« Hot Air and the Tyranny of Language: Sunday Reflection: John 9
The Bible Experience, not Hot Air: John 9:1-41
“The Bible Experience.” You may have heard it before. Its the title of a New Testament Audiobook. It’s an attempt to turn scripture into performance art with many well-known actors and musicians. Yes, I know. Well, anyway, the liberals love it. NPR thinks it’s the second coming, so you know right away there must be something wrong with it.
But this audiobook is just my symbol for experiential Christianity. You know, the kind that Fredrich Schleiermacher, the father of liberalism, jump-started at the beginning of early 18th century Romanticism? You can throw the influence of Immanuel Kant in with him. Kant was very successful in turning a whole generation of pulpits away from apologetics and toward enthusiastic, effusive pleading and displays of sincerity to show the world that Christianity is true. Or just being nice to show that it is true. Kant believed that the truths of Christianity could never be positively demonstrated, but at the same time, the Bible remains, somehow, without being objectively true, important for the regulation of moral life. The divines of the time lauded the functional atheist Kant on his piety and church-going, confirming to them that maybe he was right.
“The Bible Experience.” It’s not all that bad, but I am not, far from not, ready to use this phrase in the presumptuous way the modern age does.
Anything this new in a fallen world is not going to be a new revelation, but a new plan. It was, after all, an idea that would have been thought strange 200 years ago, and would have required a lot of talk to explain and even more to make anyone believe it applied importantly to the relationship between God, the reader and the Bible. In the Enlightenment, they were still trying to settle what God, “evidence” and “faith” were. That argument has been decisively won by the scientific party, who redefined evidence to mean inductive physical evidence, not the historiographical, documentarian type.
The study of the Bible, therefore, since it was not productive of certain evidence of anything, could not be taken as seriously as the study of, say, in Darwin’s time, finches in Galapagos. Religion eventually relented that faith applied to it alone and came from a conclusion that need not be influenced by “evidence” at all. Craven, naïve “experience” is what is left over as the vapidity and bankruptcy of this philosophical inheritance of religion and science fail to bring the transcendence that they promised into the modern age.
In respect to the Bible, “experience” in the concept refers to the subjective objects, workings, attitudes, presuppositions, and needs of the individual in any given point in history. They are crucial. It means minimally and most importantly how the reader reacts to the contents of the text and what those texts are is determinative of his understanding and a relationship with God. It is supposed to cause our focus not on the text insofar as the intent of the Author, which comes later, but the text as the means of showing himself positively, as a fact of history and an objective person, to the reader. The assumption is supposed to be that the text then is first for showing that God is real and has a certain nature before we are to know by the same text the subtleties of God’s mind. The experience of God is first, and our conclusions are drawn from that premise.
No, just kidding, that’s not what “the Bible Experience” means in our post-modern feel it-believe it-live it (because, well, because I want it) subjectivity toward all things biblical and metaphysical. I wish it did. I’ll tell you what it means to them, and what it is supposed to mean to Christians.
So what is the Bible Experience?
The problem is what of the Bible we have chosen to represent the most important revelational content of God, which is just as important in this “experience” of “God.” Leaving that decision to unhypocritically love, search for, find, expose oneself to and go where it leads is left to the individual and not to God, as the Bible clearly states. It must be the beginning, but not the end, or else it will be a tacit admission that man is God who creates meaning. The Orthodox have always maintained this, but they have not maintained that any particular Bible content as supremely important to man’s love of objective spiritual truth and experience. Thus, although they affirm that man is not God, they still refuse to separate themselves from their collaboration with the Bible’s enemies in putting their foot down in their insistence not to create meaning but to choose any meaning other than what God gave them to choose.
