A previous post mentioned the way Tolkien, because of the mythos his poetry is able to access in LoTR, is able to write in a beautifully understated idiom. It allows him casual mention of things that do not have to be elaborated. Words like "tree" have a symbolic resonance in the mythworld that allows a poet merely to mention them and move on, carrying their wider mythological significance in the structure of the poem. A similar kind of beautiful understatement can be found, I think, in the Gaelic tune "Lament of the Three Marys."
The second and fourth line of each of these stanzas contains a lament that is difficult to translate, but means something like "Wail-a-way." It seems, to the best of my knowledge, that the phrase actually capitalizes on the vowel sounds to create wailing words, barely articulate cries. And these cries punctuate a narrative that moves by easy, even playful (if "playful" can apply to something so grief-stricken) steps.
"O Peter, His apostle, have you seen my true love?
[...]
I saw that [his] enemy was here."
The naming of Peter the Apostle conveys the mythos we are summoned into. The second half of the first line combines the spheres of maternal and matrimonial love, weaving these two emotional registers together, so that we feel the suffering of Jesus' mother with a slightly overloaded ardor that would be amazingly strange except for the object of this affection. He is her Son, the child of her womb; he is also the Lord for whom she as ecclesiae Mater has the love of Bride for Husband (Eph. 5). The propriety of the sentiment in theological terms notwithstanding, it is still a little bit of an overloaded phrase when compared with the kinds of things we usually say with words. It is a surprise of charged emotion, followed by a wail whose sound says more in its untranslated state than could be communicated by translation. The third line, then, presents just a devastatingly understated sentiment: "I saw that [his] enemy was here." What a strange line to follow such a wail. But it is just here that the mythos works its magic, for what an audience gets out of this line is the tension between the quotidian phrase and the horror we know it refers to.
To my mind, this beats the etherized patient six ways from Sunday.
Click to listen (Coaineadh Na dTri Muire)
A Pheadair, a aspail, an bhfaca tú mo ghrá geal?
Ochóne is ochóne ó
Chonaic mé ar ball é i láthair a namhad
Ochóne is ochóne ó
Gabhaigi i leith, a dha Mhuire, go gcaoine sibh mo ghrá geal
Ochóne is ochóne ó
Ceard atá le caoineadh ágainn mura gcaoinimid a chriámha?
Ochóne is ochóne ó
An é sin an maicin a hoileadh in ucht Mháire?
Ochóne is ochóne ó
Éist, a mháithrin, is na bí cráite
Ochóne is ochóne ó
A Leinbh, is mór é tualach is léig cuid de ar do Mháthair
Ochóne is ochóne ó
Iompruíodh gach éinne a chrosa, a Mháithrin
Ochóne is ochóne ó
Monday, March 31, 2014
Tolkien the Modernist?
"That sounds like a bit of old Bilbo’s rhyming… Or is it one of your imitations? It does not sound altogether encouraging."
"I don’t know… It came to me then, as if I was making it up, but I may have heard it long ago."
Tolkien's poetry of Middle Earth, or at least so argues Tom Shippey (Tolkien: Author of the Century, H/T Matthew Bardowell and his namesake), achieves its splendor by an act of remembrance that had become foreign to modern England. "True tradition" shows itself in the interplay between an author's originality and the way that originality is constrained, with or without the author's awareness. Frodo reprises the "Old Walking song," without any awareness that he is reprising ("as if I was making it up"). Readers of LoTR know, of course, that he is not creating it. The road that Frodo pursues with "weary feet" is the same road that Bilbo had pursues with "eager feet" when he leaves for Rivendell near the story's beginning. But, Shippey admonishes, we should not be so quick to assume Bilbo's rhyming is really his, for Bilbo later reproduces the rhyme in a totally different way while retaining Frodo's "weary feet." In this way, Tolkien signals the existence of a poetic tradition that is deep enough to be unconscious to those who "rhyme" within it. It inheres in the basic symbols of both the Shire and Middle Earth more widely. So when Frodo composes, it is rightly called "imitation," but it is no less so in Bilbo's "rhyming." It is not really his either.
Shippey further illuminates Tolkien's poetics by analyzing his relationship to three other "shire poets": the author of Pearl, William Shakespeare, and (to a much lesser degree) John Milton. Shakespeare's poetry is ridden with effects whose presence the poet himself may have known little about. His alliterative contrast in Antony and Cleopatra between day and dark recalls a pairing that is as old as the Saxons (dœg, deorc)). And at the conclusion of Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost, one finds a stanza that Tolkien would later rewrite in Bilbo's own poetry. Shakespeare's lines seethe with folk charm:
"When icicles hang by the wallSimilarly, Milton's Comus preserves an ancient contrast between the unchanging sphere of stars and the change-ridden tangle of life beneath the trees.
