Stories First

Stories come before theology.

I know it's ironic to begin this post with a propositional statement instead of a narrative, but that's the dogma that's been running through my brain these days as our life has been plunged into upheaval over the past month.

In case you missed the memo: Josh, Marshall, and I gave away most of our furniture and threw the rest of our worldly goods into a UHaul and moved from Chicago to Philadelphia so that I could start my new job at Red Letter Christians. Our life is still packed away in boxes since we won't be moving into a more permanent apartment until the beginning of October. When I packed most of my books, I accidentally packed away my writing pad, too. I see that boxed notepad as a metaphor for my humanity, which has gone into hibernation for a spell. There’s just no time or space to devote to book writing at the moment, and in the absence of my craft, I feel stymied (though writing this blog helps me to breathe a little).

But back to my propositional pontificating on stories.

It's not that stories should come first (though this is probably also true), but stories do come first. Of course, there isn't always a clean line between story and theology, but I think of theology as reflection–the ordering or explanation–that takes place after the dust settles. We had the experience, but missed the meaning. The reflection helps us to make sense of the experience–to explicate its meaning. Our past experiences collide with the present ones, and our theology is what comes when we begin to sort that out. So theology is important, but it doesn't come first.

I used to think that we start (or should start) with theology and view our experiences through those lenses. Now I realize that we begin with stories, plunged from birth into a world of sensations and relationships that we try to make sense of as time passes.

When it comes to the stories of the Bible, we may want to come with a clean slate, but this is not how relationships work, nor does it reflect the reality of Jesus' incarnation. We come with our stories, our histories, our interpretations. As we read the Bible–or encounter the stories of Israel and Jesus through a friend–we begin to see how these collide with our story, and how our story collides with them. They do not erase our story, nor does our story erase the story of Jesus embodied in scripture and the history of God's people. Jesus' story interrupts ours, and our story interrupts his.

I now work as an assistant to man who is, among other things, a professional story-teller. He travels and speaks, and often begins his messages with stories. And as I hear him speak, I realize that what makes him such a good speaker is that the stories he tells are not illustrations for theology. The stories are the message, whether they are stories from scripture or stories from his life or the lives of those around him (often a mix of both). The theology becomes an explication of those stories, an unpacking of the meaning. The stories are not a stepping stone to the theology, but the root of it.

If God had wanted an uninterrupted story or set of unchangeable propositions–a monolithic narrative or unmalleable theology–he would not have made us creative creatures that make decisions and shape the course of history. If he wanted an uninterrupted story, he would have made us machines that work but have no freedom, or he would have made us free and left us to our own devices. He does neither. He insists that this is not just his story nor is it just ours. He creates the human world and enters it–first through creation, then through his dealings with Israel and then–most intimately–through Jesus, God made flesh.

Stories come first. The Gospel–the ‘announcement’ or ‘proclamation’–of Jesus the Christ (‘the Messiah’) is the height of a series of stories that began long ago. The four canonical Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) contain some of the earliest traditions about how Jesus’ story collided with the story of Israel and how the experiences of Jesus’ followers collided with Jesus. Although the letters of the Apostle Paul were in circulation before the four Gospels were written, these Gospels are based largely on stories that people were already telling in the community about Jesus. Paul takes the stories of Jesus and begins to unpack them for the new faith communities that are springing up across the Mediterranean world, explaining the narrative and theological significance of Jesus’ life–significance that had only just started coming to light.

Stories come first. Stories should not compete with theology, but be the basis of theological reflection–and then that reflection, in turn, begins to shape and re-shape our stories as the stories are told again and again in new ways and in new communities. Stories are not (primarily) illustrations for theology, but the soil where the seed of experience begins to be nourished by the water and sun of reflection.

On Writer's Block

I woke up at 3 AM this morning, put the kettle on for tea, and sat down at my roll top desk to write.

Nothing came. Nothing helpful, anyway.

I already have a 60,000 word manuscript. I am working through it carefully now, rewriting, rearranging, and discarding. I began to read the second chapter this morning and was not only repulsed by the writing, but wasn't sure how to rework it or how it related thematically to the previous chapter I'd just gone through.

People have different ways of dealing with writer's block. I usually deal with it by hurling myself into the depths of despair. I become frustrated with myself and start feeling as though all my efforts have been for naught. This writing is no good. It says nothing. It does not speak to the human condition. It tells you nothing real about the world. Shallow, it’s too shallow. The world you have made is small, very small indeed. (And not that small-town, down-to-earth, rich and inviting kind of small where the people have big hearts and colorful worlds. Yours is a narrow world, dull and colorless.)

I felt that way this morning. But rather than let myself be thrown into the chaos of the pit or try to work in the midst of this frustration, I put my manuscript away, finished my tea, and then went back to bed.

When I awoke, I decided it was time to make this a reading day–no trying to write, no trying to force my way through writer’s block. When Marshall went down for a nap, I turned to the place I'd left off in Buber's essay, "The Holy Way."