The experience of revelation is exactly half of the truth transference from God to man. As overarching in importance as a true bible experience is, God still controls the subjective state and content by His own content. Refusing to recognize that there is a portion of that revelational content that is particularly specialized for this experience toward knowing God is a refusal that there is a special experience among many possible others. Others that may be important but not transcendent or salvific. It is ultimately a capitulation to the death of both the opinion of the unchangeable relevancy of the Bible and any conception of a true, objective transcendent “experience” for mankind. Both the Scriptures and man’s experience of God, in whatever form we so wish, are then allowed to take their place as the equals to those in all other world religions with respect to their ability to connect to something real which is wholly outside the human box.
This is a light going over of the framework of thought that goes into my personal dissatisfaction with mainstream and historical theology through what I say is the “tyranny of language.” It’s not about linguistics perse. I really don’t visit theology by compartments and classifications as most do. When I say “language” I mean more like causal hermeneutics.
When I read a theology I don’t read like most people. What I do is look for casual keywords and phrases that are written and used in the development of important arguments that the writer assumes to carry a certain weight of meaning without the need for precise definitions. These orphaned but hugely influential words and phrases are the real tyrants of our theology, not the soundness of the argument themselves or the evidence that is brought to bear. They continue to be the static, the white noise, of my “experience” with our scholars, our “Christian” brethren. It interferes with my ability to read the Bible without having to continually, consciously filter out things. All the opinion pieces, research articles, commentaries, sermons, dissertations, histories, and lexicons that use this type of language in order for their experience to come in better.
Hot Air from Mr. Morrissey?
I use the exposition of John 9 by Ed Morrissey that recently appeared on Hot Air1 as my final example of this tyranny. Politically I tend to be a conservative, with Ed, because I refuse to be aligned with forces that have a fundamental, constituent undercurrent of thought that believes that the new human-engineered and managed utopia can only be built over the ashes of everything that went before, should be forced into existence by humans and by violent revolution sooner rather than later. Conservatives want to hold the line against it and stick with things that have proven to work. But as a Christian, I can’t really call myself a conservative in that sense because what I advocate for is the preservation and continued progress of the faith by something original and fundamental to it and effectively reviled by both liberal and conservative religious people.
The filter I use, as anyone knows who visits this website, is messianic prophecy itself. This piece essentially begins a broader discussion on why messianic prophecy as a kind of revelation within the revelation given by God is essential for man’s moral education, intellectual and emotional maturity and salvation. It is about why this is radical to the modern mind, and those such as Mr. Morrissey, as it was when Jesus introduced it in the 1st century.
Why we are so messed up
In addition to the “Bible experience, “you may have heard the phrase “Bible as Literature.” Over the last 30 or so years this was coined in an attempt by liberals to turn the Bible into a book essentially of myth and fiction, as well as used by conservatives to get the Bible back into Public School curricula without a charge of a violation of Church and State. The idea is very important for us in understanding why the Bible is read the way it is today. This general hermeneutic the Church uses has not just appeared over the last century but has dominated exegesis in one form or another over the last 1800 years, only coming to codification and becoming irreversibly mainstream recently. The religious world has “come out,” so to speak.
In literary criticism, the experience of reading the Bible is produced by the relationship between the author, text, and reader. That trifecta, in that order, serves also as a historical timeline.
There always used to be, long, long ago, after the Apostles began their ministries, at an understanding and attempt to treat the Bible as the book of its Author, as two realities that are thought separate but almost interchangeable. The problem began, however, with the Church making a distinction between revelation, the act of the Author, and what is revealed. On the one hand, revelation is a process, an act of God, a disclosure or unveiling of otherwise inaccessible information. It is if we could use the imagery, the act of God reaching his arm into our universe, down to the human level for his reception. On the other hand, it must be authored in such a way as so that its message will be understood over millennia of changing cultures. With an emphasis placed on the difference instead of the similarities between God and his revelation, what could go wrong? The next object, the text, becomes minimized while the reader becomes magnified, arriving at our place today with God being only the concept “God,” since the dawn of primitive man the first and only revelation of God that was available to man in a fallen world. After being visited by YHVH himself and being given the revelation of him on a silver platter, we have managed to deconstruct it into a pile of rubbish that does not in itself call for any more scrutiny than what sits at your curbside and awaits the city solid waste services to be deposited into the mountain of similar cultural off-scour at the dump.