And Dick the shepherd blows his nail
And Tom bears logs into the hall
And milk comes frozen home in pail..."
Although all three of these poets were capable of writing shire poetry, Tolkien parts company from them because their poetry fails to reproduce the brilliant network of symbols that make the playfulness of shire poetry cohere into a deep and earth seriousness. Tolkien's "O Light to us that wander here / Amid the world of woven trees" reprises a theme seen in Comus, but Tolkien still has a sense for the ultimacy with which these signs communicate: "We still remember, we who dwell / In this far land beneath the trees / The starlight on the Western Seas." There is loss, pathos, and memory here, because Tolkien knows something of what trees and light meant to those who first named something a "tree" in the first place. The coherence of the mythic web Tolkien is accessing here allows a poetry of astonishing understatement that allows his three lines to do what modern poets would have to go to great lengths to accomplish. These three lines resound with power even Eliot would be unable to achieve despite at his most brutal moments ("like a patient etherized...").
The comparison with Eliot, however, points out what seems to me to be a missed opportunity in Shippey's argument, the avoidance of a question that could have been pressed far more acutely than he does it. Eliot and Tolkien represent two different ways of responding to the banality of Victorian England. Eliot mocks it ceaselessly. But although Tolkien's picture of modern England is similarly comic (Shippey points out that Bilbo represents the amnesiac sensibility of modern England, "and that means comfort"), there is simultaneously an aptitude in the hobbits to become fuller parts of Middle Earth. They come from the Shire, and this means that they know more than they can say. Frodo and Bilbo inherit a poetic tradition each may think they made up even though it is more likely neither of them did. They do not know where it comes from, but they do know it. Similarly, modern English people are shire-people, even if they have forgotten this. They know, deep down, about trees and starlight, about dœg and doerc, and they can summon up courage if they have to. Tolkien's poetry is filled with pathos and sadness, but it is also a reminder of who they are to the English. And in this way, it is poetry repurposed.
The great fear of LoTR is the loss of lore. The tragedy of Tolkien's art is that he has to do with precision, uncertainty, and utter detestable self-consciousness what Bilbo, Frodo, and the Gawain-poet were able to do without knowing it was even an ability they had. He had to be a lore-finder because lore-masters had vanished from the earth. For all his archaism, the self-consciousness with which Tolkien did this marks him out as inescapably modern. He belongs to our time, and lucky us, since it is as a modern person that he instructs modern people. The modern period knows its own peculiar agonies, and our poetry sucks as bad as it does because there is no mythos for it to connect to. There is no coherence that allows us to understate; our poetry says too much and crushes the beautiful things by overexertion.
This is not a cry for a golden age; it is a summons for us to be intelligent mythmakers again. The decay and banality characteristic of our time is the result of our adherence to myths not worthy of the name, myths that have no time, no soil, no sense of how things we know arise from where and when and with whom we are. Untrue myths. It will not do to attempt to be Tolkien; it may be enough to be like him. To look hard at the earth and ask it who we are, to respond to our time with courage, and excavate a beauty that will allow the creation of true myths, in which our silence may express nearly as much as our words do.
Sunday, March 30, 2014
Credo ut Videam: A meditation on John 9
"Where is he, Lord, that I may trust (pisteusō) in him?" (Jn. 9:36). The man, recently healed of blindness, has a knowledge of something that those who have never known his ailment do not: namely, the primacy of trust over doubt for any properly human rationality.
The Pharisees insist that the man was born in sin and is therefore unfit to lecture them. The problem of course is that since he was born blind, the man has lived closer to the noetic consequences of sin than they have. They have deluded themselves into thinking that doubt is the appropriate response to ignorance: "as for this man, we do not know where he comes from."
Polanyi has well-developed why this posture of doubt is so disturbing not only to life in general but to the acquisition of knowledge. Imagine the scientist that abandons a hypothesis at the first sign of contrary data. The scientific method depends not on doubt but on faith. Once doubt is embraced as axiomatic, there is nothing in human capacity to prevent its complete takeover. We simply cannot know very much without doubt, since anything we think we know is interpreted through a web of perceived meanings none of which is certain.
One thing I know: I was blind and now I see. The man had no pretense about his ability to make himself see what he clearly had just begun to see. The utter gratuity of his seeing made him humble about what there was to know and how it could be known. How many things did he come to know in the first five minutes after his healing that he had known of only by testimony before that? How quickly he must have come to see how peculiar the relationship between faith and sight is: the seen expressed truly and accurately in the testimony about it but revealed to be only a barely serviceable faculty in the greater light that sight is. The one thing that man knew is that he had been blind. And in the first moment of seeing, he knew his blindness better than ever. There were so many true things he had nevertheless not known. The gift of human reason is the knowledge that there are things we do not know. We exercise that reason in discerning trust, beginning with affirmation as the necessary precondition to discerning, qualifying, and negating: doubt is a movement of faith or else it is neither rational nor honest.