As I read, parts of my manuscript began to come together in my mind like Ezekiel’s dry, scattered bones. I began to get a sense of what should come next, and to realize that the way my manuscript was ordered just wasn't helpful to the reader. There was material near the back of the book that needed to come earlier, and the section I was working on should really appear later. The bones began to look more like full skeletons.

That's how this morning’s writer's block started to go away. As I said, people have different ways of dealing with writer's block, but here are a few principles I find useful:

1. Maintain your designated time and space to write even if you don't write anything. I finished my tea because I wanted to complete my ritual of getting up at a particular time to work. Establishing a regular time and place to write is important if you want to make it a habit.

2. Don't let writer's block make you think you're doing something wrong or have nothing to offer. It's just part of the process, and it doesn't mean you are no good at writing.

3. Don't force yourself to write. Sometimes, trying to write will only frustrate you. Take a deep breath and go read something. Reading can help get the juices flowing.

4. Force yourself to write. Sometimes, making yourself write something, anything, can help you feel your way to what you actually want to write. Sometimes, when nothing comes, I try to sit down and write about my goals for this particular piece of writing (and jot some thoughts down). What am I trying to express? How can I show that in this particular section? What you write may not make it into the finished product, but it can help you to think more lucidly about what you want your writing to do.

Do We Have Control Over What We Believe?

How much control does a person have over what she believes? Can she choose to believe in God? To believe in no God?

I am not thinking of the tiresome debates about predestination and free will (though the close connections between these questions are obvious). I am thinking of the nature of belief and the frequent tensions between cognitive (and verbal) assent and what a person actually thinks (and how this influences her life in the world). In short: there is usually a disparity between what we say or think we believe and what we actually believe. One can give verbal and mental assent to all manner of orthodox doctrines and remain a functional heretic. I acknowledge the reality of the Triune God, but what does it mean to live Trinitarianly and to what extent can this be done?

Our beliefs are always based in experience even when those experiences are what might rightly be called 'revelation.' (One could argue that all right belief is a result of revelation.) What we believe is based on our encounter with the world and consists of what we have, in those encounters perceived to be true or real (even allowing for the locality of some kinds of knowledge). We may pay lip-service to all manner of belief -- that God is love, distant, all-powerful, ineffectual, non-existent or what have you -- but does this cohere with our experience of reality?

As Protestants, we like to think "Jesus loves me this I know for the Bible tells me so," but is this really how we knew the love of the incarnate Son of God? I don't doubt that some (perhaps many) experience God's love directly through the reading of scripture. But when I reflect on my own experience, I realize it was probably the love of my parents (in particular, my mother) that first communicated God's love to me, not the Bible. Mom was the face of God to us. In many ways, my belief still operates this way. I believe in God's love because I have people who love me and whom I love.

The difficulty, as anyone who has suffered beneath the sun knows, is that we can just as easily (perhaps more easily) believe in God's unlove because of how we have encountered unlove through others. These people (if God, in fact, is love) are false images, images that do not embody the person of God.

Still, how much do we control what we believe? I don't mean to imply that we are simply sponges that absorb whatever realities we encounter. This is, I think, even impossible, since we daily encounter (what seem to be at least) competing realities, conflicting voices that vie for our attention, and we cannot absorb it all. (Or: perhaps we do. Perhaps we hold in ourselves more tension and conflict and reality than we can ever know or bear to know, the whole world warring within us, waiting to be born.) We experience both love and hate, both mercy and cruelty. And we also find ourselves capable of both great love and great cruelty.

We do not just absorb, however. We interact. We weigh our experiences in the balance and respond, shape, act, believe.

Where am I going with all this? (Perhaps that is the real question, a question of location and movement instead of stillness and immobile being.)

What we think we believe and what we really believe do not always cohere. You can say (and even think) the orthodox creeds of Christianity but live a functionally godless life. I suppose I am intrigued (and perhaps unwittingly believe?) in the kind of Christian universalism depicted in Lewis' Last Battle, where some who did not know Aslan by name actually honored him in how they lived their lives. 

If God is the creator of the world and committed to re-creating it through his Son, Jesus Christ, are all who re-create (those who facilitate the renewal of life) in some way serving God, albeit unwittingly? Perhaps they do not believe in God. But if they live as though God is in the world (and in some sense become God in the world), do they believe even when they do not believe, their bodies working against every cognitive objection to the presence of God?

I am not saying this is what I believe, though my own declarations of belief may bear only a distant resemblance to what I believe. I am speaking in order to get to my belief, to plot how I've experienced the world and what I've encountered as true.

These reflections are (of course) evoked by experience: the fact that many of my friends and acquaintances from Bible college no longer identify as Christians  (most are athiests or agnostics). And, no, these are not people who "fell into a life of sin" and became distant from God. These are honest, questioning friends who have serious doubts about the form (and content) of the faith bequeathed to them from their parents or Church community. Their questions are not unlike many of my own, and their critiques of Christianity are (often) valid.