What God is holding in his hand is what is revealed. What is revealed is doctrine, some truth, and insight of Himself, the plan of redemption, the nature of His Son. But revelation as an act of God and what God has revealed are also two separate things. Revelation is the moment of illumination within the spirit in response to what is revealed. This is by design, done so that a spiritual industry, a religion, can be made. Those things that have been revealed are by definition, if I may use the phrase, the “conclusions of transcendence.” That is, they are, in their relationship with God’s act of revelation, finished products, particular insights, statements of truth, or conclusions to God’s premises, which are essentially the intentions of His mind for bringing them into the world. But these are understood in two possible senses: one, a declarative sentence stating a truth, like “God is sovereign,” and two, the information sitting behind it that establishes it as objective truth. With the slide already having been set in motion by stressing the text over God and the reader over the text, which choice do you think will be advanced, the statement or the predicting evidence, and what will be the predicted end?
Examples, please
For example, the product of revelation is the Blood of Christ. I sound like a myna bird on this symbol, as I always mention it first. This is only because its used so much and had such significance. But you can apply this same principle to any of the symbols of Christ.
God revealed or ordained this symbol and this fact, and we then have to nail down the main meaning for it. We give the “Blood of Christ” something like “death,” “redemption,” “propitiatory sacrifice,” because “death” is unqualified with a kind of scriptural predicating information like “prophesied death” would be. We treat the symbol, the “Blood of Christ” as a kind of conceptual revelation in itself. But “the Blood of Christ is independently meaningless except as a possible fact of history. That fact could be described and defined as a supernatural occurrence, a fulfillment of a prior prophecy and become together with this definition a revelation and a thing that is revealed, but we ascribe the meanings of “death,” “redemption” and “propitiatory sacrifice” to it instead. These are pure religious concepts that have the capacity to refer only to their referent as such, but then again they have the ability not to refer even to their symbols and take on a life their own apart from any implication of the supernatural at all. If we made these meanings into “prophesied death,” or “anticipated redemption,” or “oracular propitiatory sacrifice,” or at least carried these assumptions, then this would make the “Blood of Christ” something that is both a revelation and a product of what is revealed. It would be a call to test the scriptures for the demonstration of the existence and nature of God and stands as an instantiation of God in written form within the world, who truly speaks phenomenally, the in subjective sense, to mankind.
Since we don’t do this, however, we have to begin in our theology to try to work back from the loss we are responsible for in the bad initial assumption about revelation, because these revealed truths, the symbol and the meaning together, the way they are conceived, are incompetent autonomously to be unique demonstrations of God’s act of revelation and his disclosed mystery, and therefore anything certain about God Himself. We have to write theologies by the thousands to explain what these things mean, suffering hundreds of years of schisms over relatively trivial matters when the biblical unifying and clarifying principle was before us long before it all began.
Other tropes
For instance, consider the topics “sacramental Grace,” sola fide or sola scriptura as handled in this fallen, ever destructive, spiritually lethal hermeneutical paradigm of which I speak. Yes, we do this with theological categories, topics, and classifications as well. I am not challenging whether they are true or any particular take on them, I ask you to consider, since these topics symbolize our theological preoccupations, if it is assumed that these are the products of a transcendent revelation, if they independently state truths that bear the marks of transcendence without considerable effort put in to argue for them as such. Obviously, they are and are meant to be topics of discussion, claims of theology. But they are just placeholders for data which is either for or against them. That is the problem if they stand for the kind of truths that what we care about most. Without your topic or claim forcing its own transcendent credentials, you open up a hornet’s nest, a free-for-all for various innumerable people to assume they are justified in supplying it themselves, to make convincing claims and counter-claims in a fight over who is to own the truth.
