoning. Or more precisely, new-old ways of reading and reasoning since it is a reading of sacred texts in and for ever-new contexts, responding to specific contemporary needs and challenges.
Moreover, the particularity in and of this discourse is stressed by several of its ‘activists’. As this form of reasoning is related to the particular Scriptures of a particular community at a particular moment in history it is obvious that claims of universal or eternal truths cannot be raised. Scriptural reasoning is a dialogic process between particular people in relation to particular traditions, it implies and allows independent entities to stand in relation with each other without combining or merging them into some third entity. [14] Dialogue thus does not imply identity or sameness. It presupposes and maintains relationships that persist despite differences, differences being rather honoured than negated.
To emphasize the particularity of the dialogical process called scriptural reasoning does not mean to retreat to an island, or into sectarianism or a ghetto. The return to one’s own traditions does not mean to isolate oneself from other traditions. This return is embedded in the context of cultural and religious pluralism. A positive relation to and respect for other worldviews and faiths is part of this dialogical process, not least the scriptures of Judaism.
Scriptural reasoning as described above is inspired and nurtured by classic rabbinic forms of conversation — as conversations around texts in relation to community life before God — and relates such conversations to contemporary academic conversations around texts and questions of philosophy, theology and methods. As conversations around texts, this form of interpretation opened up ways for innovation in preserving continuity with the tradition. In disagreeing with an interlocutor one could still be listening to, and learning from, one another, since all are related to the same text. Differences are accommodated, the many voices are not assimilated into one and the same; the rabbis were masters of polysemic reading. [15]
David Ford in his ‘Response to textual reasoning’ emphasizes that there are analogies in Christianity to the rabbinic tradition of conversation. Since these were marginalized in Christian traditions a re-awareness of Jewish textual reasoning encourages a comparable approach to Christian Scripture and tradition, a rediscovery of ‘Scriptural Reasoning’ in Christian ways of re-engaging with Jewish ways of handling Scripture and tradition as the tradition to which they are so closely related as to share common roots. This might counteract and support the repairing of the damage done by authoritarian, universalizing traditions of Christian interpretation across the centuries. [16]
As Ford further emphasizes, the passion for teaching and learning is an aspect of scriptural reasoning that might prove inspiring for a Christian approach since it alerts us to the necessarily open process of interpretation as dialogue. With Ford’s comments in mind I want to sketch out what ‘scriptural reasoning’, [17] as the dynamic which informed Paul’s theologising, might involve.
3 Paul’s Scriptural Reasoning
a) The Jewish Context of Paul’s Reasoning
Paul’s reasoning is not only rooted in the Scriptures but is developed in association with, and in the context of, contemporary Jewish thinking and exegesis. Paul moves within the biblical thought world and uses its idiom and language but he did not receive his Bible in a vacuum. Paul encountered the challenge of Scripture through a Jewish filter. His thinking was directly influenced by the Scriptures but it was also influenced by his familiarity with contemporary Jewish reasoning. As B. Rosner notes ‘The signficance of many portions of the Pauline paraenesis can only be appreciated by taking full account of Old Testament background as well as the conceptual development of Old Testament ideas in early Jewish paraenesis.’ [18] This is in fact to state that Paul shares common ground with fellow Jewish exegetes, despite other differences from them. Gone then is the image of Paul, the isolated exegete using the Old Testament for his own gospel purposes in a manner which, whilst emphasizing his rootedness in Scriptures, simultaneously suggests that his gospel hermeneutic radically distances him from all contemporary Judaisms. To acknowledge Paul’s relation to contemporary Jewish thinking is merely to put Paul in his social context, to recognize the sociality of his reading and reasoning. [19] ? (Unlike modern Christians Paul could not carry his entire Bible with him on his travels. It was in the synagogue that the full text of Scriptures would be available, read and discussed. [20] ) He shared and lived in the symbolic universe, the ‘cultural-linguistic system’ of first century Judaism. [21]
In making this emphasis I am directly opposing the argument that Paul based his teaching and ethics on the gospel as opposed to the Scriptures. Rosner has shown from his study of 1 Corinthians 5-7 that the Scriptures are for Paul more than a witness to the gospel and also guide for ethical conduct. [22]
b) The Authority of Scripture for Gentiles in Christ
How Paul relates his mainly Gentile communities to the Scriptures is illuminating. It is not only in Romans and Galatians that Paul grounds his arguments in Scripture, but in his other letters, especially the Corinthian correspondence, his dependence whether explicit or implicit, is easily demonstrable. Surprisingly then, even his Gentile congregations are expected to be rooted in Scripture. He expected them to be familiar with Scripture (e.g. ‘do you not know?’ Rom 6-7). More significantly Paul takes it for granted that the authority of Scripture extends to his gentile Christ communities and that it should be formative for their identity in Christ. As Stanley perceives it, it is beyond doubt that ‘Paul regarded the words of Scripture as having absolute authority for his predominantly Gentile congregations.’ [23] ? Paul expects gentiles who live in Christ to enter the symbolic universe of the Scriptures.
More to the point however, and even when he differed from his Jewish contemporaries, Paul’s reliance on the authority of Scripture is something he shares with, and that is wholly in line with, contemporary Jewish practice. [24] Sameness or uniformity are not ideals of early Jewish interpretation nor of later rabbinic interpretation. [25] That Paul and contemporary Jews disagreed over certain issues is not yet reason enough for a parting of the ways but part of their common tradition of Scriptural reasoning.
This implies that in relating the ethical conduct of his Gentile communities to the Scriptures Paul may have come into conflict with Jews who disagreed with this. Since these ‘opponents’ also defined themselves and their way of life within the horizon of the Scriptures Paul could not avoid dialogue and interaction with them and their perspective on the Scriptures. Thus Paul is not only in dialogue with Peter and Apollos but he cannot operate in isolation from contemporary Jewish exegesis. Essentially what this means is that ‘Scriptural Reasoning’ for Paul is necessarily a social and communal activity rather than being purely individual and personal. It relates him to other Christ believers, Jews and Gentiles, as well as non-Christ believing Jews as a community which despite its divergence nevertheless centres around the text of the Scriptures.
c) The three Dimensions of Paul’s Scriptural Reasoning
Most scholars would agree that a central emphasis in Paul is the Christ event, as interpreted in the earliest ‘Christian’ tradition, which should clearly be our starting point in seeking to formulate the apostle’s pattern of thinking. This does not imply regarding the Scriptures and the Christ-event as two separate entities more or less closely related, nor seeing the one as overcome or abrogated by the other. The early Christ tradition sought to understand this climactic event from the Scriptures in the light of their current understanding. Apart from the Scriptures the Christ-event would certainly not have been self-explanatory nor would it have served as a launching point for what was eventually to emerge as a radical new movement.?
For Paul and his contemporaries in the Christ movement, the Christ-event was not just perceived as a significant event in the past but viewed rather as a past event with ongoing effects as demonstrated in the proclamation of the gospel. The gospel as the Christ-event at work in the world was again understood and interpreted through the perceived interaction between Scripture and contemporary events, these being considered as mutually illuminating each other.
Thus the Christ-event, the Scriptures and the interaction between these two and the ongoing life of the Christ believing communities in their social and political context are the three main dimensions that determine Paul’s process of scriptural reasoning. It is in the dynamic interplay between these that Paul is able to work out the will of God for his gentile communities in the differing exigencies of daily life.
Such a dynamic maintains for Paul and his communities the ongoing significance of the Christ-event not as something perceived in its pastness but rather as a present power at work in the world. It is the Scriptures that provide the framework with which to explain and evaluate what is happening in the process of proclaiming the gospel in the world. The Christ communities view themselves as created and called by God through Christ in accordance with the Scriptures. These in turn guide the communities in the face of adverse political and social events to an adequate self-understanding, thus establishing both their confidence and identity as God’s people. Neither the Christ-event nor the Scriptures themselves are perceived as completed entities in the past but as living realities in the present. It is in this sense that these communities might be said to live in Scripture and that correspondingly Scripture lives within them. (Likewise the communities live in Christ and Christ also lives in them.)
d) The Scriptures as Formative of Identity
This in fact implies that both Paul as well his communities live in the particularity of the biblical symbolic universe. Of course it may be legitimately argued that Hellenistic Judaism was itself strongly influenced by Hellenistic culture and thinking. Doubtless Paul inherited much mediated to him from this source. However, this does not mean that Paul was simply ‘a Hellenistic confluence of ideas’ as Engberg-Pedersen recently suggested. [26] Hellenistic influence on Paul and his reasoning needs to be acknowledgeded but this does not mean either that it dominated his thought or that it meant for Paul a confused identity. [27] As Niebuhr has demonstrated, early hellenistic Jewish paraenesis was shaped largely by the Torah despite the influence of Greek thinking. [28] This implies taking seriously the fact that the symbolic universe of Paul was Jewish, that is, the God who had called him was the God of the prophets, not of the ‘ actus purus’ or the ‘ ousia ‘ of Greek philosophy. Paul was embedded in one particular tradition, but to be embedded does not mean to be enclosed.
This Jewish tradition was part of the Hellenistic world but it had its own distinct perception of the world, its own beliefs and its own way of thinking strengthened by strong oral as well as written traditions. In his deconstruction of Western logocentrism and its claim to universal truth, Derrida challenges the notion of there being only one way of thinking as has been held to be the case throughout centuries. This tradition of thinking has also dominated biblical interpretation. In fact, it still does since it is the discourse we have learnt to think in from childhood. We cannot escape it completely but must seek to become aware of another reading from a different angle. In Caputo’s reading of Derrida, what is necessary is a ‘dehellenizing of biblical faith’ ? given that ‘the prophets never heard of the science that investigates ‘ to on he on. ‘ [29]
What we are maintaining here is that whatever hellenistic influences operated in Paul’s education and upbringing in this milieu, it was the Torah and its tradition of interpretation that dominated his thought and provided him with a particular and distinct identity embedded in the biblical world though not totally enclosed against other influences. [30]
Part of Paul’s goal for his mainly gentile communities was to ground them in the heritage of Abraham not as Jews but as legitimate gentile heirs of the promises. This in fact means to ground them in the biblical symbolic universe as those called by God from among the nations. For gentiles in Christ the Scriptures therefore become a new ‘identity marker’, signifying their entry into a new symbolic universe. [31]
At this point I will draw together the various aspects of Paul’s scriptural reasoning before turning briefly to two specific examples. Paul does not cite Scripture merely as proof texts in support of arguments arrived at from elsewhere. Nor does he cite Scripture in a wooden manner merely repeating its original content in a new context. [32] To speak of his ‘use of the Old Testament in the New’ also is not entirely satisfactory. Paul does more than simply ‘use’ Scripture. As we have argued, he lives in the world of Scripture, in a biblical symbolic universe which emerges in his writings in a thinking that is more responsive and associative than originative and discursive.
e) Romans 9:24 ff
The first example we will consider is Rom 9:24ff. This demonstrates with a string of scriptural citations the mercy of God on those whom he has called not from the Jews only but also from the gentiles. Paul begins by citing Hosea 2:25: 
Because this citation seems designed to support an argument for the inclusion of gentiles as well as Jews, scholars have claimed that Paul now applies Scriptures that originally referred to Israel to believing gentiles. The ‘not my people’ are seen as the gentiles and Paul thus seems to adjust scriptural meanings to suit his own purposes. Dodd voices the sentiments of many commentators when he states ‘It is rather strange that Paul has not observed that this prophecy referred to Israel, rejected for its sins, but destined to be restored — strange because it would have fitted so admirably the doctrine of the restoration of Israel which he is to expound in ch.11.’ [33] However, this citation is not what it might seem to be. It can be shown that the primary concern in this chapter (Rom 9) is with the historic people of God and their apparent lack of faith in Christ (rather than the inclusion of gentiles which at this point is brought in more as an aside). The inclusion of Gentiles has already been established in Rom 3-4 (and of course in Paul’s earlier letter to the Galatians).
When we consider the context more carefully we note that this citation is followed by two others which clearly can refer only to Israel. It seems strange that Paul would include a rather arbitrary reference to gentiles in such a grouping. A better explanation of Paul’s pattern of citation is that all three citations retain their primary reference to Israel and that the first citation referring to the ‘not my people’, whilst retaining its reference to Israel , can also by analogy be extended to include gentiles who in a more distinct sense are ‘not my people’. Such an emphasis is much more in keeping with the original Hosea context where the mercy of God is a dominant theme. It would seem strange if in fact in a passage where the prophet refers to God’s merciful dealings with Israel but then in Paul’s version of the same passage Israel is simply left under judgment and the ‘not people’ — the gentiles — take her place. This is all the more surprising since Paul’s theme at this point in Rom 9 is demonstrated to be divine compassion. In Rom 9:15 Paul sets up a scriptural text to serve as it were as a major heading for the next section of his argument: 
This is followed by other scriptural citations but the pattern of scriptural reasoning Paul uses here is one in which major scriptural citations dominate later scriptural citations which are subsidiary to the main heading. Thus subsidiary citations do not nullify the major thesis previously stated but stand under and serve to clarify the primary purpose of emphasizing divine mercy.
The reading we are following here follows partly from a proposal by Karl Barth who asks “To whom did these words originally apply? To the Israel of the kings of Samaria , which had been rejected by God and which had yet been granted such a promise. And because these words have now been fulfilled in the calling of the gentiles to the church of Jesus Christ , they obviously also speak with renewed force in their original sense; they also speak of the rejected, disobedient Israel. Now that he has fulfilled it superabundantly among the rejected without, how could God’s promise not apply also to the rejected within, to whom he had once addressed it?” [34] Interestingly, Barth sees this text as referring to both Israel under judgement and also to gentile believers.
Most likely therefore Paul does not primarily use the Hosea citation to refer to gentiles. The primary reference is still to Israel. What Paul is claiming is that rejected Israel like the northern tribes in Hosea will be restored, and along with them another ‘non people’, the gentiles will also be blessed. In this reading Paul does apply the Hosea citation in a secondary sense typologically to gentiles also but only after it has served his primary purpose to argue for the restoration of Israel. [35]
In this passage we have seen Paul at work in his scriptural world. He moves within innumerable citations to illuminate and develop his argument step by step with major and minor scriptural premises; but he uses these creatively not in opposition to their original content and context but primarily to refer to Israel and only then by extension to gentiles. At this point in particular, because he dialogues so intensely with Scripture, a comparison could be drawn between Paul’s nuanced use of his Jewish scriptural heritage and the activity of jazz musicians. As Brown describes this, multiple rhythms are played simultaneously and in dialogue with each other — each member of the group has to listen to the other so as to respond and at the same time concentrate on his/her own improvisation. [36] ??In parallel to this we might maintain that Paul plays with the multiple rhythms of Scripture with some improvisation and ingenuity. [37]
f) Galatians 3:28
The question in debate concerning this piece of early Christ tradition in Galatians has two aspects which are discussed most prominently — is it an indication that the order of creation is overcome in Christ — and if so does Paul manipulate such a supposed ‘original’ meaning of this Christ tradition to suit his purpose? [38]
The perception of Gal 3: 28 as the description of a new order in Christ which overcomes and replaces differences in creation as told in the creation narratives of the Scriptures actually sets ‘to be in Christ’ and the Scriptures in opposition to each other. It shapes the relation of scriptural tradition and Christ tradition as a dichotomy, as mutually exclusive.
Given that Gal 3:28 is, as Schussler Fiorenza and other scholars perceive, a baptismal formula, and as such a sort of charter of the early Christ movement as an egalitarian movement of equals where all differences have become obsolete, some credit has to be given to such an interpretation. [39] We then actually would need to ask whether Paul re-introduced hierarchies and differences into this early egalitarian movement. [40]
But the interpretation of Gal 3:28 as a fixed early Christ tradition expressing the generally egalitarian character of the early Christ movement is debatable. There is not room here to discuss this in detail in this paper, but this interpretation seems to reconstruct ‘Christian’ origins with too many presuppositions from outside the letter. Troy W. Martin has recently argued for a situational interpretation of Gal 3:28. He perceives the baptismal-formula explanation not as entirely satisfactory since it does not leave room for the flexibility we find in other contexts where similar pairs are mentioned, especially when compared with 1 Cor 12:13. [41] Moreover, it does not explain adequately the mentioning of the second two pairs of slave-free and male-female since in most interpretations these are not seen to be related to the situation in Galatia as the Jew-Greek pair obviously is. Since Paul adapted the formula in 1 Cor 12: 13 to fit the situation of the Corinthian community, Troy concludes that there must be reasons for mentioning the three pairs in Galatians.
