OK, first off, I need to tell Adam (and the rest of you, I suppose) that I acquiesced to his request and posted a sizeable response to the comments on my "Question". This post is not entirely unrelated to that response (as you will see if you read them both), so you can probably use this to fill in some of the gaps in my thinking in said response. Or maybe they're both unintelligible...
This is a little different kind of post for me. I am for the most part just copying a page out of my moleskine notebook, but it's something I wanted to share and I would appreciate responses to it. So, without further ado:
05-12-2005
from Auden's "Sir, no man's enemy, forgiving all":
"Prohibit sharply the rehearsed response
And gradually correct the coward's stance."
-- leaping from the "ethical" to the "spiritual": no safety in laws, no easy answer in ready imperatives
--the terror of the spiritual leap lies in leaving the ethical but not returning to the merely aesthetic: responsibility without regulations. "I was just following orders" is no longer an excuse. Christ, save us in the time of trial! Let us find that Justice which the Law could never bring. Justice, the to come. Come. Oui, oui. Come.
--this "leap of faith" is a leap into doubt, from certainty (uncertainly rejected) into a place where the answers are not known before the particular question is asked (if they are ever "known" in the way you used to know things), where Justice arrives at an unexpected time and in the form of a stranger. Faith is an unlocked door.
--It's like stepping from a boat and walking on the water: impossible, perhaps, but it has been done.
--Faith and Doubt aren't opposites? Is faith, then, more like responsibility than it is like certainty? Like openness to the Other?
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10 comments:
Just to set the background a little: these notes are written with an eye on Kierkegaard's reading of Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac. The Law, the regulation, forbids murder (and especially the murder of your own child), but there is a way of living beyond the aesthetic (doing purely what is most immediately pleasing) and beyond the ethical (living strictly according to a code or a Law)-- Kierkegaard calls it the spiritual. Abraham took the leap of faith and bound Isaac to the alter: he left the ethical and went to live in the spiritual. The difficult part (the reason it is a leap of faith) is that we cannot understand the spiritual from the perspective of the ethical life: it seems to be immoral, chaotic-- it breaks the law! This is the intersection of Kierkegaard and Derrida: Justice (that which we always hope for and which is always still to come) is not identical with the Law (a human formulation), so Justice sometimes demands a transgression of the Law, that is to say that the Law is (sometimes or often) unjust. We cannot rely on the Law to produce Justice; instead, we must live in the space between the imperfect Law and the pure but never present Justice. I'd better stop typing now before I get carried away. Yes.
I am still thinking this through, but I don't think breaking the law is ever called for. Breaking the law is what Jesus did not do and the reason he was a perfect sacrifice, "a lamb without spot or blemish." He was sinless. He kept the whole law.
The reason the law (a divine formulation) does not bring justice is that we do not and can not keep the law. The law is perfect. We are not.
Abraham was not commanded to murder his son but to sacrifice him to God. He was the firstborn and that's what happens to the firstborn throughout the Bible, in both the real and symbolic sense of "sacrifice"
Supposing that we ought to break the law and make some kind of leap of faith reminds me of how the Unman tempted the Green Woman in Perelandra.
Justice cannot be codified; therefore, any and every Law will be imperfect and incomplete (the Law could never bring righteousness) and will sometimes fail to achieve Justice, at which point the Law is already broken (in as much as it doesn't work) regardless of whether or not we follow it.
What do you make of this:
The law of the LORD is perfect, converting the soul;
The testimony of the LORD is sure, making wise the simple;
The statutes of the LORD are right, rejoicing the heart;
The commandment of the LORD is pure, enlightening the eyes;
The fear of the LORD is clean, enduring forever;
The judgments of the LORD are true and righteous altogether.
from Ps. 19
It's clear that the law IS perfect and complete and wholly just. If anyone could keep the whole law, he would be perfect and complete and wholly righteous. As born sinners though, none of us can do that so when God gave us the law through Moses, rather than giving us life he was giving us condemnation, a way to see our sin and recognize our need for a savior.
Therefore, you shouldn't date a non-Christian. Obey Paul.