The only other option is a self-defeating epistemic position that leaves little at all to be known in the end. It is by their proclamation that they can see that the Pharisees remain in their sin (Jn. 3:18). Jesus does not say to him "do you believe in me since I healed you?" Rather, he asks, "do you believe in the Son of man?" There is no indication that the man knows it was Jesus that healed him. Rather, having spent a lifetime being conducted by the testimony of others, this man is eager to believe in that which he does not know. He knows, as so many of us do not, that we demonstrate rationality primarily in our trusting.
The Pharisees insist that the man was born in sin and is therefore unfit to lecture them. The problem of course is that since he was born blind, the man has lived closer to the noetic consequences of sin than they have. They have deluded themselves into thinking that doubt is the appropriate response to ignorance: "as for this man, we do not know where he comes from."
Polanyi has well-developed why this posture of doubt is so disturbing not only to life in general but to the acquisition of knowledge. Imagine the scientist that abandons a hypothesis at the first sign of contrary data. The scientific method depends not on doubt but on faith. Once doubt is embraced as axiomatic, there is nothing in human capacity to prevent its complete takeover. We simply cannot know very much without doubt, since anything we think we know is interpreted through a web of perceived meanings none of which is certain.
One thing I know: I was blind and now I see. The man had no pretense about his ability to make himself see what he clearly had just begun to see. The utter gratuity of his seeing made him humble about what there was to know and how it could be known. How many things did he come to know in the first five minutes after his healing that he had known of only by testimony before that? How quickly he must have come to see how peculiar the relationship between faith and sight is: the seen expressed truly and accurately in the testimony about it but revealed to be only a barely serviceable faculty in the greater light that sight is. The one thing that man knew is that he had been blind. And in the first moment of seeing, he knew his blindness better than ever. There were so many true things he had nevertheless not known. The gift of human reason is the knowledge that there are things we do not know. We exercise that reason in discerning trust, beginning with affirmation as the necessary precondition to discerning, qualifying, and negating: doubt is a movement of faith or else it is neither rational nor honest.
The only other option is a self-defeating epistemic position that leaves little at all to be known in the end. It is by their proclamation that they can see that the Pharisees remain in their sin (Jn. 3:18). Jesus does not say to him "do you believe in me since I healed you?" Rather, he asks, "do you believe in the Son of man?" There is no indication that the man knows it was Jesus that healed him. Rather, having spent a lifetime being conducted by the testimony of others, this man is eager to believe in that which he does not know. He knows, as so many of us do not, that we demonstrate rationality primarily in our trusting.
Saturday, March 29, 2014
In to Go Out: Hebrews and Deliberative Rhetoric
For a book that so strongly emphasizes pilgrimage, moving on, and going to Jesus "outside the camp" (13:13), the places where paraenesis is most explicit in Hebrews seem to have a lot to say about gathering in. "Do not forsake the gathering of yourselves together" (10:25), "Keep on loving one another as brothers" (13:1), "Remember your leaders, who spoke the word of God to you" (13:7), and "Submit to leaders" (13:17), not to mention the praise of the table from which the church ("we") have the right to eat.
If, according to common practice in deliberative rhetoric, the intended action is hinted at early in the letter but becomes clearer as the letter goes on, then all of this "together" rhetoric cannot be insignificant. Indeed, if deliberative rhetorical techniques are operative here, then it is arguable that the more cryptic imperatives ought to be interpreted in light of the clearer versions of them later on. Is "drifting away" (2:1) a drift away from the gathering church? Is the "turning away from the living God" (3:12) a way of speaking about turning away from the brothers? Is the "falling short of God's rest" a typological reading of an on-the-ground reality of pulling away from a united church?
The "tabernacle" motif has a deep history in Protestant typology. When the insitution becomes corrupt, the thing to do,(so the reasoning goes) is to go to Jesus outside the camp, to come out from among them and be separate. But what if we have to go in to go out? It might be in fact that the best way to deal with weakened brethren is to cling to them with all the might of the cross. Could it be that Hebrews actually tells us that the biggest danger facing the church wasn't apostasy but schism?
If, according to common practice in deliberative rhetoric, the intended action is hinted at early in the letter but becomes clearer as the letter goes on, then all of this "together" rhetoric cannot be insignificant. Indeed, if deliberative rhetorical techniques are operative here, then it is arguable that the more cryptic imperatives ought to be interpreted in light of the clearer versions of them later on. Is "drifting away" (2:1) a drift away from the gathering church? Is the "turning away from the living God" (3:12) a way of speaking about turning away from the brothers? Is the "falling short of God's rest" a typological reading of an on-the-ground reality of pulling away from a united church?
