Surely, Von Balthasar resonates with the love commandment when he says “man exists only in dialogue with his neighbor.” For him, the neighbor reveals God not only indirectly as in Augustine, but also directly, in and of the neighbor’s self as created.
For with his thought of revelation through concretion,
Balthasar incorporates an old Thomistic notion of knowledge being known to the
knower’s capacity. He then inflects it with his own insistence that the
possibility of such knowing depends on the presentation of the known, on the
known as it is for itself.
If we apply this analogously to our interpretations of
Scripture, then we interpret to our capacities and by our natures that which
presents itself to us as itself: the
collection of texts known as the New and Old Testaments of the Christian Bible.
We interpret it authoritatively because
it presents itself to us empathically, through the invocational holism of
symbolic and linguistic imagination.
If Balthasar is at all right about the
mutually-determining relationship between the knower and the known, then it is
as plausible to say that empathy makes authority possible as it is to say the
reverse. How, after all, can I recognize that my experience is like yours if I
cannot first recognize that you yourself are different from me?
Indeed it is the fundamental mysteries of divinity
which express themselves exactly in
ways that we can comprehend. We provide a “limit” or condition of possibility
for them them—not in any absolute sense, of course, but simply because God
desires our understanding.
So already we see a certain mutual dynamic, rather than
opposition, between authority and empathy at work between beings generally and
therefore certainly through human language and then peculiarly in the case of
Christian Scripture. Through the Bible, the loving strangeness of God has both
been revealed and hidden by a bedazzling library of texts.
But this study is not concerned only with relationship
anymore than it is “merely” concerned with reading. It is concerned with
healthy relationship, with the healing of interpretation, and with healthy
reading. So we will end this series of remarks with a final note from
Balthasar, and that is that the known is not fully itself until it is known.
Owing to the
mutual determination of knower and known, the result of the encounter is not
the erosion but rather the expansion of being. The same may well be true of
Scripture. Since Scripture is always interpreted, it seems reasonable to say
that without interpretation, Scripture would not be Scripture.
It would not be revelatory. And the same may well be
true of us. If we are not fully human, not really whole, until we know God, then
without interpretation we are not fully human. Without interpretation, God has
not been revealed, and neither have we.
Understanding Scripture requires hermeneutical empathy,
which is the imaginative inter-action of reader, text, and author alike. That
the object of our understanding is the transcendent depths of God revealed
through groping human words only emphasizes the possibilities of language: its
polyvalance, its imperfect translatability, its semantic shift.
The word of God disclosed in scripture represents
divine revelation: language is what we understand through, and symbolically,
invocationally, it conveys the perceptibility, presence and participation of
the divine. The word of God exceeds its Scriptures to become sacrament for us.
The testimony of Scripture provokes, but does not require, faith as
participatory response.
The goal of
theological interpretation is to arrange this meeting authoritatively. The
purpose of salutary interpretation is to allow the reader to surrender aesthetically
and existentially to the living world of the scriptural text.
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