Rather than taking the word pair male-female as resonating with Gen 1:27 Martin ‘hears’ this pair as well as the slave-free pair as resonating with Gen 17: 9-14, the covenant of circumcision. From this, he concludes, Paul is referring not to an abolition of the created order – creation is not the scope of his argumentation – but rather the distinction between the Christ believing communities and the ‘covenant of circumcision’. [42] Whilst the distinction between Jew and Greek, slave and free, and male and female are relevant for membership in the covenant of circumcision, they are not entry requirements for being ‘in Christ’. [43] This, however, does not imply that these distinctions are abolished or obsolete in Christ. To be one in Christ does not presuppose sameness. But such distinctions should not serve as a legitimation for inequality and domination. [44] That diversity is presupposed by Paul, is indicated by his image of the one body of Christ as composed of many members (1Cor 12:12-14 and Rom 12:4ff). Significantly Martin’s reading does not create an opposition between the ‘covenant of circumcision’ and being ‘in Christ’ nor does it separate them, it just distinguishes the two entities.
Paul, in addressing the specific situation in the communities in Galatia in his response, relates early Christ tradition, the Scriptures and the actual context in a creative and associative way which we have found to be typical of ‘scriptural reasoning’. I cannot elaborate on this here in any more detail, but what is indicated by this is that there is some consistency and coherence in Paul’s form of reasoning and also that we should hesitate to be unduly critical of Paul’s use of scripture before we have considered all the options available to him.
4 Conclusion
In contextualizing Paul in the symbolic universe of the Scriptures and of contemporary Jewish exegesis we propose to perceive him as living, thinking and acting from within this ‘cultural-linguistic’ system with its own specific forms of reasoning. These forms are perceived as comparable to ‘Scriptural Reasoning’, a practice of dialogic thinking around a text which is not opposed to, but distinguished from, Western philosophical logic.
We have found that Paul’s scriptural reasoning is a vivid process of dialogic interaction between the Scriptures, the Christ-event and the actual life of the communities in and through which Paul in his letters is working out what the gospel implies in the particular situations of his mainly gentile communities. The analysis of Rom 9: 24ff has demonstrated that in taking the scriptural context of Paul’s reasoning seriously into account we find him creatively associating scriptural premises with the contemporary issue of Israel’s apparent unbelief. Considering this, the whole section is seen in the light of the theme mentioned in v. 15, that is, the mercy of God. Paul then is seen as not suddenly changing subject and turning to the gentiles after having dealt with Israel at the beginning of the chapter, but as coherently working out the unforeseeable mercy of God for his people as well as for the nations. Also in the Galatians passage, we have found that in following Paul’s scriptural reasoning, we did not find him reversing the created order nor simply opposing circumcision, but as Martin has shown, he is coherently working out the distinction between the covenant of circumcision, that is Israel, and the communities of those in Christ, without creating binary oppositions or a breach between creation and new creation or Israel and those in Christ. To perceive Paul not as a more or less coherent thinker of Western logic and its dualisms but as one who is creatively playing with the multiple rhythms of Scripture related to life in the light of the Christ-event could prove significant for an understanding of Christian identity beyond the restrictions of dualistic thinking.
5 Appendix — Some Further Thoughts on the Future of Scriptural Reasoning
The rediscovery of “reason as inescapably tradition constituted” offers exciting new options for genuine dialogue between scriptural interpreters and contemporary intellectual thinkers/practitioners of any faith or none. By ‘a return to the text’, to scriptural traditions, there is now the hope of retrieving resources long ignored, deprecated, and in many cases ideologically suppressed by modern habits of thought. The new emphasis upon traditions also offers fresh opportunity to stress how these traditions are embedded in the practices of believing communities, offering also a new understanding of the close relation between belief and practice, an insight crucial to understanding Paul’s theologising. Thus Paul’s ethical statements are of fundamental importance and it is in these that we get significant insights into his pattern of ‘scriptural reasoning’.
This new, confident emphasis upon scriptures and the search for new paradigms of reason in a type of reasoning that is more responsive than originative means also a new relationship between the disciplines of academic studies and scriptural interpreters in which there is genuine partnership and dialogue. The interpretation of Paul should benefit enormously from this. Very frequently, the application to his letters of a Western conceptualized logic has led to him being regarded as hopelessly contradictory or as not making any proper sense. This oppositional type of thinking challenged Paul’s inclusive statements such as ” to the Jew first and also to the gentile”, preferring an either /or choice which inevitably dismissed or denigrated emphases which were seen as specifically of Jewish (and therefore of tribal) origin. Again the universalising of Paul’s statements in particular letters, led to similar criticisms of his thinking.
A real possibility of listening afresh to Paul’s scriptural reasoning is now feasible, using philosophical and other academic disciplines as genuine servants and tools of understanding, rather than as dominant ideologies that hinder Paul’s thinking being properly heard or understood. But this also means a broader conception of biblical scholarship in which biblical interpreters genuinely engage with contemporary thinkers and patterns of thought wherever these may impinge upon the process of scriptural understanding. If we are to demand that academics in other disciplines take proper account of our scriptural traditions, we must likewise be open also to taking account of their intellectual traditions and modes of thought. Only in such a dialogue can scriptural interpreters be freed from the tendency to arrogance based on an unexplained biblical authority, and ‘non-theological’ academics be freed from the arrogance of ignoring or devaluing those traditions that gave rise to their academic foundations of knowledge. What is most exciting both for the understanding of Paul’s scriptural reasoning and for the contemporary application of it in a postcritical world is that now there is at last some genuine recognition of the link between theological thinking and the practice of faith in everyday life.
ENDNOTES
[1] As noted in the introduction, this essay was previously published in the Irish Journal of Biblical Studies. We thank them for their permission to reprint it in this issue of JSR .
[2] Already in earlier centuries this has been an issue of scholarly research as e.g. Emil Kautzsch, De Veteris Testamenti loci a Paulo Apostolo allegatis. Leipzig: Metzger und Wittig 1869; Hans Vollmer, Die alttestamentlichen Zitate bei Paulus. Freiburg: Mohr 1895; Otto Michel, Paulus und seine Bibel. G?tersloh: C. Bertelsmann 1929; E.Earl Ellis, Paul’s Use of the Old Testament . Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd 1957.
[3] Cf. Dietrich-Alex Koch, Die Schrift als Zeuge des Evangeliums: Untersuchungen zur Verwendung und zum Verst?ndnis der Schrift bei Paulus. T?bingen: J.C.B.Mohr 1986.
[4] On this see Brian Rosner, Paul, Scripture and Ethics: A Study of 1 Corinthians 5-7. Leiden: Brill 1994, pp.3-13.
[5] Cf. Rosner, Paul, Scripture and Ethics, p.5
[6] Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1992.
[7] Richard B. Hays, Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul. New Haven and London: Yale University Press 1989.
[8] E.g. Shiu-Lun Shum, Paul’s Use of Isaiah in Romans:A Comparative Study of Paul’s Letter to the Romans and the Sibylline and Qumran Sectarian Texts. T?bingen: J.C.B.Mohr 2002
[9] Rosner, Paul, Scripture and Ethics, p.17.
[10] As W.S.Campbell emphasizes “It is the peculiarity of Paul’s cultural inheritance that contributed largely to his thought world.” ‘The Contribution of Traditions to Paul’s Theology’ in David M.Hay ed. Pauline Theology Vol II, Minneapolis: Fortress Press 1993, p. 253. And M.D.Nanos states that “Paul’s…message and framework of thinking are those of one who considers himself working within the historical expectations of Israel…” The Mystery of Romans: The Jewish Context of Paul’s Letter. Minneapolis: Fortress Press 1996, p. 26.
[11] Cf. e.g. Steven Kepnes, Peter Ochs and Robert Gibbs, Reasoning after Revelation: Dialogues in Postmodern Jewish Philosophy. Boulder , CO : Westview Press 1998, Tikva Frymer-Kensky et.al. eds. Christianity in Jewish Terms. Boulder , CO: Westview Pres 2000, Peter Ochs and Nancy Levene eds., Textual Reasonings: Jewish Philosophy and Text Study at the End of the Twentieth Century. Grand Rapsids, Mich: Eerdmans 2003.
[12] ‘Radical Traditions’, Series description, in Textual Reasoning.
[13] ‘Introduction’ in Textual Reasoning, p. 5.
[14] Cf. Gibbs in Reasoning after Revelation, p. 23.
[15] Cf. Reasoning after Revelation, “…the rabbinic texts are dialogic. They ask us to take parts, and then they destabilize those parts by jumping from one context to another, changing the interlocutors. Even if every opinion is discarded, each one solicits the effort to justify it. You cannot read these texts alone; and when you read them with another person, they encourage you to improvise, to append your own thoughts, and to keep changing perspectives.” p. 59, also p. 36.
[16] Ford, “Responding to textual reasoning: What might Christians learn?” in Textual Reasoning , p. 263ff.
[17] This is done with the precaution Peter Ochs emphasizes when he writes ‘But textual reasoners remain as yet in the early stages of their efforts to discover and explain what kind of reasoning this is, what its premises are, its modes of inference, and its instruments of articulating and testing these inferences.’ Textual Reasoning, p. 8.
[18] Paul, Scripture and Ethics , p. 181.
[19] Cf. David Ford, “Responding to textual reasoning: What might Christians learn?” in Textual Reasonings: Jewish Philosophy and Text Study at the End of the Twentieth Century , ed. Peter Ochs and Nancy Levene. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans 2002, pp. 259-268, p. 265f. Cf J.H.Charlesworth on the diversity of Judaism, Anchor Dictionary of the Bible,Vol 5 , ‘Article ‘Pseudepigrapha’ pp.537-40, ” The contradicting ideas should not be explained away or forced into an artificial system. Such ideas in the Pseudepigrapha witness to the fact that early Judaism was not a speculative philosophical movement or theological system, even though the Jews demonstrated impressive speculative fecundity. The Pseudepigrapha mirror a living religion in which the attempt was made to come to terms with the dynamic phenomena of history and experience.” p. 538.
[20] This also applies to the congregations as Nanos has demonstrated ‘…outside the synagogue the early Christians would have had little opportunity to learn the ‘Scriptures’; gentiles in particular would have had no previous exposure to the religious life of the people of God and the ways of righteousness associated with Judaisms monotheistic practices.’ Mystery of Romans, p.73. On the institutional context of reading and reasoning, see David Ford ‘Responding’, in Textual Reasoning, pp. 266-7.
[21] I am aware that this paradigm is only partly adequate to describe a religious tradition. It presupposes a static view of culture and religion, taking rules, terms, symbols and narratives as set. It does not account sufficiently for the fact that traditions are living networks which are constantly negotiated in continous conversations.Cf. Reasoning after Revelation, p.26f.
[22] Paul, Scripture and Ethics, p.194.
[23] Paul and the Language of Scripture, p. 338.
[24] Cf. Nanos, who sees Paul’s discussions about the status and conduct of his gentile congregations as part of the Jewish debates about the relationship of gentiles with Jews. Mystery , pp42ff.
[25] Cf. Daniel Patte, ‘In other words what is essential is not a correct (orthodox) theological doctrine but an openness to Scripture, a ‘listening to Scripture’ in the context of actual life. This in fact results in “a multiplicity of theological conceptions” not necessarily fitting with each other…’, Early Jewish Hermeneutic in Palestine. SBL Dissertation Series 22, Missoula , Mon: Scholars Press 1975 , p.75.
[26] Cf. Paul in his Hellenistic Context, Edinburgh: T&TClark 1994, p. xviii.Cf also Paul Beyond the Judaism/Hellenism Divide. Troels Engberg-Pedersen ed. Louisville , KY: Westminster John Knox Press 2001.
[27] Cf. my review article “Dual Identity — a Real Possibility” in Journal of Beliefs and Values, 21/1 April 2000, pp. 121-25.
[28] Cf. Gesetz und Paraenese: Katechismusartige Weisungsreihen in der fr?hj?dischen Literatur . T?bingen: Mohr 1987, pp.45f. On this see also my book : That We May Be Mutually Encouraged: Feminism and the New Perspective in Pauline Studies. T&T Clark International, London, New York? 2004, pp.57-9.
[29] The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion . Bloomington, Ind: Indiana University Press 1997, p.5.
[30] Cf . That We May Be Mutually Encouraged , chapter 4, pp.142-54.
[31] This is the reason why scholars claim that gentiles in Christ are Israel , but this is to overlook the fact that they still remain gentiles in Christ. Cf That We May Be Mutually Encouraged, p. 151f.
[32] Cf. Shiu-Lun Shum, Paul’s Use of Isaiah in Romans. T?bingen: Mohr 2002, p. 259.
[33] Romans, 1932, p.160.
[34] Shorter Commentary on Romans (London:SCM 1959) 122-3.
[35] Cf. W.S.Campbell, ‘Divergent Images of Paul and his Mission’, in Reading Israel in Romans: Legitimacy and Plausibility of Divergent Interpretations. Ed. Cristina Grenholm and Daniel Patte. Harrisburg , PA : Trinity Press International 2000, pp. 187-211, pp. 198ff.
[36] Elsa B.Brown, ‘What Has Happened Here’, in Linda Nicholson ed., The Second Wave: A Reader in Feminist Theory ? (New York, London: Routledge 1997) , p.275.
[37] Cf. Also Ford, ‘Responding’ in Textual Reasoning, p. 259.
[38] Cf. Sch?ssler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her, pp. 208-11, also pp.235ff.
[39] J.Louis Martyn, Galatians: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary. New York: Doubleday 1997.
[40] Sch?ssler Fiorenza, Rhetoric and Ethic: The Politics of Biblical Studies. Minneapolis: Fortress Press 1999, p. 166f.
[41] Cf his article ?The Covenant of Circumcision (Genesis 17:9-14) and the Situational Antithesis in Galatians 3:28′ in JBL 122/1 (2003), pp.111-125, pp.114f.
[42] As Martin stresses, “…Paul’s concern is in not overturning the original order of creation but contextualizing the covenant of circumcision. In his argument, Gal 3:28c announces not an abolition of the male/female antithesis but its irrelevance for determining the candidates for Christian baptism and membership in the Christian community.” ‘The Covenant of Circumcision’ p. 119
[43] I find Martin’s argument quite convincing but do not agree with him in his perception of circumcision as the reason for the inferior status of women in Judaism. Such an inferior status cannot be generally presupposed (cf. e.g. Tal Ilan, Integrating Women into Second Temple Judaism Peabody, Mass: Hendrickson 2001; Bernadette Brooten, Women Leaders in the Ancient Synagogue, Chico: California 1982). That it existed is beyond doubt but this has to be seen in the context of the patriarchal structures of Mediterranean societies in antiquity generally, not due to any Jewish commandment.
[44] Cf. Sch?ssler Fiorenza, Rhetoric and Ethics, p.158f.
October 24, 2013 / / 0 Comments
William Elkins and Willie Young
Co-Editors
“I am a man: I hold that nothing human is alien to me.”
“Peace be to you and peace be to your house, and peace be to all that you have.” — I Samuel 25:6
In a multicultural context this ancient bit of Roman philosophy is not as useful as it once was. If we take it as a rule for reasoning, expecting the same rather than the strange, we will miss the many different ways humans are human. This is particularly true when one vital difference between human beings is the different ways we are formed in the image of God. In fact, even when we share the same traditions, e.g. the Abrahamic traditions, at times we will be at a loss to understand what a particular issue is and why it is as important as it is. We have much to learn from each other. We have much to learn about each other. Sometimes we succeed and sometimes we fail. But as important as our work is academically, our successes and failures have deep implications for the possibilities of peace between our houses. This is what makes the difficulties we have understanding each other so potentially tragic. It is at this point that charity must guide our interpretations.
It may be, however, that the real wisdom in “nothing human is alien to me” is in its comedy. The drama in how we get to know what we know of each other may be more comic than anything else. Even our best interpretations often miss the point and we find ourselves hopelessly lost in translation. Here our only hope is in a faith that our mistakes and failures are part of a divine comedy: that every difference fits within God’s joyful “good, very good” when God appraised the creation.
But what can we say about what we know about God’s revelations to the Children of Abraham when one aspect of our traditions is that God’s ways are not our ways. One response is to recognize that in any narrative history of how we know God, we are not the heroes. There is something going on which is a mystery of the Spirit. We must acknowledge the difficulties we have in knowing God’s ways for ourselves and, most importantly, for each other. We should, however, continue to try to explicate and interpret our ways to each other because we no longer have a choice. God’s ways is not our ways. We can say it is too difficult, too painful, with too little success in a time of international religious conflict, but, we cannot give up because God would not permit us to give up on each other.
For example, in the gospel of Mark, it is possible to read Jesus’ despair at the difficulties of the task of teaching the disciples the ways of God’s kingdom.The essay of Mike Higton provides the exegetical details of the impossible necessity that marks the drama of this gospel. It is traditionally noted that Markan exegesis is divided between the failure of the disciples and the ultimate success, in the world beyond the gospel, of Jesus’ mission to make ordinary men faithful to the call/teaching of God. The difficulty in the story is that Jesus was a man and that nothing human (ignorance, vanity and violence) was alien to him (friends or enemies were not exempt); however, “being human” and all that implies is not what the gospel is about. Mark’s gospel is “the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.”This gospel is something more than a lesson plan for instruction of the disciples. The gospel is about what it requires from us and from God if we’re ever going to learn anything at all. This is the cross. But it is also a work of divine mystery, in all its tragedy and comedy, the essence of which is the resurrection. The gospel of Mark is the story of how the cross and the resurrection teach us about how God’s ways are not our ways but are for Christians, a way of life.