The "tabernacle" motif has a deep history in Protestant typology. When the insitution becomes corrupt, the thing to do,(so the reasoning goes) is to go to Jesus outside the camp, to come out from among them and be separate. But what if we have to go in to go out? It might be in fact that the best way to deal with weakened brethren is to cling to them with all the might of the cross. Could it be that Hebrews actually tells us that the biggest danger facing the church wasn't apostasy but schism?
Soldiers, not Heroes
O'Donovan, in his (much maligned in my circles) The Desire of the Nations distinguishes two kinds of warrior tradition in ancient Israel: the heroic, found in the story cycles of Jonathan and the young David, and the sacral, found in the prophetic corpus, much of Torah, and Joshua's story of divine punishment in Jos. 6. These traditions are difficult for modern people to accommodate, and often that are shrugged off in a kind of embarrassment. But if we are not to give over the entire public square to the powers that be, then we must, simply must, insist on YHWH's right to command the armies of the earth. YHWH's cease fire in Jesus does not in fact make sense unless he holds the helm of the sword. Horrifying as these texts can be, we must insist on their being absolutely expressive of YHWH's right to liberate. The public square is determined, at the basest level, by the right to dictate who dies, how, and why. And the ascription of this right to YHWH cannot be done without the frightening entailment that sometimes the cease-fire may need paradoxical preservation by judicious force. We cannot give YHWH command and at the same time know in advance that we will never be violent. If God alone can offer peace, it is God's terms that must guide that peace. And those terms may require, as I suspect they have, the willingness of some to be soldiers. The brokenness of the world may be such, that is, that God's interaction with it requires people to do that for which they will later be rightly sorry. And I suspect that if we are to be realistic in our endeavor to live faithful lives in this world, it is the sorry soldier at confession, and not always the crowned martyr, who can dislodge from us our cult of military heroism.
Friday, March 28, 2014
The (Interpretive) Fathers' Blessing
J. Patout Burns has recently added a phenomenal selection to the Church's Bible Series, on the book of Romans. In this the product of some 14 years of careful research, he has combined the insights of Origen, Rufinus, Pelagius, Chrysostom, Ambrosiaster, Augustine, and Theodoret, running from beginning to end of Romans. The Church's first five centuries consisted of fierce debates over the meaning of Romans. The book has incredible worth, for me, on a couple of grounds: 1) It dispels the notion that what we have in the patristic heritage is something "theological," while what modern commentators are interested in is something "historical." Judgments in the patristic period may be right or wrong (and they are right far more often than modern arrogance would often be happy to admit), but the church's first interpreters were keen to demonstrate and argue about meanings they believed the texts to carry in se. Not always, but often, Augustine intends to state something about what Paul meant.
2) Relatedly, their historical acumen is combined with explicit theological commitments. To be sure, these commitments add difficulty along with their coherence. But they also demonstrate what should be the obvious fact that there is no interpretation without such commitments, spoken or not. Their detailed, careful, painstaking scholarship on the words of the text force the question on modern interpreters: how can somebody reading this carefully make what seems to be such a mistake? We are forced to deal with coherence as an (hermeneutically) imposed phenomenon. We never fail to read something into our texts.
The question a volume like this raises, for me, is one that vexes many interpreters. If the patristics are going to be understood as in any way especially useful, then there must be away of appropriating their work that goes beyond the mere "conversational" approach that many scholars advocate. That is, modern scholars who agree on the importance of Rezeptionsgeschichte generally think that such interpretations are helpful merely to serve the purpose noted in point two above. Enter Augustine or Origen, to challenge modern assumptions, and then we can go on with our work. This, of course, is better than nothing. On the other hand, scholars are ingenious in devising ways to circumvent or dismiss one another. Even a historically chastened interpreter will find ways to do gymnastics around the interpretations delivered to us by the past. What then is the real use of history of interpretation?
If we are not merely to use the ancients as foils to dislocate modern arrogance, should we instead adopt a knee-jerk conservatism? They said it, so it is so? And if neither of these are satisfactory, is there really some particular usefulness to the Patristics at all? What is to be gained by reading the Fathers, in terms of radically differing hermeneutics and so on, that could not be gained by reading a secular commentator of the modern age from Sri Lanka?
This is, for me, a not-so-open question. I am quite sure that reading the Patristics is profitable, but I am also quite suspicious of a conversational reading that allows their readings only to "edify" me when they agree with things I am already willing to see.
