Conclusion
The postmodern offence with Scripture is rooted in the problem of power and the way it appears to violate human autonomy.[1] What I have tried to establish in response is that, although the creator has indeed an authority that is of a different order from that any creature can rightly command, the word of God in the pages of Scripture functions as powerful in ways that do not contravene its humanity. In fact, that God speaks using human writing is entirely in keeping with the God whose essential nature it is to seek relationship with his creatures. His authority is, as Colin Gunton phrases it, ‘an authority of grace’.[2] We need not deny the power of the words of Scripture. But we can observe how God deals graciously and gently with us in it. The gospel proclaimed in its pages is divinely powerful – powerful for the salvation of those who believe. It is a powerful expression of the love of God.
[1] The language is Colin Gunton’s. C.E. Gunton, A Brief Theology of Revelation (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995), p. 31
Showing posts with label power. Show all posts
Showing posts with label power. Show all posts
Thursday, September 27, 2007
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
The power of Scripture VI
Second, the power of Scripture is legitimate because of the freedom that its readers are given to accept or reject it. It isn’t an incantation, as wizard-words are; or some kind of hallucinogenic rhetoric that robs its readers of their capacity to respond as persons. The freedom of readers is always to close the book – to remain deaf to the voice of God. Resistance, as Foucault observed, is always possible, to the point of self-destruction. God’s authority is, we may say, exercised gently, or even graciously. As Richard Bauckham puts it:
This is how the Bible transcends the contemporary dilemma of a total incompatibility between freedom and authority, conceived as total autonomy versus oppressive authoritarianism. The authority that inheres in the biblical story is the authority of grace. In other words, the biblical metanarrative is a story not of the assertion of autonomy in domination, but of grace and free response. In this story all is given by God, including freedom.[1]
The covenant-making God calls his people to respond to his redeeming of them with their continued trust and obedience. The book of Deuteronomy may serve as an example. Yhwh founds his command to his people on his mighty and gracious liberation of them from Egypt. Memory of the gracious acts of Yhwh is the sine qua non of Israel’s life and the ground of her obedience to him. While refusal of the command of Yhwh is condemned, it still remains for them a possible choice (see Dt 30-1). Although the word of God - the commands, stipulations, decrees and ordinances – is a word of authority among the people, it is up to them to enact that word.[2] It is they who are to ‘fear the Lord you God, to walk in all his ways, to love him, to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, and to keep the commandments of the Lord your God’ (Dt 10:12-13). The will of Yhwh is to be carried out by the co-joining of his will to the wills of the people. They are to submit, but it is from freedom that they submit, else it is not true obedience.
It is at this stage that I would like to note the place that Scriptures themselves give to the voice of protest against the absence of God. The gentleness of the voice of God in Scripture is such that he even allows the articulation of a dissent against him. The complaint of the Psalmist at the delay of Yhwh’s justice is one of the remarkable features of this word that God can call his own word. ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ pleads the Psalmist. That the God-forsaken man utters the same words on the cross reveals how well this complaint has been heard by the one to whom it was made: so well heard indeed that he enters into the very condition that led to that complaint.
Third, the final power to which Scripture gives witness remains to be seen. That is, the Scriptures declare and describe the coming judgement of God according to the righteousness of his character. The day is coming when the Lord will powerfully fulfill all the words of Scripture and show them decisively to have been true words.
According to its human nature, Scripture is revealed to be powerful along the continuum of salvation-history. That power has yet to be revealed in full; it as yet remains a power that is partly concealed, and in contention. It is rejected as much as accepted; denied as much as affirmed. It is a great, unfinished symphony! The themes have been stated and re-stated, but the resolving cadence has yet to be played.
However, we must also assert that the judgement of God has been inserted into human history, at the cross of Christ. For all the gentleness and forbearance of God’s word to us in Scripture, it has at its central motif God’s fearful verdict on humanity. The publication of this judgement in the pages of Scripture stands as a terrible warning to men and women of what the final judgement holds for them. It is God’s promise that he will vindicate his own righteousness at the last.
Furthermore, in the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead – the most dramatic revelation of God’s power since creation (see Rom 4:17) – we receive public notification that, in the work of Jesus, God himself was at work. He was handed over to death for our trespasses and was raised for our justification (Rom 4:25). How much more can the believer expect salvation from the wrath to come! As Paul describes it in 1 Cor 15, we are shown in the risen Christ the trajectory of what is to come. The death and resurrection of Christ ‘according to the Scriptures’ are a powerful affirmation of those Scriptures from within the present age ahead of the final Yes of God, which is yet to come.
Recognition of the place in salvation history from which we receive and read the Scriptures means that we can strongly affirm the meaningfulness and trustworthiness of those writings without claiming that we have complete mastery over that meaning here and now. We also know that we read those Scriptures with the responsibility to answer to their divine author for how we read and respond. As we read the Scriptures, we read as seriously as we can to discern the meaning of those writings, neither shirking the discomfort of disagreement nor avoiding the painful truth in them. Reading with what we might call an ‘eschatological’ sense we may avoid merely co-opting Scripture in the service of our own power and instead become its servants: not using the text, but being used by it.