Now, I must remind the reader, I am not so naive to think that messianic prophecy does not often require contentions discussion and hard work to “get it.” What I mean is that if your refuse to qualify the theological idea of “sacramental grace,” in the phrase itself, with that prophetic revelation, then you are giving it into the service of the pagan talismanic religious impulse to take physical and conceptual objects as revealing God without necessarily needing proof. I understand if you think there is no such miraculous, historical demonstration, but to those that do, why would you entertain the holy objects of such a cruel God, who asks for devotion but not the means of knowing if he is any different than your own imagination?
If “sacramental Grace,” for example, were reformulated into something like the “prophesied Grace through oracular symbolism,” or sola scriptura “the Oracles alone,” or sola fida “prophetic faith alone,” at least as mental constructs, these, or something like them, would contain both the act of revelation and what truth is revealed, and narrow any subsequent discussions only to how the messianic oracles show us the truths that God intended us to know in any detail. “Faith,” “Scripture” and “sacrament” leave this question open, giving us only the right objects to begin a discussion., a discussion that will inevitably be thought perfectly rational if it involves only the use of reason and other such conceptual objects alone. But with “oracle” and “prophecy,” making instead promise/fulfillment pairs, these stand for the supernatural scriptural phenomenon that proves and show God, which must be established first before any particular conclusion about him and his work is satisfied to the mind and spirit. They are also doctrinal truths that were revealed in fulfillment. It is apparent that there are no doctrines that are crucial to the faith that was not prophesied , but there are many doctrines and topics that we entertain endlessly that are worthless, trivial, paradoxical and made only for self-serving and academic reasons that were not prophesied at all, unless prophesied in such passages as Eph 4:14 , Heb 5:12 and Acts 20:29.
Literary Criticism
I want you to think about this. Why do we read the Bible as we do? We do it for the foregoing reasons, where we have, in the same way, we separated revelation and revealed, separated the Author from what he reveals. When we do this, the reader inevitably and progressively wins, and the Bible becomes either about our own lives or it’s about interesting theological puzzles and general social moral aphorisms and contextless concepts.
The Literary Criticism of Reader-Response over the last 30 years is a good illustration of where we have come. It’s a reflection, not a cause, but is useful to show us something. This came about because of an erroneous assumption at its root, begrudgingly accepted in time by the Church, that an understanding by the viewer around a piece of art is the most important thing about the art, and that of the reader of the Bible as well.
No matter what social and political messages Melville wrote into Moby Dick, the book was not written for the purpose of showing the existence and nature of Melville to the reader. What is taken for granted in Moby Dick about the author cannot be so taken of the Bible because God is a being assumed completely outside our space/time. If we did it would nix the claim that the document is His main means of contact and self-disclosure before it’s even considered. Moreover, shifting the personal comprehension level of the author and personal overall value and relevance of Moby Dick away from its author into first place can in no way come to destroy the fact that Melville wrote it, but, when applied to the Bible and God this lack of certainty of who wrote it is not only probable but a manifest and growing phenomena in our time.
Not that to become fully conscious and of an essential understanding of why God was acting or what he God meant in any particular instance is not a sound expectation. However, even to desire this as crucial is not the aim or the concern of modern hermeneutics when the needs of the human in the relationship are spoken of as something that creates as much meaning as that which is received by the Author. The idea is that the reader must interpret and the results of that are determinative of the final result of “truth.” The assumption is that the reader, beginning with the Biblical writer or speaker, is not receiving and transmitting something supernatural, and therefore the value of what is transmitted is placed on the reader to determine, much like a reader any piece of secular literature.
The idols of the Church are conceptual. An idol is not primarily a piece of wood or stone carved into an image of a god, and it is not primarily, as the Church is wont to preach, the things in your life that you value more than God. An idol is an object of any kind to which is ascribed supernatural qualities of a god, which you believe you acquire through its mere handling and obeisance, but which object shows by itself no supernatural qualities whatsoever.