But this is just one way of interpreting the ways we are human, particularly when what is human is the result of the ways God is involved in our lives. As Vincent Cornell writes, Qur’anic learning requires an awareness of the multiple dimensions through which one learns of God?scholarship, practice, and worship foremost among them. The emphasis on “remembrance,” as an internalization of divine truth, demands a humility of scholars, in recognizing that learning with one’s mind is as much a limit as a path for learning the ways of God. Moreover, Cornell’s essay emphasizes the diverse sources one must consider in learning and teaching; learning attends to both the Qur’an and the book of the world.
In light of Cornell’s discussion, the significance of scriptural reasoning as an intercommunal form of learning emerges. Practicing scriptural reasoning recognizes that our learning has not been fully informed by the book of the world, or an openness of our hearts. This is, one could say, a problem of both the academy and of religious learning, as neither has attended adequately to the diverse forms of learning of these traditions. Learning, and understanding, how others read and hear both their own and our scriptures, intensifies the relationship between the books of scripture and the world. [1]
It is along these lines that Steve Kepnes raises important questions regarding the reading of Deuteronomy 6. The reading of this text has been liturgically shaped; one is to obey the infinite command to keep the words of the Shema always before one’s mind, through a range of daily practices and liturgical reflection. Liturgy and reasoning, then, go hand in hand, in a way the academy may often ignore. At the same time, he recognizes that the command’s infinity calls for engaging with how others read this, and to consider the impact of the command in the broader world. Formation in liturgy leads toward hearing the Shema’s resonances in other communities, linking “learning” and “doing.”
If scriptural reasoning thus shapes how we learn and study, then it may also change how we understand the relationship between scripture and teaching. Kathy Ehrensperger’s essay, while not directly a part of the teaching and learning discussion, exemplifies how scriptural reasoning may re-vision our understandings of scriptural and traditional texts. Her argument that Paul’s work is more fully understood through the paradigm of scriptural reasoning?as learning in the language of scripture, and teaching others scripturally?builds on and yet transforms the standard views of Paul’s “uses” of scripture in contemporary biblical studies. It thus points us toward how scriptural reasoning may change how we teach and learn, in and with the academy. It also suggests how such study may continue to develop our teaching of the scriptures and tradition, through the deepened engagement that scriptural reasoning makes possible. More deeply, perhaps this re-visioning of Paul suggests that if “nothing human is alien” to us, it is only because our humanity, and ways of relating to other humans and God, are deeper and more complex than we ever know on our own, and the journey into this shared strangeness is where peaceableness may be learned.
Note: We would like to thank Irish Biblical Studies for permitting us to reprint Kathy Ehrensperger’s essay. It originally appeared in IBS 26: 1 (2004).
[1] Along these lines, see also Mike Higton’s essay, “Can the University and the Church Save Each Other?” Cross Currents 55:2 (2005): 172-83.
October 24, 2013 / / 0 Comments
Mike Higton
University of Exeter
Introduction
This is not a paper about learning and teaching in general. Nor is it a paper on what learning and teaching have been taken to involve throughout the Christian tradition. It is a paper built upon the reading of certain Scriptural texts, and I found that the texts I turned to would not let me talk about such sweeping topics—at least, not directly. The texts I’ve been working with from the Gospel of Mark don’t seem to know anything about ‘learning in general.’ They know only about learning one thing: the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. That is, the only kind of learning they know about is discipleship . So, although it is a commonplace that ‘disciple’ ( mathetes in Greek) means ‘learner,’ it might be more appropriate at this point to say that, for the New Testament, ‘learner’ means, and only means, ‘disciple.’
This is not, therefore, going to be a paper directly about learning and teaching in general. It is, however, going to be a paper about learning and teaching scripture . We will find, having begun our exploration of teaching and learning with a text about discipleship, that we are tipped directly into other texts that make us think about scripture. The question of discipleship and the question of scripture are, we shall find, inseparable—and the learning spoken of in these texts will be at once discipleship and reading.
I. Mark 1:16-20
I’ll begin with the text in Mark in which we are first introduced to those who are to become disciples—i.e., to become ‘learners’:
As Jesus passed along the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and his brother Andrew casting a net into the sea—for they were fishermen. And Jesus said to them, ‘Follow me, and I will make you fish for people.’ And immediately, they left their nets and followed him. As he went a little farther, he saw James son of Zebedee and his brother John, who were in their boat mending the nets. Immediately he called them; and they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired men, and followed him.
Note how both call narratives begin with seeing (as does the call of Levi, in a later chapter).? The journey of discipleship—of learning the Gospel—begins with sight, but it is not first of all the disciples’ sight; it is not their insight; not a light which dawns for them. Rather, these fishermen are seen by Jesus: held in his gaze.? And we might ask, what is it about them that is seen? For, having been seen—we might even say, on the basis of having been seen—they are called . Called to become disciples; called to learn . But what does that mean?
But though the seeing and calling in both stories are identical, things become more complex when it comes to following . Simon and Andrew, first of all, are called to a strange fulfilment of what they already are. They are fishermen ( halieis )—and besides their names and their current activity, that’s all that the text tells us about their identity—and Jesus calls them to become fishermen ( halieis anthropon —fishers of people). This calling is certainly to a process where Jesus is a maker —he will make them fishers of people—but that is not making simply as imposition, simply as creation ex nihilo . What Jesus will make of them will be the fulfilment of what they now are.
James and John, on the other hand, are called to leave their nets, and they leave their father, and in this leaving they abandon the most obvious markers of their current identities (they are , after all, the Sons of Zebedee—and aside from their names and their current activity, that’s all that this text tells us about their identity).
In other words, if we ask what discipleship, will involve for these four men, if we ask what these men are called to, and what Jesus has seen in them, there’s at least the hint of an ambivalence between fulfilment and transformation, between making and discovering .
But lets return to this word ‘follow’. These men receive a call to follow , and they respond by following . But I want you to listen for two different resonances to this word. On the one hand, Jesus says to Simon and Andrew, ‘Follow me, and I will make you fish for people’ which is exactly what Jesus is doing on the seashore right then. The call to follow rings with a call to apprenticeship : to a participation in the captivating, ensnaring work of the master. But there’s also another resonance, for us readers who are not in Galilee but in San Antonio. For us, met textually by this same Jesus, the invitation to follow means in part the invitation to follow the story . We can only find out what following means for those who are called by following this way, so that following the text becomes the first step in following the Teacher. The word ‘follow’ rings with both ‘participation’ and with ‘reading’.
II. Mark 1:21-24
Another text: this time about Jesus’ teaching rather than the disciples’ learning.
They went to Capernaum; and when the Sabbath came, he entered the synagogue and taught. They were astounded at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes. Just then there was in their synagogue a man with an unclean spirit, and he cried out, ‘What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us?’
Jesus teaches in a synagogue . Now in Luke’s parallel, the emphasis falls on the fact that this is a place for the reading and learning of the Scriptures, and admittedly Mark does not emphasise that—but especially given the comment about the scribes, I think we have to see the Synagogue as bearing weight as a symbol of Jewish identity. The teaching we’re looking at has a specific location .
But there’s a real ambiguity about what Jesus’ teaching has to do with that location. With typical sparseness, Mark gives us very little to work with, saying nothing of the content or form of Jesus’ teaching, saying nothing about whether or how he read the Hebrew Scriptures. Rather, we are given three things: the astonishment of the people; the contrast with the scribes, and the incident with the unclean spirit—and it is the latter (the one most detached from Jesus teaching—such that it is almost a separate story)—it is that one which has the clearest content. On the one hand, the man with the unclean spirit marks Jesus out as dangerous — as one who will not let him alone, as he has (apparently) been let alone by what has happened before in this synagogue. On the other hand, this clash gains its shape from the contrast of uncleanness and cleanness—its content (and so the only real content these passages give to Jesus’ identity or the identity of his teaching) is provided by the key codes in the structure of identity which the synagogue upholds.
On the one hand, then, the text does not seem to present Jesus as a danger to the synagogue as such or to Jewish identity as such (even if it is a danger to the scribes). And that sense is reinforced by the fact that although Jesus’ teaching is astonishing, the recognition that it is such is voiced by the synagogue, and those gathered are presented as recognising that his presence does draw out and throw down uncleanness. On the other hand, however, as soon as the spirit has been thrown out, those gathered declare that Jesus’ message is a new teaching—and we are forced to ask whether what is meant is a teaching that does away with the old.
As we follow the call to follow Jesus, and follow the text, then, we find that the question about the transformation of identity—the question shaped by the ambiguity already noted between the making and the discovery of identity—becomes a question about how the teaching we are following relates to specifically Jewish identities; how it relates to Jewish teaching; how it relates to the synogogue. And if we were to carry on beyond the passage I’ve quoted, we would find ourselves drawn into further stories, which are more complex, more deeply ambivalent in their relation to those things—and following, or discipleship, would lead us more deeply into this ambivalence, an ambivalence that plays over the surface of much of the rest of the Gospel. To be a Christian learner, to be a disciple, is to follow in the sense of reading and following that leads us into deep ambivalence about the relationship between what we read, and what the text we are reading reads.
III. Mark 8:31-35; 14:71-2
I want at this point to start bringing the dominant, plain sense note of ‘following’ in this Gospel back into play: the note of apprenticeship to Jesus, participation in Jesus’ mission. And we can begin to get there if we note another strange thing about this Gospel: the Gospel of Mark withholds what is being chased. If you approach the Gospel of Mark with the question it more or less thrusts on you— Who is Jesus? —it is remarkable how little it gives you to go on, how much it defers giving an answer. There is, of course, the famous messianic secret (Jesus’ injunction to various characters in the Gospel not to spread the news about him), but that is not simply one theme in the Gospel: the Gospel as a whole works in similar ways. So, for instance, in the passage we just looked at, we do not get told what Jesus taught—only that he taught, and that it was astonishing. And earlier in the first chapter we have had a tremendous fanfare from the prophet ‘Isaiah’ and from John the Baptist, and from the divine voice at the Baptism, but nothing to indicate what it is about the man who appears that might fulfil these expectations. Indeed, quite the opposite: plenty to suggest that even those expectations don’t begin to capture him. We are promised one who will baptize, and the one who appears gets baptized; we are promised one who will give the Spirit, and the one who appears receives the Spirit, and is expelled into the wilderness by the Spirit; we are promised one for whom straight ways must be made in the wilderness, and the one who appears is sent to wander that wilderness alone—and so on. We are told to look in this place for an answer, and no answer is forthcoming.
This comes to a head in a text from considerably later in the book, in chapter 8. Peter, who in Mark is definitely presented as the paradigmatic disciple—the paradigmatic learner, you might say—has just for the first time declared to Jesus, ‘You are the Messiah’. A ringing declaration, perhaps, that here, at last, is the answer. And yet the text immediately shows that if Peter thinks he understands—if we think we understand that answer, we are mistaken. Straight away, according to Mark,
Jesus began to teach them that the Son of man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. He said all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. But turning and looking at his disciples, Jesus rebuked Peter and said, ‘Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not divine things but on human things.’ He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, ‘ If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me . For those who want to save their life will lose it; and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.’
What Peter already knows, what he has already learnt, the following he has supposedly achieved, is engulfed by a greater ignorance. He cannot yet be said to be following —because he has missed the only path along which following can take place.
A few chapters later, Jesus has been arrested. And the same Peter, who has learnt so much from Jesus, who has even declared himself ready to die for Jesus’ sake, finds that he has learnt nothing. He finds that his expectations and understanding—expectations of a messiah who will overthrow his enemies and reign victoriously—still prevent him from seeing the reality of Jesus’ task and fate. In a famous scene, Peter, accused of being a follower of the now-imprisoned Jesus
began to curse, and he swore an oath, ‘I do not know this man you are talking about.’ At that moment the cock crowed for the second time. Then Peter remembered that Jesus had said to him, ‘Before the cock crows twice, you will deny me three times.’ And he broke down and wept. (14:71-2)
Peter does not weep because he has told a lie, but because he has told the truth. It is true: he does not know the man. He as yet knows nothing. He only begins to learn, truly to learn, in the moment when he breaks down and weeps. When he is broken down, we might say: when the arrest and trial and impending death of his Master begin to crucify him too—and finally to overthrow the illusory visions he has had of where his following might lead.
The following to which Jesus calls his disciples—the following to which Christian readers of Mark’s Gospel are called—is not a following which consists in learning a clear message; it does not consist in learning, for instance, a replacement for Torah—a new code by which to live. It does not consist in any kind of learning as accumulation. It does not consist in any kind of learning as acquisition of skill. It consists in dying, following the way of the cross. What is learnt is not some result of the following—not something gained by following, but the following itself. And there is no abstracting discipleship—no abstracting Christian learning, Christian teaching—from that. Learning, following is participating in the cross.
IV. Learning and the Cross
Making and discovering; reading and apprenticeship. The learning I find myself called to by this text does not involve the replacement of the Scriptures read in the synagogue with other Scriptures. Nor does it call for their supplementation with a further text that somehow fills in their gaps or answers their questions; Mark does not present itself as the answer-pages to the puzzles set for the reader in the main textbook. Mark’s text does not have the kind of content that would allow it to perform such a function. In one sense, it barely has any content of its own at all: it is not content but a convolution of content—a transformation to be performed on a content that it does not itself give, or which it borrows from elsewhere. The kind of Christian learning that Mark calls for is the kind that takes place when, in the midst of that synagogue, a call is issued to a certain kind of following: to follow the way of the cross.
So Christian learning (to the extent that there is such a thing) will involve a kind of oscillation: between reading the Hebrew Scriptures and following the passion—allowing the reading of the Hebrew Scriptures to inform and deepen and shape and resource the reading of the passion, but also to be interrupted and interrogated and convoluted by it. The Christian Bible has been mis-stitched, and the Gospel should in fact be interleaved with the Hebrew Bible. Christian learning pursues interleaved reading.
And the oscillation can be amplified, until it takes Christians into any and every other context of learning there is, so that even though the Hebrew Scriptures retain a priority for us, our oscillations might also take us into the Quran, or into the textbooks and course-notes of our universities. A Christian reading of these other texts will be one in which the Hebrew Bible is interleaved with them, and (since you can’t really have an interleaving inside an interleaving) in which that interleaved Hebrew Bible will have the Gospel as a strange interlinear gloss.? Christian learning involves an oscillating reading, an interleaved reading.
Secondly, though—and more difficult to state—Mark says something about what is happening to Christians in that oscillation: something about being seen, being called and being fulfilled, something about a transformation that is both making and discovery, but also something about this transformation involving a kind of death, a death without which we will not have begun to learn.
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October 24, 2013 / / 0 Comments
C.C. Pecknold,
University of Cambridge
I. Towards a Postliberal Political Theology
There is a strong desire for unity in democracy. Think of the American flag after September 11 th . At the heart of the glorious American experiment is the desire to unite multiple faiths in the one, true democratic faith.I read this push for unity in diversity as an eschatological desire, that is to say, a theological one.
In contemporary debates, there is on the one hand Jeffrey Stout teaching us the virtues of democracy and democratic faith. And on the other, Stanley Hauerwas, who no longer seems set on thinking that democracy is a bad idea, but clearly believes that the Church has no fundamental stake in sustaining the liberal social orders. I find myself convinced that both are right, and yet remain unsure of how to navigate between Emersonian, Augustinian and Barthian responses in this debate. [1] That leaves me in a patient posture—but also an urgent one. We will stay with these problems of democracy, but we need to begin thinking them through in more deeply theological ways. I share the long-term view that the problems are only going to become more acute.
What are those problems? Contemporary democracy seems unwilling to do at least two things: (1) It seems unwilling to draw deeply from the wells of tradition, veiling a modern antagonism towards the past. And (2) it seems unable, but not necessarily unwilling, to deal with multiple sources. It is casual about multiplicity, and for reasons related to its eschatological desire for unity, unable to deal adequately with religious reasons that constitute and are constituted by multiple communities of faith.
Sheldon Wolin and the ‘radical democrats’ have been pointing us in some fruitful directions, encouraging us to attend to the grassroots, to the actual and multiple sources of our political culture. They have encouraged us to look towards the ‘micropolitical’ — or the small ways in which political judgements are shaped. [2]
This response to problems with contemporary democracy seems right to me, but perhaps not radical enough. Any ethnographic attentiveness to the communities of scriptural faith which make up the vast majority of the population should display that the authoritative sources are sacred scriptures and the traditions generated by them. The micropolitical that interests the radical democrats may be best displayed through an analysis of how political judgements are formed through small, interpretive acts in tradition shaped communities.
