blip : Being Lonely In Paradise :

Is there a unity to Scripture? Is there a way to hear one voice—the Word—speak in diversity bound together between the covers? Jason raised this question in his comment on my Psalm 88 post. Yeah, that’s a great question. I think it’s worth saying that it’s a question that takes some work to get to. It takes careful reading of our Scriptures to come to see the problem. It isn’t self-evident to the speed-reader that Ecclesiastes and Job engage in an argument with Proverbs and other ancient wisdom literature. Or that Jeremiah’s vision for Israel’s diasporic future might disagree with Nehemiah or Ezra’s fight to keep Israel centered on Jerusalem. This is not to mention the divergent attitudes toward kingship we find in Chronicles, Kings, and Samuel. Or how about the different voices Martin Luther heard in Romans and James? But it takes work to feel the rough texture of those pages of Scripture. It seems like a unity shouldn’t be self-evident—and if it is, then maybe we need to read longer and harder for the strangeness to emerge.

Rowan Williams makes this point toward the end of his book on Arius, that ‘arch-heretic’ of Athanasius: “Scripture and tradition require to be read in a way that brings out their strangeness, their non-obvious and non-contemporary qualities, in order that they may be read both freshly and truthfully from one generation to another. They need to be made more difficult before we can accurately grasp their simplicities” (Arius, p.236). It takes the wrestling of a contemplative eye to feel the subtle edges emerge, to feel the strangeness and difficulty always there awaiting our engagement. We must feel the difficulty of the text—the roughness at the edge of every jot and tittle, the silences between words and pages, gaps, pauses. Williams draws our mind to the spiritual discipline, the contemplative art, of reading Scripture in ways where we abandon ourselves to the strangeness, and pray for those graceful moments when God makes the difficulties speak the simplicity of the one Word, in all its freshness, vibrant life. This art of reading involves attentiveness to the way the text flows and disrupts itself—the way traces of ink can speak the passion captured in the moment of inscription, that unspeakable love racing between paper and pen, playing in the markings, revealed yet still elusive ; a way of revealing that still hides, offers more… invitations awaiting discovery (see my post on Derrida and careful reading).

Part of what I am trying to say is that our holy Text defies mastery; the way the texts play with near and distant neighbors within the canon refuses our attempts at definitive knowledge. This means that we always come to any particular text with other Scriptural voices echoing in our heads. There is no blank slate of interpretation. We already have a chorus of voices in our heads when we start reading at any point in the Bible. So, we read James’ “faith without works is dead” and can’t help but remember Paul’s words about “dead works.” Or, we read about how Luke portrays the earthly authorities as under Satan’s dominion (e.g. Lk.6:5-7) but remember something we thought we heard Paul say about God establishing civil authorities (Rom.13). How do the voice come together? Is their reconciliation?

Reading the Bible is like walking into a room where a conversation has already been going on for a while. If someone later on asks us what everyone was talking about, we say something, of course. Especially if they were talking about some good news. But as we haphazard a summary of the conversation we realize that there is so much more energy, more wrestling, more arguments, more subtleties, that escape our re-telling. The conversation going on in the holy Text always exceeds our summaries, re-descriptions, systems—the Meaning always eludes mastery. But that’s not to say that the one meaning doesn’t exist. We can’t say that as Christians because we confess Jesus Christ as the Truth (and if you press this, that’s where it gets interesting. Because, Jesus Christ names that first century Jewish Messiah, and somehow the church(es) also make(s) up the identity of the body of this same Christ!) And so we shouldn’t shy away from struggling to communicate a summary. If fact, it’s our vocation to tell other people about the good news we know. That’s what proclamation is all about. The church receives life from our practices of re-telling the stories of Scripture, and preaching the one, true gospel spoken in the divergent lectionary readings on Sunday.