Criticism of Criticism
In the 1930’s emerged the New Criticism: rejecting that the text can exist by itself, without the reader. The reader is cut off from the author:
“Without an author to determine and control the interpretation, the text has to be subjected to other constraints; otherwise, meaning would have so many possibilities, than it could hardly be called‘meaning of a text”.
Structuralist criticism, from de Saussure, Lévi-Strauss and A. J. Greimas:
“refusing to accept that the author’s intention has anything to do with the meaning of the text. The movement could be described as a belief in the non-referential character of literature; a concern for literary form, shape, and genre.” Meaning is determined by the literary odes within the text.2
Then there is the mentioned Reader-Response Criticism, mostly from Stanley Fish. With interpretation moved from the author as the creator of meaning to the text and the reader, meaning finally came to be seen as never embedded in the text and the aim of the reader is not to get it out. Ultimately, there is no meaning in the text at all. The response of the reader is not to mean, but is meaning.3
How this was already working all along in Biblical hermeneutics is not hard to find. The strategy is first to question or place emphasis on the experience of the prophet speaking God’s revelation in the Bible, but, again, stripping the idea of “experience” from a necessary contact positively with transcendent information. When we start trying to decide if it is imperative in knowing God that the speaker, primarily the prophet and pertaining to prophesy and typology, also understood or was conscious of God’s intentions, then, more as time went goes on, whether or not the scripture applied to the life and experience of the reader. It is then that its supernatural value tied to the prophet, as an inspired transmission of knowledge from Heaven to Earth through a human agent, is abandoned.
You might think I am talking primarily about the interpretation and acquisition of meaning from the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus’s “rich,” “poor,” “meek,” “lost” and “saved.” “persecution,” “hunger,” “the Cross,” “sin,” righteousness,” the lamb of the sacrifice, the Brazen Serpent, the type of Messiah in Joseph, the Virgin Birth prophecy of Isaiah 7, I am not. Neither primarily about whether or not Moses and those who looked to the Brazen Serpent for healing knew it was a prophecy of the Messiah is taken as the starting point of its consideration as a prophecy, and therefore whether or not it was fulfilled. Its the progressive restriction of prophetic texts and prophetic meanings to a narrow corner of scripture and then re-aligning of everything else to have value through one’s ability to interpret it as applying to the reader alone. The language of the commentator, when speaking of anything in scripture, is massaged carefully so that key concepts and words are as broadly defined as possible, for only by this can we be made free to re-narrow it to ourselves. This is clearly seen in our pedestrian church exegesis in the transference of scripture as pertaining to Jesus over to ourselves instead. The Bible is about promises God made to us, about our money, our happiness, our marriage and children, our feelings, our traditions, our church, our affections, not Christ unless a distant second.
Mr. Morrissey Returns
We now get to Mr. Morrissey’s article. He is by no means unique, and he is not a theologian but represents overwhelmingly the standard for that pedestrian Bible interpretation. He deals with John chapter 9.
Before beginning, let us set the context of this confrontation of Jesus with the Pharisees. What is all this about?
In order to answer this, we first have to think about the question again. The narrower the question is the narrower and precise the answer can be. In John 9, the question is not “what is this all about?” That frees us to any number of possible choices. It’s not “what is Jesus’ main concern here?” That means the answer category is permitted that can be just as diffuse, general and earth-bound as the question, like “the poor, the blind, the downtrodden.” Do we think that it was Messiah’s mission to be kind, to make physically blind people see, to make physically lame people walk, or do we think these are meant to represent a spiritual malady? That he came to solve our carnal problems? That he came to make us appreciate the blind, and make us feel good for taking care of them?
Morrissey is not a liberal, so he does not take that line. Conservatives accept the spiritual answer but equivocate and become foggy not only on what blindness exactly represents spiritually but how the meaning of the symbol of blindness in John 9 could be the same as the spiritual thing that causes it.
“Why, though, do the Pharisees stay stuck in that paradigm of illness as punishment?”
