One of the
most lamentable aspects of conventional Bible interpretation is the practice of
purporting to demonstrate that a particular “salvation economy” is rolled out
across the landscape of the New Testament.
Even just the short span of the canonical Gospels contains such a number
of varying statements and episodes that, by emphasizing or ignoring
aggregations of them according to some set of criteria—or by subsuming aggregations
of them under some other Scriptural elements taken to be normative—any number
of a broad range of workings-out of salvation theory can be conjured.
The most
notorious of these “salvation
economies” is “faith alone.” Innumerable
careers of talented and industrious interpreters have been spent attempting to
prove that a gospel of salvation by works is delusional and futile. Moody’s The
Ryrie Study Bible (KJV) reckons that the following verses can lie at the
heart of a passage “on discipleship”:
“For what is
a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his
soul? For the Son of man shall come in the glory of his Father with his angels;
and then he shall reward every man according to his works” (Matthew 16:25-26).
It is amazing
that the plain meaning of a scriptural passage about salvation can be
interpreted so as to refer to post-salvation “discipleship,” yet it is also
drearily unsurprising. It is unfortunate
that the Gospels—and what is more, the Gospels under the shadow of the balance
of the New Testament—can be construed as some one or another “story,” this
story consisting of such elements and themes as the interpreter selects.
A layman
like me cannot have a car radio tuned to Christian stations for very long
without noticing the visceral energy with which preachers declare that this or
that constitutes something like a “golden thread” through “all of Scripture.” Few of such threads cannot be shown to be
plucked out of an immensely more complicated fabric.
Therefore, it
would not serve well, in light of the preceding, for this blog to attempt to
provide another “golden thread” or to make contentions about the proper “story”
to be seen in “all of Scripture.”
(Indeed, it
would not be warranted to assume that an elucidation of the teachings of Jesus—if
that be our goal—would necessarily involve, or be limited to, all the Bible or
Bible-variants’ contents. One might be
reminded of the conjectures—before the hagiographers got to him—of Martin
Luther about whether he might be required to discard the Letter of James.)
And so, if I
am to contend that this blog has anything to offer, I must hope to provide
something other than a story—or, to be more precise, less than a story. I contend that the canonical Gospels—barring some
scarcely-contested corruptions, errors, and interpolations—comprise not a story
framework by which salvation through Jesus is presented, but comprise rather a narrative
arc in which the ministry of Jesus is shown to be consonant with a primordial
and inescapable proto-story of creaturely experience.
This universally
present proto-story repeats endlessly, with endless variations and endless
varieties of duration. It is the basal experience
the created being has with Creation; it is the infra-cognitive connection with
the environment that provides the tangible experience through which a
fleshed-out relationship with existence is gained; it is the coming-into-being
of a consciousness that had being before it had consciousness.
It is the
fleeting and ephemeral experience, endlessly to be grasped at, that Jesus
describes:
“Verily I
say unto you, Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child
shall in no wise enter therein” (Luke 18:17).
This is
also, of course, the substance of the “roused” element of “Roused, Readied,
Reaped”—though in practice, as we shall see, it might be more exhaustively
rendered as “Roused, Readied, Reaped—Repeat.”
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