Revelation and Imagination

The dynamics of Tradition

David Brown

In this lecture I want to introduce you to some of the leading ideas in the two books I have recently published with Oxford University Press, Tradition and Imagination in 1999 with the subtitle, Revelation and Change and Discipleship and Imagination earlier this year with the subtitle Christian Tradition and Truth. Titles and subtitles will already have given you some idea of what they are about. Inevitably in an hour I can only give you a taste. Even so, rather than proceeding directly into description of their content, let me say something first about where I was coming from and so also something about my worries concerning the way in which theology is currently practised.

Let me draw attention to three in particular. The first is the worry that as a profession we are still failing to open up to students different ways of thinking about truth. Much of the focus in biblical courses continues to be on whether something did or did not happen. While that remains an important question to ask, as any teacher of literature or art knows, it is by no means the only type of question available. Something can be factually false, such as the plot of a novel or the presence of a twelfth century saint in a painting of the crucifixion, and yet still contain important elements of truth - with the novel, for example, about the meaning of life or the nature of moral commitments, or a real engagement of the saint with his Lord in the latter case. Using slides or novels in teaching can thus help release pupils from too narrow a one-to-one correspondence theory of truth, and in turn open them up to the quite different ways in which symbolism has been used throughout the centuries, including in the Bible itself. If that first worry connects with how we teach theology, my second concerns its more academic formulation. For it seems to me that in much recent theology there has been a real narrowing of focus, aided not least by the revived popularity of the writings of Karl Barth. The good side of that revival has been a proper stress on the distinctiveness of the Christian message, but with this has often come an arrogance that refuses to acknowledge what God might be trying to teach us through the secular world. Against this contention of mine might be quoted the use to which Barth has been put in the narrative theology of Hans Frei and his successors where we do seem to have real imaginative engagement with the biblical text, but in fact that text remains strangely frozen with no particular attempt to wrestle with the question of why it has so differently appropriated by the culture at a whole at different times in the history of its transmission. Why, for example, during the first millennium was the crucifixion depicted in general as a triumph while for most artists in the second millennium it becomes pre-eminently a matter of divine identification with human suffering, an obvious case in point being Grünewald’s famous Isenheim altarpiece, painted on the eve of the Reformation but inconceivable a thousand years earlier? Although the interpretation of the biblical text has always been in part a product of interaction with its wider culture, surprisingly hitherto such issues have been seen as essentially a matter for historians and not theologians. But if neither individual Christian nor the Church as a whole can ever quite escape such social and cultural conditioning do we not need to face such facts and identify how God might be involved, if at all, in the process? One major reason why currently no such investigation occurs is because many believe a simpler alternative explanation to be available for understanding change, and that is the slow and gradual perception of the full implications of the biblical message, derivable solely from reflection on the biblical canon alone. That could of course be true, but for me it leads naturally to what constitutes my third and final worry, and that is what seems to me the increasing implausibility of such patterns of explanation when applied, for example, to the abandonment of belief in hell as a place of eternal punishment or the acceptance of the full equality of women with men. Take the latter. Galatians 3.28 is constantly quoted, but not only does Paul ignore the women at the tomb he also omits the reference to ‘neither male nor female’ in the two parallel uses of such phraseology elsewhere, suggesting perhaps that he did think that much turned on what he had said, while both Luther and Calvin give entirely natural readings of the verse that identity the equality in question as simply that of access to salvation not equality of civil status. My point, I hasten to add, is not that there should not be equality between men and women, but that Christians do themselves a disservice if they pretend that it was a obvious truth already there in Scripture for two thousand years but only noticed again by perceptive Christians in modern times. When we make claims like that, it is little wonder that the secular world does not believe us. Better, therefore, it seems to me, that we search for some more complicated story of how such new perceptions come to light that takes seriously Paul’s setting in history no less than our own, as well as that of each succeeding generation.