“Jesus tells the disciples that the beggar’s blindness is an opportunity to make God’s work visible, which means that all can see it who bother to look. But if affliction can be a path for God’s mercy, so too can our comfort. That starts with a recognition that we are all “totally born in sin,” and all in need of God’s mercy, which can come through the actions of our neighbors. The Pharisees remain blind to this truth, just as they remain blind to the demonstration that their assumptions have all been in error.”
He is the Light of the World, so that all of us blinded by sin to our own fallen natures may see, repent, and love God with all our hearts again — and express that through love of our neighbors rather than assume to know the mind of God in rejecting neighbors. Affliction and comfort offer us the opportunities to come together in the unity of the Holy Spirit to lift all eyes to the Lord, so that all may eventually see that beatific vision of eternal life.
In our marriage, blindness has offered that opportunity for growth in charity and love. That’s because while Marcia and I met because of her need for transportation due to her physical blindness, our love has helped me open my eyes to God’s word and blessings. As readers concluded long ago, her vision far exceeded mine where it counted.
All of the italics are my emphasis. They are key concepts that the writer uses in an entirely unspecialized way. The meaning of John 9 is for the reader about his own life, not that of Jesus and his mission to reveal himself as Messiah and finish his prophesied word. Therefore, at any point in the narrative where we encounter an idea that carries a spiritual connotation, it must be used naturally “unless the passage says otherwise, or is clearly using metaphorical language we must give and accept the literal meaning of scripture. It is a well-stated rule, ‘If the literal sense makes sense, seek no other sense.’”4
We might think that this only applies to the debate over historico-/grammatical and historico/critical, allegorical forms of interpretation. The center to that debate is mostly around biblical symbolism that is obvious as such, such as in the Book of Revelation. The fight is never on passages such as John 9, as just about everyone interprets it in the natural sense of one form or another: one where “blind” means “the socially, physically downtrodden and afflicted” or “blind” means “sin,” “without spiritual understanding and insight,” “without Christ’s illumination from his Word.”
The tropes are an affliction, God’s mercy, God’s work, our comfort, mercy, Light of the World, blinded by sin, lift all eyes, repent, know the mind of God, the mind of God, growth in charity and love, neighbors, love our neighbors. Ultimately, the blindness that is cured is one of an inability to see our fallen natures, that we are all born in sin and need God’s mercy. What do these mean? Well, you decide. It’s wide open! Morrissey also applies the entire passage in John to his own learning experience through his wife, who is blind. Are these meanings, with Jesus, his light, his messianic mission, his perfect nature and Divine authority, his redemptive plan, and self-authenticating and transcendent in the way I have demanded and which is so obvious? I don’t think so.
Keep reading on the website, as we go through, one by one, the distinctive prophetic emphasis of each of these symbols, and why Jesus is not some conventional religionist, not come to clothe idolatry in new vestments, not come to speak platitudes and give us bromides, but give us something so radically different that the world was sure to fail in seeing it, come to hate it, and kill him over it.
But I leave you a couple of verses from John to ponder, to set the real context of what is really going on, which the emphasis mine. Is the speaker only Jesus’ person? Is sin in respect to his person, ours or another? Is the context that of messianic prophecy, or is Mr.Morissey right?
John 8:28 Then said Jesus unto them, When ye have lifted up the Son of man, then shall ye know that I am he, and that I do nothing of myself; but as my Father hath taught me, I speak these things.
John 8:56 Your father Abraham rejoiced to see my day: and he saw it, and was glad.
John 9:16 Therefore said some of the Pharisees, This man is not of God, because he keepeth not the sabbath day. Others said, How can a man that is a sinner do such miracles? And there was a division among them.
John 9:35 Jesus heard that they had cast him out; and when he had found him, he said unto him, Dost thou believe on the Son of God?
And finally,
John 9:39: And Jesus said, For judgment, I am come into this world, that they which see not might see; and that they which see might be made blind.