All this makes me wonder about the nature of belief. Why is it that I say I "believe" in the God revealed in Jesus Christ and his Church, as witnessed through Judeo-Christian scripture and the testimony of the saints throughout history? Why do I (if I do) actually believe? In what or whom do I believe? What (perhaps more importantly) should or do my husband and I communicate to our son about belief in God? Faith, like any living, breathing relationship, must evolve or die. What shape does my faith take now and what shape ought it to take in this transitory life? And how much control do I have over its shape?

Divine and Human Space: Shall I Say It Again?

It's three weeks until the comprehensive exams, so I imagine I'll spend much of the coming week (Spring break) studying, but I wanted to take this weekend to type up the rest of the handwritten and hand-edited portions of the second draft of my book. It turns out that I've managed to get through roughly two-thirds of this second draft even with all the busyness of school and motherhood, editing out approximately ten thousand words and adding about the same.

The following is the very last section of the book's most recent iteration. I am not sure if I will end up keeping it (it may be a bit too "obvious" for the rest of the book's tenor). I'm not even sure if I agree with all the theology in it. Nonetheless, I'm glad I wrote it, as it is helpful for me to keep the book focused on what I want it to be about.  So, for those of you who asked what the book is about, this is it. Enjoy.

Divine and Human Space

As I near the end of this small book of fragmented narratives, I find Eliot’s refrain from The Four Quartets turning over in my mind: You will say I am repeating / Something I have said before / I shall say it again / Shall I say it again?  To say it again, however, I must determine what I said.  What did I mean to say?  And what have I actually said?  To determine what I meant to say, I must go back to the beginning.

You thought I began with my lineage: the space bequeathed to me by Christianity and Judaism, the religious legacy of my parents.  And so I did.  That is what I said.  But what did I mean?

I meant: if I were to trace my origins, the place of my birth, I would have to go back to my Creator, the divine being who came to earth as a human being.  I was born on his land, in his home.  He is my father, my mother, my resting place.  The God who set up shop in this world is the same God who will renovate it in the end: Jesus.  The earth is God’s temple, but Jesus is his temple, too.

God did not wish to demolish his temple, though it had become a wasteland because of human sin.  So, instead, he tore down Jesus, all the while planning to raise him up again so that the whole world could live in him.

Jesus is where I begin.

But what precisely, what really, have I said?

My point–my life, my hope, my joy–is the simple yet baffling reality that God has built his house among humans.  The Eastern Orthodox Christians have a turn of phrase that sums up the incarnation nicely: “God became man so that man might become God.”

Now, of course, when they say “man might become God,” they don’t mean that humans become the ontological equivalent of the Creator God or that they supplant his unique divine status.  They mean that humans become “deified” in the sense that Adam and Even were meant to be “like God” in Eden–being and doing in small what God is and does in large.  If we put this in spatial terms, we might say: “God lived in human space so that humans could live in divine space.”  Jesus left his Father’s house in heaven to come be with us.

When I was a girl, I thought the story of my life with Jesus was all about sin.  In some sense, it was, but this was not the beginning nor the heart of the matter.  The beginning of the story was not my sin, but God’s act of love in building the world for his creatures to enjoy, a divine house–a temple–where humans could work and dance before the divine.  And there was hope of immortality in God’s good land through the Tree of Life that God planted in the garden of Eden.

And you know the story after that–how our spiritual ancestors were told they didn’t need God in order to inhabit divine space, that they could be gods of their own temple instead of images in Yahweh’s temple. 

And so I was born into the world thinking, like my ancestors, that I could be queen of my own space, the center of my own little world.  I was not beholden to those who came before me or those who would come after me.  I had no obligation to share space with my neighbor or any deep sense that everything I owned had been given to me by someone else–that there was no “my land,” “my house,” “my space,” only God’s space.

But God looked at me–looked at us–shook his head, and said, Not good.  I will show them what it looks like to share space.  I will visit them again.  Though they sought to exile me from this land, to shove me back into heaven, I will come to them.  I will teach them how to live in divine space, how to be at peace in the world again.

And so for years and years he came to us in many different ways.  He spoke to Cain and Noah and Abraham.  He even appeared to Abraham at the oaks of Mamre, Yahweh announcing to the patriarch his promise of a son.  He showed his face to Jacob as they wrestled by the River Jabbok.  God showed himself to Moses on Mt Sinai and disclosed his words to Israel through the giving of the law.  His presence came upon the tabernacle, his glory filled the Israelite temple.  He spoke to us through the words and visions of prophets.

Then, in the fullness of time, he came to us in his son, Jesus.

As I write this, my son dozes beside me in his stroller, his tiny lids fluttering open now and then only to once again close in deep sleep.  How little he knows about the world he has entered.  For nine months, he has known only the compact, comforting space of my womb, where he was always fed, always secure.

For nine months, I shared my body with him, though he knew it only as his own space.  But now he must relearn his dependence on me and learn to participate.  I will feed him, but he must also learn to eat.  Day by day, he will grow bigger and develop a sense of independence from me–that we are two separate human beings sharing divine space.

