Anthology: Book

26 [Robert Palmer] taught me to revere the works of Werner Jaeger and Walter Otto. From Otto, Palmer took his favorite formula, “First the god, then the dance, and finally the story.” All religions begin in theophany, the real encounter with the numinous, present in a particular way in a particular time and place. “God” in this sense is plural: “the gods.” Although the underlying reality of the divine may be one, the appearances of the divine are necessarily many and distinct according to different configurations of site, community and historical moment. The gods are no mere “idols” or human projections, to be unfavorably contrasted with the one true God of biblical revelation. The god experienced in the oracle of Eleusis was not less real than that which appeared to Moses in the burning bush. The theophany of encounter with the numinous expresses itself first of all in cult; that is to say in ritual action. The presence of the god is reenacted, made present again, first of all in dance and drama. Only afterward is it formulated as word or story. In that sense theology, the systematizing of the stories, is the stage farthest removed from the actual experience of the god.
This insight was, for me, a valuable aid, not only in taking ancient piety seriously, but also in understanding biblical religion. One cannot start, as I had been taught to do, by asking if you “agree with the doctrine.” Rather one must first work back to the story, then to the dance, and finally to glimpse the experience that lies behind these expressions. Only then can you begin to understand what the verbal reflection really means. It was from Palmer I discovered that a religious proposition, such as Christ’s resurrection, is not primarily a doctrine demanding rational assent to a “fact” about something that happened to someone else long ago, unrelated to myself. Rather it is a statement about something that could “happen to me”; about the renewal of my life.
32 [The legacy of the great year cycle of Near Eastern cultic experience] takes on another dimension of critical insight only when transformed by that religious genius that, as far as I know, is uniquely Hebraic. It is this genius that transforms the Canaanite year cycle of natural-social renewal into the prophetic dialectic of judgment and promise. The scene of the drama has shifted from seasonal cycles to historical crisis.
There is no way to retreat back to the first world and do justice to the realities of Western society. Western consciousness and action, and increasingly that of the whole world, have been decisively shaped by the Hebraic transformation of seasonal theophanies. This is not a question of nature over against society, but rather nature and society together, the human and nonhuman cosmos as one, appearing differently, depending on whether it is viewed through the theophany of being or the crisis of historical judgment. One might almost see this as the distinction of the aesthetic and the ethical. This does not mean that there are no ethics, personal and social, in the Near Eastern and Greek backgrounds. But this is seen more as the restoration of imminent harmony rather than historical conversion and decision against the dark background of human historical apostasy. Only the Hebraic religious vision has the categories to embrace this second dialectic.
This does not mean that all parts of the canonical Bible rise to the promise of prophetic faith. At its best, prophetic faith represents a decisive break with the pattern of religion that makes the divine a confirming theophany of the existing social order. Instead, the existing social order as a hierarchy of rich over poor, the powerful over the weak, is seen as contrary to God’s will, an apostasy to God’s intent for creational community. The revelation of God therefore appears as a judgment against this apostate order. God comes as advocate of the oppressed, overturner of an unjust order, whose action in history points forward to a reconstructed community that will fulfill God’s intent for creation, a time when God’s will shall “be done on earth, as it is in heaven.” Heaven, in this language, is neither the confirming halo of existing creation, nor is it another world into which we can escape from this world. Rather it is the mandate of that rectified world that stands as judgment and hope over against things as they are.
But even when biblical texts are most clearly in this prophetic mode, not all dimensions of unjust relations may be discerned. The prophet may see clearly the injustice of rich urbanites against impoverished country-fold, or of imperial nations against the small and scattered nation, but may miss entirely the injustice of master-slave relations, of male-female relations in patriarchal, slave-holding society, or else ameliorate these relations in more conventional ways that still take the basic system for granted.
The vision of the world rectified may also degenerate into a vision of world reversal, or “revenge theology,” that merely makes of the presently poor and weak new imperial powers triumphing over their former enemies. In significant parts of the Scriptures, both Old and New Testament, the prophetic vision evaporates allowing God again to become simply the sanctifier of the existing social order, as in much of the law codes and the New Testament household codes. Even at its best, prophetic insight has some limitations of the sociology of consciousness of its spokesmen (generic not intended). It cannot raise truly critical questions from the context of those who have not yet gained the voice to raise such questions, specifically women and slaves.
The prophetic dialectic I believe to be the critical norms of biblical faith. But it is a norm that existed in the communities reflected in the texts by constantly struggling against more conventional ways of understanding religion as a sanctification of existing power structures or power dreams. It is partial, as all critical insight is partial, for we can see the dialectic of injustice and new possibility only from one context, not from all contexts. It is constantly manifesting itself in new ways in new contexts. In the Old Testament prophets it arises first as a way of critiquing naive nationalism. It also sets itself against religion and religious elites who use religion to escape from the questions of justice, “I hate the noise of your songs; to the melody of your harps I will not listen,” cries the prophet Amos. “But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an everflowing stream (5:21, 23-24).
37 My annoyance at Protestant triumphalism did not prevent me from exploring a variety of Christian traditions. My graduate studies took me through Reformation and modern Protestant theology. I found Luther and Barth very helpful in critiquing institutional self-idolatry. But there remained something in the Augustinian dualism of nature and grace that was foreign to my spirit. My doctoral studies also opened up the world of Eastern Orthodoxy. In spite of the stasis of its historical development, I still suspect that the Orthodox tradition has the most authentic vision of the union of nature and grace, self and cosmos, one that has tended to get lost in the quasi-Marcionism of Western theology.