The thesis is simple:reading skills are political skills, and the reading of scripture is the training ground for reading the political. That is to link scriptural hermeneutics and reading practices with the generation of political culture. In this, I am working towards a postliberal political theology which encourages faithful Christians to make public their deepest reasons, which is also to say to make their reasoning publicly accountable to those who reason differently. This is to look forward to a different form of civic life than we presently face.
One of the promises of the practice of ‘scriptural reasoning’ is that it may help model a different relation of unity and diversity in which traditions and the sources of traditions can fully face one another and converse in political friendships that seek political wisdom together. The rest of my paper looks at these issues indirectly. I provide some scriptural texts, and then I offer a reading of Augustine’s The City of God which displays how that work performs a creative interpretation and a political logic that will have significant implications.
Two of the key texts are worth considering in their ‘plain sense’ before advancing to Augustine’s reading.
In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, a first day. Genesis 1:1-5
Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being bound in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross. Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father . Philippians 2.5-11
II. The Narrative Substructures of The City of God: Generative Political Tendencies
Unlike some readers, I do not read The City of God as a tale of two cities: the city of Man and the city of God. Careful readers will note, it is at least the tale of three cities: Rome, Jerusalem, and Babylon, and the narratival inter-relationships of these cities is complex. The City of God is a conversation between the multiple, authoritative sources of these cities. There are those scriptural texts from Genesis, the Psalms, Isaiah, the Gospels, and Paul’s letters. But there are also the Roman city’s own authoritative texts: mainly Cicero, Varro, Seneca, Porphyry, Plato, and the imperial scripture itself, Virgil’s Aeneid . Augustine pays attention to sources, and throughout the whole of The City of God , he hopes to teach us how to read the city, and put theological pressure on the political order through those texts which are generative of their political cultures.
The pressure that Augustine applies in these first ten books is primarily a monotheistic pressure from the inside of the Roman narrative. But it is not quite right to say that he speaks to Rome only on her own terms that would be to somehow veil his own reasons, which Augustine never does. He believes that the God of Israel is the founder of the true Rome. What enables him to find an intimate relationship between the empirical city of Rome, and the biblical category of Jerusalem? Like other ancient thinkers, Augustine holds together the City, the Soul, and the Cosmos, and just as the Soul can find its true identity by searching more deeply within its life for God’s logic, so too can the City find its true identity by a deeper examination of its life through the sources of its life. Augustine performs for the Roman city what he performs for himself in the Confessions : a kind of askesis, or a process of disciplined learning that is redemptively directed towards the deepest political resources.
This narrative of Roman identity shifts towards another narrative that works both within and beyond Rome’s local history through the practices of the church in that city. And here we see Augustine move from the City to the Cosmos, for it is clear that Augustine moves in this second half to a narrative which provides critical tools for reading the political signs of the Roman city through a heightened pitch of attention to the scriptural universe. There is a real conversation at work between the first and second half of The City of God . Though Rome is not included in the two, within this cosmic, or scriptural universe, there are indeed two cities: they are, in fact, the biblical categories of Jerusalem and Babylon, which I read as socio-political tendencies. Some, such as J.N. Figgis, have suggested that Augustine gets the two cities idea from the Book of Revelation, but in fact, he sees it through the whole of the scriptural narrative. [3] He reads the scriptures as a narrative about two primordial polities commingled throughout time, and generative of Rome itself.The key word here remains “commingled”: if these two political tendencies are commingled in every city, and they are difficult to discern, what will be required to cultivate citizens capable of the good and just society?
Careful readers of The City of God should not find any of this surprising. But my reading of the two cities as generative political tendencies within the scriptural universe may be offering something helpful: the point is not to obsess about dyads, or to fixate exclusively on some sense of cities or communities in conflict. The point is to learn how to read the signs of the political good in every city, that is, to become skilled readers of the political in order that we might be led to the kingdom of charity, to be led in our political decisions through the orders of love, through the sources which have generated our forms of life and wisdom. [4]
What this means is that a political education is required to put corrective or redemptive pressure on the babylonian tendencies of all our political lives, through performing those redemptive Jerusalem tendencies which so often allude us, even in the empirical Jerusalem, even in the empirical church. But what sort of political education, what sort of askesis is needed?
III. Genesis and the Scriptural Logic that Generates The City of God
There is something right about the suggestion that Augustine gets his idea of the two cities from the Book of Revelation. The something right is the eschatologically-inflected attention to the narrative. But it must be said that Augustine struggles to read Genesis more than he reads any other text of Scripture. Though he was reasoning eschatologically, he was listening for the generative logic of creation.
Books 11 through 14 of The City of God display what Augustine takes to be the engine upon which all political life depends, the creation of angelic and human beings imbued with the gift of freedom, and delegated with power. The Devil is the primordial instantiation of this freedom and power misused. On Augustine’s account, God made the Devil, but did not make him wicked. That he did all by himself, Augustine says, by misusing his freedom and power, turning in upon himself solipcistically, and swelling with “the pride of independence”. For Augustine, this pride-rendered angelic fall precedes the human fall. Indeed, when Augustine turns his attention to the Garden of Eden, his interpretation here is charged with the suggestion that Adam and Eve could have turned things around for creation.He just about suggests that Adam and Eve had a brief chance to redeem the whole of creation, and undo the Devil’s declaration of independence simply by cleaving to God, using their freedom to participate in God’s glory through a politics of humility. But alas, Augustine suggests that such a reversal awaits the new Adam: our political cure.
And yet, the constant refrain of the first chapter of Genesis is that everything is good. There’s nothing wrong. So how does he find a Fall in the angelic community preceding the Fall in the human one? This is an interpretive puzzle as there seems to be no narrative of a Fall until Genesis chapter 3, and then it is the human Fall. What is going on here? It is important to pay attention to Augustine’s powers of biblical reasoning here because they generate micropolitical judgments that have extraordinary consequences. Augustine asks the difficult questions of the text: where did this serpent suddenly come from in chapter 3? If things are created, and seen to be created as good, why is there this serpent in a Garden tempting Adam and Eve to misuse their freedom and power and declare their independence? There seems to be a problem with the text: we are not being given the whole story. Augustine does not try to explain his way around this problem, but rather he seeks a deeper engagement with the first chapter, where he believes the text yields signs of the necessary back-story. He pushes especially hard on those texts which testify to origins, especially the first day. He keeps asking the question that the text itself seems to ask: if creation is good, what made the first evil will bad? (12.6) The only answer, he thinks, is that it must be some tendency away from the good. The only ground for defection from God seems to be in the formless void, the nihilo out of which God creates. As others have noted, this is to refuse to explain evil, to refuse it a causative nature. This leads Augustine to his powerful theological claim, not just for creatio ex nihilo, but for his idea that the first evil will is a privation of the good, a turning away from the source of goodness, and thus a way of cutting creation off from its deepest wells of life. Augustine reads this as a political tendency towards privacy, solipsism and pride. From this reasoning, it becomes easier to see Augustine’s back-story for why the serpent appears in the Garden. The Serpent is an instantiation of this political tendency towards superbia , the prideful swelling of self-love choked off from the source of its created goodness.
Two political tendencies, Augustine reasons, derive from that very first day, from the very first verses of the first chapter of Genesis: from the division of Light and Dark. Hardly the literal sense: ‘Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light.And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness.” (Gen 1.3-4) Augustine reads these verses as the creation of the heavens, or the creation of the angelic orders, and so reads Light and Dark socio-politically. But why so far from the plain sense? Augustine has deep reasons for this. He believes that good semiotic performance is ruled by the incarnation of the Word made flesh. So any dyadic logic in the plain sense will be problematic, and will stimulate him to display his deeper incarnational logic (otherwise unspoken) for the sake of a politics of redemption in which Jerusalem redeems Babylon in the drama of Roman history.
The babylonian tendency remains privation of the good — but it is a realistic recognition that it is a political tendency in human action which needs to be corrected, repaired, redeemed through an incarnational hermeneutic. But the point about their being commingled from the very origins is to suggest how difficult it is to identify and properly distinguish these tendencies in the actual histories of socio-political life, even if we know their destinies. Some political education is required to learn how to read the city, some education which will shape readers to perform the redemptive logic of the Incarnation in the world; indeed, to perform the politics of Jesus.
IV. Philippians and the political askesis of humility
Augustine writes from the outset that he has embarked on a great and arduous work in writing on ‘the glorious city of God.’ There is, of course, no more loaded term in the Roman political lexicon than the word ‘glorious.’ But as he knows, God’s glory works differently from Roman glory: namely, it works through humility. Always the rhetorician impressed by the humility of the scriptures, Augustine writes in his preface:
‘For I am aware what ability is requisite to persuade the proud how great is the virtue of humility, which raises us, not by a human arrogance, but by a divine grace, above all earthly dignities that totter on this shifting scene. For the King and Founder of this city of which we speak, has in Scripture uttered to His people a dictum of the divine law in these words [from James 4.6 and Proverbs 3.34]: “God resisteth the proud, but giveth grace unto the humble.”‘ (Preface).
He immediately follows the scriptural citation with one from the Imperial scriptures, from Virgil’s Aeneid : ‘Show pity to the humbled soul, and crush the sons of pride.’ And throughout the work, this inter-textual pattern continues: not as a rivalry between texts, but as a conversation between political cultures that have access to deep sources. [5] The hope is that the conversation itself will be a kind of askesis that disciplines the city’s ‘lust of rule,’ and though often neglected, the church’s lust of rule too (I read Hauerwas as performing this discipline in the church). Augustine wants to teach a culture which seems prone to babylonian political tendencies, ‘a way of life’ that gives Rome access to another authoritative source for its life that can enrich and deepen a truer vision for Rome. Augustine seeks for Rome the appropriate reference for ‘glory,’ as he puts it, ‘referring that glory itself to the glory of God.'(5.14) But this leads Augustine back to the pattern of God’s glory he knows in the Christ of St Paul’s Letter to the Philippians, where he finds the LORD who comes in the form of a servant to mediate political wisdom on a Roman cross. Glory finds its true reference only through the humility of Jesus Christ.
Philippians 2.5-11 provides him with an eschatological mapping of how God’s political wisdom is mediated in the world through Christ’s cross where humiliation meets exaltation. In turning to this text, Augustine displays that his fundamental political wisdom consists in a redemptive ‘politics of praise.’ [6] In this sense, Augustine aims to bring ‘the mind of Christ’ into a profound relation to the Roman mind; not to absorb Roman political culture, or even replace it, but to give it access to a political education which can better resource its people — or at a minimum, to display how the redemptive ‘mind of Christ’ provides Rome’s Christian citizens with an ecclesial politics which will enrich, broaden and deepen the life of the people in that city.
At the end of Book 11, he comes full circle to the scriptural text that opens The City of God , namely the one from Proverbs 3.34 about pride and humility: ‘God resisteth the proud, but giveth grace unto the humble.’ It is the text he opens with, and the text he places at the structural center of his entire work. So who are the humble? At a minimum, those who make themselves open to the judgment of the other. But ultimately, the humble are those who make themselves open to the judgment of God.The humble are those who perform the redemptive semiotics of the incarnate Word.
V. Democratic Vistas
For Augustine, Rome was an eschatological idea bound up with the new Jerusalem. I’d like to say the same for what Sheldon Wolin has called ‘fugitive democracy,’ rare, episodic democracy.It is ‘fugitive’ because it is eschatological: there is a truer democracy than the liberal one we now know. Augustine’s whole project in The City of God is about developing a political askesis of humility which will renew and transform Rome. Above all, he thought the rhetorical humility of scripture would have the most transformative effect because it mediated the humility of Jesus to the world. [7] He believed that Rome’s Christian citizens brought into its political culture the resources for a political education which could have this fructifying effect. In retrospect we can say this pre-liberal attempt to make divine revelation central to reason-exchange in political culture worked to produce Christendom, but in prospect, we will need to imagine a different future for liberal democracies. What if liberal democracies learned to live not only with a politics of multiple communities, but a politics of multiple traditions committed to enriching, broadening and deepening political discussion through their own authoritative sources and reasoning? If, as it seems willing to do, liberal democracy can discipline its desire for an independent source towards the actual and multiple sources of political culture, from the grassroots up, it may just begin to see not only how the religions of biblical faith sustain political culture, but how they offer the curriculum, the education, the askesis which can not only discipline democratic pride, but also give grace to democratic humility.
ENDNOTES
[1] I am currently writing a book on Augustine, Barth and Political Theory with these urgent concerns in mind, and in response to Jeffrey Stout’s Democracy and Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).
[2] See Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought , Expanded Edition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); and Aryeh Botwinick and William Connolly (Eds.) Democracy and Vision: Sheldon Wolin and the Vicissitudes of the Political (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).
[3] See J.N. Figgis, The Political Aspects of S. Augustine’s ‘City of God’ (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1921).
[4] Cf. Augustine’s correspondence with Marcellinus, eg Letter 136/138 which supports this reading in E.M. Atkins and R.J. Dodaro (Eds) Augustine:Political Writings (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2001).
[5] See Sabine MacCormack, The Shadows of Poetry: Virgil in the Mind of Augustine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
[6] I am indebted to Randi Rashkover for this felicitous phrase. See her book Revelation and Theopolitics:Karl Barth, Franz Rosenzweig and the Poliitics of Praise (New York & London: T&T Clark/Continuum, 2005). The ‘politics of praise’ matches well Augustine’s own sense that God’s just society must be performed in the worshipping community.
[7] As Hauerwas suggests, ‘humility’ was Reinhold Niebuhr’s great virtue, and makes me aware that employing it here might work against the narrative or postliberal political theology I am working towards.Rather than avoid humility simply because it was Niebuhr’s virtue, I want to press on it more, through the Carmen Christi , through the politics of praise which recognises the humility and obedience of Jesus Christ, an obedience which leads to death, and to his resurrected body. This is a humility which changes the causative scope for what is politically possible through an openness to judgment.
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October 24, 2013 / / 0 Comments
C.C. Pecknold,
Loyola College, Maryland
On one level it is the world of Dante in which every sphere of history is traversed, and where every moment of time is penetrated and judged through an intense eschatological realism. Similarly it is the world of Karl Barth, a strange new world of the Bible in which we learn to see things as they are in Jesus Christ. David Ford?s vision is both catholic and evangelical, and we can see it in his passion for God’s story, which is matched by a serious attentiveness to the shape of reality as it is given (the ?shape of living? in his apt phrase). It is difficult not to get caught up in Ford?s passion, contagious as it is. Spend enough time with him, and you will sense that ?everything is happening? right here and now as part of the history of redemption. Along with Ford?s pentecostal passion?a genuinely Pauline shout of joy and rejoicing in the Spirit?there is also the comprehensive, catholic, contemplative Christian for whom the ?adoring act of listening to the Word of God? is also ?the primal cell of all fruitful action.? [i]
David Ford’s intellectual labors have been thoroughly systematic. Or perhaps it is better to simply say, as I will argue throughout this essay, that his labors are best seen in the light of a scripture-centered catholicity that seeks the Wisdom of God. Those who will attempt to fit him into a single category?narrative theologian, philosophical theologian, liturgical theologian, dogmatic theologian, conversational theologian?miss all the gathered-up coherence of the man, i.e. the particular-universal at which he is aiming. We can see it in the progression of his studies. In Barth and God’s Story we see the scriptural and dogmatic united in a single voice. In Jubilate we see dogmatics and liturgy in conversation. In Truth and Meaning in 2 nd Corinthians we see his interests in philosophical theology already insisting on a return to scripture. In Self and Salvation: Being Transformed , a pattern of thinking develops in which facing Jesus Christ transforms human beings. Here we can see him bringing each aspect together around the Trinitarian ( prosopon ) image of ?facing?: scripture, dogmatics, liturgy, and philosophy all in conversation at once concerning the central importance of facing Jesus. The whole trajectory could be imagined as a kind of lyrical rhyme scheme, a poiema moving from Scripture to dogmatics, from dogmatics to liturgy, and from liturgy back to Scripture, before recapitulating the whole into a fuller dynamic. Recapitulation, then, becomes key for an Irenean retrospective on his work, most recently seen in his Christian Wisdom: Desiring God and Learning in Love . Here we see the attempt to think the particular-universal of Christian Wisdom, to envision the whole corporate destiny of humanity by a perichoretic light of participation with the Triune God. I take such a cursory retrospective of his work to encourage this image of Ford as aiming at catholicity. This is to say nothing of the great ecumenical reach involved in his massively influential editorial endeavor, The Modern Theologians , or the attempts to cast a still wider net with A Very Short Introduction to Theology and The Shape of Living .