Those, then were some of the kind of factors that directed me towards an increasing interest in how the Church theology and imagery had developed over the centuries in interaction with the wider culture, but it was only when I observed similar patterns of interaction within Scripture even before the canon was defined that my overall thesis began to take shape. For, as you are all aware, various key biblical events have themselves been subject to reinterpretation within the canon, and the process does not seem essentially different whether one takes, for instance, the rewriting of JED and P in the Pentateuch, Kings by Chronicles, the Synoptics by John or influential extra-canonical writings such as what the Book of Jubilees does to Genesis or the Testament of Job to the canonical work of the same name. Hitherto theologians have operated with a two-stage model, biblical revelation and church tradition, whereas now it seemed to me that neither could any longer be held apart one from the other: revelation clearly in some sense continued, while tradition, so far from being merely what came after was the motor which ran through the whole process, biblical no less than post-biblical. The handing on of stories from the past never remained static, but was constantly being adapted to speak as effectively as possible to a new generation. Before the canon was closed, this could be done quite simply by rewriting as, for example, in Chronicles with Mount Moriah being identified with Sinai or John’s Gospel having John the Baptist declare Jesus the Lamb of God, but it would be a mistake to suppose that a fixed canon put an end to the process. Far from it; re-interpretation continued, with the spaces or interstices between the letters and the lines now, as it were, being given fresh fillings, and so a new grid of interpretation formed.

There is thus a real continuity between the pre- and post-canonical development of the tradition and it seems to me we do the plausibility of Christian claims a serious disservice if we differentiate too sharply between before and after. Of course, the decisive events of Christ’s life, death and resurrection happened at one particular moment in history, but if we are prepared to admit that it takes time, and John in particular, to work out the full implications of Christ’s divinity, why should we not also concede that some elements of divine revelation could only come very much later, and perhaps some not even till our own day? God would thus be seen as guiding the community of faith throughout its history, in the present no less than two or three thousand years ago, but all in the context of a developing tradition of the community’s self-understanding that is essentially dynamic and creative, because it needs constantly to respond and interact with its surrounding culture and the fresh challenges and ideas that these throw up, themselves also at times part of the handwork of God. If I may be allowed to introduce a little bit of jargon at this point, what I suggest happens is that trajectories emerging from within existing texts interact with cultural triggers from the surrounding society in various ways, sometimes to generate a strong negative counter-reaction, sometimes to produce a new emphasis, and sometimes, more controversially, even to correct what was once thought to have been the fundamental thrust of Scripture as a whole. If the last seems more than some of you are prepared to bear, let me offer a minor example with which few could quarrel. Nothing in the opening chapters of Genesis tells us that they should not be read literally, and indeed that is overwhelmingly how the Church has taken throughout most of its history. It was thus not the Bible that from within itself generated the new reading but scientific discoveries; yet, so far from undermining the power of those stories, a non-literal approach seems to me at least actually to enhance their significance. However, I do not what to go into that here. Nor is it possible to cover the range of examples that I take across the two volumes. So I shall say nothing further about changing images of Abraham and Job, Peter and Paul, Pilate, or the Virgin Mary, or of doctrinal issues connected with heaven and hell, the equality of the sexes, faith and works, classical myths or attitudes to suffering, all of which are explored in the two books. Instead, to give you just a little of the flavour of the argument, I shall confine myself to only two examples, one drawn from the Old Testament and the other from the New before concluding with some reflections on how all this might apply to our perception of Christ himself. The latter, though, I shall do so only briefly, as in the seminars I am due to give later in the day I want to show how biblical and doctrinal questions concerning Christ can be usefully illuminated by including relevant artistic examples.