My mother used to write to us in little notebooks when we were young, hoping to give us a sense of our infancy when we were older.  I carry on this tradition, every so often jotting down short notes in Marshall’s notebook, telling him about himself and sharing with him my hopes and dreams for his life.

I tell him that I want him to be able to pursue the activities that intrigue him the most, knowing that God loves it when we cultivate his good gift of creation and human activity.  I tell him that a full life is a thankful life, a life lived in gratitude to God for coming to live with us.

Most of all, my dear, sweet boy, I want you to know Christ and the re-creative power of his resurrection.  I want you to know the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, in his broken body.  We are dying already, you know–me, you, Dad, everyone.  We will suffer no matter what.  We will die one day, whether that happens tomorrow or one hundred years from now.  But when God came to live with us, he came to die with us, too.  And he promised that if we would suffer and die with him, that we would also be raised from the dead in order to live with him forever on this earth.  This, my Marshall–my love, my life–is my prayer for you.  Christ became like you–may you become like him.

But Love Troubles My Head

In my last post, I wrote that love doesn’t trouble my head much anymore. But it does.

My freshman year of college, I met my first boyfriend – his name was Biblical Studies. I hadn’t been particularly studious as a high school student. We were homeschooled and school was what we did all the time (it was nothing to get too excited about). But just a few weeks into my Bible classes, I was enamored of it all – the primary texts, the commentaries, the discussion of probing questions that charmed and vexed the soul.

For the first time in my life, I’d found something more thrilling than a boy. Here was a quest for which I would gladly forego meals. (I see now my obsession with Biblical Studies was worse than love – I would never have forsaken food for love of a boy.) The following summer, I took a series of summer classes back-to-back. I got into the habit of going from my (4-5 hr) morning class straight to the library and studying until supper. My stomach would knot with hunger, but my elation was so visceral that I barely felt the knots.

This kind of love still troubles my head from time to time. When I met Josh, the old, troublesome sort of love began to show its true colors. Over time, I began to see that what I had understood to be romantic interest or physical attraction (I never dared to call anything “love”) had less to do with interest in a particular person or subject and more to do with my need for distraction. Of course, it’s never that simple – most of what we do is a complex mixture of real interest and the need for distraction. But mostly it was distraction.

This is why love still troubles my head from time to time – because it isn’t about romance or attraction or sex. It’s a quest to keep our ghosts at bay, to distract us from our raw, wounded insides. This troubles me, but I’ve gotten better at resisting it, refusing to let it rob me of real interest, real love. The source of every human love is God, and when someone loves us as we are, that gives us the confidence to face who we are. We no longer need to be distracted from ourselves. (Josh’s love helps a lot.)

I think of distraction as a kind of gluttony. It keeps you from really focusing on what’s in front of you and loving it. Instead of encountering the gift before you, you’re always searching for more, not because you’re interested in genuine knowledge, but because you’re interested in acquiring, possessing.

As I reflect on my undergraduate education, I see that in many ways, I was not taught to love knowledge. I had to learn that on my own. I was taught to be thrilled with knowledge, and this carried me for a time. But the leisure of four years of full-time study has a way of encouraging gluttony – a swift love affair with books and the meaning of life. It fattens you up with knowledge, but does not give you the tools to pursue knowledge when you no longer have the leisure to do so. And you begin to starve.

At the end of this affair, you are unsatisfied. You have not learned to live with knowledge, only to gorge on it. You are unable to maintain the vigor you once had now that the pressures of work and family life make it difficult to devote many hours to study. You learned to love knowledge in one context: the classroom. You did not learn to talk about the questions when you sit at home and when you walk along the road and when you lie down and when you get up.

Since knowledge was just a distraction, an erotic pang in your love-sick gut, you feel justified in leaving it behind. Fantasies are quickly exhausted, and you need to move on to something new.

When Love Doesn't Trouble My Head

Love doesn't trouble my head these days, but it used to -- a lot. I've been married for well-nigh five years now, and I forget how harrowing life seemed back then in those days before I met Josh.

Before Josh, there was always someone I fancied, whether or not the lad reciprocated my affections (most often not). There was always the flutter, the highs and lows of he-loves-me-he-loves-me-not, the anxious but excited wondering, the hope at an unexpected conversation, the despair of absence or uncertainty.

And, of course, the butterflies that I have always called butterflies because we had no language to talk about sexual attraction.

Then I met Josh. And not one butterfly.

I bumped into him on the steps leading to the college chapel. He told me about his upcoming senior recital. I mentioned that I was writing a novel. He said he'd like to see it when I was done.

He looked older than when I'd last seen him two years ago.

Those early sightings had been fleeting, certainly. He spent most of his time in the bowels of the music building, and I only ever saw him briefly in the cafeteria or on the sidewalk on his way to the music building. I remembered a young man with enthusiastic hand gestures whose shirts and khakis had clearly been purchased in the 90s. And he wore sneakers with those khakis, sneakers laced super-tight for good ankle support.