Perhaps not surprisingly, given my argument, two Greek words stand out in my memory of Ford?s intellectual habitus: pleroma and panta . The words have to do with a semantic field concerning the fullness of all things, everywhere for everyone. The words belong especially to the Johannine and Pauline tradition. In the Johannine tradition, we can see how this passes to the martyr St. Polycarp and then to his disciple St. Irenaeus who understands everything growing into the fullness of the Word. Jesus Christ is the Word of God who is also the new Adam, the One who is the fullness of humanity as it was divinely intended to be. Jesus is the restoration of original justice, and the lost unity of humanity is recovered in Christ?s Body. Jesus moves through all of human experience in order to fulfill it, to make it holy, free and obedient, gathering up ?all in all.? Where St. Irenaeus may single out the atoning significance of the Incarnation, Ford has especially taught us that ?facing Jesus? in every aspect of his experience of being human is central if we are to understand both the inter-personal, social, political and cosmic significance of the atonement. Rather than enter the pleroma of God through some esoteric knowledge (Ford is thoroughly anti-Gnostic) we enter through the public face of Jesus: a face that we know through the scriptural narrative, through icon, through sacrament, through authority, through nature, through praise in the Spirit, through superabundance ( pleroma ). We enter the pleroma of God by growing up before the Father, living into the superabundant life of the Son.
The so-called Christ hymn of Philippians is also a helpful introduction to what these terms connote (Phil. 2-5-11). The kenotic gift of the Son emptying himself in obedience to God on the Cross inverts the tragedy of the Adamic human fall that had grasped at equality with God through disobedience; Christ?s descent into hell means that even the darkest aspects of human experience are touched by Jesus so that all of humanity might be sanctified and fulfilled in Christ?s new humanity. The risen and glorified Christ, to whom every knee will bend , makes it possible for all humanity to grow to full maturity. And this ancient Pauline theme comes through clearly in Ford?s person and work. It is not easy to avoid the particular universalism of Ford?s Christology here. It is not only the theme of pleroma , which is dynamically conceived around the tri-unity of God?s life as Father, Son and Spirit, but also the panta, God?s superabundant life is offered to all, in every way and everywhere .
These two themes of pleroma and panta , which of course can be found in Karl Barth?s Christocentric universalism as well, aim at catholicity. Another Greek term, katholikos , ?according to the whole,? embraces our word ?universal,? though distinctions should be made between them. And I would not want to insist that Ford?s catholicity is identical with Roman Catholic comprehensions of the term that privilege the authority of the Petrine Office. But Ford similarly imagines a comprehensive catholicity in which all people, everywhere and in every way might converse with the superabundance of the Word of God. This is not to say that Ford?s catholicity resides only in the conversational event of the Word being revealed by the Holy Spirit, for to sum up Ford as a ?conversational? theologian, while accurate, would miss his traditionalism and his catholicity. These conversational moments are gathered up and carried by traditions, and especially institutional forms of gathering these fragments into a coherent whole. But the centrifugal force of his catholicity is precisely through the reach of God?s story as narrated in Scripture.
Before reflecting more in my conclusion on Ford?s theopolitical vision, I want to extend my appreciative comments on Ford?s catholicity by way of an admittedly incomplete comparison with the catholicity of Henri de Lubac (and a brief comment on the political theorist Sheldon Wolin). This comparison helps support my comments concerning Ford?s scripture-centered catholicity, but I also hope, in an age too often characterized by indifference to both real and imagined ecclesial divisions, that it will encourage theological reflection on the gifts and virtues needed for Christians who proclaim their faith in ?one, holy, catholic and apostolic church.?
Henri de Lubac?s Catholicism
Henri de Lubac wrote a great many books, shaped more by historical circumstance than systematic calculation. He wrote monographs on Teilhard de Chardin simply because the Society of Jesus ordered him to give an orthodox defense of the thought of a fellow Jesuit who was under suspicion of heresy for his evolutionary theology. His work on Buddhism is also hard to place except as part of a whole theology of mission, and a commitment to the dialogue of cultures. De Lubac?s retrieval of medieval exegesis, of the four-fold senses of scripture read in the Tradition, brings a massive dose of Augustinianism into the largely neo-Thomist bloodstream of the Catholic world, and his Surnaturel makes the whole ?supernaturalizing of the natural? the fundamental resource for the kind of catholicity that nouvelle theologie so vigorously presents to the world. De Lubac?s works must be seen as ways of imagining the whole ; his Catholic imagination is charged with a theological vision of the ?mystical body of Christ? comprehending the entire shape of living (to use a favored phrase of Ford).
De Lubac is now seen in some quarters as a theological conservative, but we should recall that he was not always seen this way. As with those thinkers identified with Nicene orthodoxy or Thomas Aquinas, de Lubac was a risk-taker, but in retrospect we can see him as a conserver of tradition. Neither conservative nor liberal, de Lubac certainly was a Christian humanist, and he found a way beyond the impasse between Modernists and Veterists through the very category of ?tradition.? He certainly was a ?radical? in the sense of going to the source, or rather to the sources. His humanism flowed, not unlike Ford?s, from the fount of Christological realism. We now know the cumulative effect, largely through his impact on Vatican II, and through the whole seismic force of his little book Catholicism . [ii]
In Catholicism , de Lubac examines the patristic notion of the Church as a universal social reality. ?Catholic,? here, always denotes the ?gathering up of the whole.? But for de Lubac, as for the Church Fathers and for Thomas Aquinas, it is the Eucharist as the visible sacrament of Christ?s mystical body that does the gathering. The Church certainly has a crucial, even necessary, co-operative agency in liturgical acts of consecration, but most truly, supernaturally, and mystically, ?the Eucharist constitutes the Church.? The Eucharist is the ?source and summit? of Catholic Christian life, it is what gathers up all the fragments of truth, hope, and life into the mystical unity of Christ?s Body, the Catholic One. In the words of the encyclical Veritatis Splendor , ?The presence of Christ to men of every time is actualized in his Body, which is the Church.? [iii] That is a highly particularized and concrete embodiment of Christ gathering up the whole human race in the Eucharist. No other gathering practice, no other ?religion,? whether it is liberal democracy, the global economy, or any other theopolitical vision of the whole?so the red-blooded claim goes?is as comprehensive as this Eucharistic gathering in the teaching of the Catholic Church. Against the backdrop of modern individualism, de Lubac stressed the social nature of Christ?s Body in the sacrament of Eucharist, and ?the corporate destiny of mankind.? The human race itself depends on the mystical body of Christ assembled in the Eucharist, extended through time so that the world might mature into redemption. The Eucharist that constitutes the Church enables fugitives from grace to become pilgrims of the promise in the fullness of time.
The classical view that time is cyclical, eternally recurrent, endless, is ruptured by the climactic view of time revealed in Christ. But the rupture is actually an opening for history to be charged with significance as the history of God?s redemption, pulling humanity towards it true end in Christ. Time is now a gift given to grow a pilgrim people. The Eucharist, and all the sacraments, likewise, cultivates our openness to the gifts of the Spirit needed for this growth in the Body of Christ. This can be seen especially in the Pauline theme of the Christian ?body politics? growing to maturity [e.g. Ephesians 4.15] and which I have said is a helpful theme for understanding Ford as well. This bodily growth in time is not the ?myth of progress,? for that is but a corruption of the good, plain to see in the American notion of itself as a ?redeemer nation.? No, Christian time suggests a particular kind of ecclesial growth. Perhaps not unlike Hubble?s theory of an ?expanding universe,? the Christian view of time also suggests ?the Church is a growing body, a building, in course of construction.? (123) But if we like the organic metaphors of growth, some may wrestle uncomfortably with an exclusive ecclesiocentric soteriology, as it immediately raises questions about ?unbelievers? at the very moment it claims comprehensiveness. Two lengthy quotations from Catholicism help to explicate and illumine a point that de Lubac often tries to make concerning the place of ?unbelievers? in the providential ordo saltutis .
As ?unbelievers? are, in the design of providence, indispensable for building the Body of Christ, they must in their own way profit from their vital connexion (sic) with this same Body. By an extension of the dogma of the communion of saints, it seems right to think that though they themselves are not in the normal way of salvation, they will be able nevertheless to obtain this salvation by virtue of those mysterious bonds which unite them to the faithful. In short, they can be saved because they are an integral part of that humanity which is to be saved. (125)
Far from using catholicity as a weapon against the unbeliever, de Lubac?s view suggests that ?vital connections? between the Body of Christ and ?unbelievers? must be beneficial to the building up of the Church. If this is going to be a truly historical claim, then certain institutions will be necessary for the connections to be sustainable, and for new imaginative possibilities to be envisioned.
One more lengthy passage from Catholicism suggests that it is not only beneficial but also the very grace and charism of Catholic Christians to co-operate in the history and politics of God?s redemption of the world, perhaps especially where we can make ?vital connections? with those who do not yet fully ?share in this Body.?
The grace of Catholicism was not given to us for ourselves alone, but for those who do not possess it?Fidelity to that grace by which we are members of the Church makes two demands upon us: we must co-operate in the collective salvation of the world by taking part, each in accordance with his own vocation, in the construction of that great building of which we must be at once the workmen and the stones; at the same time we must co-operate, by the impact of our whole Christian life, in the individual salvation of those who remain apparently ?unbelievers.?? (129)
It is not, in other words, by being ?fugitives from the world,? by withdrawing from ?unbelievers,? or ?escaping? in communal solitude from the world (although that may sometimes be needful), but through creative collaborations with ?those who do not possess? catholicity. The suggestion that de Lubac makes is that genuine catholicity requires that we fully co-operate in God?s work of ?bringing redemption to maturity,? by bringing all humanity into contact with the fullness of Christ who is all in all (cf. Ephesians 1:22-23).
Written at about the same time as Catholicism (1938), another early work stands out as central for understanding de Lubac?s theology: Corpus Mysticum, recently translated into English by Sr. Gemma Simmonds, a former student of Ford?s. [iv] We can expect to see a whole new generation of theologians working in English-language theology discover this work for the first time. This was a very influential study when it was first published in French in the years immediately preceding World War II. It was a work that secured de Lubac?s reputation as the premier Catholic historical theologian working in Europe. The book is an historical study of the medieval migrations of the term ?corpus mysticum,? and, more fully than in Catholicism , it is here that we can see a historiography for de Lubac?s catholic vision: the world comprehended as a whole, being gathered up (for judgment and salvation) in the mystical body of Christ. It is also, here, rather than in Catholicism , that we can begin to glimpse the significance of his work for understanding what has gone wrong with the political imagination in the West.
It is well known, of course, that this idea of the mystical body comes from St. Paul who is most fond of organic metaphors for the ekklesia [e.g. Romans 12; 1 Cor. 12; Ephesians 3-5]. The identity of Christ?s Body and the Church raises the whole question that occurs after the Ascension: if Christ has ascended, how is Christ?s Body present in the Church? Can Christ both be at the right hand of the Father and really present in the community of the faithful? The idea of the mystical or spiritual body of Christ is thus distinguished from his historical body that has risen and reigns in heaven. The mystical body of Christ is that assembly which Christ the Head gathers through history, through the scriptures that bear witness to the Word of God, but especially and actually through the Eucharist. The identity claim that is made in the institution of the Lord?s Supper, ?This is my body,? is an utterance that performs the gathering of all humanity into Christ?s Body. A whole sacramental theology ?grows up? to describe the real presence of Christ in the Church, indeed as the Church.
De Lubac notes that in early Christian thought, the presence of Christ?s Body was considered both in terms of Scripture and in terms of the community gathered around the Lord?s Supper, the Eucharist. It was not either/or. Without equating their catholic visions, here we can see something of the way in which David Ford belongs to this early Christian tendency to identify Scripture with Christ?s real presence in the world. The way that Ford performs this, both in his strong commitments to the one holy, catholic and apostolic church, in his founding the Cambridge Inter-Faith Programme, and in his other labors for a university that imagines a global constituency, we can see him participating in a fundamentally catholic vision of Christ?s body present in the world, here through Scripture, there through the Eucharist?his participation in one energizes his participation in the other.
De Lubac is able to trace the subtle shifts that enable the idea of the corpus mysticum to migrate from the complex ways in which the term refers to the nexus of ?Scripture, Eucharist and Church? in the 5th century AD to the way the term is carefully circumscribed to refer only to the Eucharist in the 9th century AD, to the way the term becomes co-terminus with the Church itself in the late medieval period. This last move was a logical extension of the earlier movements which held them altogether because, as noted earlier, ?the Eucharist makes the Church.? ( Corpus Mysticum , 88) Or, as he notes in Catholicism , ?The Church, without being exactly co-extensive with the mystical Body, is not adequately distinct from it.? (41) There is nothing problematic about these extensions, these theopolitical migrations, except perhaps in retrospect, wherever we can see the movements as transgressions , deteriorations of true catholicity. In this, de Lubac helps us to be vigilant about false expressions of catholicity.
Corpus Mysticum , as a term, moves from a highly-particularized Eucharistic realism to a naturalizing of the very notion of Society stripped of all its original history and theopolitical vision, yet maintaining its value for providing a mystical sense of unity. It is the ?condition for the possibility? of a de- theologized society that nevertheless retains its religious quality of mystical unity. It is no surprise then that it gives birth to Leviathan, an artificial body whose mystical unity can only be secured through a ?civil religion? that, as Rousseau recognized at the end of his Social Contract , requires devotion and sacrifice. The mystical unity that makes sense in the Eucharistic realism of the Catholic Church is never more perverted, nor clearly visible, than when nation-states go to war. The process of transferring the gathering power of the corpus mysticum from the Eucharist to the Church to Society to the Nation-State is a process aided as much or more by Machiavelli?s de-theologizing of politics as by Luther?s de-politicizing of theology. It is a process that makes it possible to have a universal vision of society without the particular-universal of Jesus Christ. Because Church can become distorted when seen as co-terminus with Society, what begins to emerge is a universal that is both less and more comprehensive that the Eucharist. The tragedy is that the migrations of the term to the society, and then the invention of centripetal politics in the modern nation-state, correspond to the practice of violence on an ever-increasing scale.
Liberalism, Anti-Liberalism, and Catholicity
Interestingly, the unity of Corpus Mysticum is maintained in the Romantic idea of the civil society only by breaking off from the Body of Christ, cutting itself off from not only the Eucharist but Scripture as well. It breaks from unity with God, but it retains all the social power carried in the idea of a mystical union. Stripped of all its ecclesial attributes, the social arrangements secured under liberal orders make ?society? into a secular Church, but one that cannot exist without its exclusionary and coercive instrument, the modern nation-state. John Milbank does indeed owe Henri de Lubac quite a lot on his allied point, and he is right to note de Lubac?s reticence to extend his argument to the political implications. Even if the procedural liberalism of the nation-state seems far from ?withering away,? it does seem that the power of the nation-state has been transferred or perhaps extended to other corporate agents in the global economy. And it is something to consider that at precisely the point at which nation-state power seems in decline (according to mainstream political scientists), or at least in transition, political liberalism seems to be likewise, deteriorating under critiques from left, right and center in ways that suggest that new political visions of the common good are sorely needed. Perhaps theopolitical vision is the most needful of all. It is telling, for example, that even defenses of political liberalism, for example in debates that have raged around the thought of Habermas and Rawls, always fall down badly on the question of theology and religion.
But it might give us pause that de Lubac never followed through on the political implications of his work. Was this because he believed that peculiar form of modernity called liberalism to be a good thing? De Lubac was highly critical of liberalism, though his was a critique of the Church before it was a critique of the ?world.? De Lubac was even concerned, years after the publication of Corpus Mysticum that people might draw the wrong conclusions from it; he worried that it encouraged some sort of fortress mentality, a ?Veterist? retreat into medieval life. Far from it! Like Maurice Blondel before him, he saw the political Catholicism of L?Action Français to be a failure of the integrative, catholic imagination. And yet, despite his vision for a way beyond the Modernist-Veterist controversies, he did not go very far to help us with the political implications we are to draw from his argument.
The political theorist Sheldon Wolin risked a political interpretation of de Lubac?s argument that has proved both influential and controversial. Wolin has made de Lubac?s narrative do important work in a massive, and persuasive critique of political liberalism. [v] In his eyes, we can see the mystical body idea very clearly shaping political liberalism from the sixteenth century onwards. Liberalism tries to speak to all, and attempts to embrace all. In this sense, liberalism aims at catholicity that is ostensibly centered in the individual, but a particular conception of the individual that, in the name of freedom, conforms to the economic interest of the community. In Wolin?s critique, liberalism aspires to provide a kind of mystical unity for society, whether through the instrument of the nation-state or through a certain way of imagining social and political attachments through the global economy. The myth of inclusiveness is strongest in liberalism here, and yet we know that the political and economic orders that liberalism has thus produced, namely ?democratic? nation-states and free markets, are actually terribly exclusionary and in Wolin?s terms, tending towards the centripetal pull of totalitarian forms of power. If we have our doubts, Wolin might point out the problem of ?stateless persons? as it highlights how central the nation-state is for narrating human identity, or point out the problem of ?border security? in the face of the free movement of people as a window into the inherently exclusionary, even violent, nature of liberalism. Likewise, there are barriers to participation in the global economic community that became apparent when one takes into account where the vast majority of wealth is concentrated and who controls its distribution. Or we may simply observe the fact that a nation calls on the unity of its people, and asks for ?faith in nation,? most emphatically when it needs to go to war. Unlike true catholicity, which embraces people of all races and nations, the catholicity of liberalism is concerned with conformity to the economic interests of those with the greatest concentrations of wealth, and defines political participation solely through market consumption and cyclical voting? all in the name of freedom and democracy.