This is a beautiful encomium (a formal poem praising an abstraction) praising the kind of life into which God calls his people, and it deserves a second and third reading. [pause] OK, now that we've all had a chance to re-read the psalm, let's take a look at the structure used by the psalmist. The poem uses five synonyms for essentially the same thing (law, testimony, statutes, commandments, judgments) and dedicates one line to the quality of following those commands ("fear"). This method of exposition (constant repetition with change) points us structurally towards seeing the incompleteness of the poem-- towards it's inability to say all that should be said. It recognizes that the poem is a much smaller, much more limited thing than that which it praises. Now, the poet could have taken that knowledge and said "screw writing this poem, it will never be satisfactory", but, instead, he (or she) structured the poem in a way that indicates its limited nature but still points us in the right direction. I think that this structural principal we see at work in the poem (the poem cannot fully express praise of the law but it was written anyways to point us towards the goodness of the law) is at work in the relationship between the law and Justice (the law is incomplete and imperfect, but it was written to point us in its imperfection towards Justice). A law was written that did not and could not encompass every ethical decision that would be faced by human persons, but it could point us towards Justice, towards Love. Essentially, it points us towards Christ: I believe it was the author of Hebrews who says that the Law and Prophets were incomplete and only in the coming of Christ incarnate has the full Word of God entered the world. I have a hard time taking this poem as literally saying "The Mosaic Law is perfect, complete, and lacking in absolutely no way", especially when Hebrew poetry is characterized throughout by hyperbole.
It is very interesting to look at Christ's relationship to the Law during his incarnate life. He begins His ministry by taking water jars used for ceremonial cleansing and using them for the first century equivalent of a beer run. He has a lengthy theological discussion with a Samaritan (!) woman (!!) who was living with a man who wan't her husband (!!!). He makes a habit of healing people on the Sabaath and intentionally breaking Sabaath law in the process (why else make mud to heal the blind man? why else tell the cripple to pick up his mat and carry it home?) He almost never (I can't think of any instance) simply affirms the law ("you have heard, but I now tell you"), but he also says that not a word of it will pass away. When he is asked about the legal obligations of a neighbor, he doesn't say "such and such persons are neighbors and should be treated this way" but "whoever treats someone this way is his neighbor". He profanes the sacred and sanctifies the profane. When his enemies try to trap Him with the rigidity of the Law, He grabs a loose thread, gives a sharp tug and let's us watch the whole thing deconstruct itself. And in the end, what does He tell us encompasses the entire Law: love God and love your neighbor (who is my neigbor-- the unexpected stranger found on the road and the unexpected other who finds you lying in the ditch). He does not dismiss the Law, but He also does not allow us to sit safely within its rigidity and hide in what we think are loopholes. Christ forces us into a terrifying responsibility that lies in the space between the Law and Justice.
I have been thinking a lot about this conversation over the last few days, and I have several responses from different angles that I want to share (probably both here and on the other “Question” post), but, for clarity’s sake, I want to limit myself right now to a response to the exchange Coye and Ryan have been having over Psalm 19 and the nature of the Law. It strikes me that these readings are largely complementary in that Ryan’s emphasis is on the law itself, arguing that “the law IS perfect and complete and wholly just. If anyone could keep the whole law, he would be perfect and complete and wholly righteous,” while Coye’s reading, at its best, dwells more on the human ability to capture and communicate the law. Coye (literary critic that he is) does a very nice job of discussing the structure of the poem and the psalmist’s acknowledgement of inadequacy—“the poem cannot fully express praise of the law but it was written anyways to point us towards the goodness of the law,” a move which helpfully frames this psalm. With that said, however, my criticism of Coye’s post is that it overreaches, conflating human perception of the thing with the thing itself, and further projecting anthropomorphic attributes onto God, both of which strike me as somewhat problematic. Coye’s reading, as I’ve noted, is compelling and rich, and offers a strong and helpful explication of psalmist’s ability to perceive and communicate the Law linguistically. If his argument stopped there, I would find myself in complete agreement with him—clearly the things of God transcend human reason, and he is right to point out the means through which this psalmist gestures toward this disconnect, this failure of language. But he extends his argument both to the thing itself (the Law) and to the Law-giver, implying that the Law ontologically reflects the limitation of the human writer (because human description will always be incomplete, there is something incomplete about the Law) and that the limitations of the human writer also apply to the divine author such that the same structural principle you identify in the poem can obtain in the relationship between law and justice. I am confident that Coye will have some solid responses to these observations, and hopefully he and everyone else will take them in the spirit of shared inquiry and sharpening of argument.
