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The Gospel Truth as Re-enactment
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 February 2009
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The world of the fine arts provides paradigms for explaining the role of the imagination in the development of new theologies and the communication of the Christ-event. Although there is but one definite script for a play or an opera, plays and operas admit of widely diverse representations because the script and its characters are imagined differently. For example: Amanda Wingfield, the mother in The Glass Menagerie, has been represented as a rather high-strung woman in one production, and as a serene and gracious lady in another. The script had remained the same in both productions; however, the spirit of Amanda Wingfield had changed because the directors of these productions had not imagined her in the same way. The written script is static, definite, one; the enacted representations, on the other hand, allow for the dynamics of change, diversity, and imagination.1
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- Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 1976
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page 311 note 1 See Lynch, William F., Christ and Apollo: The Dimensions of the Literary Imagination (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1960) p. 150Google Scholar. Lynch's description of analogy applies to the relationship between the written script and its re-enactment according to the potentialities of diverse actors. He affirms that existence is analogous. It is never the same act of existence. It is a completely new fact; it must be new; for it must adapt itself completely to the new materials which it confronts, adapting itself in its bone and heart to the bone and heart of each new subject of being, each new part of the total organism. So too with an analogical idea, with our inward thinking about being. The work, the thinking of it, is never done. The process of adaptation is eternal. We can never come up with one logical core and say it will satisfy the requirements of all subjects. Only the proportion is the same; but the two parts of the proportion are always changing. The act of existence is always different; so too is the possibility, the material into which it enters. (The Word of God has different existences in the different individuals (and communities) in which it exists; it exists as qualified according ro the potential of those who receive it.) See Tavard, George H., ‘Christianity and the Philosophies of Existence’, Theological Studies 18 (March, 1975) 3, pp. 4–5Google Scholar. Tavard explains that the being which man enjoys is neither identical with, nor heterogeneous to, the being of God. Instead, their relationship is analogical. Being is one, yet it develops intrinsic differentiations according as it is actualized. Those differences are related one to another according to a scheme of proportionality. If we conceive of being as a relation between existence (that which is) and essence (the way it is), the connection between this existence and this essence corresponds to the connection between that existence and that essence. Being is realized proportionally at all its degrees. (The one Gospel truth is realised proportionally in individual Christians and in separate Christian communities.)
page 312 note 1 Lonergan, Bernard, Method in Theology (London: Carton, Longman and Todd, 1971), pp. 28Google Scholar.
page 313 note 1 Bozzo, Edward, ‘Jesus as Paradigm for Personal Life’, Journal of Ecumenical Studies II (Winter 1974), pp. 45–63Google Scholar.
page 313 note 2 This does not mean that it fails as drama.
page 313 note 3 For a related problem, see Navone, John, History and Faith in the Thought of Alan Richardson (London: SCM Press, 1966), p. 47Google Scholar.
page 313 note 4 The divisions among the Christian churches might also be explained in terms of Hugh Dalziel Duncan's principle that ‘Social order is achieved through resolution of acceptance, doubt, and rejection of the principles that are believed to guarantee such order’ (in Human Communication Theory, Dance, Frank E. X., Ed. [New York: Holt Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1967], p. 253)Google Scholar. Duncan believes that the question of social order or unity is not how to eliminate doubt and rejection, but how to resolve them. This requires that means must be provided to express openly and freely love, doubt, and rejection. When we cannot communicate with a real other, Duncan believes that we create fantasy others; for even in the dream we must communicate. The dream is a drama, and like all drama, it is an act of communication in which we struggle to make some kind of order out of problems in relationships. Dreams and fantasies arise out ol blocks in communication. Perhaps the breaking away of Christian communities from the central authority of the Church can be interpreted in this context: a breakdown of communications for resolving conflicts and the consequent pursuit and realization of new dreams of Christian fellowship. Visions of the future represent a search for ways to complete an action in the present. And since the present is always problematical, it is only through such visions of the future, as well as the recaptured past, that we organise action in the present. Protestant churches, by their very existence, imply new interpretations of the past, of the primitive church, which are incompatible with that of the Roman Church; they also imply a new vision of the future that seeks to resolve the conflicts and problems of the present. See also E. Bozzo, op. cit., pp. 43–63.
page 314 note 1 Gardiner, John, Self-Renewal: The Individual and the Innovative Society (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), p. 38Google Scholar. Gardiner affirms that such a trait enables an individual to tolerate internal conflict and suspend judgment in the presence of unanswered question. A ‘tolerance for ambiguity’ enables one to endure unresolved differences with tranquility and patience as one analyses the differences in search of a resolution.