Wolin provides a superb and provocative analysis that is devastatingly critical of liberalism, and concerned to free our idea of democracy from its false attachment to political liberalism. While his historical arguments are faultless, and his criticisms penetrating, the theoretical speculations may not offer us any way out. And this is a problem with almost all the anti-liberal ways that could be imagined to follow de Lubac. We could, of course, pursue other interpretive options. We could, for example, argue that this ?mystical unity? has been a gift that Christianity has given to the world. It has given the world a cosmic idea of social unity that enables us to aspire to a global community in the first place. That interpretive approach is very much alive in certain quarters, though I expect it will run its course and die. Another approach is to take a neutral position. Perhaps liberalism does inherit from Christianity an errant catholicity, but it can also strip itself of the idea of the corpus mysticum, it can self-correct, and we can continue forward with some chastened version of liberalism. This revisionism is more attractive, but it is filled with the very temptations to control that were so troublesome for Christendom. In my view, it is the anti-liberal interpretation that holds the most power. The power lies in that the anti-liberal critiques identify falsehood, and likewise identify the need for a true vision of the common good. But it is a critical power that may need to become part of a better dialectic if it is to participate more fully in God?s truth.
In medieval dialectical theology ( Sic et Non ), the theological method is to reconcile diversity through careful distinctions. The approach is to both purify thought through complex distinctions, and also integrate it into a more comprehensive vision. One can see a similar pattern in the Church Councils as well; to state anathemas in order to affirm belief worthy of the Gospel was the normative way that the Church dealt with falsehood and truth-telling. One of the risks of being dialectical is that the negations will be carried too far, and the affirmation (the truth-telling) will not be carried far enough. Theological critiques of political liberalism, for example those that might follow Wolin?s impressive arguments, or critiques of theological liberalism, for example those that might follow Karl Barth, may need to pay more attention to the way true catholicity handled anathemas in the past. That is, properly dialectical critiques of liberalism will make judgments that do not finally end in negation. However ruthless they may be in their denials, or how ?purifying? their distinctions may be, beyond liberalism and anti-liberalism (or in de Lubac?s context, between Modernists and Veterists), there is only Catholicism.
De Lubac actually helped the Church to find a way out of the fortress mentality that seemed overly determined by either a rejection or embrace of modernity. He did this by cultivating the ?virtues of openness? that he thought the Church needed and practiced at Vatican II. And he almost always practiced these virtues through a return to Scripture. De Lubac wrote on scriptural interpretation more than any other theological issue that he addressed. This was one of his great contributions to Vatican II, where he had a profound influence not only on Lumen Gentium but also on Dei Verbum . The increased use of scripture in the liturgy after Vatican II is a direct result of his influence. De Lubac asked us to pay attention to the Corpus Mysticum as that whole nexus of Scripture, Eucharist and Church that attaches us to God by inserting us into the Body of Christ. And thus his return to Scripture was at once a return to the Body of Christ, arms outstretched to the world.
The political implications of de Lubac?s work are already in the theology itself: it is only in this ecclesia romana , this particular-universal ?mystical body? politics of redemption, that we are able to see what liberal society is capable of doing, and what it is not capable of doing for humanity as a whole. By being inserted into Christ?s Body in the Eucharist, the Christian has an ecclesial vision of what counts as the common good, and thus can see what ?goes too far? and what does not go far enough. If liberalism seems for some to be an errant or transgressive catholicity, then anti-liberalism will be both too much and too little. It would lack participation in a larger dialectic of theological denial and affirmation; but that, of course, will require real theopolitical vision and cooperation with God?s work of redemption. De Luabc?s way is not to fall into the house of anti-liberalism, critical though he is of liberal individualism, but to draw our attention to the Eucharist as the primary way of seeing and becoming a Christian people.
Participation in the Eucharist is not a one-way trip, a procedure for attaching us to God by inserting us into Christ?s Body but detaching us from the world. What flows from this Eucharistic realism is real power and energy that is anything but quiet and detached. Indeed, Sheldon Wolin himself recognizes that the early Christians revivified Western political thought paradoxically, not by trying to influence the political order, but by attending to their own ecclesial order in which the Eucharist was ?meaningful participation in community.? (Wolin, 87) By attending to their own ecclesial growth as the Body of Christ, Christians unwittingly expanded the Western political imagination with theopolitical vision, seeing the world through Christ?s eyes. Thus theopolitical vision was formed in participating in the Eucharist, for this is the normative way in which Christians receive the gifts of the Spirit, and are shaped into virtuous people. As Thomas Aquinas teaches, the gifts of the Spirit are necessary for our training in the virtues. In the modern period, Christians have forgotten about the virtues and the gifts they receive in the Body. But early Christians were keenly aware that they were being given spiritual gifts that would cultivate the virtues most needful as they sojourned towards the beatific vision of God?s city.
The Gift of Wisdom and the Virtues of Openness
For the Church Fathers and Aquinas, the gift of Wisdom given by the Spirit in the Body of Christ was always paired with the virtue of prudence because, along with charity, prudence was required for the practice of all the virtues. Wisdom was the gift to seek above all others in the Body, because without it one could not discern, make decisions, or act as part of Christ?s Body. Far from modern political definitions of prudence as ?careful deliberation? or ?wise advice,? Christian prudence is both more practical, and more reasonable than liberal political visions have been. In David Ford?s terms, the gift of wisdom and the virtue of prudence are necessary for the whole ?shape of living.?
David Ford seeks God?s wisdom above all. It is a gift of the Spirit in 1 Cor. 12.8 ( logos sophia ) where it is seen to be necessary, according to St. Paul, ?for the common good.? Participating in Christ?s Body, then, is the key to receiving the gifts of the Spirit, including the gift of wisdom. Where the gift of wisdom perfects in us the virtue of prudence, a different politics than we have seen in the deteriorated forms of catholicity that belong to political liberalism becomes possible. Ford has never taken the anti-liberal position. In his gift of ?wise speech,? he has studiously avoided the fated negations of liberalism. Rather he has sought to cultivate the very virtues of openness that defined de Lubac?s approach.
When working most closely with Ford in Cambridge, I often found myself impressed with the man as a thoroughly theological politician. One of his favorite things to do, he often will say, is to gather people together, to connect his diverse friendships in ever-new combinations. This is part way to appreciating Ford?s catholicity as well as his charism of wisdom in the body of Christ. He gathers people, and almost inevitably, gathers them around the Word of God, wherever they are, whoever they are. In my memories of him, his postures are almost always open. Sometimes his hands are thrown up into the air, as with his exultant laughter, in a praise-like movement. Other times it is a vision of him with his arms stretched between people, introducing them to one another, always with some key word or reason (some logos sophia ) as to why they should form a relationship, or seek a common good. When the gathering gestures have had their affect, and people are drawn to his office or some seminar room to study Scripture, then we see a different kind of gesture that is, I think, more fundamental. The vision I have of him before Scripture is much more the contemplative man than the gregarious gatherer. Almost always with a pen in hand, his posture before the sacred text is relaxed but also highly disciplined, intent on knowing the truth and being receptive to the gift of wisdom. It is as if his participation in the Eucharist has trained him to read Scripture with exactly the same reverence. He feasts on the Word. Balthasar?s phrase, ?the adoring act of listening to the Word of God? sums it up nicely. His posture before the Bible is characterized by a serious listening that entails the freedom of obedience, and the expectation that God will reveal Himself. Ford?s open posture reflects that he has been trained in the virtues of openness, especially the virtue of prudence, which he performs with excellence, precisely because he seeks the gifts of the Spirit in the Body of Christ. His passion for the truth, his wise decision-making, and his discernments of good action all flow from the pairing of the gift of wisdom and the virtue of prudence that he has received in the Body of Christ and cultivates in his reading of Scripture.
What makes Ford?s practice so different from de Lubac, of course, is that his stress has not been on the Eucharist as much as it has been on Scripture. That certainly has to do with a Protestant catholicity that envisions opening the Scriptures to all people. But Ford never personally detaches the Scriptures from their rightful place in the nexus of Scripture-Eucharist-Church; he rather sees the Scriptures as an opening for both the performance of the love of God and the love of neighbor. The gift of wisdom and the virtue of prudence are so important for cultivating all the virtues of openness, and we can see that Ford has discerned the way in which people of all races and nations can gather around the Scriptures to envision the common good. As a consequence, Ford provides a different theopolitical vision of what is possible between Jews, Christians and Muslims. This vision might be seen, in de Lubac?s words, as co-operating in God?s work of ?bringing redemption to maturity.?
Finally, it would be unfortunate if Ford?s work were seen to culminate in matters of ?inter-faith.? Just as in the earlier description of de Lubac?s labor as part of theology of mission, we can see all of Ford?s labors as part of a whole theology of Wisdom. To put a finer point on it, it is a Spirit-Christology in which we learn to read the Word of God in a way that helps us hit the target: the Wisdom of God. The sapiential approach has as much to do with hermeneutical skills as it does with the Eucharistic imagination for the ?gathering up of the whole? in communion with God. It is the particular-universal of Jesus Christ, the Wisdom of God that he is after. Ford?s activities are really incomprehensible unless one sees that ?the primal cell? of all his fruitful actions, the seed of his extraordinary endeavors in building up the Body of Christ, flow from a life of praise, from the ?adoring act of listening to the Word of God.? This makes Ford?s theopolitical imagination not only catholic, but also evangelical. And according to St. Paul’s letter to the Philippians, that is, please God, what we shall all be in the end.
ENDNOTES
[i] Hans Urs von Balthasar, My Work in Retrospect (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1993), p. 39.
[ii] Henri de Lubac, Catholicism (Sheed and Ward, 1964).
[iii] Veritatis Splendor , no. 25.
[iv] Henri de Lubac, Corpus Mysticum , trans. Gemma Simmonds (London: SCM, 2006).
[v] Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2004)
October 24, 2013 / / 0 Comments
Peter Ochs,
University of Virginia
Remembering three at the lake…
What a joy to celebrate the 60 th birthday—according to a rabbinic tradition, the birthday of wisdom—of David Ford, the theologian who holds the promise and the company of a whole generation of scriptural reasoners in his broad embrace. And what a joy to celebrate by reading this feast of writings by David?s students. According to an oft-cited rabbinic midrash, the students of sages increase peace in the world; through their study of God [?s word], they gain the wisdom of discernment [and such wisdom is a path of peace, for ?there is great peace for those who love your Torah? (Ps. 119:165).]
And all of your children will be taught by God; and great shall be the peace of your children. [Isaiah 54:13]
Rabbi Elazar said in the name of Rabbi Haninah: Disciples of the Sages increase peace in the world, as it is written: And all of your children ( banayikh ) will be taught by God; and great shall be the peace of your children ( banayikh ). Do not read the second appearance of the word banayikh as ?children,? but rather as bonayikh — those who possess wisdom and understanding. [Berakhot 64a]
So here, in this Festschrift is, at once, a many layered study of Christian wisdom by leading theologians of this generation, a celebration of a sage teacher of Christian wisdom, and a gathering of student-scholars who, in their performance of Christian scriptural reasoning, enact, prove, and extend the wisdom of their teacher and, therefore, spread peace in the world!
In this Coda to the Festschrift, a Jewish colleague and friend of David?s celebrates the friend by celebrating the words of these students: drawing from their words a portrait of the many faces of God?s presence that light up David?s work and, in that light, attract so many to His peace.
Introduction: The Face of Facings
One of the characteristic marks of David?s theology is that each decade or half-decade of his writings is marked by a different centering trope that refracts as if through a single prism the whole light of God?s glory or name ( kavod ). To use one of these tropes, we might call each one a ?facing?: a way that the One makes itself known to the many, a patterning whose character declares, at once, that it is of the One and that it is but one of an indefinite multitude of such patternings. We might call this a mark of David?s ? facial realism,? since each facing is not merely an appearance (or ?glow,? Schein in Hegel?s usage) , but a direct appearing ( Erscheinung ) of what it signifies. It is far, however, from any direct or naïve realism, since each face also reminds us of the superabundance of facings not this moment seen. In these terms, we may delight in this Festschrift as a feast of such facings. In both different and overlapping ways, the essays celebrate a definitive array of David?s central tropes: examine them, turn them over and then inter-relate, reframe (sometimes rename), and extend them into a discerning group portrait of these facings of David?s theological wisdom.
The following pages offer a sampling of these facings. Mixing metaphors—and trying readers? patience—each sample will be dubbed a ?course,? in memory of multicourse feasts at Cambridge enjoyed as respite from days feasting on scripture and reasoning. Each of the courses will bear a label, naming either one of David?s tropes or new tropes through which David?s students have explored and extended his work. Each course will begin with a text of Tanakh (alias Old Testament) which is then interpreted by some Jewish classic: to draw from the Scriptural text a Jewish spicing that appears to complement the Christian fare. Then the fare: quotes and paraphrases from the essays and comments about how the various authors contribute to a given course. There are ten courses in all. While each is brief, the set of sixteen should suffice to provide readers enough of a tasting to understand why David?s ?cooking? has not only nourished so very many but also inspired and guided them to prepare such meals—and students—of their own.
Setting the Table: the Faces of Wisdom
Seder: the set table. ?Karpas??
If you have enjoyed a Passover Seder, you may have noted that the Haggadah, or telling of the Passover story, includes a literal menu for the meal and that the menu is recited before the story and its accompanying eating begins. The menu is itself a seder , or ?order? of the meal, and the meal is also a seder, or order of communal and familial observance. This Festschrift is, similarly, at once an order of telling (a ?menu?), a telling and a performance of various dimensions of David?s discernments of wisdom, and those dimensions are themselves ways of ordering, telling and performing words of the divine Word. In Rachel Muers? captivating image, the student of God?s Word imbibes the Word as a babe does her mother?s milk. And, she says, Christ both serves this milk and is the milk?and, we may add, proclaims the coming of the milk. This is, then, a feast in which the menu itself is eaten. And what kind is that? For the authors of this Festschrift, it is a feast in which all the discernments of wisdom are present at once, a meal with endless courses: of tasting, dancing, inhabiting, encountering incarnation, theo-politicking, reparatively reasoning, discerning, receiving sacrament, receiving the Word, and scripturally reasoning.
In the language of Tom Greggs? essay, each course of such a feast displays ?the one and the many faces of Christ.? A rabbinic midrash sets Gregg?s account within its Jewish heritage:
?One word God spoke, two words have I heard, for might belongs to God? (Ps. 62:12). One scriptural passage issues as several meanings, but only meaning does not issue from several scriptural passages. In the school of R. Ishmael is it taught: ?[Behold My word is like fire, declare the Lord,] and like a hammer that shatters rock? (Jer. 23:29). Just as a hammer divides into several sparks, so too one scriptural passage issues as several meanings. [ Sifre Deuteronomy ] … So too each and every utterance which issued from the mouth of the Holy One, blessed be He, divided into seventy languages. [B. T. Shabbat 88b]
In Paul Janz?s words, it is an epistemology and theology of ?polyphony and particularity.? In Greggs? words, ?Christ is endowed with many names in Scripture and… we should attend to the plurality of these and their significance.? Each name discloses one of the innumerable epinoiai or ?aspects? of Christ?s identity and each aspect guides a given creature?s life according to its capacity to know and follow Him. As Muers writes of the recipients of Paul?s letter: ?they are being reminded about the multiple embodied relationships through which they receive what they need for their ?growth? and learn to cry out for it.?
In this way, each trope in David?s work celebrates another face of the divine identity and illumines contemporary theology through the prism of its distinctive characteristics. Thus, the one and the many of David?s sapiental pneumatology and the one and many that inform the following feast.
A Feast of Facings
1: The Taste of Wisdom
? Taste and see how good is the Lord….[Psalm 34:9]
? ?Come, eat!? [the words of every Jewish grandmother.] Why quote the somewhat more male written tradition when the oral tradition of mothers celebrate even more directly what this psalm is about—literally feeding each one of us, and in that way glorifying in the creator and in the life of each of His creatures?
For Rachel Muers, the occasion of her teacher?s 60 th birthday is served by a sensuous, playful and spirit-filled reading of 1 Peter 2:2-3:
Like newborn infants, long for the pure, spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow into salvation—if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good.