Perhaps, then, what reading the Patristics does more than anything else is to raise the theological question, rather than merely the hermeneutical one, to the reader? Perhaps, I wonder, reading the Patristics either 1) raises the question of the Holy Spirit and divine superintendence of (even my own) Scriptural interpretation or 2) shows the ancient readers to be really of no greater worth than a diversity of intelligent modern interpreters. Perhaps, if the Fathers have a blessing to give us, it is the blessing of their risk of incoherence if what they proclaim is not true. Perhaps the value of patristic interpretation is the value of theological interpretation itself and nothing more. That is, the great Christian exegetes either leave us the inheritance of God's presence in the reading of Biblical texts, or else, having given everything in the hope of God's truth, they have no other silver or gold to bequeathe us.
Power Base: The Rises and Falls of Joseph, son of Jacob
What is one to make of Joseph's meteoric rise to power in Egypt?
Is it an example to be followed? I can actually remember a group of Christian businessmen called the "Joseph Company" with whom I once found myself sharing a conference call (I can't actually remember how). The lynchpin for their self-conception was the narrative of Genesis 47, in which Joseph shrewdly concentrates Pharaoh's power base by a series of judicious investments. God tells Joseph to save his grain, Joseph does so, and when famine comes Joseph turns all Egypt into a Pawn shop.
Hauerwas wasn't at morning prayer this morning when Genesis 47 was read (he often is), but I would have loved to sit next to him to see whether he actually cringed at this display of Constantinian capitulation or whether he kept the cringe inside. It cannot be escaped; Joseph shrewdly turns Pharaoh into the slavemaster whose power can later afflict the generation of Moses. This is everything Hauerwas and Yoder feared: the people of God actually handing the keys of the kingdom to the principalities and the powers. They don't need to breach the walls when we show them in and give them tea!
But the words of the Egyptians themselves speak against too hasty a panic: "you have saved our lives" (הֶחֱיִתָ֑נוּ—note the root, חָיָה). The word recalls the revival of Jacob's spirits in Gen 46 at the news that Joseph was still alive as well as Ezekiel's valley of the dead as they "revive." These people thought they were going to die.
It is true that what we see here is the development of absolute power for the Pharaoh and the possibility of the ruthless dictatorship that we see in the opening chapters of Exodus. Joseph literally makes slaves out of the Egyptians. Thus, it cannot be denied that what seems to be a bit of shrewd over-reaching by Joseph creates a nasty situation for his children later on: again, the sins of the fathers reaching their children. It will be helpful to note, however, that Pharaoh was already the power over Egypt. One can overcook the changes that Genesis 47 narrates. To whom else could Joseph's interpretation of the dream have gone? Would anyone else have had the means to save enough grain to support not only Egypt but the immigrant children of Abraham? Infrastructure has an importance in this story as well. I think, then, that in Genesis 47 one sees a stark realism at play about the goods and risks of power. The risks do not negate the goods; the goods do not justify the risks. Both just are.
There is an inevitability to power in a world like ours. To readers of Genesis, this comes as no surprise. We are told as far back as Genesis 15 that the promise of YHWH's blessing entails not only Abraham's sojourning but that of his children as well. They will be slaves. Famines come, and powers rise. But if the unflinching realism of Genesis makes the fact of power as pervasive as its abuse, it also creates grounds for hope by that very realism. "Know for certain that your descendants will be slaves," but just as certainly, "I will punish the nation they serve as slaves, and afterward they will come out." The sins of the fathers will follow their children, but YHWH will show mercy to a thousand generations of those who love him.
The logic of election is that there will always be, for as long as the world endures, the possibility of power's abuse, the chance that we will use our blessing to inflict harm on our neighbors. What God meant for our good, we have twisted to evil. But Genesis is a God book; what we mean for evil, God turns incomprehensably to good. This, I think, can allow us to engage with power in constant awareness of how small we are and how big God is. In the time between times, we can (and should) focus on the proximate. Yes, our wickedness will seek always to make the proximate goods of the world into ultimate ones. But God will punish the nation we serve and will punish us if we are that nation. We willl receive from the Lord's hand double for our sins. And those whom God loves God disciplines.
The urgency with which theological ethics is pursued belies a deep uncertainty about the character of God, who will judge and save. Joseph's responsible use of power and his idolatrous over-reaching are bound together in the same actions. His rises and falls grow out of the same earth. Who is equal to judging them for what they really are? I take comfort in the surety of God's promise to punish sin (my own included), because God's good judgment frees me for real, imperfect action in the world. It frees me to discern the good as best I can and to trust that my evils will be made right. It frees me to be humbled in the fact that the evils with which I am unwittingly complicit will be judged (and me with them). But it is better to be judged by God than flattered by the devil.
