Posted by The Happy Tutor
Facts are interpretations; interpretations reside in human heads; heads meet in an interpretive community, a language game, an episteme, a paradigm, a discipline, a tradition, a cult, a shared delusion. Thus we reduce not only science, and literary criticism but also theology to sociology, politics, and the will to power, or to mortality, to death. That is one side of AKMA, in the line of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Austen, Wittgenstein and Stanley Fish. In a time when democracy is in peril, we split Scholastic hairs and quibble about meaning of meaning. The other side is a man who has devoted his life to the imitation of Christ, and whose everyday being channels grace. I am not part of AKMA's interpretive community. I despise the facile Stanley Fish as I despise Simon Magus, or the Sophists. Nietzsche and Heidegger reek to me of Judas, Machiavelli, Strauss, Schmidt and the Neocons. Nor am I an Episcopalian. Yet, when AKMA writes me he signs off with "Grace and Peace be with you." I do not take those words as cited, or iterated. I do not take them as a performative utterance within a language game to which I, as an outsider, have no access. I accept them as a blessing offered in earnest, not only by AKMA, but through him. And I bow my head in humbleness of heart, a dry soul in a dry age. For in his blessing is the prospect of eternal life.
"Lord, I am not worthy that thou shouldst enter under my roof, but say but the word and my soul shall be healed." When and if that moment comes the one touched is transfixed on a vertical axis that pierces our community of fools and knaves like a shaft of sunlight through clouds on a dark day, searching the ground like a spotlight, twisting here and there. All it asks is that we imitate Christ who in his own moment, when it came, said, "Father if it be thy will, let this cup pass from me." Would that this were all interpretation, a game of words. We are called, I am afraid, to another moment of truth. I have not read AKMA's book yet, but I am pretty sure the book, Faithful Interpretation, says this all somehow and says it better, for he recalled me to it, in many private conversations, and blogging moments. We bear witness when we see in others the courage to do the same. When Paul, asked about Jesus by the properly constituted authorities of the Empire, as they rounded up the suspected enemy noncombatants of that era, to subject them to the alternative procedures then in force under Caesar, said "I do not know the man," I take that to be God's own comment on epistemology, theory of interpretation, and hermeneutics - what do we any of us "know"? etc. How could Paul "know" Jesus, when all is interpretation? When the time comes you know well enough to lie in order to save your own skin. Even a Saint.
Truth and eternal life, are not found in the head nor in schools of theory frequented by the Scribes and Pharisees as part of their professional education and credentialization. We find truth in brokenness and surrender. That is the way of the Cross and the price, maybe, of salvation. Theory is optional. I say this in the spirit of faith in what AKMA is, and pray that I might be, with his blessing, or through his intercession, or however that works outside a covenanted community of interpretation, ritual, practice and belief. If the blessing extend so far, beyond the pale, outside the church door, to Dumpster in the public square, thank you, Father. (C.f. Weinberger here, Matrullo here, and AKMA here.)
I believe that salvation is more real than this flesh, that it passes understanding, and that I am not yet assured to that great gift. I turn to AKMA not for knowledge, but for access to forgiveness and redemption. To be shriven and saved. He is the closest point of contact I have with the divine, and the signal is so faint, through my fault, not his, for I am dense and I am proud, an intellect unbending of the knee. All is a facon de parler, all of it. Every book including the Bible, and the Gospels recording the words of the Trickster, Jesus. Yet, "Say but the word and my soul shall be healed." Either the words are answered by the holy, by an infusion of grace, or we are dead in the spirit. Out my deadness, I turn to AKMA. And out of his fullness of divine life, he speaks of interpretive religious communities, of which I am not one. That too is Biblical, that withholding. For some, as Jesus notes, in St. Mark's Parable of the Sower, are not meant to be saved.
And when he was alone, they that were about him with the twelve asked of him the parable.
And he said unto them, Unto you it is given to know the mystery of the kingdom of God: but unto them that are without, all these things are done in parables:
that seeing they may see, and not perceive;
and hearing they may hear,
and not understand;
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lest at any time they should be converted,
and their sins should be forgiven them.
The Scribes and Pharisees discuss theory of interpretation. But Jesus says, "Suffer the little children to come unto me." And this stories enter their preschool hearts and make an impression that lasts a lifetime, that outlasts even training in an interpretive community, the way Brands enter chidlren's hearts today and systematically corrupt them for the benefit of Wealth Bondage, and the facile advertisers, schooled by teachers like Stanley Fish to explain all away, including their own guilt.
You see, Jesus would never debate these things. What his example shows is that when asked for a theory of interpretation, you go off on a tangent, almost like a rebuke to intellectual pride, talking instead about a bushel basket or a mustard seed, or a lamp, or a worker in a vineyard, or this guy who goes on a trip and leaves a couple of servants in charge, or a banquet where they go out into the streets to invite in the crippled and the blind. Jesus spoke for those with "eyes to see and ears to hear." And most often that was kids below the age of reason.
When we are called to suffer unto death, we do not serve Jesus well by convening the Pharisees to discuss hermeneutics only to decide that nothing is certain and nothing to be done. No one wins such debates, but the holy spirit dies in our hearts. (How do I know? How do you think I got this way? Same place AKMA learned this interpretive community stuff. His faith was more vital and sustains him yet. He can afford to play with these soul-destroying ideas. They do not touch his faith. They pretty well killed mine. AKMA is softening dogmatism, and that too is noble work, the work of the Enlightenment. He leads a dual life, as do I, as Swift wrote Sermon and Satire, so AKMA preaches what he deconstructs, to one purpose, and that is, I am sure, not victory in debate, nor truth on mortal terms, but the cure of souls.)
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