So for the present let begin with my Old Testament example, taken from the first volume, Abraham’s planned sacrifice of Isaac in Genesis 22. Powerful and moving sermons continue of course be preached about the nature of Abraham’s dilemma, but I suggest even at their best there remains something deeply morally unsatisfactory in the conventional modern way of treating the story, and that is that the person who would have suffered the most, had Abraham gone ahead, is left almost entirely off stage. Little wonder then that we find one biblical commentator (Crenshaw) remarking: ‘No acquisition of fresh insight seems sufficiently precious to justify the private hell initaited by these words’ (God’s command). One might put that particular remark down simply to modern squeamishness, but what is fascinating about the history of the interpretation of this story is the way in which such criticisms have throughout most of the Church’s history been implicitly accepted, and so the story told in a new way. Indeed, even if we confine ourselves to the biblical canon we find this so, since the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews clearly modifies his version with the suggestion, quite foreign to the original, that Abraham went ahead because he ‘considered that God was able to raise men even from the dead’ (11.19). Should, however, we cast our net wider, what we find repeated quite early on in each of the three major monotheistic religions is overwhelming resistance to the notion that sacrificing another should be held up as the highest ideal, and instead comes in its place the view that only the idea of self-sacrifice can so function. Thus in the Jewish tradition that Isaac should offer himself becomes the norm, so much so indeed that he becomes the pattern for all subsequent Jewish self-sacrifice. If one asks how this is possible when the biblical narrative seems to imply that Isaac was still a child, the answer the rabbis eventually gave (as in Genesis Rabbah) was that Sarah was 99 when she gave birth to Isaac but the text immediately after this incident speaks of her death at age 127. So, the argument goes, it must have been the shock of what had happened that precipitated her death; therefore Isaac was 37 when the incident happened. To us such reasoning doesn’t sound remotely plausible, but in our eagerness to dismiss it let us not forget the underlying aim, to hold up a different ideal of behaviour: self-sacrifice as the highest form of action. Turn now to Christianity, and the pattern repeats itself. Most biblical scholars question any allusion to the incident in the Gospels since baptismal references to the ‘beloved son’ are in fact drawn from the Psalms Even so, the Church Fathers showed no such hesitation, but once more note what happens. Because the parallel is being drawn with Christ, the voluntary character of the act is very much stressed. Clement of Rome, for instance, informs us that because ‘Isaac knew with confidence what was about to happen, it was with gladness that he was led forth as a sacrificial victim,’ while Irenaeus urges us to ‘take up our cross as Isaac took up his bundle of sticks.’ Finally, consider what happens in Islam. The Qur’an does not actually name the son in question, but later Muslim tradition has overwhelmingly adopted the view that it was the elder son who so acted, Ishmael, and his conduct has become a model for Islam, and indeed various incidents from the lives of Abraham, Ishmael, and Hagar are all re-enacted during the Hajj or pilgrimage to Mecca.

Now we could of course say that these were unfortunate developments, and that we ought to return to the purity of the biblical narrative. But, if that is your response, let me ask you what motivates it? An obvious answer would be to say that my account fails to take seriously enough the original intention of the author, or, perhaps putting it more theologically, God’s hand in that original narrative. That God played such a part I personally would not wish to challenge; where I cavil is in the supposed conclusiveness of that claim. Certainly it is important to know how God’s dialogue with the community of faith began, but surely that does not entail that we must treat it as his last word on the subject. I began by recalling to your attention the way in which the historical books of Scripture have subjected to rewritings, and much the same applies to many of the prophets, with the multiple authorship of the book of Isaiah or the way in which a later editor modified the unqualified prophecies of doom that once dominated the book of Amos. This has led the distinguished American scholar, Brevard Childs, to argue for what he calls canonical criticism, treating only what the Scriptures as whole - the final version of a text - suggest as authoritative. But my question remains, does this go far enough? It is of course inherently unlikely that all post-biblical developments will be good, but it is surely equally implausible to suppose all bad, and in this case do we not need at least to take seriously the possibility that God was continuing to speak to the various communities to faith through these changes? The irony is that if we deny this, not only does it mean that for most of history most readers have misread the story but also we confront ourselves with a deeply problematic text: putting it crudely, a God who commands what is wrong - the sacrifice not of oneself but of an innocent child . To express the matter in visual terms, if we reject the tradition, the exception - Caravaggio’s screaming Isaac - must replace Ghiberti’s valiant youth on the doors of the Baptistery in Florence, along with a thousand other more typical representations.

