Page a Day: One Hundred Seven

PART THREE

Chapter Ten

In death,

            My dead lover came to me. She returned not as in life, of course, but as she had been transformed. I have not described her in this book. On the night she died I lay across her body until the Temple guards came and dragged me from her rooms. They left her where she lay. While the city fell, from my Temple prison I saw her wake. In my mind’s eye her skin turned gold, her face flowed like water. The blood that drained from her wrist poured out blue and green. When she stood, her wings unfurled across the room. Her form was tall and lithe and filled with grace. She moved with a purpose both beautiful and dread. She left my rooms and I saw her cross two extra arms behind her back.

            In the rioting streets they uncrossed as scimitars, and she spun and carved a path to me. Her dance was the dance of death, and those who fell never saw her in their midst. She broke the Temple wall with a fist; she parted the bars of my cell as though they were made of wax. She dropped a bundle at my feet, and I saw it contained my dagger and my journals. In a voice of a thousand tongues she told me to rise, and led me from that place. She took me to a Well of the Blood of the Profusion and the memories of ten thousand dead. She waited while they turned white. When that was done, she led me with a dagger in my hand to the Well of Faith’s Healing, where the current Faith had hidden.

            Now she stood over me where I lay in darkness. Her brilliance made me squint as I sat up. Light both white and gold poured out through her skin. She held out a delicate hand, and touched her finger to my forehead.

            “Del...Tanich,” she said, every word a complex song, “it is...time...youmetyour...father.”

            She withdrew her hand, and I tumbled backward into darkness.

These Essays: The Interpretation of Love

He said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and

 with all your soul and with all your mind.” This is the greatest and first commandment.

And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

- Matthew 22:37-38

Whoever, then, thinks that he understand the Holy Scriptures, or any part of them,

but puts such an interpretation upon them as does not tend to build up this twofold

love of God and our neighbor, does not yet understand them as he ought.

- Augustine, On Christian Doctrine

Almost any loving interpretation might pass through On Christian Doctrine. Augustine’s guidance agrees with Scripture itself, wherein Christ’s injunction to love both God and neighbor is already an interpretive guide. Jesus clearly uses his instruction as a way to read Scripture: love is the most important of the laws, the Torah and Talmud of Pharasaic Judaism. More, the double love of God and neighbor in Matthew’s gospel goes one step further: Jesus will himself fulfill the law as love. Jesus becomes the double love of God and neighbor. 

So Christians can interpret the Old Testament in light of the New. Did Jesus fulfill the law and the prophets? If so, what was the nature of this fulfillment? One answer might be that through the fulfillment of God’s love of the world, Christ accomplishes God’s purposes. Christ is the promised Messiah of Israel and all of humankind. 

But to even ask these questions is to begin a kind of reading. Scripture becomes a text that refers to itself. In practical terms, this requires a codex, a book, rather than a scroll. And this, among other things, made early Christians so distinct in the ancient world. Seeking Christ defined Christianity in a very practical way.

Of course the gospels and epistles contain other instances of intertextuality, but the love commandment emphasizes Christ. John’s gospel and epistles identify God with love, and Paul elevates love as the highest Christian virtue. Love can lay a good a claim as any as a rule for interpreting Scripture. If the immediate purpose of Scripture for Christians is to identify the Christ, then its ultimate aim would be to identify that to which Christ points: the loving goodness of the Father, and our human need of it.

This does not meant that Christian love or charity is the only possible theological purpose of Christian Scripture. But building love cannot be an indefensible purpose for interpreting Scripture. Indeed, on the merits of emphatic passages of Scripture as well as its place in Christian tradition, it seems just as arguable as any of those other second-tier criteria. 

An emphasis of the broadest Christian traditions has been that Christians interpret Scripture together. Indeed it may be one of the things that makes Christians Christian. So any rule of interpretation which openly solicits a communal understanding of interpretation has much to say in its own defense. And an interpreter who seeks to love the neighbor would certainly not deny his or her interpretation out of hand, far more so if one’s neighbor is also a brother or sister in Christ diligently seeking to understand the Scriptures.

Such meetings mark the beginnings of the church, as Christians discussed the Scriptures together, or met to hear those interpretations proclaimed. Here begins the traditional appropriation of reading Scripture in worship, and the later Protestant fascination with the Word of God bringing communities together. An Augustinian understanding of the purpose of Scriptural interpretation as the building up of caritas speaks to basic Christian desires toward understanding, community, and transformed life together.  

These Essays: Human Transformation

Christian interpreters of Scripture best understand interpretation when we read Scripture as empathy and authority working together to foster transformation. The work of Hans Ur Von Balthasar seems parallel to this: transcendence which we cannot understand only ever presents itself in concrete terms which we do understand. So knowledge, a gift given us by God, is known only insofar as we can know it. But it is also known only insofar as it is given. We understand when God’s wisdom fits itself to human shape. Such a transaction is both empathetic and participatory. The incarnation, for example, is like us enough to draw us in, but different enough that we will be transformed.

The radical step Von Balthasar takes is to suggest that things are most fully themselves when they are understood or witnessed. This casts an exciting light on what the criterion of salutary force might gesture toward, because it is tied to what we are becoming. Christ most clearly reveals God when upon the cross, not because God is supremely dying or supremely victim, but because it is there that Christ is supremely witnessed. For our part we may say that Scripture, in turn, is both more authoritative and more empathetic when we read it so, and become transformed ourselves.

What, then, are we becoming? When we arrive at the destination Scripture imagines, where will we be? What will our healing finally look like? These are, of course, enormous questions, the answers to any one of which far exceed the scope of a single tome, let alone the aspirations of these essays. But about them, I think, two things may very broadly be said.

