Untimely Christianity

Hearing the Bible in a Secular Age

Michael Edwards, John Marson Dunaway, John Marson Dunaway

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781506480879
• eBook ISBN: 9781506480886
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Poesia religiosa

Christianity is always untimely, always foreign to our beliefs and contrary to our desires. It was untimely in Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome when Jesus and his early followers were killed. It is just as untimely now. But we have become deaf to its otherness, to the disruptive strangeness of Christian faith. If we are to hear it again, we must traverse the distance between our comfortable and overly conceptual Christianity and the true Christianity that "turns the whole world upside down."

In Untimely Christianity, acclaimed poet and literary scholar Michael Edwards calls for a countercultural Christianity that recovers the Bible's radical otherness and renews our habits of attention to its message--to its revelation of a God who is not merely a set of doctrines but a person, someone we can know. Edwards's work is an eloquent, prophetic effort to recapture the revolutionary power of the Bible to transform the way humans view the world and how they live in it. Rich in theology, philosophy, poetry, biblical interpretation, and cultural criticism, Untimely Christianity invites readers of all kinds to encounter the Bible anew, as "a continuous questioning of the reader and a prodigious expansion of reality."

1

Know That I Am God

1.

To write about God, doubtless, is folly. We are neither prophets nor apostles, so who are we to meddle? Still, if we seriously want to recover true Christianity, the knowledge of God and the recognition of his nature certainly constitute the heart of the quest and end of the journey. Once again, we have no need for the concepts of our philosophy, for the reasonings of our theology, in order to approach God through intelligence, for he has revealed himself throughout the Bible. We must hope that in listening attentively to him, our folly will disappear in the great and foolish wisdom of those to whom this revelation was confided.

The notion of the sacred has already encouraged the return to the God of the Bible. But such as it was put into circulation by Rudolf Otto’s great book Das Heilige (The Idea of the Holy) in 1917, it has also hindered it. The presuppositions that caused this work to go astray still being current, it is better to point them out before proceeding.

Noting that a certain kind of orthodoxy had sought to rationalize Christianity to the point of rendering the idea of God exclusively rational, Otto proposes to demonstrate the irrational dimension of God, that by which God escapes the grasp of our concepts. To this end, he explores the experience of the sacred, which he presents as both a terrifying and attractive totally other, existing at the basis of all religions. Here is the first problem: As a specialist in comparative religion, Otto seems to believe in the existence of a kind of sacred-in-itself, whereas every intuition of the sacred is an intuition of the one true God. This affirmation comes not from me but from Saint Paul. Thinking of those who are not acquainted with the revelation afforded the Hebrews, he declares they cannot be forgiven for not having perceived in the works of God since the creation of the world “his eternal power and Godhead” (Romans 1:20). When Seneca, in his Letters to Lucilius, says he senses in a wood of ancient trees of extraordinary proportions, in the immense shadow they cast in broad daylight, in the solitude of the place, that “a God is there” (letter 41), we must believe that the Creator God grants him that thrill. When the Egyptians sculpt gods that are totally other in their immensity, they are not discovering the sacred, and they are worshipping still less the true God such as he demands to be known and served; they are touching with the soul’s finger the eternal power and divinity of a God that they are unable to identify. On the path to conversion, the intuition of the sacred in nature or in the mystery of the invisible may strike us (we must not limit, we cannot even imagine, the ways God chooses to come to us), but this sacred is already his veiled presence.

Otto is thinking according to the European philosophical tradition instead of meditating from the outset on the biblical revelation. Whence a second problem: Justly convinced that God is found beyond our reason, Otto nonetheless feels the need at the same time to consider him rational. Seeing that God’s being remains obscure, he seeks despite all this to catch him in the net of our ways of thinking. He assumes that a process of rationalization is already at work in the Bible, beginning with “the religion of Moses” and culminating in the preachings of the prophets and the gospel. Judeo-Christianity would have evolved toward “rational predicates”—God’s love or his mercy—that would make him understandable. But how curious it is to call love, mercy, and forbearance rational. He judges that in Isaiah’s revelation, God, whose alterity is revealed in his oft-repeated title of “The Holy One of Israel,” is at the same time a “clearly conceived” God, thanks to certain of those predicates: “omnipotence, goodness, wisdom, and truth.” But what do these biblical ways of naming the attributes of God have to do with the terms of our philosophy, capable, according to the first paragraph of the book, of “grasping divinity” with precision—that is, reason, teleological will, unity of essence, self-consciousness?1

And do we really understand them? These are more familiar notions than holiness, but God’s goodness and God’s wisdom elude our grasp because of their infinite dimension. Since God’s thoughts are not our thoughts (Isaiah 55:8), his love, his justice, his compassion invite us into a world that is, strictly speaking, divine. By the same token, the simplest statement of the gospel, such as Paul offers it to the Corinthians—namely, “that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures” (1 Corinthians 15:3–4)—defies reason from start to finish.