[1] Richard Bauckham, "Authority and Scripture," in God and the Crisis of Freedom: Biblical and Contemporary Perspectives (Louisville, Ky.; London: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002), pp. 67-8
[2] Kevin Vanhoozer similarly speaks about the practice of the Word of God. Kevin J. Vanhoozer, The Drama of Doctrine: A Canonical-Linguistic Approach to Christian Theology, 1st ed. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005)
This is how the Bible transcends the contemporary dilemma of a total incompatibility between freedom and authority, conceived as total autonomy versus oppressive authoritarianism. The authority that inheres in the biblical story is the authority of grace. In other words, the biblical metanarrative is a story not of the assertion of autonomy in domination, but of grace and free response. In this story all is given by God, including freedom.[1]
The covenant-making God calls his people to respond to his redeeming of them with their continued trust and obedience. The book of Deuteronomy may serve as an example. Yhwh founds his command to his people on his mighty and gracious liberation of them from Egypt. Memory of the gracious acts of Yhwh is the sine qua non of Israel’s life and the ground of her obedience to him. While refusal of the command of Yhwh is condemned, it still remains for them a possible choice (see Dt 30-1). Although the word of God - the commands, stipulations, decrees and ordinances – is a word of authority among the people, it is up to them to enact that word.[2] It is they who are to ‘fear the Lord you God, to walk in all his ways, to love him, to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, and to keep the commandments of the Lord your God’ (Dt 10:12-13). The will of Yhwh is to be carried out by the co-joining of his will to the wills of the people. They are to submit, but it is from freedom that they submit, else it is not true obedience.
It is at this stage that I would like to note the place that Scriptures themselves give to the voice of protest against the absence of God. The gentleness of the voice of God in Scripture is such that he even allows the articulation of a dissent against him. The complaint of the Psalmist at the delay of Yhwh’s justice is one of the remarkable features of this word that God can call his own word. ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ pleads the Psalmist. That the God-forsaken man utters the same words on the cross reveals how well this complaint has been heard by the one to whom it was made: so well heard indeed that he enters into the very condition that led to that complaint.
Third, the final power to which Scripture gives witness remains to be seen. That is, the Scriptures declare and describe the coming judgement of God according to the righteousness of his character. The day is coming when the Lord will powerfully fulfill all the words of Scripture and show them decisively to have been true words.
According to its human nature, Scripture is revealed to be powerful along the continuum of salvation-history. That power has yet to be revealed in full; it as yet remains a power that is partly concealed, and in contention. It is rejected as much as accepted; denied as much as affirmed. It is a great, unfinished symphony! The themes have been stated and re-stated, but the resolving cadence has yet to be played.
However, we must also assert that the judgement of God has been inserted into human history, at the cross of Christ. For all the gentleness and forbearance of God’s word to us in Scripture, it has at its central motif God’s fearful verdict on humanity. The publication of this judgement in the pages of Scripture stands as a terrible warning to men and women of what the final judgement holds for them. It is God’s promise that he will vindicate his own righteousness at the last.
Furthermore, in the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead – the most dramatic revelation of God’s power since creation (see Rom 4:17) – we receive public notification that, in the work of Jesus, God himself was at work. He was handed over to death for our trespasses and was raised for our justification (Rom 4:25). How much more can the believer expect salvation from the wrath to come! As Paul describes it in 1 Cor 15, we are shown in the risen Christ the trajectory of what is to come. The death and resurrection of Christ ‘according to the Scriptures’ are a powerful affirmation of those Scriptures from within the present age ahead of the final Yes of God, which is yet to come.
Recognition of the place in salvation history from which we receive and read the Scriptures means that we can strongly affirm the meaningfulness and trustworthiness of those writings without claiming that we have complete mastery over that meaning here and now. We also know that we read those Scriptures with the responsibility to answer to their divine author for how we read and respond. As we read the Scriptures, we read as seriously as we can to discern the meaning of those writings, neither shirking the discomfort of disagreement nor avoiding the painful truth in them. Reading with what we might call an ‘eschatological’ sense we may avoid merely co-opting Scripture in the service of our own power and instead become its servants: not using the text, but being used by it.
[1] Richard Bauckham, "Authority and Scripture," in God and the Crisis of Freedom: Biblical and Contemporary Perspectives (Louisville, Ky.; London: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002), pp. 67-8
[2] Kevin Vanhoozer similarly speaks about the practice of the Word of God. Kevin J. Vanhoozer, The Drama of Doctrine: A Canonical-Linguistic Approach to Christian Theology, 1st ed. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005)
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
The power of Scripture V
Some utterly pagan dancing.
Thus such forms of speaking do not so much express clearly what God is like as accommodate the knowledge of him to our slight capacity. To do this he must descend far beneath his loftiness.
The drawing out of God’s speaking over time as portrayed in the Scriptures is a feature of his stooping to us – what we may call his gentleness. This gentle accommodation is not an act or a façade: rather, it is entirely true to the character of the God the Bible describes, a characteristic seen in its full flourishing in the obedience and humility of the Son.
