Collapsing Revelation

The Bible contains a theory of revelation but it does not contain a theory of inspiration. When the writer says “Every scripture inspired by God is useful for….” They aren’t telling anything about the ‘how’ of that inspiration. You can collapse a theory of revelation in multiple trajectories, Roman Catholics have done it with the church, Protestants with the Bible and Charismatics with the self (the ego, the autonomous individual).

The Bible however collapses revelation in the person Jesus of Nazareth. The writer to the Hebrews believes revelation was collapsed in the life of Jesus when he asserts, “In the past, God spoke through the prophets to our ancestors in many times and many ways. ² In these final days, though, he spoke to us through a Son” (Heb 1:1-2 CEB). Paul, quoting an earlier hymn, sings the same in Col 1:15-20, and avers later in the letter that in Jesus “the fullness of divinity dwelt” (Col 2:9). We see the same in the writer to the Ephesians in another hymn (1:3-14), in the longest sentence in the New Testament (202 words). Over eleven times in that passages one encounters the centrality of Jesus with the phrases, “in Christ”, “in him” or “by him” or “through” him” etc.

Further proof of the collapse of revelation toward a specific human being (the bar enasha, the True Human) can be found in the hymn of Phil 2:5-11 which I exegeted in The Jesus Driven Life. Then there is the capstone text that literally rips the heart out of the those who have collapsed revelation into a book, the prologue to the Fourth Gospel, where it is said “Torah (text) came through Moses, grace and truth came through Jesus Christ” (1:1-17). It even deconstructs itself!

Theories of inspiration that collapse revelation into language cannot account for the polyvalence of human speech; they tend to see language through a correspondence theory of truth where word = thing. Modern linguistics has demonstrated the symbolic nature of language and I have elsewhere written about this in my posts on ‘bloody language.’ Philosophers like Paul Ricoeur also write about the polyvalence of language, and how language has ‘an excess of meaning.’ This is not to mention Derrida and deconstruction with its eternal play of ‘le supplement’ hiding behind every alphabetic symbol.

It is true that God collapses revelation into that which is creaturely. But God collapses revelation into the life of a person, a person with a history and a story, not into a generic metanarrative called a Christology. Nor is revelation to be limited to the nature of an amorphous textuality where interpretation is akin to walking through a Distorted Mirror Funhouse. Every theory of ‘how’ scripture is inspired is an attempt to do the impossible: to assert that revelation has been collapsed into language, into a (the) text. What ends up happening then is that those who derive a theory of inspiration from the Bible, fail to see that what they are constructing, and what they call a theory of revelation, is actually their hermeneutic. The entire edifice of the Evangelical theory of the inspiration of the Bible has not come crashing down because of the effects of historical criticism alone. The castle walls of this theory of revelation was breached by the philosophers.

Now listen carefully please. Some might begin to say, this is all too complicated for me. Trust me, I understand that. I often read books and authors above my pay grade. I don’t always understand what I am reading but I do learn lots of things I can use when reading them. So it is here. What a joy it would be to have the kind of epistemologically stable foundation that many enjoyed throughout modernity, which is the time when the Protestant theories of inspiration were composed (and if you want to get picky, along with others I trace the roots of modernity back to the medieval Renaissance in Florence). However, today we no longer live in the world of intellectual stability. Our world has gone adrift.

A major difference between theorists of inspiration and many today who realize that revelation has been collapsed into the figure Jesus of Nazareth is that the later have been influenced by the hermeneutics of suspicion. We have read or drunk deeply from the well of Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, we have seen through to the vistas of Wittgenstein’s ‘language games’ and Gadamer’s ‘horizons.’ And so it is that by moving from a first naivete through critical distance to the intellectual position of a second naivete (for me that of postfoundational critical realism), we can clearly see how, from the perspective of the collection of texts known as the New Testament, that because revelation is collapsed into the a specific life and not a generic concept (textuality) or a hermeneutic (a theory of inspiration), revelation can only be told in narrative form, that Christian doctrine is narrational, not propositional, and that revelation is inter-personal.

Now please do not think I am asserting that revelation is pure subjectivity, it is not. It has a subjective component, that of conversion, not of morality or worldview, but that of hermeneutic. The collection of texts we call the bible has a key by which to unlock it meaning, its history, its trajectory. You know what it is you just don’t use it that way.

I am speaking of a theology of the cross.

This is the very specific place within the very specific life of Jesus of Nazareth and where the brightest revelation occurred. Only, standing there on the hill that day, nothing like that could be seen. One only saw the state sponsored, religion driven execution of terrorists. From this perspective we might think that we ‘become’ the women at the cross, and thus Christian, who weep and wonder “Where is God and what is God is doing about all this injustice and pain?” If so, we have made the first shift, from being that of the executioner to being the bystander. That is the first shift engagement with the Crucified brings. There is a second paradigm shift that still must take place.

God is veiled on the Cross.

From God’s side of the cross, something very different was happening. “God was in Christ reconciling the world to God’s self.” This is the light that removes the veil, so that when we stand before the cross, we, who were the religious mob, the religious leadership, the fickle followers might have the scales drop from our eyes to see exactly who it is that nails Jesus to cedar post.

The Jesus who encounters each and every one of us bears scars, the scars of his torture and execution. The very fact that we still persecute others, and scapegoat others is that which Jesus confronts in all of us and he comes to us as our victim(s). To encounter the lamb that was slain, the Risen Jesus with his scars, is to begin a understanding of subjectivity from a theology of the cross. Engagement with the death of Jesus, and thus the death of all deus ex machina god concepts, takes the ‘I’, the ego, self conscious self, into the abyss of nothingness (hell, chaos, tohu wo bohu), and only reconstitutes the ‘I’ in the resurrection encounter (where shalom re-creates the self relationally (I-Thou relations).

The subjectivity of resurrection life is not the navel gazing subjectivity of narcissism (Who am I? Why am I here? What is my purpose in life?). No, the subjectivity of the new age is grounded in and mirrors in the inner subjectivity of Trinitarian life. This is a subjectivity of love.

And so it is that what we really seek to do is to read the Bible, not through the lens of a theory of inspiration which cannot adequately handle the surplus of meaning in language or the polyvalence and plurality of voices in Scripture, rather we seek to understand how to read the bible through the only linguistic hermeneutic capable of healing and bringing linguistic and sociological shalom, that of the very life of God’s self.

I wrote The Jesus Driven Life as my way of reading ALL of scripture through the death of Jesus, from the perspective of the one who hangs from a cross.