This is not a matter of semantics. The opposition of rational and irrational, which has a meaning for our way of conceiving the work of the spirit and envisioning the real, does not come from the Bible and does not correspond to its worldview. Thinking with the concepts and terminology of our culture inclines us inevitably to read the Bible wrongly. And if Otto describes God as “that essence irreducible to the rational, which is hidden from all philosophical study” (a door opening to a correct approach to God, but one that he closes partly), if he affirms that rationalization does not in any way eliminate the numinous, the mysterious, then speaking of the rational and irrational dimensions of God skews the data, and his manner of presenting rationalization proves dangerous. He imagines that in the “Bible the rational element is found at the forefront” and that therefore “it is the Bible that convinces us that the rational predicates . . . exhaust the essence of divinity.” The Bible would be divided against itself? And there is worse still. The misleading impression given by the Bible would be inevitable, through the fault of language. All language would have “the essential purpose of transmitting notions, and the more clear and unequivocal the expressions, the better the language.” Otto’s simplistic idea of language is less worrisome than his distant attitude toward the Scriptures and the word they transmit.

According to the Bible, God does not elude our grasp by his irrational qualities while allowing us to understand the rational ones. He makes us sense the difference of his divinity; he approaches us. When he offers himself to us in his love, compassion, and humility, he remains himself, other, and sacred. At the very moment when he comes into our world, in Jesus, “a multitude of the heavenly host” appears suddenly to the shepherds, saying, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men” (Luke 2:13–14)! At the same time, it reveals in a few words the ungraspable glory of God in which he remains and the love and peace that he pours lavishly out on us.

2.

In the Old Testament, encounters with God or with his messenger are so well known that we may fail to realize just how absolutely strange they are. Moses looks at the impossible in the burning bush that is not consumed (Exodus 3:2). Informed that the place where he is standing is “holy ground” (Exodus 3:5), he plants his bare feet on a here that has become other. When God reveals his name, he discovers the alterity of religious fear and veils his face (3:6). And if “the angel of the Lord” appears to him “from the midst of a bush” (3:2), it is God who calls him “from the midst of a bush” (3:4). How shall we explain the relationship between the angel and God, their apparent identities, which God alone understands?

A few verses suffice to draw us into the fearsome numinosity of the scene, of the intervention of heaven into an earthly place, of the Eternal into passing time. The mystery changes in the passage from the book of Joshua that recalls that encounter:

And it came to pass, when Joshua was by Jericho, that he lifted up his eyes and looked, and, behold, there stood a man over against him with his sword drawn in his hand: and Joshua went unto him, and said unto him, “Art thou for us, or for our adversaries?” And he said, “Nay; but as captain of the host of the Lord am I now come.” And Joshua fell on his face to the earth, and did worship, and said unto him, “What saith my Lord unto his servant?” And the captain of the Lord’s host said unto Joshua, “Loose thy shoe from off thy foot; for the place whereon thou standest is holy.” And Joshua did so. (Joshua 5:13–15)

Joshua falls into that same abyss of the unknown, but from the very ordinary. He only sees a man; he quite naturally advances toward him to find out whether he is friend or foe to his people, and when he hears the answer, either God opens his eyes so he can see the archangel or else the latter strips himself of his human appearance. Joshua too enters the frightening world of the sacred, and the first order he receives obliges him to realize it.

A third encounter, again well known, concerns Isaiah:

In the year that king Uzziah died I saw also the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up, and his train filled the temple. . . .

And [the seraphim] cried one unto another, and said,

Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord of hosts.

The whole earth is full of his glory. . . .

Then said I,

Woe is me! for I am undone;

because I am a man of unclean lips,

and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips:

for mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts.

(Isaiah 6:1–5)

Isaiah finds himself without any transition in the presence of God, a blinding vision of an incommensurable Reality. He also sees supernatural creatures who in their praise stress in impenetrable words the unfathomable nature of God. They go from holiness, which names what he is in himself, to the glory of his being in its radiance. Already seized with astonishment in observing that God’s train fills the temple, he realizes as well that his glory fills (same verb in the text) the whole earth.

His famous reaction—“Woe is me, for I am undone”—is blinding to the reader. Isaiah finds himself not in the presence of the love or the goodness or the mercy of God but facing God in all his Godhead, beyond all we know and all human conception. Isaiah’s terror is understandable, but it is surprising to note that the vision of a holy God reveals to him also his sinful condition as “a man with unclean lips.” A true encounter with God is enough for this condition to grip us with horror. He understands at the same instant that his people also have “unclean lips,” as if such an encounter revealed to him the fall and its disastrous consequences. Or as if such an encounter caused the fall and its disastrous consequences to appear.

3.