Thursday, March 27, 2014
Inter-textual Healing
Gabriel Said Reynolds (The Qur'an and its Biblical Subtext) argues that the best way to understand the Qur'an is as a moment in the reception of Biblical tradition. While I imagine that at least many Islamic readers are not going to be swayed much by the idea that the Qur'an even has intertexts, I find the argument interesting perhaps in its way of addressing just how one goes about dealing with intertexts.
Reynolds' first case study concerns the question of prostration of the angels in Qur'an. He begins with God's intention (2.30) to make a khalifa ("caliph") upon the earth. This word, Reynolds contends, creates problems for the early mufassirun, in that through one optic it seems to indicate a likeness to God that Muslim theologians have historically rejected entirely (guided in part by declarations in Qur'an about God's unlikeness to anything that is not God). In light of this, Reynolds argues, most of the translators chose to receive khalifa as "successor" and attempted to understand human beings as inheritors of the earth from the angels. This of course avoids the potential problem of likeness to God but only at the cost of pressing the question of why the angels became disinherited in the first place.
They were disinherited, Reynolds notes, for refusing to bow to human beings. To refuse to translate khalifa as vicegerent creates the very discomfort about the command to bow to humans. For the Quranic term for prostration (sajada) is closely associated with worship, as indicated by the word for the place of prostration, the mosque (masjid). Some Muslim commentators speculated that Shaytan mocked Adam and so God commanded the prostration merely to reveal the pride. Others understand the prostration to be something permitted in a previous era but abrograted to Islam. Reynolds finds, and he thinks many others would find, those glosses unsatisfactory.
On the basis of the problem he observes here, Reynolds raises an ancient biblical tradition in which readers gloss Psalm 8:4, "what are human beings that you spare a thought for them, or the child of Adam that you care for him?" In the Babylonian Talmud, that verse is glossed in conjunction with Gen. 1:26, "let us make man in our own image." Genesis Rabba 8:9 shows angels moved to wonder and perhaps even worship: "when the Lord created Adam, the angels mistook him [for a divine being]." Several early Christian writings likewise contain a narrative of angels bowing to Adam, a tradition that becomes more accentuated in light of the early Christian typology where Adam figures as an ante-type of Christ. The Cave of Treasures in fact has what seem to be linguistic overlaps with Qur'an, where the angels bow to Adam not because he looks divine but because of the authority God gives him. It also has the devil refusing to bow to Adam becuase (again in language redolent of Qur'an) the devil is made of fire and man of clay.
Thus, although the proposal creates problems for Islamic theology, Reynolds nevertheless concludes that khalifa is least problematic, in Quranic and textual terms, if we understand it as the imago Dei from Genesis 1:26.
I have no desire to enter into an apologetic and counter-apologetic discussion with Muslim friends of mine (even though it would be disingenuous to say I do not find Reynolds convincing). Instead, I find Reynolds most instructive as an instructor in how to discern a discussion between texts. For biblical scholars, the question of what constitutes an "echo" is one whose contentions reveal that there is a methodological confusion at large (at least broadly if not in the case of many individual writers). Richard Hays has opened a tremendous area of research by his thoroughgoing suggestions about the exegetical self-awareness of the NT vis-a-vis the OT. Some feel that his suggestions reach too far, and others that there is no way to constrain possible readings. Reynolds, I think, can be used to discern, at least in sketch form, a way of thinking about these. Notice:
1) There is a problem in Quranic language. It seems to affirm here what it denies elsewhere, either in affirming man as vicegerent while denying him any likeness to God, or in affirming him as a successor while denying any thick account of why the succession had to happen in the first place.
2) There is a text that bears enough of a broad similarity to make it, in Reynolds' judgment, worth trying out.
3) It discovers even "tighter," verbal or syntactical links between the "background" passage and the passages being evaluated.
4) Finally, upon trying it out, it seems not only to alleviate some of the textual tensions but to give an account of how such tensions might have arisen in the first place. There is a fullness not only to the reading given but of the plausibility that other readings might have ever arisen elsewhere. This "fullness" is a category difficult to formalize, and that is almost certainly due to the fact that it is an aesthetic judgment. The faculty of judgment cannot ever be factored out of such work. But it may help to reinforce the point that such judgments are aesthetic, since there are at least a few readers who seem to think judgment is not what they are doing.
Reynolds' method, at least in the cases he reviews, performs beautifully. He makes an argument whose power might tempt one to think it is easy to do what he does. But the fragments of arguments made over intertexts for the New Testament allow no such conclusion. In light of the previous generation's work on the so-called fictionality of the limits of texts, questions of intertextuality are often especially frought with difficulty. Those difficulties led to the brutalization of texts in the later half of the twentieth century. Reynolds, however, has performed readers of the great texts of the world a service in helping to see how some of those difficulties might be overcome and intertextual relationships healed, at least a little. This seems to me a worthy venture, for such relationships are beautiful and instructive. They delight and teach, and in so doing they yield a significant part of the pleasure that reading gives.