But I think our declarations of the one Truth of Scripture shouldn’t be final. This is to say, our summaries of the one story of Scripture shouldn’t end the conversation. Rather, they should be offered as invitations to mutual discernment. Instead of setting us up above the flux of interpretation, the ever-shifting signification of the Texts, our synthesis should invite vulnerable struggle with another. The way we hear the words of Scripture come together in one message, one word, should be more of a question, offered in a tone that reveals our need for more eyes and ears to help us get a grasp on the Truth. And if our synthesis of the one Word found in the pages of our Scriptures succeeds, if we proclaim the Truth (don’t forget, that means Jesus Christ) in a manner that invites one more person to the table of discernment, then we may find that our charitable struggle to hear the voice of the other (and Other) may help us discover new freshness previously hidden from our gaze. And this freshness, this abundant life of God, that drives us to read the Bible with fervor in hopes of receiving that one Word, that one Truth, that one Meaning, that one unified Text, may surprise us by turning our gaze away from the written word, and up to the Word written in the flesh of the other at the table with you. Yes, the struggle with Scripture may transfigure the person with whom we read the Text and wrestle to find the Meaning. The hard work of reading the Bible together may give us new eyes, a renewed vision more apt to see how this reading may be just the thing I need to illumine my reading companion’s face with the likeness of the Son, the image of the Father, the work of the Spirit.

But this isn’t so radical, or so new. This ain’t that fancy “postmodern” hermeneutics all the cool kids are are doing in literature departments at avant garde universities. It’s just Augustine in a different key. For Augustine bible study is the life-long process where we find ourselves in the other. It is the dance of divine charity, the work of the Holy Spirit moving in our midst to draw us to each other and participate in the Truth—that is, Jesus Christ, who is made available to us in his body, the gathered church wherever she may appear. As Augustine writes,

“How would there be truth in what is said—”For the temple of God is holy, which you are” [I Cor. 3:17]—if God did not give responses from a human temple, but called out all that He wished to be taught to men from Heaven and through angels? For charity itself, which holds men together in a knot of unity, would not have a means of infusing souls and almost mixing them together if men could teach nothing to men” (De Doctrina, prologue 6).

Augustine’s point seems to be that God could have chosen to instruct us in truth through angels, but instead chose to use our brothers and sisters so that we can tangibly taste and see the Son, the living witness of the Father’s love for us. In the church we are invited to vulnerably expose our selves to one another and hope for the touch of the Spirit. We work hard at reading the Bible in order to feel the rough edges emerge, so that the difficulties help us see our interpretive limits. And that process of discovery weakens the grip of pride and turns us to other readers who may (or may not) offer us helpful solutions to the so-called “problem” of the text, the rough edge that disrupted our grasp of the meaning, the synthesis, the unity of the Text. But the solution to the “problem” might not come to us as we first anticipated: It might not be a new formulation, a new handle on the meaning. Rather, Augustine teaches us to hope for textual difficulties because they provide the opportunity to feel the work of divine charity, the work of the Spirit—the God whose desire is to knit us together in a knot of unity.

For Augustine, the way the Word hides himself in the words of Scripture is a means of grace. Isn’t that strange? The strangeness of the text, the way our Scriptures constantly slip through our grip of mastery, is an invitation to the sacrament of the other: to find God in the human images of the Son. Here, it seems, Augustine sorta turns the tables on us; he deepens the question I started with: Is there a unity to Scripture? Instead of escaping from the struggle with Scripture to a well-ordered synthetic system, the question drives us to consider the struggle itself as the point of the Text. For in our practices of listening we invite the work of the Holy Spirit, drawing us into the divine life of love. As Augustine puts it, “when people are affected by us as we speak and we by them as they learn, we dwell each in the other and thus both they, as it were, speak in us what they hear, while we, after a fashion, learn in them what we teach.” Conversation centering in Scripture is the moment of textual unity through which we learn how to “dwell each in the other.” And this conversation is the mission of the church, the practice that discovers the (re)union of all flesh in the new Adam. As Henri de Lubac wrote, “it is the Church’s mission to reveal to men that pristine unity that they have lost, to restore and complete it” (Catholicism, 53).