The word holy escapes us. What it designates in God remains infinitely obscure. Even while declaring that he delivers his people and keeps his covenant forever, the author of Psalm 111 adds “holy and reverend is his name.” The second adjective gives information about the first; the Port-Royal Bible translates it as “Holy and terrible” (following the Vulgate, “Sanctum et terribile”); the New English Bible (NEB) as “Holy . . . and inspiring awe.” God is reverend, terrible, awesome. And incomparable: “There is none holy as the Lord,” says Hannah in her canticle (1 Samuel 2:2).

And here, it seems to me, is the passage we should read and meditate on if we want to know who he is and how to approach him: “Be still, and know that I am God” (Psalm 46:10). We must forget our questions, our conjectures, we must calm ourselves, concentrate, wait, in order to be penetrated with the simple, overwhelming idea that God is indeed God. He loves us, he seeks us, he pardons us, he allows us to serve him, but he remains above all, in heaven and in eternity, God. And what does the context say?

Come, behold the works of the Lord,

what desolations he hath made in the earth.

He maketh wars to cease unto the end of the earth;

he breaketh the bow, and cutteth the spear in sunder;

he burneth the chariot in the fire.

Be still, and know that I am God:

I will be exalted among the heathen, I will be exalted in the earth.

(Psalm 46:8–10)

The voice of God intervenes in the poem. One would say the poet suddenly encounters a God-who-is-God in the act of writing. God’s words are not addressed to him; he is only the mouthpiece for them, but how he must tremble in writing them!

4.

The God of the New Testament, as Otto correctly saw, is no less fearsome than the Old Testament God. The idea that a primitive, terrifying God would have changed himself into a God of love and mercy under the influence of an evolution of religious feeling toward a more enlightened conception does not hold up to the reading of the texts. Nothing exactly corresponds to the apparition of God on Mount Sinai, to his fiery descent, to the smoke that rises “as the smoke of a furnace,” to a whole mountain that “quaked greatly” (Exodus 19:18). He even orders Moses, responding to him “in thunder”2 (Exodus 19:19), to warn the priests and the people not to cross the boundaries he has set in order to climb up toward him, “lest he break forth upon them” (Exodus 19:24). This last expression is particularly frightening, repelling; it puts our intelligence in its place, with its desire to understand. However, the New Testament, which constantly probes the Old, fully recognizes this terrible God. The author of the Epistle to the Hebrews exhorts his readers to remain faithful to the God of Sinai, to him “whose voice then shook the earth” (Hebrews 12:26), while also recalling the revelation of God in Deuteronomy 4:24 and in Isaiah 33:14, “for our God is a consuming fire” (Hebrews 12:29). Meditating on other passages such as “Vengeance is mine” (Deuteronomy 32:35), the same author cries, “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God” (Hebrews 10:31). Paul, remembering another oft-repeated expression—when Miriam and Aaron, for example, become jealous of Moses, “and the anger of the Lord was kindled against them” (Numbers 12:9)—declares, in a prose that itself is kindled, that “the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness” (Romans 1:18). But how does this wrath reveal itself? Where do we see it? The ungodly and the unrighteous are not burned here below, apparently, by any divine fire. It is revealed in the frenzy of their ungodliness. “Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonor their own bodies. . . . For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections. . . . God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient”: injustice, perversity, greed, and so on (Romans 1:24–28). As Otto says, the revelation of a God who gives sinners over to their sins causes us to tremble with incomprehension. It reminds us of what God imposes on Pharaoh before the exodus—“I will harden his heart, that he shall not let the people go” (Exodus 4:21)—and the repetition, during successive plagues, of this divine act that disarms our idea of justice.

Then the encounters with Jesus in the Gospels often offer the alarming vision of a holiness that absolutely transcends the known and the knowable. The transfiguration is now so familiar to us—paradoxically, in part because of its numerous artistic depictions—that it seems difficult for us to feel the inordinate power of this unique moment when Jesus is actually changed by eternity into himself, when a window is opened onto heaven, when the voice of God, as in the Old Testament, resounds in a cloud.3 According to Luke’s version, Peter, John, and James contemplate the ineffable glory: the glory of Jesus and the glory of Moses and Elijah (Luke 9:31–32). Dazzled by the “glistering” whiteness—which now has nothing earthly about it—of Jesus’s clothing and the appearance of his face, which becomes other (“altered”; Luke 9:29), they “feared as they entered into the cloud” (Luke 9:34), as in Mark’s narrative (9:6) and that of Matthew (17:6), where they fall on their faces. The only moment when Jesus, a man who eats and sleeps like other men, appears in the glory of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword by Alister McGrath
• Translator’s Preface
• Introduction: True Christianity
• 1. Know That I Am God
• 2. Faith Is Knowing
• 3. On Joy
• 4. Of (Not So) Numerous Words
• 5. Incarnation and Culture
• 6. Art, the Strange Hope
• 7. The Charitable Work of Translation
• 8. On Inspiration in Poetry
• 9. Seek and Ye Shall Find
• 10. I Am the Truth