Promise is one feature of God’s stooping to us in Scripture; the use of a human mediator is another. That divine speaking might be mediated through human words is not an embarrassment to Scripture itself. At Horeb Israel shrank back for fear of God’s word to them: ‘if we hear the voice of the Lord our God any longer, we shall die. For who is there of all flesh that has heard the voice of the living God speaking out of the fire as we have and remained alive?’ (Dt 5:25-6) Yhwh provided for them a mediator, Moses, to teach and expound his will to them. The role of the prophet in the Old Testament grows out of this gracious possibility in the life of Israel with Yhwh. In appreciation of this point lies an important rejoinder to Shaw, Jasper and Castelli: the power that Paul claims is only as a messenger of the gracious divine word – the gospel in other words – and expressed with persistent awareness of the limitations of his own humanity and the derivative nature of his authority. In fact, in the Corinthian correspondence, he appeals to his own weakness, suffering and lack of verbal skill as a sign of the work of the Father of the crucified and risen Christ in him.
ii. the gentleness of God
The written words of the Bible show the perspiration of human authors as much as the inspiration of a divine one. Can the divine authority survive uncompromised by its use of human language? Can the Bible as God’s word overcome the scandal (to use Barth’s phrase) of its humanity? For an answer to this question I point to the nature of the Scriptures themselves, and make three points:
First, the Scriptures are promissory and prophetic in nature. They have at their core the great promises of God to Abraham, to Israel at Sinai and, later, to David: and signal God’s declaration of his commitment to his people. In Jesus of Nazareth all God’s promises coalesce; and yet in him there is a magnification, an intensification, as well as a fulfillment, of the ancient promises. The promise of his return and the recapitulation of all things in him is the abiding hope of the New Testament. The Holy Spirit, whose work as inspirer, illuminator and counsellor so closely intertwines with the words of Scripture, is given to believers as an arrabon or guarantee of the return of the Lord Jesus (2 Cor 1:22).
The legitimate power of Scripture is rooted in the God who says and it is, as we have seen. But it is a power now played out gradually, over the sweep of human history, within and across human culture and language. The word of the creator God HAS the power of absolute force, but the Bible’s power is not like this. It is a power appropriate to human nature, too. With that in mind, we may observe that scripture is primarily and not incidentally a narrative. The various parts of the Bible cohere around the story that is its central theme. This narrative shape is not merely the casing for a set of propositions or timeless truths. It is quite deliberately immanent, as humans are. The Scriptures chart a revelation that has taken time to come to its fullness. For men and women to see the righteousness and trustworthiness of God necessitates the passage of time: for it is only over time that promises are to be declared, believed, tested and fulfilled.
We might here adopt Calvin’s language of accommodation to describe what we here find in the nature of the Scriptures. In speaking to us in Scripture, ‘God is wont in a measure to ‘lisp’ in speaking to us’ as a nurse does with a baby:
The written words of the Bible show the perspiration of human authors as much as the inspiration of a divine one. Can the divine authority survive uncompromised by its use of human language? Can the Bible as God’s word overcome the scandal (to use Barth’s phrase) of its humanity? For an answer to this question I point to the nature of the Scriptures themselves, and make three points:
First, the Scriptures are promissory and prophetic in nature. They have at their core the great promises of God to Abraham, to Israel at Sinai and, later, to David: and signal God’s declaration of his commitment to his people. In Jesus of Nazareth all God’s promises coalesce; and yet in him there is a magnification, an intensification, as well as a fulfillment, of the ancient promises. The promise of his return and the recapitulation of all things in him is the abiding hope of the New Testament. The Holy Spirit, whose work as inspirer, illuminator and counsellor so closely intertwines with the words of Scripture, is given to believers as an arrabon or guarantee of the return of the Lord Jesus (2 Cor 1:22).
The legitimate power of Scripture is rooted in the God who says and it is, as we have seen. But it is a power now played out gradually, over the sweep of human history, within and across human culture and language. The word of the creator God HAS the power of absolute force, but the Bible’s power is not like this. It is a power appropriate to human nature, too. With that in mind, we may observe that scripture is primarily and not incidentally a narrative. The various parts of the Bible cohere around the story that is its central theme. This narrative shape is not merely the casing for a set of propositions or timeless truths. It is quite deliberately immanent, as humans are. The Scriptures chart a revelation that has taken time to come to its fullness. For men and women to see the righteousness and trustworthiness of God necessitates the passage of time: for it is only over time that promises are to be declared, believed, tested and fulfilled.
We might here adopt Calvin’s language of accommodation to describe what we here find in the nature of the Scriptures. In speaking to us in Scripture, ‘God is wont in a measure to ‘lisp’ in speaking to us’ as a nurse does with a baby:
Thus such forms of speaking do not so much express clearly what God is like as accommodate the knowledge of him to our slight capacity. To do this he must descend far beneath his loftiness.
The drawing out of God’s speaking over time as portrayed in the Scriptures is a feature of his stooping to us – what we may call his gentleness. This gentle accommodation is not an act or a façade: rather, it is entirely true to the character of the God the Bible describes, a characteristic seen in its full flourishing in the obedience and humility of the Son.
