REGARDING FICTION & FAITH

A correspondence with a former student of my father

NOTE: The following is a somewhat edited transcript of an actual e-mail correspondence between myself and a former student of my father. His comments are in purple. Those comments of mine in green are later reflections from other e-mails.

I reply to this note of yours …, which I have been brooding about. I am inclined to think of faith as a question of membership, loyalty, social bonds, rather than of private opinion. One breaches faith by acts and not by thoughts. Apostasy and infidelity come before unbelief. And I think this would have been the prevailing idea in Christendom before, say, Martin Luther, who really did seem to believe you were saved by, in effect, changing your mind. On this basis, Judas's failing was not in his beliefs but in his behaviour.

CRT - Behavior begins with belief. One breaches faith in an act that is a consequence of some thought process leading up to that act. It is not either/or but both/and. Luther's "change of mind" reflects Paul's exhortation to be transformed by the renewing of one's mind (Romans 12:2).

Your comments lead me to see the difficulty with my settled view. A paradox, perhaps a contradiction, opens up. I mean in personal terms. How can I know what I have betrayed? In what order? To what effect? Am I honest about the sources of my unbelief? More to the present point, Can I have community on the basis of a half-way covenant? A covenant of nostalgia with no price to pay of cognitive assent, let alone of confession?

I am eager enough to confess to the transgression of abandonment and betrayal.

CRT - Are you “honest about the sources of your unbelief?” You are “eager enough to confess to the transgression of abandonment and betrayal.” Yet you wonder, “How can I know what I have betrayed? In what order? To what effect?” What absolution do you imagine to be forthcoming, if the response is only 'simply believe'? What have you abandoned? Whom have you betrayed? To whom will you confess?

Absolution comes from the Latin absolvo, “set free.” Is that what you are trying to imagine, being set free? Jesus simply said, “Follow me.” Freedom is found in following Jesus. “If the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed” (John 8:36). Following Christ is believing and behaving within the boundaries of Christian fellowship. Real relationship with God and others revolves around the person and work of Jesus Christ. To be restored to fellowship is the desire that drives confession.

If 'faith begins in ... imagination' have we not placed a faculty with which people are very variously endowed, as the gate-keeper of salvation?

CRT - The faculty of imagination is that with which one figures one’s faith. Faith is a given, measured to us by God’s grace. With the measure of faith we are given, we go on to conceive how we may follow God. Either that or flee from Him.

Have we not loaded the terms of debate? A Greek would have had no quarrel with this thinking, as they had no trouble with praiseworthiness and blameworthiness as being one's fate, like Oedipus'. We could say it was Judas' fate to be Judas. He would be damned even though he had no choice, either in his temperament or in his quality of imagination or in the force of the temptation he was given.

CRT - The “quality” of one’s imagination does not quantify the measure of one’s faith. God initiates the whole process by first loving us; we then have the privilege of responding. Do we follow Him or flee? Love Him or leave Him – such a simple choice leaves little to the imagination!

How can we know what Judas was? Much less that he was cynical?

CRT - A cynic sneers at life rather than embracing its abundance. Doubt dogs a cynic until no delight is possible, only despair. Judas did doubt that joy could come from keeping to Christ’s command. He chose to act against God because he could not imagine God working the way Jesus taught. Seized with remorse, he died with the realization, “I have betrayed an innocent man.”

One might make out Thomas as the greater cynic, who was at the least a man of mediocre imagination, a vulgar materialist, an opportunist.

CRT - What do we know? We know that both Judas and Thomas, like us, were sinners whom only grace could save. We know that Judas betrayed Jesus. We know that Thomas confessed Jesus to be Lord and God. We know that doubting has its limits and that, at some point, we must stop doubting and believe. We know that we too must face whether or not we are willing to go die with Christ. “We know that anyone born of God does not continue to sin …. We know that the Son of God has come and has given us understanding, so that we may know him who is true” (1 John 5:18-21).