It strikes me that this same issue—conflating human perception/understanding with the law, and then drawing conclusions about the pair that should properly be limited to the former—can be observed in Coye’s ensuing discussion of Christ and the law, in which he posits a deconstructive role for Christ. I agree completely that Christ engages in some form of deconstruction (and this is something I want to think/write about further at some point), but I think what he deconstructs is not the law, but the pharisaical human apparatus that has been erected around the law. So, when Coye says that Christ “profanes the sacred and sanctifies the profane. When his enemies try to trap Him with the rigidity of the Law, He grabs a loose thread, gives a sharp tug and let's us watch the whole thing deconstruct itself,” I think he is on to something, but (just as Dave has shown with the Christian/non-Christian definitional issue under “Question”) there is a need for clear categorical distinctions between the law (transmitted by the law-giver) and the mishna and other human interpretative traditions which become grafted on to it. When Christ heals on the Sabbath, for example, he is breaking pharisaical law, but not the law provided by the law-giver, he is demonstrating the inadequacy of human understanding while at the same time upholding the law’s perfection. The rigidity and loopholes, then, are characteristics of human deployment and interaction with the law, and not of the law itself, and Christ’s challenging of these positions, as Coye points out, forces us into a position of “terrible responsibility.” I can’t help but think of Christ’s teaching on adultery in this regard: “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ Bu I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Mt. 5:28-29).
Thanks, Coye, for making such a thoughtful response. And you Andy your gracious well mannered post puts me to shame and will not go unanswered. For now, though, I limit myself to responding to Coye.
I can see that this poem was written in praise of the law and of the kind of life to which to which God is calling his people. The law is not an abstraction however and would not have been conceived as such by the author, David. He is talking about the words of God, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy.
When he says "law, testimony, statutes, commandments, and judgments," he has a definite set of words in mind, "revelation," the same words which we have today in our Bibles thanks to the working of the Spirit through various men.
I agree that the "law, testimony, statutes, commandments, and judgments" are all synonymns basically pointing the same thing and i can see how the "repetition with change" structure might show that the psalmist feels his words are inadequate to express the whole beauty and perfection the law.
I don't agree though that because Ps 19 fails and praise of the law fails to wholly express its beauty that we should somehow take the psalmist at less than his word that the law is "perfect, sure, right, pure, true and righteous altogether." You look at the structure but you ignore what the psalmist actually says.
The law was not written to encompass every ethical decision? First I think this touches the crucial point of disagreement. Why was the law written? I gather you think the law was written "to point us in its imperfection to justice". You think the law is a humanly devised text that temporarily functioned to point God's people to justice but in the end, as all texts do, it unraveled. It dissolved into the Jesus' summons to follow him in the life of faith, the life of responsibility to love God and our neighbor.
We diverge at step 1, thinking of the law as a text. It is not a deconstructing decomposing mutating dying text but an eternally present and living word, as brimming with truth and applicability today as it ever has been.
So, back to why the law was written. As you say, it was not written to bring righteousness but rather to point us to Christ. I couldn't agree more. How does the law point us to Christ? It does so by being a perfect and all encompassing Law. This is the only possibility. Only a perfect and complete law could point us to Christ. Why? Well, how does the Law point us to Christ? It does so by pointing to our NEED for Christ. That is, it does so by being so exhaustively complete and impossible to keep that we humans can no longer trick ourselves into thinking that we can keep the law, that we are basically good people. The law was a gift, a great gift, but it was the gift of seeing our dark and corrupt and incurable hearts. The gift of seeing sin. The gift of seeing death. The gift of seeing ourselves like God sees us.
The psalmist understood this! Look at what immediately follows his encomium on the law:
"Who can understand his errors? Cleanse me from secret faults"
He dwells on the perfection of the law and immediately he is struck by his unworthiness, his guilt, his sin, and he is inspired with a spirit of confession and penitence. This is exactly how the law is supposed to function in the life of Christians and how it has functioned in history of man.
Wow. Suddenly the blog is firing on all cylinders. Well, thank you, Andy and Ryan, for your contributions. It's nice to have some theologically conservative friends who will keep me anchored. That being said, let's push against the horizons of orthodoxy while looking for that ineffable Word of love.
OK, I want to quickly tell Andy that I am not trying to discuss the failure of human ability to follow the law but the failure of the law itself. Yes, our human limitations do prevent us from constructing a perfectly just legal code, but I want to make a stronger claim than that. I spent several days thinking "Would divine Law be beyond the distance between Law and Justice in such a way that the Law would BE Justice?" I provisionally decided "no", and I will try to make it clear why.