Promise is one feature of God’s stooping to us in Scripture; the use of a human mediator is another. That divine speaking might be mediated through human words is not an embarrassment to Scripture itself. At Horeb Israel shrank back for fear of God’s word to them: ‘if we hear the voice of the Lord our God any longer, we shall die. For who is there of all flesh that has heard the voice of the living God speaking out of the fire as we have and remained alive?’ (Dt 5:25-6) Yhwh provided for them a mediator, Moses, to teach and expound his will to them. The role of the prophet in the Old Testament grows out of this gracious possibility in the life of Israel with Yhwh. In appreciation of this point lies an important rejoinder to Shaw, Jasper and Castelli: the power that Paul claims is only as a messenger of the gracious divine word – the gospel in other words – and expressed with persistent awareness of the limitations of his own humanity and the derivative nature of his authority. In fact, in the Corinthian correspondence, he appeals to his own weakness, suffering and lack of verbal skill as a sign of the work of the Father of the crucified and risen Christ in him.
[more points to follow]
The power of Scripture IV
III God, Christ and Power
i. the authority of God
I would not want to dispute - but rather join with - the postmodern protest against abuses of power in the form of wizard-words. Across the sweep of history, human words have been deployed by the mighty to oppress the lowly. As George Orwell showed in 1984, language can be the ultimate instrument of coercion, offering the possibility of enslaving not just the body but the memory and the imagination as well – all without guns. If no power is available that is not guilty of this oppressive tendency, then a retreat into a peaceful plurality is the only strategy for the survival of the human race in the age of mass destruction. It is notoriously the case that the Bible has been co-opted by those who would support violence, terror and oppression: the apartheid regime in South Africa being only one such recent example. This is a text that has been misused: that much we can grant.
But the power critics have gone too far.[1] What they have failed to see is the crucified form in which the Bible seeks to persuade its readers; which is to say, although the Bible witnesses to an Almighty God, it witnesses to him through the story of his sacrificial love for the world. The God of the gospel is a God who himself rules by dint of an act of submission to the powers of the earth. The very nature of the Bible’s message in fact relativizes human attempts at domination: it is a power protest of its own.
The authority of the God of the Bible – the God who is Father, Son and Spirit – rests on three supports: his capacity to act, his knowledge, and his utter trustworthiness. First, Scripture testifies from its opening sentences to a Lord who says and it is. His Word corresponds exactly to reality: in fact, it is what reality is: ‘And it was so’. The absolute sovereignty of this deity is not met by any challenge. He is not tapping into some primal force or casting a spell, but exercising his free creative power and his absolute mastery of things. These words were the kind of speaking that wizards attempt to emulate: except that here, of course, the being that is speaking is of an entirely different order. And his act of creative will establishes his worthiness to receive the adulation of all creatures (Rev 4:11).
Second, God speaks true words because of his knowledge of all things. He has the ‘view from nowhere’, although it is better rebadged as the ‘view from heaven’; and so may properly speak powerful words. It is not that he is objective; rather he is authoritatively subjective. This difference in knowledge is what Yhwh wields against Job in Job 38-41: it is a comparison of Job’s ignorance (rather than his weakness) against Yhwh’s knowledge of the origin of things (rather than his strength). It is a conversation, not an arm-wrestle.
Third, the character of the God of Scripture is not dissembling or unreliable but utterly trustworthy. Words that he speaks do not distort or pervert reality. In speaking, this God speaks truly of the world but also speaks truly of himself. He does not construct an identity for himself like a participant in an Internet chat room. When he speaks, he truly reveals himself.
So: if the God who is mighty, knowledgeable and reliable speaks, ought we not expect powerfully authoritative words? Does he not have a moral right as well as the freedom and the capacity to utter words of power? Once again, Job 38-41 is suggestive: after all, what right do human beings have to dispute with God? And yet, from the whirlwind the Lord deigns to converse playfully and beautifully with Job in such a way that it restores him to his original dignity.
The lines of our argument are of course consummated in Christ himself, who as Prophet, Priest and King exercised the authority of God on earth. It is of course from this enfleshed Word that we learn not about what God is capable of doing but what he wills to do and does do. First, the life of Jesus was marked of course by dynamic activity – a virgin birth, and many miracles and healings. Yet, though his ministry had the character of a challenge he refrained from taking up arms against the rulers of the world. His consummate ‘act’ was becoming subject to the power of those who killed him. Secondly, he spoke, powerful, life-giving words – ‘Talitha koumi’; ‘Lazurus, come out!’; ‘Peace! Be still!’ – and yet also spent his days in patiently teaching his disciples from the Scriptures about the cross-shaped pattern of their discipleship. Thirdly, he also demonstrated in his life and death the utter covenant faithfulness of God; he was the proof that God had remembered his people, and that their consolation was near – as the aged Simeon and Anna recognized when they met the child Jesus at the Temple. In this cruciform way Christ was indeed ‘the power of God and the wisdom of God’ (1 Cor 1:24).
[1] It ought to be noted that some of Foucault’s interpreters have gone taken his descriptions of power and presented them as a blanket censure of all power. Elizabeth Castelli, for example, badly confuses the Foucauldian terms ‘governmentality’ and ‘domination’: Castelli, Imitating Paul: A Discourse of Power
i. the authority of God
I would not want to dispute - but rather join with - the postmodern protest against abuses of power in the form of wizard-words. Across the sweep of history, human words have been deployed by the mighty to oppress the lowly. As George Orwell showed in 1984, language can be the ultimate instrument of coercion, offering the possibility of enslaving not just the body but the memory and the imagination as well – all without guns. If no power is available that is not guilty of this oppressive tendency, then a retreat into a peaceful plurality is the only strategy for the survival of the human race in the age of mass destruction. It is notoriously the case that the Bible has been co-opted by those who would support violence, terror and oppression: the apartheid regime in South Africa being only one such recent example. This is a text that has been misused: that much we can grant.