Where is this going? I have no idea. I simply want to acknowledge a hermeneutical circle you have opened up that rattles my own somewhat materialist understanding.

CRT - The hermeneutical circle which our conversation has opened up spirals up to eternity. Our ongoing relationship now takes us around beyond the bend of comfortable conformity to encounter new possibilities of meaning and understanding. This may be the beginning of a new community that we will discover to be really in continuity with the ancient community of Christians whom Jesus called His Church.

“Restore to me the joy of your salvation and grant me a willing spirit, to sustain me.” Psalm 51:12

The point you make is well taken. Regarding behaviour and belief, not being either/or but both/and. The sort of thing to keep a graduate seminar going for a heated hour or two. The phrase that leaps out on a third or fourth reading is, naturally, a text from Nick. The sort of arresting thing he was wont to say. I mean his "let's assume that it is true." This gets us away from circularity and proposes a method for reading. But I would run with this in two directions.

In one direction I would ask is this not also the method for reading the Koran, or the Buddhist scriptures?

CRT - Yes, assuming a text is true allows the text to speak for itself. Deconstructive criticism finds flaws in the text using the text's own criteria. That is what I like about Derrida – he insisted that one read the text first to appreciate how it is constructed before re-reading it to deconstruct it as one may.

Or, why do Catholics have visions of Mary, Muslims of the Prophet, Buddhists the Buddha, and so forth? Why does Sister Patsy see Jesus?

CRT - I am none of those, so I can only speculate. I imagine that ... hmmm, anything I write now will be true only as far as I am able to imagine what is true for others with whom I have little or no relationship. I can speculate why, but then must go to them and let them respond to my speculation, then revise what I have imagined to be true according to what they revealed by way of our relationship.

In other words, returning to our seminar conundrum, I would say that the text we choose on which to apply the method is predetermined by our community.

CRT - We're getting into Bultman's preconceptions here. Being aware of one's community is prerequisite for hermeneutical understanding.

It is not innocent to say let's read the book of John as though it were true and see what happens. We already know what will happen given the circumstances of the experiment, the community of faith to which we already belong, the bond between reader and hearers -- the bond of discipleship -- the status of the text before us.

CRT - We approach the text with expectations, to be sure. However, allowing the text to surprise us takes an openness to Truth that one may be avoiding.

Truth is truth, to be sure. But there is scientific truth, and there is a truth of the soul which arises in community. Isn't it this "hand of fellowship" which, in the end, you extend to me in your gracious and loving words? Everything else is opinion. Or anthropology.

CRT - Scientific truth is supposedly evidentially based. Yet science begins with some hypothesis that can be tested to see whether or not that hypothesis is true. This hypothetical beginning is the realm of religion, i.e., Truth.

But I said two directions. The other way I read Nick's injunction is the opposite of isolating and elevating the text in question, but rather normalizing it as literature. The operation he recommends -- "let's assume that it is true" – is precisely the exercise of mind demanded by reading a novel or other fiction, or invoked every time the curtain rises at a play.

CRT - The willing suspension of disbelief requires one to have some idea of what one believes at first.

The gospels are novels. Jesus taught in parables. It seems to me that the strongest possible doctrine of divine inspiration has to wrestle with, and assimilate, the fact that we "know" Jesus as a literary character, according to methods that do not differ in essential points from the methods by which we "know" Hamlet.

CRT - We know Jesus not merely through reading, but through relationship as well. In fact, relationship precedes reading. He first loved us, some community introduced us to that which we read. Within the context of that relationship we begin to read. Then we return to our relationships renewed by our reading. Jesus insisted that it is in our relationships with one another that we truly know him. "Where two or three are gathered in my name, there I will be also." Their self-understanding is unfolded in reported discourse and dramatised action, and that self-understanding has universal import.

As I recall Nick's course on the Gospel of John, it was his "close reading," his teasing out of a philosophical and historical context for the particularities of the text, that opened my eyes to the powerful community-forming and community-judging work that literary art does.