But, it may be said, to go down the track I am suggesting would be to adopt a cavalier attitude to history, and in particular to the question of what precisely happened. That historical answers should be sought where possible, I do not deny, but once again, I question whether of themselves they ever clinch matters. Part of the problem in this particular case is of course that we just don’t know. For while an earlier generation of historians thought that they had found conclusive evidence of the reliability of the patriarchal narratives through parallels with customs in second millennium BC culture, more recent writers such as Van Seters have called this all into question, pointing to the fact that such customs persisted well into the time of fifth century BC Babylon. But let us for the sake of argument concede historicity, and ask what then follows. Certainly that this was then how Abraham experienced the incident, but even so it still would not necessarily follow either that God intended it thus or that this is how the story might most usefully be told in our day. If you doubt this consider the parallel with Jesus’ own life. The gospels are shot through with descriptions of incidents as they were now seen in the light of the resurrection, but not necessarily as the disciples had experienced them at the time. An obvious case in point is the Nativity stories which exhibit a confidence in what will happen that the disciples, particularly in Mark, never once show until Jesus is raised from the dead. The Nativity is thus told as we as readers should now experience it, not as it must have felt for Mary and Joseph at the time.

To help clarify the issues, it is perhaps now appropriate to introduce my second example, this time from the New Testament and discussed in my second volume, the elaboration of Mary Magdalene’s life and legend. Nowadays, it is commonplace to read attacks, particularly from feminist theologians, upon the way in which Mary Magdalene, the first witness to the resurrection, becomes confused in the history of the western Church not only with Mary of Bethany but also the penitent sinner who washed Jesus’ feet. That way, it is held, the curse on Eve was intensified and women reviled not only as sinners but pre-eminently as sexual sinners. That there is some truth in this I would not deny, not least during the seventeenth century when painting Mary Magdalene in effect became simply an excuse for painting a naked woman, as in the portrayals by Lely and Kneller of Charles II’s mistresses under just such a guise, but this is by no means the whole story. Consider, for instance, this rather lovely appeal by Saint Anselm: ‘Most blessed lady, I the most wicked of men do not touch once more upon your sins as a taunt or reproach but seek to grasp the boundless mercy by which they were blotted out ... Draw for me from the well where I may wash my sins. Hasten to me from him who can satisfy my thirst ... For it is not difficult for you to obtain whatever you wish from so loving and so kind a Lord who is your friend living and reigning.’ Similarly, the author of an anonymous Cistercian Life written not long afterwards is quick to remind his readers that they too probably fell in a not dissimilar way ‘as is usual at that age.’ Herein surely lay the great attraction in the composite figure. She offered to both men and women someone with whom they could readily identify themselves, and so like her seek forgiveness from their common Saviour. Sexual sin is after all something from which almost all of us suffer at some point in our lives, whereas few of us can compete with Peter’s act in betraying his closest friend or Paul’s in participating in judicial murder. In other words, an ease of imaginative identification was possible that was lacking with most of the other characters in the drama, but there is more. By elaborating the story, one could envisage one’s own presence, sinner though one is, throughout the story of Christ’s adult life as the drama unfolded. For there one was receiving forgiveness from Christ in one anointing, at Bethany sitting at his feet and caring for him in another, and present in turn both at his crucifixion and at his resurrection. Moreover, if the story was allowed to continue, there was one also responding to his commission by going to preach in France and ending one’s life there in prayer.

In rehearsing this tale once more there is certainly no intention on my part to persuade you that it is after all historical, still less that the Magdalene’s bones are in their reputed shrine at Vèzelay. But I do hope that you can now see something of the reason why Pope Gregory the Great’s amalgamation of the three figures exercised such a profound influence, indeed to such a degree that Mary Magdalene became the most popular saint in western Christendom next to the Virgin Mary. She had prevented the gospel story from being simply something that happened in the distant past; instead it became a narrative within which any Christian could imaginatively place her- or himself. Of course, there was an historical cost, but what precisely that historical cost was becomes much less clear once we turn to consideration of the biblical narratives themselves.