Muers invites us into a reading that imbibes 1 Peter—and through its verses scripture?s word and God?s incarnate Word — as a child would her mother?s milk. Milk is offered as sustenance, in answer to her cries; which is also sustenance delivered by this mother?s breast, one?s flesh to another; and delivered with a mother?s cry of Joy. Milk as the Word that flows in response to humanity?s cries; delivered by way of an Other?s flesh to humanity?s flesh, and delivered with a cry of worldly agony that rises to a cry of cosmic joy. She comments, ?As I read this text, I find that the milk metaphor is hard to contain. It refuses to keep its distance from the realities it is being used to describe ? because its primary reference is to something universal and unavoidable. All the readers of this letter really were once crying children who needed sustenance.? It is an account of the materiality of Christian hope, of how God?s presence comes not just to be acknowledged or even proclaimed, but to be touched, tasted, and ingested. Thus, the milk of David Ford?s teaching, as Muers cites him, ?Desire is… the embracing mood of a life immersed in history and oriented towards the fulfillment of God?s purposes.?
2: Play, Dance and Sing: a feast is after all jubilation
? Halleluhu b?tsiltsile truah, ?Praise Him with resounding cymbals? (Ps. 150:5)
? Lord our God, may there always be heard in the cities of Judah and the streets of Jerusalem voices of joy and gladness, voices of bride and groom… the voices of young people feasting and singing? [from The Seven Blessings ( Sheva Berachot ) for a Wedding Meal]
For Rachel Muers, the time of receiving and giving the word is a time of play as well as feasting. Consistent with the spirit of rabbinic midrash, she offers her exegesis of 1 Peter as ?a brief play.? With David Ford, however, she notes the play is also serious theological work—even as that work is also play:
David Ford has never been prepared to compromise on the seriousness of the theological task, and its significance for what he describes as ?the world?s great challenges?; but he also takes seriously the playfulness of theology, a consequence of its orientation towards God for God?s own sake and ?for naught? else. Wisdom, we hear (on at least one possible translation of the relevant text) is in the presence of God at the establishment of the heavens and the earth, playing like a little child (Prov. 8:30-1).
This play shows itself, for one, as sporting or as what Paul Janz calls the play of ?contingency.? In David?s work, this is ?wisdom which is … presented as offering the promise of holding together both heterogeneity and commonality, both deep particularity and genuinely principled responsibility, both the fierce vigil of contingency? and the hope of ?congruence? ( Long Rumour of Wisdom ). This is the recognition that human life is experienced within ?particularities and polyphonies? that gainsay any effort to pre-judge, predict and legislate all that we shall know and do. Play is that life in the spirit that knows that knowing follows waiting and seeing and following.
Play also means opening up the universe of possibility and imagination . In his study of ?Theology on the Road to Damascus,? Ben Quash therefore bemoans that kind of positivist biblical scholarship that leaves ?not much space for play … ; for the imaginative developments of biblical metaphors for new situations; for thinking with and out of the Bible; for adapting features of the Bible-city to one?s own needs. There is only the application of texts.? For Muers, such play ?is also joy? ?the abandon, joy on earth—the capacity of matter to act like spirit. This is, finally, to engage in a given action for its own sake : l?shma in Hebrew, or literally, ?for its name.?
3: Inhabiting God
? How lovely is Your dwelling place,
O Lord of hosts!
My soul longs, yes, faints for the courts of the Lord;
my heart and flesh sing for joy to the living God. (Ps. 84:1-2)
? The master key is the broken heart. When one truthfully breaks the heart open to God, then one can enter into all the gates of the apartments of the Holy Blessed One. (Baal Shem Tov)
The rhythm of the thing is that drinking, sporting, and enjoying the word means living, enacting, inhabiting it. It is what one is tempted to call David?s incarnational pneumatology . That is, perhaps, too much to claim, but us see how close any of David?s students come to conceiving of his project that way. ?Inhabiting God? is the defining trope in Ben Quash?s essay, ?Theology on the Road to Damascus,? and Quash?s focus is, indeed, on embodiment and the Spirit. He focuses, foremost, on Norman Adams? painting of Paul?s encounter on the road to Damascus, but first, on Paul?s Letter to the Romans:
22 For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. 23 And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies.
Quash?s study of the painting introduces tropes that we will consider later (Scriptural word, suffering, repair), but for now we may note his treatment of spirit and habitation. On one level, what is inhabited is Scripture, as noted in these words of David Ford?s that Quash cites in conclusion:
Will [we] really inhabit scripture […]? Will our language have something of the intensity and vitality of the Bible? Above all, will we find in scripture the authoritative exposure of the deepest reality of our world, and in God and the blessing of God the deepest truth of our history and of ourselves? [Spoken at the Lambeth Conference, 1998]
The habitation in question appears Christological, rather than pneumatological: it is the Word that is inhabited. As Quash reads it, however, David?s effort at Lambeth was to nurture practices of reading that open what members of the Communion too often take to be Scripture?s finite borders: releasing a Spirit that is also there with the Word so that meaning overflows, melting over-determined accounts of the identity of Christ and of the paths taken to follow Him. In this light, ?Play, Dance, and Song? bring Spirit to body and movement to Word, so that Christianity is reduced neither to spirit nor to body, but that through such rhythms the body (and the body of the word) receives its capacity to move as the spirit.
For Quash—adopting a vision of Luke Timothy Johnson?s — the Scripture we inhabit is like a house or building or, better, like ?a city of buildings.? That is, I take it, the city we visit is already inhabited, so that its words are not directly transparent, but carry their own human-filled histories. But hospitality is offered and we may bit by bit find our own places in these buildings, bringing our own histories to them, even over time finding that room has been made for us, specifically. Or perhaps we learn to make room as well, since David?s writing and Quash?s reading release ?the unsettling energy of the biblical material.? I take this to mean that this Word-home is also of the Spirit, a home that moves.
4: Incarnation: the incarnate word and incarnate spirit:
? Therefore the children of Israel shall keep the Sabbath, to observe the Sabbath throughout their generations as a perpetual covenant. It is a sign between Me and the children of Israel forever; for in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, and on the seventh day He rested and was refreshed? (Exodus 31:16?17).
? The Sabbath is a synonym for the Shekhinah , for the presence of God in the world ( Zohar , III, 257a)
Our three previous ?courses? lead from tasting and enjoying to inhabiting the divine Word or perhaps Word and Spirit. For this Jewish reader, the movement sounds incarnational, and I mean this in strictly Jewish terms. Read as it presents itself, the plain sense of Tanakh is replete with images of the embodied God. Rabbinic midrash adds even more vivid accounts that hint, for some readers, at what appears explicitly only in the Kabbalah: that anthropos may be literally the divine image and that Torah may disclose paths of movement from image to what we might dub ?face of the source.? But all the immanence one needs is available, in the most overt Judaism, through the weekly practice of Shabbat : life now, as the sages put in, in the end of time.
Incarnation is a strong trope for David?s students. Tom Greggs? ?Many names of Christ in wisdom? captures what we might call the pneumatological breadth of the incarnation in David?s work: that his work is Christ-centered—as displayed in the dominant tropes of both ?face? and ?(scriptural) word—and that the identity and name of Christ is Spirit-filled so that it appears no single way but in this name, and this, and this…. In Greggs?s words,
It should perhaps be of little surprise to us, therefore, that Christ is endowed with many names in Scripture, and that we should attend to the plurality of these and their significance. However, so often theologians are selective of only a few of Christ?s titles which become the norm for all of the others.
Greggs suggests that this wisdom is displayed in the writings of both David Ford and Origen:
If Ford?s concerns are to present the face of Jesus Christ as the foundation for face to face, person to person relationships of which humans cannot have a total overview, Origen?s concern is to present the names of Christ as the foundation for a superabundant number of interpersonal relations with the Son of which humans cannot have a total overview.
And, like David?s, Origen?s more vivid treatment of Christ?s identities appears in his readings of John?s Gospel.
For Greggs, there are three most significant features of Origen?s treatment. (i) The epinoiai , or ?aspects? of Christ?s identity and name, each of which displays a particular character of His relations to humans and to the world (his economic functions). (ii) That each aspect and name is displayed in relation to each creature?s capacity to know and follow Him, so that:
?We do not … all come to him [Christ] in the same way, but each one ?according to his own proper ability.?? [1] Therefore, Christ is ?named in different ways for the capacity of those believing or the ability of those approving it.? [2] Attention is given to the plurality of Christ?s names in order to allow for the plurality of means by which one might come to and know the Saviour.
(iii) And that,
according to Origen?s interpretation of Prov. 8.22f., Origen sees this plurality of names as an aspect of the highest title of Christ—wisdom. [3] The wisdom of God exists hypostatically and eternally in Origen?s thought; and subsisting in wisdom ?was implicit every capacity and form of creation that was to be.? This is because … ?she was created as a ?beginning of the ways? of God, which means that she contains within herself both the beginnings and causes and species of the whole creation.? [4]
The parallel with David?s work should be clear: as we will restate it in a later course, Christ is both One and many, and to know this (and follow this knowing) is wisdom.
There are complementary observations throughout the Festschrift, and we will mention only a few for the sake of illustration. Paul Janz writes of the two most prominent features of Ford?s ?this worldly attentiveness?: ?(a) an engagement with scripture, and (b) a fundamentally this-worldly attentiveness, even when asking about the wisdom of God.? Put together, these two resonate with Gregg?s characterizations of Origen/Ford on the wisdom of Word and worldly Sprit. Muers? study of 1 Peter is thickly incarnational, but with that pneumatological face that appears to undercut any over-determined reading of Christ?s identities. Of significance here are here images of what we might call ?incarnate milk and breast,? tropes perhaps for the embodied spirit and of what she and David call ?desire?: that our desire for God and God?s desire for us are actual dimensions of incarnation. For Chad Pecknold, David?s Johanine attention to the divine pleroma is matched by his more clearly Christocentric attention to the divine panta : that is, the all :
Ford has especially taught us that ?facing Jesus? in every aspect of his experience of being human is central if we are to understand both the inter-personal, social, political and cosmic significance of the atonement. Rather than enter the pleroma of God through some esoteric knowledge (Ford is thoroughly anti-Gnostic) we enter through the public face of Jesus: a face that we know through narrative, through icon, through sacrament, through authority, through nature, through praise in the Spirit. We enter the pleroma of God by growing up before the Father, living into the abundant life of the Son.
For Jason Lam, finally, the challenge of a Christian-Buddhist encounter in China is to locate a non-exclusivist doctrine of incarnation. The result appears to approach the unification of Word and Spirit we discussed in a previous course. Lam draws us through a series of reasonings that test the degree to which Christology and pneumatology can interpenetrate and thereby lend doctrines of the incarnation features of the Spirit?s indeterminacy. Consider—by way of illustration — the text of Luke 4:18 citing Isaiah 61:1-2: ?The Spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me, Because the LORD has anointed me To bring good news to the afflicted; He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, To proclaim liberty to captives And freedom to prisoners.? This teaches, says Lam, that ?Jesus is also depicted as the one inspired by the Spirit apart from the incarnation account.? Since, however, Paul?s writings lack such an account, it is therefore ?easy to find direct correspondence between Christ and logos or wisdom? in the New Testament and early Church, but His relationship with the Spirit is somehow ?not identical.? If they are non-identical, Lam reasons, then Christ will lack the indeterminate identity Buddhism requires. Lam seeks a solution through doctrines of the ascension. If incarnation renders logos determinate, will ascension reintroduce indeterminacy? Lam reasons that resurrection enabled ?the sending of the Spirit,? which is then shared, after Pentecost, with all those present. It is the Spirit that resurrects Christ and transforms ?the incarnated/inspired and resurrected Jesus into the Lord of the Spirit. Therefore the divine wisdom/logos is still present after ascension through the cooperation with the Spirit.? Therefore Lam leaves us with a closing hint that the cooperative spirit that marks David Ford?s work is a sign of this co-presence: Logos without exclusion.
5: Theo-Politics: ecclesial and global
? Through wisdom is a house built; and by understanding it is established: And by knowledge shall the chambers be filled with all precious and pleasant riches. (Prov. 24:3-4)
? R. Shimon says there are three crowns: the crown of Torah and the crown of priesthood and the crown of civil rule and the crown of a good name rises above them all. ( Pirke Avot 4:17)
Rare in any generation, all the more so in modern times, David?s theological practice is at once thoroughly ecclesial and academic and theo-political. In my heritage, this was a mark more of those few medieval and early modern Jewish scholars who somehow lived as well as religious leaders within the Jewish community and political figures in relation to the host nations. One and many, pleroma and panta, logos and spirit: even a third of the way through this Festschrift one senses that the authors are celebrating someone who inhabits the interstices or in-betweens of a world too vast to permit such habitation. The point is not to try to keep up—the idea is exhausting—but to contemplate what lesson is to be learned about how the centre holds. If the lesson can be measured by what appears most often in most of the essays then it may have to do with something we might dub ?theo-political feasting.? Let us imagine that this means: (a) you cannot just think or just pray without also getting involved (to be sure, within the economy of some division of labor) with how there comes to be a building to think or pray in, a polity to have buildings in, and many kinds of neighbor to have your polity with or next to or far from; and (b) if you didn?t pray as well as think you would soon lose your way in all these involvements. Here the ?all? and the ought belong to ?a?, the condition for your being given to what beloved Daniel Hardy z?l called the extensity of the world; the mercy, shelter, and life belong to ?b?, the condition for your being given to what he called its intensity. Put together, ?a+b? are political (since ?a? is explicitly so, and since ?b? presupposes ?a? as much as mind and spirit presuppose body) and theological (since ?b? is explicitly so and since ?a? depends on ?b? as much as creature depends on Creator—even if the reason is not self-evident) and they involve feasting (since ?a? makes you very hungry and ?b? makes you want to celebrate).
For Chad Pecknold, David?s ?extensity?—his reaching to the all—is a mark of his (Anglican) catholicity. And, as we might expect, it is also a mark of the political reach of his theology—reaching to the world outside. As Pecknold suggests, this aspect of David?s reach has parallels in the work of de Lubac, for whom
The sacraments are an opening, and cultivate our openness to the gifts of the Spirit needed for this growth in the Body of Christ. This can be seen especially in the Pauline theme of the Christian ?body politics? growing to maturity [e.g. Ephesians 4.15] and which I have said is a helpful theme for understanding Ford as well.
This citation is doubly helpful for our theme, since it characterizes both the movement ?outward,? from sacramental intensity (?b?) to ?body politics? (?a,? both ecclesial, I assume, and of the world) and the movement back in (?a to b?): ?…?bringing redemption to maturity,? by bringing all humanity into contact with the fullness of Christ who is all in all? (cf. Ephesians 1:22-23).
Ben Quash attends in particular to David?s practice of ecclesial politics: efforts at primates? meetings, such as Lambeth 1998 and later, to call a divided ecclesial body to the reparative word of Scripture. As Quash narrates, this dimension of Ford?s theopolitics is strictly reparative: not a politics of building from out of the stuff of the world but a politics of healing and caring for what is already in the world out of the movement of Spirit and the sacrament of Word. Such a politics begins by attending to contexts of division and suffering, bringing to them context-appropriate practices of reading and of fellowship. In this case, Quash recalls that it was
a conference riven with bitter disputes and politicking … where the theological debate, to quote Rowan Williams, ?so readily polarise[d] between one or another variety of positivism (biblically fundamentalist, ecclesiastically authoritarian, or whatever) and a liberalism without critical or self-critical edge?, his wise inhabiting of the Bible with a mind alert to the demands of history and ethnography was a timely and gracious gift.
Ford?s method ?was to relativise the terms of immediate debates in Anglicanism by eschewing any direct engagement with their detail. Instead, he used a deep meditation on the Bible, born out of months and months of regular scriptural study with our small group in Cambridge in the run up to the Conference.? ?Bracketing detail and focussing on God and fellowship and text, [he let] the Spirit work.?
6: The Cry of Suffering and the Face of Reparative Reasoning
? One day, Rabbi Johanan ben Mathia said to his son: Go hire some workers. The son included food among the conditions. When he came back, the father said: My son, even if you prepared a meal for them equal to one King Solomon served, you would not have fulfilled your obligation toward them, for the are the descendents of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. (TB Bava Metsia 83a)
? Here are some indications as to the extent of the other man?s right: it is practically an infinite right. (Emmanuel Levinas, ?Judaism and Revolution?)
Ben Quash?s account of David?s reparative politics already introduces our next course: David?s reparative reasoning. Norman Adams? painting introduces the relevant tropes: the face of Paul in agony and ?the radiant heavenly face [of a risen Christ,] emerging in blues and golds, with flowers for eyes, weeping with compassion.? Here the reparative word of Christ becomes scripture through its healing performance. Jason Lam offers a complementary trope: the self-negating cross that rends the incarnate Word with the indeterminacy of Spirit. For Lam, this is at the same time, the performance of Christian wisdom as reparative practice:
Only if we are crucified with Christ, then may he lives in us through the Spirit (Gal. 2:19-20). Self-negation becomes the final word and key of recognizing the presence of Christian wisdom.