CRT - It seems that we are saying very similar things. As an actor, I must insist that we know Hamlet best through an actor's portrayal of that character. This is why I despise Drama as Literature; one misses the essential element of "seeing" that is Theatre; drama is doing, not merely reading!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! And whatever a human does, is done in the context of relationship. "It is not good for a man to be alone." As Christians, we have been made a theatre to the world to reveal Jesus Christ. The call to become imitators of God compels us to act out our own portrayal of the character of Christ in the daily drama of life.

I could go on and on. To this concept I have devoted my professional life in theatre and theology.

CRT 1/04/07 - The reported “self-understanding” of Shakespeare’s fictional Hamlet has no reference to the self-understanding of a historical character; the actor researching the role of Hamlet has no actual referent to guide how faithful the eventual performance may be. The self-understanding of Jesus refers to what John writes to be Logos, the Word that was/is/will be God. The reported self-understanding of Jesus Christ has the historical person of Jesus as its referent; putting on Christ faithfully, therefore, is of much more consequence.

Perhaps my father’s “close reading” of the Gospel did lead to some insight regarding “the powerful community-forming and community-judging work that literary art does,” but I wonder what effect his faithful reading had?

So I would add to my "strong" version of a doctrine of divine inspiration an allowance for diverse, layered, multi-form, even competing or antagonistic, virtual-communities embedded in scripture, implied in the numerous genres and vocabularies and rhetorics and even literary personalities on display. In my correspondence with Nick I sometimes tried to oppose a "Jewish" community of "witnesses" to his community under the Greek and neo-Platonist Word. Unsuccessfully and naively, to be sure.

CRT - Unfortunately, we depend too much on slanted scholarship to understand communities other than our own. That is why we need to be honest with ourselves about our primary relationships within our own community and be open to understanding our shortcomings in that context before going outside our community to interpret the world.

But I would also claim something else, perhaps blasphemous, which is that the inspiration which we think of as Biblical extends to all strong poets. Further, that the humblest worker in the vineyards of art and literature, writers of fictions like me, to the extent that their work is work in good faith, out of authentic response to life, are extending the reach of the Biblical Word, accumulating the tough web of repetitions and variations across the whole body of the community, rather in the manner of Talmud. Or, in a different way, of the Gnostics.

CRT - The Spirit of God breathes as He wills. It is my responsibility to respond (pun intended) when His Breath falls on me. Do I bow or break? By His grace, He hasn't blown so hard that such brokeness as I have experienced destroys me. I await Judgment Day to experience the possibility of that happening. Until then, I hope to learn to bear the burden of His Breath by relying on the wisdom that is Christ to discern His Voice wherever and whenever He may choose to speak.

CRT 1/04/07

But I would also claim something else, perhaps blasphemous, which is that the inspiration which we think of as Biblical extends to all strong poets.
Faithful reading takes into account that it is the Spirit that leads us into truth, and all truth is God’s truth. Does not the question of scriptural inspiration address the text and the author and the reader?
… the humblest worker in the vineyards of art and literature, writers of fictions like me, to the extent that their work is work in good faith, out of authentic response to life, are extending the reach of the Biblical Word, accumulating the tough web of repetitions and variations across the whole body of the community, rather in the manner of Talmud. Or, in a different way, of the Gnostics.
If work in good faith is done out of authentic response to life, what is authentic? Authenticity implies the possibility of a counterfeit (contrary to faith, unfaithful) The “humblest worker” is one who faithfully works with fear and trembling before God the giver of life.

I know Nick did not read fiction. Neither does his friend Russ Spittler. Many people of evangelical persuasion do not. Except as entertainment. Certainly with condescension. I am saddened by that. To me it is a way of knowing that is deeply Biblical.

CRT - Once again, knowing God (and others) is a matter of relationship, not reading. I hope to discuss this further as we continue our conversation.