He'd grown a beard since then and his eyes looked older, sadder, wiser. 

And I thought, "He seems to have shaped up nicely. I wonder if he's still with that Amanda-girl. I hope he is with someone who deserves him."

It was an innocent thought. You may not believe me, but I had no thought of him for myself. Because there were no butterflies.

Instead of butterflies and drama and confused, angst-ridden prayers, all I felt was an almost startling ease. We talked often in those next few weeks, and every time we met, I felt more and more like my real self.

This was not how love was supposed to work. I was supposed to be intimidated, happily anxious.

I emailed him a draft of my novel, but we didn't talk over the summer. In August, when we came back to school, we got together for tea. And it was at that tea, that I was certain of what I had suspected over the summer -- this was the man I was to marry.

This was not how love was supposed to go for me. I had always been suspicious of the stories people told and how they "knew" when they first met that they would fall in love. You can't know, I thought. You can't know after only having known someone such a short time. You can't be sure of someone's character so soon.

Yet here I was, so sure that Josh and I were meant to be together. And I wasn't even in love. I have not been certain about many things in my life, but I knew that Josh and I fit. For the first time in my life, I wasn't worried about being in love. Love didn't trouble my head.

I wasn't worried about butterflies (or the lack thereof). I knew they would come when they needed to come.

And they did.

Do We Control What We Believe?

How much control does a person have over what she believes? Can she choose to believe in God? To believe in no God?

I am not thinking of the tiresome debates about predestination and free will (though the close connections between these questions are obvious). I am thinking of the nature of belief and the frequent tensions between cognitive (and verbal) assent and what a person actually thinks (and how this influences her life in the world). In short: there is usually a disparity between what we say or think we believe and what we actually believe. One can give verbal and mental assent to all manner of orthodox doctrines and remain a functional heretic. I acknowledge the reality of the Triune God, but what does it mean to live Trinitarianly and to what extent can this be done?

Our beliefs are always based in experience even when those experiences are what might rightly be called 'revelation.' (One could argue that all right belief is a result of revelation.) What we believe is based on our encounter with the world and consists of what we have, in those encounters perceived to be true or real (even allowing for the locality of some kinds of knowledge). We may pay lip-service to all manner of belief -- that God is love, distant, all-powerful, ineffectual, non-existent or what have you -- but does this cohere with our experience of reality?

As Protestants, we like to think "Jesus loves me this I know for the Bible tells me so," but is this really how we knew the love of the incarnate Son of God? I don't doubt that some (perhaps many) experience God's love directly through the reading of scripture. But when I reflect on my own experience, I realize it was probably the love of my parents (in particular, my mother) that first communicated God's love to me, not the Bible. Mom was the face of God to us. In many ways, my belief still operates this way. I believe in God's love because I have people who love me and whom I love.

The difficulty, as anyone who has suffered beneath the sun knows, is that we can just as easily (perhaps more easily) believe in God's unlove because of how we have encountered unlove through others. These people (if God, in fact, is love) are false images, images that do not embody the person of God.

Still, how much do we control what we believe? I don't mean to imply that we are simply sponges that absorb whatever realities we encounter. This is, I think, even impossible, since we daily encounter (what seem to be at least) competing realities, conflicting voices that vie for our attention, and we cannot absorb it all. (Or: perhaps we do. Perhaps we hold in ourselves more tension and conflict and reality than we can ever know or bear to know, the whole world warring within us, waiting to be born.) We experience both love and hate, both mercy and cruelty. And we also find ourselves capable of both great love and great cruelty.

We do not just absorb, however. We interact. We weigh our experiences in the balance and respond, shape, act, believe.

Where am I going with all this? (Perhaps that is the real question, a question of location and movement instead of stillness and immobile being.)

What we think we believe and what we really believe do not always cohere. You can say (and even think) the orthodox creeds of Christianity but live a functionally godless life. I suppose I am intrigued (and perhaps unwittingly believe?) in the kind of Christian universalism depicted in Lewis' Last Battle, where some who did not know Aslan by name actually honored him in how they lived their lives. 

If God is the creator of the world and committed to re-creating it through his Son, Jesus Christ, are all who re-create (those who facilitate the renewal of life) in some way serving God, albeit unwittingly? Perhaps they do not believe in God. But if they live as though God is in the world (and in some sense become God in the world), do they believe even when they do not believe, their bodies working against every cognitive objection to the presence of God?

I am not saying this is what I believe, though my own declarations of belief may bear only a distant resemblance to what I believe. I am speaking in order to get to my belief, to plot how I've experienced the world and what I've encountered as true.

These reflections are (of course) evoked by experience: the fact that many of my friends and acquaintances from Bible college no longer identify as Christians  (most are atheists or agnostics). And, no, these are not people who "fell into a life of sin" and became distant from God. These are honest, questioning friends who have serious doubts about the form (and content) of the faith bequeathed to them from their parents or Church community. Their questions are not unlike many of my own, and their critiques of Christianity are (often) valid.