But the main serving of this course is Susannah Ticciati?s essay as a whole, ?Paul as Reparative Reasoner: Group Rivalry in Galatia.?
For Ticciati as for Quash (and Muers and Higton), scriptural reading is a performance, at once, of repairing some divided practice of reading (reading the revealed word) and, by way of that, of repairing some divided practice of living ( embodying the created word).In this case, the illustrative text is Galatians , and the reading is divided between two rival methods of academic scriptural reading: historicist and universalist. At the same time, Ticciati?s Galatians is itself a reparative reasoning: Paul?s bringing Christ?s Word as means of healing the human rivalries that tear the Galatian community into two, between Gentile and Jew. The way Ticciati resolves each binary introduces a sub-course of Reparative Reasoning, which we will label:
6b) Reparative reasoning from 2 to 1 or 2 to 2-in-1.
For Ticciati, each binary pair is marked by futile efforts for supremacy by each member of the pair over the other: Jewish versus Gentile, law versus faith, historicist versus universalist. And in each case she argues that Paul?s reparative response renders the two into complementary parts of a one, by transforming self-assertive opposition into cooperation. Ticciati?s most general move is to recommend reparative reasoning itself as an alternative to either of the two reductive reading practices: historicist or universalist. She then suggests reading Paul?s own practice as reparative reasoning, so that his response to the Galatians is not to promote either rival, but to recommend removing what divides Jew and Gentile. For the historicist scholar Esler, the division is caused by ethnic parochialisms endemic to the region, which, within the more specific context of religious community, generate corresponding conflicts of religious identity: which community better fulfils the promise of Abraham? Paul?s removing the division means subverting the principle of rivalry itself: replacing ethnic competition with peaceful difference, the conflict of law and grace with the reappropriation of law as scripture, and competing claims to Abraham with the discovery of Abraham?s ?excessive identity?: that is, of its power to yield identity without exclusivity.
Mike Higton?s study of Psalm 1 is a conversation partner to Ticciati?s study of Galatians. We have two scriptural readings and reasonings: one of a NT portrayal of conflict in a Christian community between Gentiles and Jews, the other of an NT song of distinctions between the lives of the righteous and the sinner; one examining how the (NT) text resolves its conflict (replacing the way of conflict with a way for peace), the other examining how the (OT) text discerns its distinctions; one asking how the text would be read by opposing schools of contemporary scholars, the other asking how it would be received in mutually exclusive ways by ancient Christian and Jewish exegetes; one drawing from the (NT) text itself a third (Christian) way of reading to replace the two conflicting schools, the other introducing another (Christian SR) way of reading that preserves differences between Christian and Jewish exegeses but in non-mutually exclusive ways.
This remarkable dialogue of essays performs on numerous levels the model of conversation that all festschrift authors learn from and celebrate in David Ford. For this ?sub-course? of our feast, the defining conversation is between the two essays themselves and the two models they offer of how to resolve conflicting readings. For Ticciati, Paul brings a Word (1) in light of which a path of peace internal to the text (that transforms a conflictual 2 into a non-conflictual 2-in-1) may be applied to replace the conflict of historicist/universalist exegeses (2) with a single peaceful way of reading the text (Christian SR). For Higton, Christ?s Word offers a path of exegesis (SR) that replaces supersessionist Christian reading (1 in place of 2) with a Christian exegesis that differs from but does not replace a potential Jewish exegesis of the same text (leaving a different but non-conflictual 2-in-1). Do Ticciati and Higton not offer two different ways of practicing SR? For Higton, Psalm 1 generates irrepressibly different sub-traditions of reading whose polyphony is good but irresolvable. For Ticciati, Galatians recommends a unified practice of reading that preserves human differences while resolving hermeneutical difference. Generalized, Higton?s practice in this particular reading would appear to leave us with (at least) two non-universal communities of reading that could enjoy conversation but without exegetical agreement. Generalized, Ticciati?s practice in this particular reading would appear to leave us with a potentially single and universal community of reading in which human persons could enjoy conversation within the context of exegetical agreement. For Higton, communal differences may display the marks of different paths of religious law. For Ticciati, the replacement of law with hermeneutics may lesson communal difference and may tend to replace it with differences among individuals. One may say that Ticciati muses on how each 2 may share in the 1, while Higton muses on how each differs from each other but in indeterminate ways.
If the essays of Higton and Ticciati may, in this way, represent a conversation within Christian SR, then perhaps the essays of Pecknold and Lam represent another such conversation. For Lam, Buddhism and Christianity retain unresolved hermeneutical (and epistemological) differences that would leave a potentially Buddhist Christian with unresolved inner religious conflicts. At the same time, Lam perceives the pneumatological conditions for a potential resolution: cooperation between Logos and Spirit, so that the incarnation is (or would be) as many as it is one. One might call this a hermeneutic of waiting for the (fulfilled) ascension. Pecknold?s concern, on the other hand, is that Christian scriptural reasoners may, in the name of Christ?s self-negation, neglect the unity of the body of Christ, so that the All may be occluded by the many. Reading Lam/Pecknold in light of Ticciati/Higton, we may have before us a feast of four different practices of SR. Examined from different perspectives, for example, the essays would appear to overlap in 4 different ways, where the essays of Ticciati and Pecknold share a relatively greater hope for the all; those of Higton and Pecknold share a greater trust in Christology; those of Ticciati and Lam a greater trust in pneumatology; and those of Higton and Lam share a greater sense of hermeneutical indeterminacy. In these terms, finally, the essays by Muers and Quash seem to share yet a fifth approach to both scriptural reasoning and Trinity. We might say that, in both their essays, the Thirdness of relation is realized pneumatologically but without over-determining Christ?s identity. Like Ticciati?s, the essays by Muers and Quash seeks ways of replacing the dialectic of extrinsicist (or universalist and positivist) and historicist (or experiential) scholarship with an irenic, embodied, and integrated practice of reading and reasoning. Can this practice, however, be extended to the all, that is, are there ways of clarifying its principles? Or does it assume different, regional forms, each specific to a community of practice? The essays hint at different answers. Meanwhile, these doubled and re-doubled conversations pay fitting homage to David?s conversational example.
7: Wisdom as the Virtue of Discerning Judgment
? For learning wisdom and discipline,
For understanding words of discernment…. (Prov. 1:2)
? Hillel said: The more Torah the more life, the more schooling the more wisdom; the more counsel the more understanding; the more righteousness the more peace. ( Pirke Avot 1:8)
Paul Janz?s ? Cantus Firmus : Wisdom, Reason and ?Love?s Congruence?? offers the Festschrift?s most comprehensive treatment of Wisdom as a virtue: what Janz calls the virtue of ?discerning judgment.? The essay also best serves the philosophic side of David?s work, extended here into a general account of the difference between rationalized models of wisdom and what Janz considers true representatives of David?s wisdom pneumatology. One may add that Janz associates David with a distinctly Reformational epistemology, sharply distinguished in Janz?s terms from an Aristotelian-Thomistic account of prudential reasoning. The result is not fideism, skepticism, or apophasis, but an account of knowing that is appropriate to scriptural reasoning. Here, knowing is marked at once by ?commonality and contingency,? ?polyphony and particularity,? ?plurality and pneumatology,? ?an engagement with scripture and a fundamental this-worldliness.? The doctrinal ground for these juxtapositions is Janz?s account of an incarnate logos that—in the various ways we have seen through these courses ?remains inseparable from the movement of Spirit. The philosophic ground is his distinction between the criteria of unity and of distinctness: unity as the condition of human rationality and the I-think, distinctness as the condition of sapiental discernment—or also, we might add, of the order and ratio of creation, where ?God separated light from darkness.?
Here are three illustrative moves in Janz?s argument. The first is that, for Aristotelian-Thomistic thought, both theoretical and practical reasoning are measured by the criterion of I=I or unity and coherence. This, Janz explains, is synonymous with the criteria of ?excellence,? ?demonstrability,? ?perfection? and of self-reference—whether displayed in the analytic self-reference of formal systems or what we might call the lived coherence of habits, customs and the like. The latter claim is significant, for it means that Janz reads classical virtue theory (and will that mean the theory of ?language-games? as well?) as in this way another form of rationalism. Janz?s second move is to ground judgments of wisdom in moral consciousness or conscience, rather than in practical reasoning, and to identify these as discriminating rather than unifying judgments:
We have no choice therefore but to say that moral consciousness confronts us with the immediacy of something like a law within us. It is a law, moreover, which speaks from within us, never as something unifying, but intrinsically and always as something dividing.
This law, says Janz, is the law of the heart that cries out for discernment, and this is the cry David Ford identifies with the cry of wisdom calling in the streets. [5] Janz?s third move is to claim that, in the languages of both Genesis and Gospel, this law of the heart is shared by sinners and saved alike, for sin is possible only by way of self-legislation and salvation is possible only if the self-legislator lends him or herself to the agency of God?s word. Janz?s fourth move is, with Paul, to identify God?s word with both Mosaic legislation and the incarnate logos, which means that ?the ?law of sin and death? … is not, as it is sometimes treated, the Mosaic law—which is itself ?holy, righteous and good? (Rom. 7.12)—but rather the moral law within us, by which we have become a law unto ourselves.? It is only by way of the law that we become aware of the sin of self-legislation (Rom 3.20), and for Janz the Word that is Christ is law as much as Mosaic law:
For even ?the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus? is not the annulment of the Mosaic law but its fulfillment, and indeed as this fulfillment, a kind of radicalization of the law, as Matthew 5-7 makes clear.
In this way, Janz?s claim is very close to Higton?s:
I can?t really avoid asking whether Jesus? righteousness, the way of the cross, can be understood as ?delight … in the law of the Lord.? [6] I might find myself led to think of Jesus? claim that not one stroke of a letter will pass from the law until it is all accomplished (Matthew 5:18) …. I might also find myself thinking of Jesus? claim that the whole of the law and the prophets hangs on the command to love God and to love neighbour (Matthew 22:40). In the reading of [Psalm 1] that Jesus provides, or is, the way of righteousness is the way of the cross, the way of the cross is the way of love and justice, and the way of love and justice is the way of obedience to and delight in the law. Once again, the Christian reading need not be seen in opposition to the field of possible Jewish readings, but as a particular position within that field
For Janz, delighting in the law in this way is what David calls loving God for God?s sake:
The command to ?love God for God?s sake? declares itself not in the ?likeness of a supernatural perfection?, which must always be in the remoteness of a distant ideal, but rather in the nearness that is immediate to every human heart—i.e., ?in the likeness of sinful flesh? (Rom 8.3). Or as Deuteronomy also echoes this…: ?this commandment that I am commanding you today is not too hard for you, nor is it too far away. It is not in heaven, that you should say ?who will go up into heaven for us, and get it for us so that we may hear it and observe it?? Neither is it beyond the sea, that you should say ?Who will cross to the other side of the sea for us, and get it for us so that we may hear and observe it?? No, the word is very near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart for you to observe? (Deut. 30. 11-24).
8: Sacrament
? Holy, holy, holy, is the LORD of hosts:
the whole earth is full of his glory. (Isaiah 6:3)
? Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai was once walking with his student Rabbi Yehoshua near Jerusalem after the destruction of the Temple. Rabbi Yehoshua looked at the Temple ruins and said: ?Woe unto us! The place that atoned for the sins of the people Israel through the ritual of animal sacrifice remains in ruins!? Then Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai spoke to him these words of solace: ?Do not grieve, my child. There is another way of gaining atonement even though the Temple is destroyed. We must now gain atonement through acts of kindness (g?milut hasadim), for it is written: Lovingkindness I desire, not sacrifice (Hosea 6:6).?
Chad Pecknold?s essay attends most explicitly to the place of sacrament in David Ford?s practice of Christian wisdom. The model comes from de Lubac:
The Eucharist is the ?source and summit? of Catholic Christian life, it is what gathers up all the fragments of truth, hope, and life into Christ?s Body, the Catholic One. In the words of the encyclical Veritatis Splendor , ?The presence of Christ to men of every time is actualized in his Body, which is the Church? (No. 25).
Pecknold explains that, while David shares this view of sacraments as the means through which the body of Christ is built up,
What makes Ford?s practice so different from de Lubac … is that his stress has not been on the Eucharist but on Scripture. That certainly has to do with a Protestant catholicity that envisions opening the Scriptures to all people. But Ford never detaches the Scriptures from their rightful place in the nexus of Scripture-Eucharist-Church; he rather sees the Scriptures as an opening for both the performance of the love of God and the love of neighbor.
And, in another place:
It is as if his participation in the Eucharist has trained him to read Scripture with exactly the same reverence. He feasts on the Word. Balthasar?s phrase, ?the adoring act of listening to the Word of God? sums it up nicely.
In the terms of our earlier courses on feasting, dancing, and habitation, this is to view sacrament as the means through which individuals come to embody Word and Spirit. We need, however, to clarify what is distinctive to a sacrament of Scripture.
9: Scripture in the Church
? And the Lord spoke to Moses, saying …
? Rabbi Meir taught: Whoever engages in the study of Torah for its own achieves a host of merits; moreoever, it is worth creating the world for that person?s sake alone. This one is called: beloved friend, lover of God, lover of humanity, a joy to God, a joy to humanity. (Pirke Avot vi:1)
For all the authors in this Festschrift, Scripture is the primary sacrament that unites Spirit and Logos in David Ford?s theological, ecclesial, and theopolitical work: the embracing arms of fellowship in he Church and of communion with God?s light and love. For Muers, Scripture is the spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow into salvation—and so that if you have tasted it you know that the Lord is good. It is the gift of the Spirit through whose ingestion God indwells?the stuff of play and the engine of care for other. For Janz, engagement with scripture is the primary medium of David?s sapiental discernment and of David?s movement between the Word?s indwelling spirit and theo-political outreach. For Greggs, it is the primary place where Christ?s many names are disclosed and through each one of the members of Church receive personal guidance in how when and where to follow after Christ. For Higton, it is the irrepressible source of divine instruction, out of which all wisdom may flow and without pre-determined limit, so that
When freed from our control and rediscovered in conversation, the text yields more abundant fruit. It becomes an arena for delighted, multi-voiced, sometimes cacophonous exploration; it becomes more uncontrollable, more surprising, more irrepressible. If it is, as this Psalm 1 suggests, a stream of water, then it is not a slow, calm and silent upwelling from which one may sip in a controllable, predictable way. It is something more like a garden hosepipe in the hands of unruly toddlers.
For Ticciati, it is the stimulus to communal fellowship so that conversation over scripture is the tissue of communal relationship. It is moreover, the doctor?s medicine case, the source of reparative reasoning that mends broken and divided hearts. It is the way that law becomes grace and that finite possession discovers the means of divestment. For Pecknold, Scripture is David?s Sacrament, his means of entry into both conversation and tradition, creative collaboration with souls both past and present. For Lam it is the means through which Word moves like Spirit?and Spirit returns to word?the place where Wisdom is named, its story told, its virtues spoken, and where guidance is offered to meet members of the church where they are. For Quash Scripture is a city of buildings in which the community of believers has lived and it is itself the building where each church member finds domicile now?The place where God is centered on us and where we acquire God centering. It is what David turns to as primary agent of peace and fellowship and repair:
?The Bible is extraordinarily complex and multi-dimensional?, said David in his opening address to the Lambeth Conference. ?How do we take account of dramatic narratives, of prophecies and radical questions, of passionate poetry and visions, of laws, teachings and letters, of cries and longings, of Abraham, Solomon, Ezekiel, Ruth, Job, Mary, Paul, and the angels of the seven churches? Who can do justice to them all??
10: Scriptural Reasoning in the World: Christianity and Abraham
? Make His deeds known among all peoples. (1 Chron. 16:8)
? Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity! (Ps. 133:1)
Most powerfully, one of the many original consequences of this Festschrift is to frame SR indirectly as enactment of the incarnate spirit, or at least of the movement of resolving Christ?s relation to Spirit in the eschaton. In Jason Lam?s words, SR is the means through which members of the Church may do theology and render hospitality to others.
Scriptural reasoning is a way that David Ford brings the peace of God?s light to this world. Bless him.
Openness. Again and again to realign.
Another face and the moves must begin.
Anew. And we unfold into our design.
I want to dance for ever.
(?Dance,? Micheal O?Siadhail)
ENDNOTES
[1] HomGen. 1.7
[2] HomEx. 7.8
[3] He.93f.
[4] De Princ. I.2.2
[5] CW, p. 14.
[6] Augustin, vol.9 (New York: Christian Literature Co., 1898), 236.