First, Jesus Christ of Nazareth imagined our purpose and destination to be the kingdom of God poeticized by the prophets and narrated in his own parables. And second, that Paul in his epistles grants that our best nature and greatest human fulfillment come through participation in Christ’s atoning death and vivifying resurrection. These are, I think, two non-identical and perhaps even non-stable imaginative schemes, between which there may well be varying degrees of tension.

But I believe the wager of Scripture is that they are not incompatible. Rather, they both contribute to the best possible visions of human thriving in light of the reign of God. Because we Christians read, or ought to read, the Bible as a whole, we can only fail by exhausting one by ignoring the other. So in these essays I trust that taking the two together, Kingdom as well as Christ, directs us toward both our deepest human thriving and our highest possible goals.

“Taking things together” shall, as it happens, be my sort of comprehensive theme. Ultimately, the interpretation of Scripture is about the thoroughly, rigorously holistic operation of the human mind, and thence springs its possible healing value—and the salutary force of its interpretive findings. One would not expect such complexity to be contained in one intended meaning anymore than we would expect that just any old interpretation would suffice to heal a soul.

Rather, this study would hope that thoroughly valid Christian interpretations of Scripture would share as a family, as a class, as a limited but lively multitude, a certain quality of excellence, a rigorous healing force of positive transformation. They would not have gained such power only by being technically or factually correct, but they also certainly would not have earned it by being mistaken, or by being flippant.

Instead, if ones takes salutary force as a criterion of interpretive validity, the interpretations which it identifies will have gained their virtue by arranging a meeting. The best encounter a reading of Scripture may produce is that between the Author of the universe and the wounded, faulty misapprehension of a human being, a reader, a listener willing to undergo the voyage of understanding.

One could not expect such a journey to necessarily be painless. But one would also not expect it to be destructive, malicious, or confused. What one might expect instead is that the salutary force of an interpretation, the power of its ability to holistically heal a human psyche, to arrange an encounter between the reality of divinity and the actuality of humanity, would have been most notable for its empowering authority of explication and the empathy of its compassionate understanding—its outstanding interpretive validity.

And this study would hope that if, as Christian interpreters of Scripture we are wrong about whether or not we have been healed, if we are mistaken to think that it has been wise to invite others along our road, if what we have taken to have been positive transformation has in fact been the destruction of our souls, then doubtless we would be so wrong about so many steps in the odyssey of interpretation that all our doings could not have mattered very much in any case. But surely the Word of the God of love, who lives and reigns as the way and truth and life, will have saved us from such error, or not given us such Scriptures in the first place.

These Essays: Salutary Force

          What we Christians need is salutary force. Or at least, that is what I think our interpretations of Scripture need. Salutary means for something to be of benefit. The theologian Karl Barth believed in salutary of doctrine. For example, the doctrine of original sin, he thought, should be used to lead people to Jesus – and for no other purpose, such as driving them to despair. Now I don’t know that our interpretations should lead people directly to Jesus, necessarily. That is not what I’m saying. But I think they should have salutary impact. If we are Christians, our interpretations of Scripture should heal. And, all else being equal, we should prefer those interpretations of Scripture which do heal, which have salutary force.  

         This is not just a kind idea or a gentle thought. For Christians, those interpretations of Scripture which have salutary force are actually better interpretations. Now precisely why this is so will take a great deal of explanation, and that will be the purpose of these essays. But I am not the only person to have thought this. There is currently a resurgence in the therapeutic use of Scripture, which in the old days people just would have called biblical pastoral care. But what is of interest to me is that all of this research tends to do one of three things.

          First, the research focuses on what we might call the authoritative contents of Scripture. The Bible offers wisdom about how to live that people could not get elsewhere. Second, the research may also focuses on the empathetic, linguistic form of Scripture. The Bible was written for us as human beings. And it comes to us in particular ways, though the language of poetry, narrative, letter, and parable, and how we read or hear all of these affects our cognition, empathy, and understanding.

          Finally, the research may combine Biblical form and content working together to foster human transformation. The Bible was written for human beings seeking right relationship with God, and – as the apostle Paul was quite clear – this project requires wholesale change, the new birth of spiritual, mature human beings.   

          Now I myself agree with this last focus. But I do not want in these essays to eschew any of the research I’ve encountered, whether psychological, linguistic, or theological. The purpose of the Bible is obviously going to employ both its form and content. So these essays will focus on the themes of authority, empathy, and transformation in the Bible. And hopefully in the end we will all have a better sense of why an interpretation which follows the salutary content, form and purpose of the Bible is actually going to be superior to those that do not.  

          Perhaps I should conclude with two visions of what such interpretation might look like. The first of them is quite old. It comes from Augustine, one of the church fathers. He says that “so our medicine, Wisdom, was by His assumption of humanity adapted to our wounds, curing some of them by their opposites, some of them by their likes.” So here we have a therapeutic relationship between affinity and opposition—between kingship and kinship, as the ancients might have said, or through authority and empathy, as we might say today. In the Bible that which commands us as human also relates to us as kin.

          The second image actually comes from contemporary psychological therapy. And what is fascinating about modern therapy is that it comes in very many different forms, which nearly all have about the same rate of success in helping clients, no matter what reason or school of thinking lies behind them. Now the scholar Robert C. Roberts has outlined what almost all such therapies have in common: the therapist is considered an expert, the client trusts, the client makes an effort to confront or change the problem, and the therapists recommends altered behavior while conveying a sense of empathy.

          Do you see how this might happen when Christians read Scripture? We trust the text as authority (content) and empathize with the people Scripture imagines (form). In doing so, we come to a new understanding that allows us, through the power of Christ, to “live into” the reality that Scripture imagines (transformation). This is the face of salutary force. Holistic, personal growth through transformation is the healing which salutary force should indicate.