Reynolds' first case study concerns the question of prostration of the angels in Qur'an. He begins with God's intention (2.30) to make a khalifa ("caliph") upon the earth. This word, Reynolds contends, creates problems for the early mufassirun, in that through one optic it seems to indicate a likeness to God that Muslim theologians have historically rejected entirely (guided in part by declarations in Qur'an about God's unlikeness to anything that is not God). In light of this, Reynolds argues, most of the translators chose to receive khalifa as "successor" and attempted to understand human beings as inheritors of the earth from the angels. This of course avoids the potential problem of likeness to God but only at the cost of pressing the question of why the angels became disinherited in the first place.
They were disinherited, Reynolds notes, for refusing to bow to human beings. To refuse to translate khalifa as vicegerent creates the very discomfort about the command to bow to humans. For the Quranic term for prostration (sajada) is closely associated with worship, as indicated by the word for the place of prostration, the mosque (masjid). Some Muslim commentators speculated that Shaytan mocked Adam and so God commanded the prostration merely to reveal the pride. Others understand the prostration to be something permitted in a previous era but abrograted to Islam. Reynolds finds, and he thinks many others would find, those glosses unsatisfactory.
On the basis of the problem he observes here, Reynolds raises an ancient biblical tradition in which readers gloss Psalm 8:4, "what are human beings that you spare a thought for them, or the child of Adam that you care for him?" In the Babylonian Talmud, that verse is glossed in conjunction with Gen. 1:26, "let us make man in our own image." Genesis Rabba 8:9 shows angels moved to wonder and perhaps even worship: "when the Lord created Adam, the angels mistook him [for a divine being]." Several early Christian writings likewise contain a narrative of angels bowing to Adam, a tradition that becomes more accentuated in light of the early Christian typology where Adam figures as an ante-type of Christ. The Cave of Treasures in fact has what seem to be linguistic overlaps with Qur'an, where the angels bow to Adam not because he looks divine but because of the authority God gives him. It also has the devil refusing to bow to Adam becuase (again in language redolent of Qur'an) the devil is made of fire and man of clay.
Thus, although the proposal creates problems for Islamic theology, Reynolds nevertheless concludes that khalifa is least problematic, in Quranic and textual terms, if we understand it as the imago Dei from Genesis 1:26.
I have no desire to enter into an apologetic and counter-apologetic discussion with Muslim friends of mine (even though it would be disingenuous to say I do not find Reynolds convincing). Instead, I find Reynolds most instructive as an instructor in how to discern a discussion between texts. For biblical scholars, the question of what constitutes an "echo" is one whose contentions reveal that there is a methodological confusion at large (at least broadly if not in the case of many individual writers). Richard Hays has opened a tremendous area of research by his thoroughgoing suggestions about the exegetical self-awareness of the NT vis-a-vis the OT. Some feel that his suggestions reach too far, and others that there is no way to constrain possible readings. Reynolds, I think, can be used to discern, at least in sketch form, a way of thinking about these. Notice:
1) There is a problem in Quranic language. It seems to affirm here what it denies elsewhere, either in affirming man as vicegerent while denying him any likeness to God, or in affirming him as a successor while denying any thick account of why the succession had to happen in the first place.
2) There is a text that bears enough of a broad similarity to make it, in Reynolds' judgment, worth trying out.
3) It discovers even "tighter," verbal or syntactical links between the "background" passage and the passages being evaluated.
4) Finally, upon trying it out, it seems not only to alleviate some of the textual tensions but to give an account of how such tensions might have arisen in the first place. There is a fullness not only to the reading given but of the plausibility that other readings might have ever arisen elsewhere. This "fullness" is a category difficult to formalize, and that is almost certainly due to the fact that it is an aesthetic judgment. The faculty of judgment cannot ever be factored out of such work. But it may help to reinforce the point that such judgments are aesthetic, since there are at least a few readers who seem to think judgment is not what they are doing.
Reynolds' method, at least in the cases he reviews, performs beautifully. He makes an argument whose power might tempt one to think it is easy to do what he does. But the fragments of arguments made over intertexts for the New Testament allow no such conclusion. In light of the previous generation's work on the so-called fictionality of the limits of texts, questions of intertextuality are often especially frought with difficulty. Those difficulties led to the brutalization of texts in the later half of the twentieth century. Reynolds, however, has performed readers of the great texts of the world a service in helping to see how some of those difficulties might be overcome and intertextual relationships healed, at least a little. This seems to me a worthy venture, for such relationships are beautiful and instructive. They delight and teach, and in so doing they yield a significant part of the pleasure that reading gives.