But the power critics have gone too far.[1] What they have failed to see is the crucified form in which the Bible seeks to persuade its readers; which is to say, although the Bible witnesses to an Almighty God, it witnesses to him through the story of his sacrificial love for the world. The God of the gospel is a God who himself rules by dint of an act of submission to the powers of the earth. The very nature of the Bible’s message in fact relativizes human attempts at domination: it is a power protest of its own.
The authority of the God of the Bible – the God who is Father, Son and Spirit – rests on three supports: his capacity to act, his knowledge, and his utter trustworthiness. First, Scripture testifies from its opening sentences to a Lord who says and it is. His Word corresponds exactly to reality: in fact, it is what reality is: ‘And it was so’. The absolute sovereignty of this deity is not met by any challenge. He is not tapping into some primal force or casting a spell, but exercising his free creative power and his absolute mastery of things. These words were the kind of speaking that wizards attempt to emulate: except that here, of course, the being that is speaking is of an entirely different order. And his act of creative will establishes his worthiness to receive the adulation of all creatures (Rev 4:11).
Second, God speaks true words because of his knowledge of all things. He has the ‘view from nowhere’, although it is better rebadged as the ‘view from heaven’; and so may properly speak powerful words. It is not that he is objective; rather he is authoritatively subjective. This difference in knowledge is what Yhwh wields against Job in Job 38-41: it is a comparison of Job’s ignorance (rather than his weakness) against Yhwh’s knowledge of the origin of things (rather than his strength). It is a conversation, not an arm-wrestle.
Third, the character of the God of Scripture is not dissembling or unreliable but utterly trustworthy. Words that he speaks do not distort or pervert reality. In speaking, this God speaks truly of the world but also speaks truly of himself. He does not construct an identity for himself like a participant in an Internet chat room. When he speaks, he truly reveals himself.
So: if the God who is mighty, knowledgeable and reliable speaks, ought we not expect powerfully authoritative words? Does he not have a moral right as well as the freedom and the capacity to utter words of power? Once again, Job 38-41 is suggestive: after all, what right do human beings have to dispute with God? And yet, from the whirlwind the Lord deigns to converse playfully and beautifully with Job in such a way that it restores him to his original dignity.
The lines of our argument are of course consummated in Christ himself, who as Prophet, Priest and King exercised the authority of God on earth. It is of course from this enfleshed Word that we learn not about what God is capable of doing but what he wills to do and does do. First, the life of Jesus was marked of course by dynamic activity – a virgin birth, and many miracles and healings. Yet, though his ministry had the character of a challenge he refrained from taking up arms against the rulers of the world. His consummate ‘act’ was becoming subject to the power of those who killed him. Secondly, he spoke, powerful, life-giving words – ‘Talitha koumi’; ‘Lazurus, come out!’; ‘Peace! Be still!’ – and yet also spent his days in patiently teaching his disciples from the Scriptures about the cross-shaped pattern of their discipleship. Thirdly, he also demonstrated in his life and death the utter covenant faithfulness of God; he was the proof that God had remembered his people, and that their consolation was near – as the aged Simeon and Anna recognized when they met the child Jesus at the Temple. In this cruciform way Christ was indeed ‘the power of God and the wisdom of God’ (1 Cor 1:24).