All this makes me wonder about the nature of belief. Why is it that I say I "believe" in the God revealed in Jesus Christ and his Church, as witnessed through Judeo-Christian scripture and the testimony of the saints throughout history? Why do I (if I do) actually believe? In what or whom do I believe? What (perhaps more importantly) should or do my husband and I communicate to our son about belief in God? Faith, like any living, breathing relationship, must evolve or die. What shape does my faith take now and what shape ought it to take in this transitory life? And how much control do I have over its shape?

My Bible Education: Does It Mean Anything?

As I near the end of nearly seven years of formal training in Bible and theology, I wonder if it means anything. I’ve had enough divine sovereignty hammered into me to know that it will end up meaning something, but I’ve also breathed in enough eschatology and incarnation to know that the present event and the ending up are in constant tension. And there’s no glory gained for the ending up by glossing over the present futility.

*

“We must follow the evidence where it leads,” a Bible professor of mine once said, “and trust that the truth will be made known.”

I believed in these words for many years. When it came to the Bible, I tried my best to lay my presuppositions aside and follow the evidence where it led, trusting that if God was true and the Bible was his word, then the Bible would be able to bear up under academic scrutiny. 

What I didn’t realize then–in those early days when I was drunk on dead poets and the musk of crumbling books–was that my professor’s statement was limited by its own rationalist assumptions and the myth of objectivity that form the philosophical basis of the Western academy. This philosophy assumes that we can follow the evidence without bias to some logical conclusion–to truth, if you will. It advocates a mode of “knowing” that assumes we can submit to truth as discovered through empirical means, and that the truth leads us.

But the evidence itself is siphoned through our own selectivity and assumptions. The evidence may not end up leading us to the truth, but simply back to ourselves. (In a rationalist system, this is a negative thing, for if we inculcate ourselves into truth, it has no authority over us since it stands within us instead of outside us.)  Although rationalist philosophy uses the rhetoric of “being led” to the truth by evidence, the idea behind the rhetoric (how the divorce of form and content haunts our words, both confirming and contradicting them) is that we are able to lead ourselves to the truth by the sweat of our intellect, tapping into a higher truth by gaining mastery over it.

In a rationalist system, the ideal is to remove ourselves from the equation so that abstract truth can reign. The system collapses, however, because we are still attempting to know truth by standing outside of it. By trying to stand outside, we set ourselves up as the authority over it. We also abdicate our hope of knowing, for knowledge does not come by standing outside, but stepping within.

So I believed that if I followed the questions raised about the Bible by higher criticism that I would arrive at a fuller understanding of the Bible since I would be able to better understand the messages of the biblical authors in their original contexts. I was persuaded that if I used the proper tools, I would somehow come to see the Bible for “what it is,” since I would be setting the text free to speak on its own terms.

I am now persuaded that the questions lead back to the questioners.

For people of faith, the evidence would lead to scripture’s divine authority (however that authority might be mediated through the limitations and concession of human language and culture). For people of no particular faith but rationalism, the evidence would lead to the Bible as a merely human book sans any divine trace or authority. For the former, the evidence led to a history of revelation (God reaching down to humanity), but for the latter, the evidence led to a history of religion (humans reaching up to God). In both cases, the evidence led back to the assumptions.

The problem that I did not perceive as an undergrad was that the bulk of conversation about the Bible in the academy was had in the context of this rationalist framework, which could only lead back to the Enlightenment illusion of objectivity (with a big helping of functional deism to boot).

My professors seemed to think everything was okay (and so did I). The cultural context of the Bible “properly understood” would lead to a re-affirmation of the Bible as the word of God, mediated in human speech.

But it was that assumption–the presupposition that “proper understanding” came through the tools of grammatical-historical exegesis–that began to become a barrier to actually hearing the word of God.  In the early days of my Protestant faith, I did my fair share of harping on the Catholic church of Luther’s day and the monopoly it held on biblical interpretation. Only later did I realize that the rallying cry of ad fontes (“back to the original sources!”) and the development of critical tools for the study of scripture meant that the final authority on interpretation had simply shifted from the Church to the individual scholar (who, through use of the proper linguistic tools, was able to somehow determine the “meaning” of scripture).

These are the tools I have been learning to use for almost seven years now, freighted with all the philosophical presuppositions described above. And for the past two years, I’ve been in a program that’s given me all the ammunition to pick apart the Bible and virtually no theology with which to put it back together.

The grammatical-historical method is founded on distance. The ideal is to disentangle yourself from theological presuppositions–to suspend your history with the text and the God it proclaims–in order to come at it with some sort of disembodied, objective, God’s-eye-view of the thing.

Sometimes I feel like the Israelites staring at the manna, this bread from heaven, asking, “What is it?”

What is it? Just eat it. You’ll see.

“There’s nothing but all this manna to look at.”

So don’t look at it. Eat it. It will nourish you and preserve your life.

“Is YHWH really among us or not?”

Eat.