Back to Life: Jacob's Change of Mind
Upon hearing that his son Joseph may still be alive, Jacob reacts with understandable lack of luster. His spirit, we are told (45:26), faints within him (פּוּג). It seems that there are at least two problems with the news his sons bring to him: 1) the unrealism of the message, and 2) the utter unlikeness of the messengers to the healing message they were to bring their father (note Joseph's exhortation right before the brothers head home, remembering something of the sibling rivalry that had already wrecked the family--"do not quarrel on the way").
The message goes against not only what Jacob knows, factually, but against an entire way that he has learned to conceive the world in light of Joseph's loss. "My years have been few and difficult," spoken by a man of 130 years! The cloud over Jacob's soul resists the news that of Joseph—news that is, simply enough, too good to be true.
There is also the irony of the source of this message: the ones who brought to him sure and certain sign that Joseph was dead are now before him insisting they have seen him. It was their testimony that led him to the grief that became his inheritance. "Your descendants will inherit the earth": the family blessing had seemed to fail at Jacob. The message of God in the world is ever doomed by this failure: its messengers are never equal, or even much like, the news they bear. The psalmist might well speak for the exile-ridden history of his nation when he moans,
Your arrows pierced me,
and your hand has come down on me.
Because of your wrath there is no health in my body;
there is no soundness in my bones because of my sin...
My wounds fester and are loathsome
because of my sinful folly.
I am bowed down and brought very low;
all day long I go about mourning.
My back is filled with searing pain
there is no health in my body.
I am feeble (פּוּג) and utterly crushed (Ps. 38).
The strange power in the preached word is that, for all its unbelievability and the unworthiness of its messengers, it opens our eyes to a way of reading the world that becomes persuasive in what it allows us to see. Jacob's sons tell him everything, and suddenly the "carts" full of things Joseph had sent are enabled to speak as evidence to the question. The juextaposition in the narrative of the bloody cloak that initially tells of Joseph's death and the carts that Joseph sends later relates the unreliability of the signs in the world until we are taught to read them. Something happens to Jacob in their testimony, in which light the signs begin to reconnect and Jacob is "revived" (חָיָה). What happens to his mind, that is, is what happens to Ezekiel's bones (37:5) when the Word of God summons them from their slumber into life. When the testimony that Jesus is not dead but alive hits the ear of the world, it contradicts both all that we know of the world and of those who tell it to us. But the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom. Let the preacher be ever so intelligent and compelling: what is required is death and resurrection of the mind. It is only God who lifts the head of the faint!
The message goes against not only what Jacob knows, factually, but against an entire way that he has learned to conceive the world in light of Joseph's loss. "My years have been few and difficult," spoken by a man of 130 years! The cloud over Jacob's soul resists the news that of Joseph—news that is, simply enough, too good to be true.
There is also the irony of the source of this message: the ones who brought to him sure and certain sign that Joseph was dead are now before him insisting they have seen him. It was their testimony that led him to the grief that became his inheritance. "Your descendants will inherit the earth": the family blessing had seemed to fail at Jacob. The message of God in the world is ever doomed by this failure: its messengers are never equal, or even much like, the news they bear. The psalmist might well speak for the exile-ridden history of his nation when he moans,
Your arrows pierced me,
and your hand has come down on me.
Because of your wrath there is no health in my body;
there is no soundness in my bones because of my sin...
My wounds fester and are loathsome
because of my sinful folly.
I am bowed down and brought very low;
all day long I go about mourning.
My back is filled with searing pain
there is no health in my body.
I am feeble (פּוּג) and utterly crushed (Ps. 38).
The strange power in the preached word is that, for all its unbelievability and the unworthiness of its messengers, it opens our eyes to a way of reading the world that becomes persuasive in what it allows us to see. Jacob's sons tell him everything, and suddenly the "carts" full of things Joseph had sent are enabled to speak as evidence to the question. The juextaposition in the narrative of the bloody cloak that initially tells of Joseph's death and the carts that Joseph sends later relates the unreliability of the signs in the world until we are taught to read them. Something happens to Jacob in their testimony, in which light the signs begin to reconnect and Jacob is "revived" (חָיָה). What happens to his mind, that is, is what happens to Ezekiel's bones (37:5) when the Word of God summons them from their slumber into life. When the testimony that Jesus is not dead but alive hits the ear of the world, it contradicts both all that we know of the world and of those who tell it to us. But the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom. Let the preacher be ever so intelligent and compelling: what is required is death and resurrection of the mind. It is only God who lifts the head of the faint!
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