[1] It ought to be noted that some of Foucault’s interpreters have gone taken his descriptions of power and presented them as a blanket censure of all power. Elizabeth Castelli, for example, badly confuses the Foucauldian terms ‘governmentality’ and ‘domination’: Castelli, Imitating Paul: A Discourse of Power
Monday, September 24, 2007
The power of Scripture III
ii Suspicion of Scripture as a discourse of Power
To the Enlightenment critique of the text of the Bible is now added a postmodern protest against its operation as a discourse of power. This ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ suspects that naïve reading of the Bible allows a system of power to develop in human communities that is detrimental to the flowering of individual selves in their full self-determining authenticity. We offer some examples: Elizabeth Castelli is one biblical scholar who has taken Foucault’s power analysis and applied it to the New Testament, and especially to the writings of Paul. She writes in her book Imitating Paul: A Discourse of Power that:
[T]he thesis of this study is that the notion of mimesis functions in Paul’s letters as a strategy of power. That is, it articulates and rationalizes as true and natural a particular set of power relations within the social formation of early Christian communities.[1]
Reading those Pauline texts which enjoin his readers to imitation – 1 Thess 1:6, 2:14; Phil 3:17; 1 Cor 4:16, 11:1 – Castelli seeks to demonstrate that in doing this Paul is not benignly calling the churches to emulate a laudable ethical model, but rather inscribing in the early communities a hierarchical ‘economy of sameness’, resulting in a (sinister) ‘erasure of difference’. Paul’s rhetoric is not a rational argument, but a subtle assertion of power that needs to be exposed and resisted. These are wizard-words. Castelli writes:
Discourse is never innocent, it discloses the incapacity of any rhetoric to convey the truth.[2]
This betrays her suspicion that Paul is up to no good:
Paul’s discourse of power may be read as a complex fiction whereby he asserts the conditions of proper power relations in the Christian community at Corinth as truth… His attempts to reduce what to him is the cacophonous discord of many voices result in his own bellowing tones filling the stage.[3]
That is to say, when it comes to this scriptural author at least, we see him forming in his language – by his powerful metaphors and by his rhetorical stratagems – the conditions under which power will operate within the Christian community. But he doesn’t do this innocently, for Castelli: he does it to suppress diversity and shore up his own authority.[4]
Castelli is not alone. In his study of religious rhetoric, David Jasper writes:
Paul…leaves little space for mutuality or a real relationship between himself and the Thessalonians apart from that of their utter dependence upon him.[5]
He goes on:
Paul’s doctrine, it seems, cannot be distinguished from the political and personal moves of his writing, or the uneasiness of his relation to his readers. The assertion of authority and the exercise of personal power are dominant themes of these letters.[6]
Jasper’s deconstruction is not limited to Paul: he makes a case, following Frank Kermode’s analysis in his book The Genesis of Secrecy,[7] that Mark’s gospel can also be read as a dissembling book of secrets and suspicions, teasing and entrancing its readers with the covert aim of rendering them docile. Once again, the Scriptures are not here critiqued for their flawed textuality as such (which is generally assumed but set aside as irrelevant), but for their deployment of power.[8]
OK: so what seems to be the trouble? To summarize, the power-critics see Scripture – the text of texts[9] – as an attempt at wielding what we have called wizard-power. This is held to be an inappropriate and illegitimate use of human language. To misquote Oscar Wilde, rhetorical language is rarely pure and never simple; and the Bible is a celebrated case of this in action. The claim for the Bible that it is divinely inspired - or for any sort of authority - surely withers if it is as morally suspect as its critics hold. The criticism has two related features: first, that the Bible and its authors offer a totalizing world-view, a ‘view from nowhere’ that squashes heteronomy and allows no space for human freedom. To the postmodern mind this universal perspective inevitably leads to violence: the clash of the civilizations is rooted in their refusal of plurality: and the great religions of the book are held to be the cause of this implacable belligerence. The second side of the coin is that the Bible is an abusive form of power-language, inscribing its stories and words into human consciousness and invalidly authorizing the hegemony of patriarchal religious individuals and structures. In particular, feminist critics (like Castelli and Trible) have fought to uncover the suppressed and hidden voices of women marginalized by the phallo-centric biblical text.
[1] E. Castelli, Imitating Paul: A Discourse of Power (Louisville, Ky: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1991), p.15
[2] Ibid.
[3] E. Castelli, "Interpretations of Power in 1 Corinthians," in Michel Foucault and Theology: The Politics of Religious Experience, ed. J.Bernauer and J.Carrette (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 34-5
[4] We may say further that for Castelli, Foucault’s works have become Holy Writ. She is, it turns out, gormlessly uncritical of him while being super-suspicious of Paul. Why doesn’t she do a Pauline reading of Foucault?
[5] D. Jasper, Rhetoric, Power and Community (Louisville, Ky: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993), p. 42
[6] Ibid.
[7] F. Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979)
[8] Other power-critics exercising the hermeneutics of suspicion include G. Shaw, The Cost of Authority – Manipulation and Freedom in the New Testament (London: SCM, 1983); and, from a feminist perspective P. Trible, Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984). See also Bible and Culture Collective., The Postmodern Bible (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 1995).
[9] Since the study of literary criticism is a direct descendent of biblical interpretation, protest against textual authority inevitably entails a protest against the Bible.