Mary, we are repeatedly told today, was the first witness to the resurrection, but this seems far from certain. Not only does Paul not mention her, John’s claim seems undermined by a number of other considerations. Let me mention just two. First, initial support from the synoptics is undermined by the fact that not only is there no mention in Luke while that in Mark comes in a later appendix, but also Matthew’s reference looks like an interpolation, given the fact that the earlier appearance of the angel has more dramatic content than that of Christ himself. Secondly, as Raymond Brown and others have observed, the real point of the John story is not historical but to contrast the ‘beloved’ disciple as the ideal who needs no proof with others such as Mary who do. Add to that the claim in Matthew and Mark that the first appearances would be in Galilee, and it looks as though, while Mary may well have experienced a disclosure at the tomb, it only comes first in John because of the way in which he has structured his narrative. Again, the various anointing stories are, to say the least, somewhat confusing. Was it Christ’s head or feet, or both? Did any take place in Bethany? Was there one in the house of Simon the leper and another in the house of Simon the Pharisee? Comparing them it is hard to resist the conclusion that each evangelist adapted what he had inherited to suit wider theological purposes, and that John’s version in particular is an amalgam of Mark’s and Luke’s (setting in Bethany from Mark, anointing of feet from Luke). So it isn’t just the later tradition that plays fast and loose with fact in order to convey the gospel more effectively. That process is already well under way within the gospels themselves. Indeed, the American biblical scholar Ed Sanders has observed that for all we know to the contrary Mary Magdalene may well have been ‘eighty-six, childless, and keen to mother unkempt young men.’

Appearances notwithstanding, my ultimate aim in saying all this has not been to induce complete agnosticism in you. Instead, it is to challenge you to re-think what the gospels are fundamentally about, and so what also the later tradition might have been trying to achieve. Of course Christianity is an historical religion and so it matters tremendously that Jesus lived, died and rose again, and that by his words and deeds he enabled the disciples to come to believe that he was indeed God incarnate. But from that it by no means follows that every detail of the gospels must be literally true. What mattered more to the gospel writers, and what should therefore matter more to us, is that what Christ means for our lives be successfully communicated, and for this to be so it doesn’t follow that telling a literal story is necessarily always the best means of achieving this. Luke in his anointing story tells us what it means to receive forgiveness, Mark about the uncalculating character of a giving love, John in his account of the resurrection about the need for faith in the absence of proof, and that is what mattered most to each of them. So similarly, then, in the developments that came later. You could, for example, imagine yourself at the foot of the cross if the penitent Magdalene was there also. Now of course to us it is hugely irritating that no careful distinction was drawn between fact and fiction, but that doesn’t mean that one cannot be drawn, and in fact I see no reason for doubting that there was indeed an anointing, as also a resurrection appearance to Mary. All I am questioning is how important such facts are, as though necessarily they must be ranked higher than the truth to be found in the fiction, for in this case it is the fiction that gives us closest access to Christ as Saviour. You only need to give a cursory examination to the art and poetry the composite figure generated to get the point. To give but two examples, think of the confidence and strength of resolution that shines through Donatello’s ascetic figure or the way in which Henry Vaughan in accordance with the tradition powerfully combines Simon the Pharisee and Simon the leper to press home the gospel:

Self-boasting Pharisee! How blind

A judge wert thou, and how unkind!

........................................................

Go, leper, go; wash till thy flesh

Come like a child, spotless and fresh;

He is still leprous, that still paints:

Who saint themselves, they are no saints.

But, it may be objected, there is one obvious difference between the world of such images and our own, and that is that previous generations treated them literally whereas we cannot. Now to some extent that is of course true. Vèzelay became a great pilgrimage centre precisely because Mary Magdalene’s bones were believed to be there, but that is by no means the whole story. Certainly by Vaughan’s time the nature of the composite figure was common knowledge; even so the poet still utilises the old imagery. But even if we travel further back in history, we find matters not nearly as simple as might be initially supposed. So, for instance, in the highly influential early fourteenth century Meditations, once attributed to Bonaventure, the author is very keen to encourage his readers to place themselves imaginatively at various scenes throughout Christ’s life: as he puts it, ‘as they occurred or might have occurred according to the devout belief of the imagination.’ It is a practice that continues in many another writer, among them Margery Kempe from the following century who even envisages herself after the crucifixion making Jesus’s mother ‘a good hot drink of gruel and spiced wine.’ Engagement thus took precedence over strict historical record.