But eating is the very thing we must not do with texts. For when we eat, we lose perspective. When we eat this word, letting it live in us, letting it know us, it changes us. We learn to love it instead of interrogating it in the old way.

And if I’ve learned anything in the past seven years, it’s that I mustn’t love this word.

Gudea to Jesus: Shepherd-Temple-Builder

I’ve been reading up on a Sumerian ruler named Gudea of Lagash in order to learn more about how his statues functioned as “images” of the king. There are some parallels between this mode of representation and how cult statues functioned as “images” of gods. The following is a (draft) excerpt from my book-in-progress, in which the concept of humans as the “image of God” in Genesis 1 features quite heavily. As I was wading through the inscriptions on the Gudea statues in order to write this narrative section, it reminded me of how texts like these can inform our understanding of the relationship between gods, kings, and temples in the ancient Near East and in the Bible (but I’ll talk more about that below).

*

His oval, dark green diorite eyes stared at me, unblinking. His whole face was carved of the same smooth, green stone, his pursed lips framed by a strong, dimpled chin and full cheeks. The nose, too, was full and round, like an unbroken dewdrop on a date palm leaf. A sturdy royal crown encircled his forehead. He was seated, his hands clasped together, firm and dignified, at his waist. The top of his robe was gathered to his left shoulder, leaving his strong right arm bare and unflinchingly still. The hem of his robe reached to the tops of his naked feet, and was covered with line upon line of cuneiform script. On his lap was what looked to be a board or book of some kind.

The statue of Gudea of Lagash was less than a meter high, but those eyes, perfect and impenetrable as a crow’s, seemed to take in the room. The glass display case that separated us did little to mute their gaze.

“He can’t see you, you know.” The voice belonged to a rotund, straight-backed woman with a docent tag pinned to her navy blazer.

“Can’t he?” I tilted my chin to look at her. Her long, silver hair was stretched taut from the edge of her high forehead and coiled into an unimpeachable bun in the middle of her skull.

“The ancient Mesopotamians thought he could, but only when he had undergone the proper rituals and been set in a special room in the god’s temple. Until then, our friend Gudea was just a block of cold diorite–blind, mute, deaf.”

“What’s this writing on his skirt?”

“We’re very lucky that the writing on this statue is intact,” she said, her painted eyebrows raised with excitement (which made the bun quiver a little). “We have the remains of twenty-seven Gudea statues in museums around the world, but many of them are severely damaged or, in some cases, just fragments. But this little guy,” she said, gesturing toward Gudea with one leathery, manicured hand while the other remained calmly at her side, “tells us a lot about himself.”

“He’s a king, no?” I said. “Why is he sitting? I thought only gods sat.”

“Gudea was deified after his death, and this statue may be trying to reflect that. But what’s most interesting–well, what I find most interesting–is how this image functioned as a representation of the flesh-and-blood Gudea. Over the course of his life, Gudea built temples to the gods in the places he governed, many in the ancient Sumerian city of Girsu. Kings like Gudea believed that they had been chosen by the gods, or a particular god, to be the ruler (or ‘shepherd’) of the region. Building temples to the god who had chosen the king accomplished two things. It showed gratitude toward the god and also showed the people, in a very public way, that the right ruler was on the throne, endorsed by the gods. The writing on the image’s robe extols Gudea as the shepherd chosenby the god Ningirsu out of 216,000 people, and tells the story of how Gudea built a house, the temple Eninnu, for Ningirsu. Once he built Eninnu, Gudea fashioned an image of himself out of diorite mined from the mountains of Magan, placed it in the temple before the cult image of Ningirsu, and commanded it to speak to the god on his behalf. ‘Statue,’ Gudea says, ‘tell my lord, Ningirsu…’–and then proceeds to tell the statue the details of how he built the house and installed his statue in order to convey messages to Ningirsu.”

*

The inscriptions on the Gudea statues frequently refer to Gudea as “the shepherd,” and emphasize that he was chosen by the god to whom he built the temple. The Gudea texts are not unique in this regard, as rulers in the ancient Near East were often called shepherds. It comes as no surprise, then, to find out that the biblical writers portray King David as a shepherd in the days prior to his becoming king. What better way to remind your readers that David is a king than to show that he was an actual shepherd before becoming a metaphorical “shepherd” as king?

David, as you’ll remember, wanted to build a house for YHWH. He believed that he was YHWH’s chosen king, God’s anointed. It was good religion and good politics to build a temple. What better way to express his gratitude to YHWH for choosing him as king than by building him a house where the people could worship?  And what better way to show the people that David was God’s man than by building the temple?  David’s son, Solomon, ends up building the temple for YHWH, but it serves the same purpose. God promised to David that he would establish his dynasty, that a son of David would continue to sit on the throne (2 Sam. 7).

When we get to the Gospels, Jesus emerges in various ways as a New Solomon. In Matthew’s genealogy, Jesus is the messiah (“anointed one”), the son of David (Matt. 1:1). He is not just the temple and temple-cleanser, but the temple-builder like Solomon (except here, Jesus builds the “temple” of his body by raising it from the dead) (John 2:19).