To the Enlightenment critique of the text of the Bible is now added a postmodern protest against its operation as a discourse of power. This ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ suspects that naïve reading of the Bible allows a system of power to develop in human communities that is detrimental to the flowering of individual selves in their full self-determining authenticity. We offer some examples: Elizabeth Castelli is one biblical scholar who has taken Foucault’s power analysis and applied it to the New Testament, and especially to the writings of Paul. She writes in her book Imitating Paul: A Discourse of Power that:
[T]he thesis of this study is that the notion of mimesis functions in Paul’s letters as a strategy of power. That is, it articulates and rationalizes as true and natural a particular set of power relations within the social formation of early Christian communities.[1]
Reading those Pauline texts which enjoin his readers to imitation – 1 Thess 1:6, 2:14; Phil 3:17; 1 Cor 4:16, 11:1 – Castelli seeks to demonstrate that in doing this Paul is not benignly calling the churches to emulate a laudable ethical model, but rather inscribing in the early communities a hierarchical ‘economy of sameness’, resulting in a (sinister) ‘erasure of difference’. Paul’s rhetoric is not a rational argument, but a subtle assertion of power that needs to be exposed and resisted. These are wizard-words. Castelli writes:
Discourse is never innocent, it discloses the incapacity of any rhetoric to convey the truth.[2]
This betrays her suspicion that Paul is up to no good:
Paul’s discourse of power may be read as a complex fiction whereby he asserts the conditions of proper power relations in the Christian community at Corinth as truth… His attempts to reduce what to him is the cacophonous discord of many voices result in his own bellowing tones filling the stage.[3]
That is to say, when it comes to this scriptural author at least, we see him forming in his language – by his powerful metaphors and by his rhetorical stratagems – the conditions under which power will operate within the Christian community. But he doesn’t do this innocently, for Castelli: he does it to suppress diversity and shore up his own authority.[4]
Castelli is not alone. In his study of religious rhetoric, David Jasper writes:
Paul…leaves little space for mutuality or a real relationship between himself and the Thessalonians apart from that of their utter dependence upon him.[5]
He goes on:
Paul’s doctrine, it seems, cannot be distinguished from the political and personal moves of his writing, or the uneasiness of his relation to his readers. The assertion of authority and the exercise of personal power are dominant themes of these letters.[6]
Jasper’s deconstruction is not limited to Paul: he makes a case, following Frank Kermode’s analysis in his book The Genesis of Secrecy,[7] that Mark’s gospel can also be read as a dissembling book of secrets and suspicions, teasing and entrancing its readers with the covert aim of rendering them docile. Once again, the Scriptures are not here critiqued for their flawed textuality as such (which is generally assumed but set aside as irrelevant), but for their deployment of power.[8]
OK: so what seems to be the trouble? To summarize, the power-critics see Scripture – the text of texts[9] – as an attempt at wielding what we have called wizard-power. This is held to be an inappropriate and illegitimate use of human language. To misquote Oscar Wilde, rhetorical language is rarely pure and never simple; and the Bible is a celebrated case of this in action. The claim for the Bible that it is divinely inspired - or for any sort of authority - surely withers if it is as morally suspect as its critics hold. The criticism has two related features: first, that the Bible and its authors offer a totalizing world-view, a ‘view from nowhere’ that squashes heteronomy and allows no space for human freedom. To the postmodern mind this universal perspective inevitably leads to violence: the clash of the civilizations is rooted in their refusal of plurality: and the great religions of the book are held to be the cause of this implacable belligerence. The second side of the coin is that the Bible is an abusive form of power-language, inscribing its stories and words into human consciousness and invalidly authorizing the hegemony of patriarchal religious individuals and structures. In particular, feminist critics (like Castelli and Trible) have fought to uncover the suppressed and hidden voices of women marginalized by the phallo-centric biblical text.
[1] E. Castelli, Imitating Paul: A Discourse of Power (Louisville, Ky: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1991), p.15
[2] Ibid.
[3] E. Castelli, "Interpretations of Power in 1 Corinthians," in Michel Foucault and Theology: The Politics of Religious Experience, ed. J.Bernauer and J.Carrette (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 34-5
[4] We may say further that for Castelli, Foucault’s works have become Holy Writ. She is, it turns out, gormlessly uncritical of him while being super-suspicious of Paul. Why doesn’t she do a Pauline reading of Foucault?
[5] D. Jasper, Rhetoric, Power and Community (Louisville, Ky: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993), p. 42
[6] Ibid.
[7] F. Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979)
[8] Other power-critics exercising the hermeneutics of suspicion include G. Shaw, The Cost of Authority – Manipulation and Freedom in the New Testament (London: SCM, 1983); and, from a feminist perspective P. Trible, Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984). See also Bible and Culture Collective., The Postmodern Bible (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 1995).
[9] Since the study of literary criticism is a direct descendent of biblical interpretation, protest against textual authority inevitably entails a protest against the Bible.
Friday, September 21, 2007
The power of Scripture II
II Suspicious Minds
i. Suspicion of power
Suspicion of power itself is a given of our times. [1] ‘Power’, we imagine, has the tendency to transgress the boundary of the individual, impinging on his or her freedoms and rights. It is the means by which control of one by another is exerted. Of course, this may be by violent physical coercion or by the threat of force, what Michel Foucault called ‘domination’; but power may also be exerted by shaping the realities in which people live: by the bureaucratic apparatus of government, by the shape of the physical environment, or by the instruments of commerce. These words are held to be in their own way ‘wizard-words’: words that may claim for themselves a power inappropriate to their humanity, a power that compromises the freedom of individuals to self-determine.
Postmodernity, showing itself to be the bastard child of modernity, offers a critique of (and a protest against) power in all its forms. However, the power of language to mould thought and behaviour has been the particular concern of postmodern thinkers. In particular they have sought to free us from the oppressive power of rhetoric. They have sought to unmask the work of wizard-words as a conjuring trick. Like the tin-man, the lion, the scarecrow and Dorothy, we will find when we actually meet the wizard that he isn’t what he seems: the power of words is merely illusion, a conjuring trick brought off using smoke and mirrors.