Moreover, if we return once more to the present day, it is far from clear that modern thought, so far from excluding such a option, might not actually make it more of a possibility. This is because we are now aware as never before of the extent to which fictional literature can itself help give access to truth. For among other things from the nineteenth century onwards we find novelists striving to indicate how what they write too partakes in precisely that same quest. Henry James, for instance, took strong exception to Trollope’s admission that he was only engaged in ‘making believe’ on the grounds that ‘it implies that the novelist is less occupied in looking for the truth ... than the historian, and in doing so it deprives him at a stroke of all his standing room.’ Similar remarks are also to be found in Dickens and in many another novelist, and in the case of Dickens or Balzac it is surely not hard to see the point. They offered their contemporaries imaginative insight into a particular set of social conditions, and if the particular incidents recorded corresponded exactly to no specific case nonetheless they sometimes enabled the reader to see more clearly what was at stake than could be achieved by a bare reciting of the facts.

At the beginning I said that I would end with the case of Christ himself. Were this a different sort of lecture I might well have devoted all my time to trying to demonstrate the essential reliability of the gospels and to explaining why I see the dogmatic formulas of the creeds as a natural expansion from what we know of Jesus’ life death and resurrection from the gospels. As a matter of fact I am not someone who has difficulty in believing in something as stupendous as, say, the Virgin Birth or the feeding of the five thousand, the latter being incidentally the best attested of all Christ’s miracles since uniquely it occurs in all four gospels. What, though, I do find problematic is the view that everything in the Christian message must ultimately be directly derivable from what we are told of Christ in the Scriptures. Kenosis, Jesus living under the ordinary conditions of our humanity, must be taken with full seriousness, and that means acknowledging the possibility that even he may not have seen his full significance for the world. If, as seems likely, even something as basic as the mission to the Gentiles was a Pauline development of his message, I fail to see why we should afraid to admit that such a process continued into subsequent centuries. Plausible candidates would include a distinctive significance for his childhood in its own right, the cross as divine identification with human suffering and even, so central a concern to my own view of Christianity, religious art as integral to its self-understanding. There is not the time to explain here why I think the examples I have just given must be regarded as essentially post-biblical developments. I mention them simply to indicate the extent to which what we now take as an essential aspects of faith and believe to be fully present in the Bible are quite often, in my view, really debts we owe to the later Church. To expand just a little one of my examples, as many a biblical commentator has observed, initial appearances notwithstanding, the infancy narratives in fact show no real interest in the child Jesus; what concerns them is the way in which the actions surrounding that child point to his future significance as Saviour. Our Christmas celebrations thus no a much deeper debt to the middle ages than is commonly acknowledged. It is not only that their form - carols, cribs and so on - come from that period, but even the very idea of finding significance and value in God as child. Almost certainly the impetus was in large part a new secular interest in observing children, but, however caused, the notion was transformed as this interacted with the gospel stories. Childhood was now given a more than human value. It was part of the very life of God.

As this example well illustrates, it is thus not simply a matter of the Church receiving; the Bible and the Church’s inherited wisdom can still give their own distinctive gloss. What I have been arguing, though, is that this seldom happens without external input - the triggers of my earlier terminology - and that is where examples from contemporary art, music and literature can help us comprehend what is going on. They express the struggle towards a changing vision. Sometimes the community of faith will accept the direction in which they are pulling; sometimes not. But either way the focused image will show us clearly what is at stake. Follow, for instance, how Peter and Paul have been portrayed in art across the centuries and you will make some unexpected discoveries about what assumptions regarding their authority were being made at different historical periods. These may even force one to reconsider one’s estimate of the two figures in the Scriptures themselves. For example, the second century portrayal of Paul in the Acts of Paul as a an authoritarian charismatic miracle worker may initially seem quite remote from the biblical Paul, but then one notes the frequency in the epistles of Paul’s appeal to dunameis, translated elsewhere as miracles, and one begins to wonder.

I’ll leave that issue unresolved, because I hope that by now enough has been said, to give you at least a flavour of what type of approach to theology it is I am trying to advocate, one where we no longer treat the Bible in isolation but see its history of interpretation as also the history of God’s continuing dialogue with the community of faith. Christianity is not simply a book; it is a living religion in which the totality of human endeavour has helped shape our understanding of God and his purposes for the world. The study of its impact on the wider culture and that wider culture’s impact on it can no longer be seen as optional extras in trying to understand its dynamic, and that applies whether such understanding is sought from outside or as a believer seeking to comprehend the nature of God’s revelation to humanity.