By rebuilding the temple of his body, Jesus accomplishes two goals. His resurrection is the public declaration that he is YHWH's chosen ruler, the messianic son of David who is the king, the son of God. Rebuilding YHWH's temple is also an act of gratitude. Jesus thanks YHWh for establishing his kingship by creating a place for YHWH's presence to rest, where people can come to worship him. And that temple is Jesus.

At least, that's my working theory. There’s obviously a lot more to explore here, but these are some initial thoughts.

When Nothing Arrives

When Josh picks me up from class, I sometimes ask for his smartphone as we drive home. “I need to check the ‘likes’ on my Facebook status,” I say.

“Dear, you’re so Facebook-popular,” he says. “I’ll bet you have fifteen ‘likes.’”

“You’re the one who makes me popular,” I say. “Everyone loves when I quote your witticisms.”

It’s just a running joke between us. We both know the ‘likes’ mean nothing and that Facebook updates are just part of a persona. Still, there’s a small boost in my mood when I see a ‘like.’ A ‘like’ means acknowledgement. It means someone has heard. Conversely, when there are no ‘likes’ or comments, it’s as if I’ve spoken up in a crowded room and no one has heard. My voice falls on nothing and void.

That sounds a bit dramatic when we’re talking about Facebook, but I view the desire for Facebook affirmation as microcosm of a broader gap that I often feel – a bigger nothingness that comes periodically (most often during times of transition). First comes the sense that I have been speaking and speaking and Nothing answers back. Nothing hears. And then comes the feeling that I myself am Nothing. My labors are for Nothing. My writing says Nothing. I am good at Nothing. I am worse than a waste of space – I do not even occupy space.

I can write such disparaging thoughts without misgivings because I think most of us feel this way from time to time. Writing helps me assuage the gnawing sense of Nothing. For you, it might be another creative activity – telling stories, baking, building, painting, crafting a mosaic, learning a second language. These activities, these Somethings, dismantle Nothing brick by brick. But you’ve got to face the Nothing first – the blank page, the empty canvas, the scattered mess of tiles and wood and letters.

I think the majority of human activity is spent trying to beat back Nothing. That quest is what’s behind our routines and rituals and roles. We create structures so that the world will be full of Something instead of Nothing.

I know why Nothing arrives in times of transition. It comes because the old routines, traditions, and identities begin to fall away, and I am faced with the dreadful silence.

Many people take this Nothing as evidence that Nothing is, that God is not (or at least inactive), and that all our busy Somethings are attempts to fill the void with meaning. I don’t think that’s an unfair conclusion, but this answer has never satisfied me. It only accounts for the Nothing. And the Nothing – though troublesome and dark – has never been a source of cognitive dissonance for me. I know the Nothing. I feel the Nothing. I am that Nothing.

For me, the source of dissonance (if I can call it dissonance) is the excess of joy that cuts through the Nothing. The meaning that somehow, someday always breaks through, filling me with gratitude for life, both this present life and the “life of the world to come,” as the Nicene creed calls the new life that believers in Jesus look forward to after the resurrection of the body.

I want to explore this more in a future post, but I’ve been thinking a lot about how to go about building wisely in an intellectual climate of deconstruction. My generation of Christians (or perhaps my “brand” of Christianity) has a kind of allergy to easy answers, absolutism, and certainty. This is a natural and, to an extent, healthy reaction to the religious dogmatism of previous generations. That very dogmatism was (I suspect) bound to fall apart because it was forged in the fires of rationalism. Rationalism assumed that the best (nay, the only) kind of knowing resulted through human reason and objective observation. Western Christianity could survive in that climate when church dogma was assumed to be part of the truths of human reason, but once everyone figured out that the truths of Christianity were not universally “self-evident,” Christian dogma had to be relegated to the sphere of subjectivity (of revelation rather than human deduction) – which had already been deemed inferior to the sort of knowing that was “provable” through experimentation.

By now, most everybody in the academy (regardless of religious adherence or lack thereof) has figured out that no one can view anything objectively, which is why we’re always awkwardly apologizing in our papers for our limitations and unobjectivity. It’s embarrassing, really – the fact that we're not God. Because we are limited human beings, we’re only allowed to say “I believe” and not “it is” – but our intellectual heritage has already taught us that the subjective “I believe” is inferior to the objective “it is,” so we feel bad about “I believe.”

All this to say: my generation knows it needs to find a different kind of knowing, not one that is necessarily antithetical to Christian dogma, but one that sees faith, doubt, and dogma working together. But we are often at a loss as to how to rebuild our faith without resorting to cookie-cutter answers and insincere platitudes in responses to real suffering and tough theological problems. The unfettered dogmatism of our forebears frightens us – we cannot go back there, nor do we wish to. 

But what do we do when Nothing arrives in its place, when even our shanty towns of meaning crumble and we are left in the dark surrounded by rubble?