The acknowledged patron saint of postmodern power-criticism is Michel Foucault (d.1984).[2] In the 1970s Foucault became fascinated with power: though his interest was, he insisted, limited to asking how power is exercised in various contexts. Rather than seeing power as a thing held by various groups or institutions, he preferred to see power as a ubiquitous network of social relations and interactions. ‘Power is everywhere’, he wrote, ‘not because it embraces everything but because it comes from everywhere’.[3] Power circulates within a system of relationships rather being the possession of a particular person or group. As Foucault put it: ‘Power relations are rooted in the whole network of the social’.[4]
Crucially for our study of powerful words, power operates through discourse. Therefore, Foucault argues that the scientific knowledge so beloved of the Enlightenment does not free human subjects from the shackles of power relations but in fact enmeshes them in what he termed ‘power/knowledge’ (pavoir/savoir). There was not a liberation so much as an exchange of discourses. We can see this today in the discourse of scientific knowledge, with its appeal to ‘facts’ and ‘logic’ and the supremacy of a particular type of reasoning.
Foucault did not indicate that he felt all power was essentially bad. In fact, by describing the hidden fingers of power in human relationships he highlighted the increased possibilities within the mechanisms of (what he called) governmentality for genuine resistance to occur.[5] By describing the operations of power he hoped to enable people to be less docile in response to it – exposure of the hidden mechanisms of control is the route to freedom from them.
[1] It is noteworthy that ‘power’ in the discourse of the mass media almost always has a negative, even sinister, connotation: if an individual or an institution is ‘powerful’ it is almost never held to be a good thing.
[2] For an example of one author who takes the canonisation of Foucault very seriously indeed, see: David M. Halperin, Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995) He writes at one point: ' as far as I am concerned, the guy is an f---ing saint.'
[3] M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality - an Introduction (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 92-3
[4] M. Foucault, "Governmentality," in Power, ed. J.D. Faubion (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994), p. 345
[5] Foucault’s neologism ‘governmentality’ indicates ‘the ensemble formed by the institutions, procedures, analyses, and reflections, the calculation and tactics that allow the exercise of this very specific albeit complex form of power, which has as its target population, as its principal form of knowledge political economy, and as its essential technical means apparatuses of society’ in Ibid., p. 219-20
i. Suspicion of power
Suspicion of power itself is a given of our times. [1] ‘Power’, we imagine, has the tendency to transgress the boundary of the individual, impinging on his or her freedoms and rights. It is the means by which control of one by another is exerted. Of course, this may be by violent physical coercion or by the threat of force, what Michel Foucault called ‘domination’; but power may also be exerted by shaping the realities in which people live: by the bureaucratic apparatus of government, by the shape of the physical environment, or by the instruments of commerce. These words are held to be in their own way ‘wizard-words’: words that may claim for themselves a power inappropriate to their humanity, a power that compromises the freedom of individuals to self-determine.
Postmodernity, showing itself to be the bastard child of modernity, offers a critique of (and a protest against) power in all its forms. However, the power of language to mould thought and behaviour has been the particular concern of postmodern thinkers. In particular they have sought to free us from the oppressive power of rhetoric. They have sought to unmask the work of wizard-words as a conjuring trick. Like the tin-man, the lion, the scarecrow and Dorothy, we will find when we actually meet the wizard that he isn’t what he seems: the power of words is merely illusion, a conjuring trick brought off using smoke and mirrors.
The acknowledged patron saint of postmodern power-criticism is Michel Foucault (d.1984).[2] In the 1970s Foucault became fascinated with power: though his interest was, he insisted, limited to asking how power is exercised in various contexts. Rather than seeing power as a thing held by various groups or institutions, he preferred to see power as a ubiquitous network of social relations and interactions. ‘Power is everywhere’, he wrote, ‘not because it embraces everything but because it comes from everywhere’.[3] Power circulates within a system of relationships rather being the possession of a particular person or group. As Foucault put it: ‘Power relations are rooted in the whole network of the social’.[4]
Crucially for our study of powerful words, power operates through discourse. Therefore, Foucault argues that the scientific knowledge so beloved of the Enlightenment does not free human subjects from the shackles of power relations but in fact enmeshes them in what he termed ‘power/knowledge’ (pavoir/savoir). There was not a liberation so much as an exchange of discourses. We can see this today in the discourse of scientific knowledge, with its appeal to ‘facts’ and ‘logic’ and the supremacy of a particular type of reasoning.
Foucault did not indicate that he felt all power was essentially bad. In fact, by describing the hidden fingers of power in human relationships he highlighted the increased possibilities within the mechanisms of (what he called) governmentality for genuine resistance to occur.[5] By describing the operations of power he hoped to enable people to be less docile in response to it – exposure of the hidden mechanisms of control is the route to freedom from them.
[1] It is noteworthy that ‘power’ in the discourse of the mass media almost always has a negative, even sinister, connotation: if an individual or an institution is ‘powerful’ it is almost never held to be a good thing.
[2] For an example of one author who takes the canonisation of Foucault very seriously indeed, see: David M. Halperin, Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995) He writes at one point: ' as far as I am concerned, the guy is an f---ing saint.'
[3] M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality - an Introduction (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 92-3
[4] M. Foucault, "Governmentality," in Power, ed. J.D. Faubion (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994), p. 345
[5] Foucault’s neologism ‘governmentality’ indicates ‘the ensemble formed by the institutions, procedures, analyses, and reflections, the calculation and tactics that allow the exercise of this very specific albeit complex form of power, which has as its target population, as its principal form of knowledge political economy, and as its essential technical means apparatuses of society’ in Ibid., p. 219-20
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