Narrating The Success and Failure of God

Susan R. responds to this post:

Otter, can you expound on the following intriguing statement?:

[The] exegesis [of the Eastern Orthodox Church] has always been rooted in a very-nearly semitic habit of seeing salvation as inclusion into story.

That post was about the "New Perspectives On Paul" and how it challenges interpretations of Paul that revolve around "justification" or "sanctification" as abstract concepts that apply or do not apply to individuals through purely personal faith.

Orthdoxy, a faith that keeps its own counsels, recognizes the words "justification" and "sanctification," as any biblical religion must do.  But it means something a little different, something older and more rooted in Christian history.

If you elevate the concepts of justification and sanctification to too-high an importance, you do wind up with something very like Western Christianity (in both its Catholic and, to a greater degree, Reformation forms).  That is, the individual soul is considered to have a status before God: one is damned or saved.

In other words, one is either justified or not.

In this reading of Paul, one's process of sanctification takes place as something wholly extrinsic to whether one is "justified," and this produces all sorts of worry over whether one is always saved / justified or not, whether one can "lose" the salvation one "has."

Notice some features in this habit of thinking.

First, all that vocabulary has to do with states of being and possession: it's a very late-medieval, Early Modern, and Modern way of talking about things, drawing on a budding awareness of psychology as an objective field.  One can "freeze" a person in mid-story and comprehend the state of her soul / mind and describe it.  It has the feature of "justification."  It is in a quantifiable state of "sanctification."

Second, no matter where you are in your story, your story is pretty much over.  We know the ending.  You're justified.  There's no tension, no drama, no "arc" here.  Sure, you're becoming "sanctified," but it's a process of limited relevance, and since most Western Christians avow that they are not going to die holy anyway, merely justified (which they already are), what's the real interest?  There's a vacuum of narrative created by a strong view of justification that cripples the Christian's relationship to history.

One might fill this vacuum with various ad hoc needs or values: one exists to evangelize, to serve others, or as part of the apocalyptic unfolding of the kingdom.  

But ultimately, that's not your story.  That is, in evangelism, you propose justification to someone else, who accepts justification and whose story comes to a close more or less as yours has.  Or you help build Ezekiel's Temple or feed the masses, but your personal justification remains the fait accompli.  You have nothing to gain, since you've already gained everything.  You've won.  The game is over, it's just that you're still playing it as a sort of sham.

And once you buy that "justification-centered" way of thinking, you can read the Bible through that lens pretty much forever with only very mild fears of contradiction: the text will bear that interpretation, regardless of whether that was the one that was intended, in much the same way that Hamlet very easily supports a Freudian reading that is probably not precisely what Shakespeare had in mind.

Putting it another way, Western Christianity has tended towards a view of salvation that creates a rather poisonous (in my view) stasis.

Eastern Christianity can also do this.

But as a very general thing, they see rather that one's life has an arc or narrative shape, a trajectory towards (or away from) God that is of ultimate significance.  

This is an older way of thinking.  It gives every choice and every instant and every relationship a tremendous importance, since the end of the story is not precisely known.  Very often where the West temperamentally employs a declaration of almost mechanical certainty ("Your relative was a Christian and therefore is in heaven"), the East employs a hope ("Your relative was a Christian: we have a hope of seeing her again").

One must make a good end in this more narratological view of salvation.  One must make good choices.  It isn't a matter of failing and asking forgiveness: I have sometimes thought as a Protestant and in Catholic churches that the act of contrition / confession was like the habit we had in college of touching the nose on the bronze bust of a past college president: it shines, it polishes, it means nothing much except for ensuring that we have a shiny-nosed bust.

This is not to say that such confession or contrition is either insincere or ineffectual.  It's very important, both psychologically and spiritually.  But it serves no serious soteriological purpose that I can think of.  One is not saved for doing it, or damned for failing to do it.

Where (as in Orthodoxy) the goal is to be absorbed into God, to be (in the image of Athanasius) drawn up into God as humanity drew him down to itself, there is a drama at work in which each choice becomes a plot device, and it is not only our salvation that hangs in the balance but the very success of God in his bid to undo the work of the devil.

Comments

[Susan R]

Thanks so much for elaborating at such happy length.

It was helpful to learn more about EOC theology, and also useful for me to realize through reading your posts that a fair chunk of my motivation in moving further into the Anglican church (and therefore moving further away from the evangelical church) has to do with “aesthetic considerations,” for lack of a better phrase. I’m not talking about beautiful church buildings or vestments or music—though I do think all that is distantly related to what I’m referring to—I’m referring mainly to the language of their theology.

I don’t know if that’s very clear. More concretely: It was the phrase “salvation as inclusion into story” in your earlier post that piqued my curiosity, and in the second post your references to narrative, drama, plot, arc, etc., tipped me off to the realization that I’m drawn to theology that reads more like literature than lecture. And I really don’t think it’s compelling because it sounds prettier; it’s because it actually sounds truer somehow. For example, I am suspicious of Calvinism because it seems to me that it is trying to flatten out and square up and then dice all of scripture into nice, rectangular pages of lecture notes—and that strikes me not only as unappealing but also as unlikely. When is truth ever so neat and tidy? (Particularly the truth about an actual Person?)

Anyway, if you ever find yourself flailing about for topics here at the Riparian Church, I propose some rambling about the possible relationship between truth and beauty in theological language.

Thanks again.