I want to quickly preface this by saying, once again, that the Law can still be good and useful without being perfect. Just because the Law doesn't perfectly represent Justice doesn't mean that it is useless, it just means that it has limitations. An imperfect Law can still convict the heart of a sinner and point him/her to Christ. That was the main point in my explication of Psalm 19-- the poem is beautiful and useful even though it cannot perfectly describe and praise the Law. The connection between the two is not causal but analogical/anagogical. Now, as succinctly as I can, I will try to give three arguments supporting the claim that the Law is imperfect.
1)Hebrews: the theologian of the book of Hebrews begins his letter by saying that God spoke to us long ago in the prophets and fathers, but now he has spoken to us in His Son. This structural principal carries through the entire epistle, and the old Law is NOT given equal footing with the revelation of Christ: he unequivocally says that the revelation of Christ is superior to the revelation of the Law, that the Law was imperfect. I think that everyone in this conversation should take the time to read through the book of Hebrews (it only takes about an hour), but for the moment I want to point out 8:7, "For if that first covenant had been faultless, there would have been no occasion sought for a second." Chapter 10 verse 1 also tells us that that Law had "only a shadow of the good things to come and not the very form of things".
2)word vs Word: [I know that Dave and I discuss this somewhere on the blog, but I can't seem to find it right now.] We must be careful not to confuse the Word (that is, God the Word) with the word of God (the Bible which was written, compiled, preserved, translated and canonized by dozens of men over several centuries). The Word is perfect, and He is Justice and Love and Truth and all of those things. The word, on the other hand, is-- at least in part-- a human endeavor even while it is a divine work. The Bible is a product of the Church and not the other way around, and while the Holy Spirit's role in the shaping of Scripture is important, it does not negate the human actions of its authors and compilers or the textuality of the Scriptures themselves. The written Law will be subject to the limits of textuality, if for no other reason, because it is a WRITTEN Law and language is an insufficient medium to express a perfect, divine and unchanging code.
3)NO Law is Just: This is what I meant when I said "Justice cannot be codified" several posts ago, but WHY NOT? Justice is what Jesus describes in the parable of the Good Samaritan: it is openness to the unexpected coming of an other and responsibility for that other--it means being responsible for the other. The English word "responsible" comes from "response" and "able"-- whoever is able to respond to the needs of her neighbor is responsible for him, is responsible to make the correct response. Let's go back to Hebrews for a second: the priest Melchizedek appears without geneology or history-- appears as the wholly other-- and is received by Abraham who gives him a tithe and receivs a blessing. The other came, Abraham acted responsibly and he was blessed. (The theologian points out that this action was prior to and greater than the Levitical Law.) Also, Peter on the roof of Simon the Tanner tries resolutely to follow the Law, but the Spirit brings an unexpected vision of a blanket with unLawful food and the command "take and eat". This vision prepares him for the enexpected coming of the other in the gentile Cornelius, and Peter's reponsible reaction to Cornelius (Just but unLawful) benefits all of us today. The coming of the other is always unexpected, so we cannot have what Auden calls a "rehearsed response" because we do not know what need or what Other we will be responding to. Justice demands a RESPONSibility that cannot be prescribed (litterally "pre-written") by the Law.
One beauty of the Law is that it recognizes its own finitude. The prophets tell us countless times that the Law in and of itself does not please God: Isaiah gives a prophetic warning against the hollow "trampling" of God's courts for sacred assemblies (assemblies required by the Law), and he declares that a true fast is not covering your head with ashes but loosing the chains of injustice and feeding the orphan and widow (responding to the needs of the unexpected Other). Micah's prophetic description of the Law is not following the prescribed sacrifices but to "do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God". He does not dismiss the Law, but he recognizes that God requires us-- that we are responsible-- not for meeting the requirements of the Law but for living in that space between the Law and Justice.
Two more clues about the nature of Justice: the Old Testament consists almost entirely of narrative, and Jesus consistently taught in parables.
Law is codex; it is quantifiable precepts. Our received Scriptures do not rely predominantly on axiomatic, propositional teaching: instead... the Kingdom of Heaven is like a man wandering through a field who stumbles upon a great treasure-- he goes and sells all he owns in order to buy the field.
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