page 314 note 2 The crucial importance of how we express ourselves, as opposed to what we express, is recognised by Burke, Kenneth in The Rhetoric of Religion: Studies in Logology (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961)Google Scholar. Burke is concerned with how words about society persuade us to act in certain ways in our social relationships. How we express ourselves is a determinant of what happens to us in our social relationships. We do not relate and then talk, we relate in talk, and the forms of talk available to us and the spirit with which they are employed determine how we relate as social beings. Society not only exists by transmission, by communication, but in transmission, in communication of the significant symbol. (For Christians, communication in Christ and the Gospel truth gives existence to the Christian community; nevertheless, the distinctiveness of how Christians communicate Christ and in Christ, can be either a source of enrichment or of division and conflict among Christians. How Christians communicate determines how they relate; how they distinctively embody faith in Jesus Christ determines how they relate as denominations and as individuals within denominations. We must create models of the Christian as communicator as others have created their models of man (e.g. psychologists, sociologists, etc.); and such models must respect distinctiveness among Christian communicators.
page 316 note 1 Taylor, Vincent, The Names of Jesus (London, 1951)Google Scholar.
page 316 note 2 Mitros, Joseph, ‘Patristic Views of Christ's Salvific Work’, Thought (Autumn 1967), XLII, p. 414Google Scholar.
page 316 note 3 The form of action and passion in the God-and-man relationship can be illuminated by dramatic models. Forms of drama have been used by Aristotle and Kenneth Burke, and to a lesser extent by Freud and such anthropologists as Lord Raglan in their models of social interaction. A dramatic model involves an action, a struggle between hero and villain over some principles of social order, a cast of characters, a group of community guardians (as in the chorus) who comment on the actions of the players, and an audience who accept, reject, or doubt the value of the acts of the hero and villain as a way of upholding social order. And finally, there is some kind of ultimate appeal to a great transcendent principle of social order, whose mystery and radiance resolves all conflict. The Gospels offer such a dramatic model of the God-and-man relationship in Christ's struggle to redeem mankind; the Fathers of the Church express the work of Christ with similar models.
page 317 note 1 Duncan, Hugh D., ‘The Search for a Social Theory of Communication’ in Human Communication Theory, p. 254Google Scholar, affirms the importance of re-enactment of those principles of order that are believed necessary to the survival and continuation of a society. Social order, he holds, is created in social drama through intensive and frequent communal presentations of roles whose proper enactment is believed necessary to community survival. These principles are never given once and for all. Myths of origin are not simply acted out in one great moment of social birth. The visions of futures that are guides to action in the present are never ‘engraved’ for all time in the minds of the community. They must be done with great conviction and intensity, using all the resources of self, if these principles are to retain their hold over us. Duncan's views have obvious implications for the existence of the Church and life according to the Gospel truth through faith's daily re-enacting of the authentic meaning and value of the Christ-event in the present moment of history.
page 319 note 1 Navone, John, Themes of St. Luke (Rome: Gregorian University, 1970)Google Scholar. The ninth chapter treats of the Christian's summons to represent the life of God in mercy and other perfections of God, pp. 95–100.
page 320 note 1 E. Bozzo, art. cit., p. 458.
page 321 note 1 E. Bozzo, art. cit., p. 458.
page 322 note 1 See Dulles, Avery, The Church is Communications (Rome: Multimedia International, 1970), pp. 6–8Google Scholar.
page 324 note 1 Gerhard Ebeling, ‘Die Evidenz des Ethischen,’ p. 344, quoted by Funk, R. W., in Language, Hermeneutic and Word of God (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), p. 220Google Scholar.
page 324 note 2 See Tyrrell, Bernard, Christotherapy (New York: New Seabury Press, 1975)Google Scholar. The fourth chapter, ‘Mind-Fasting and Spirit-Feasting’, explains the implications of effective repentance.
page 325 note 1 William F. Lynch, Christ and Apollo. The sixth chapter, ‘The Analogical’, is germane to this concept.
page 325 note 2 Burrell, David, ‘Indwelling: Presence and Dialogue’, Theological Studies 22 (March, 1961), p. 16CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Burrell affirms that every friendship between God and an individual is unique, because the love of God is received by unique individuals. Its expression is unique, because the active receptivity of the gift of God's love ever seeks expression among those who have received it. Although the receptivity and the expression (complacency and concern: cf. Crowe's, F. three articles, ‘Complacency and Concern’, Theological Studies XX, March, June, September, 1959)Google Scholar are the created effects of God's gift in us, they differ in that God works the first one alone, but the second along with us and in virtue of the first (p. 17). We are his friends, radically, because all that Christ has heard from his father he has made known to us (John 15.15); we are his friends authentically only if we respond to this revelation of Love by faith and love, which means holding fast to his commandments (1 John 5.1–5). In that case, the eternal possession that God has of us is historically unfolded in a multiplicity of ways and persons. The ground of this friendship is that ‘He has first loved us’: being loved comes before loving, consent to God's love for us is the source of any concern for his glory. This friendship must be lived out in the presence of the person to God, where he is loved with an eternal love, where ‘those whom he has foreknown he has also predestined to become conformed to the image of his son’ (Rom. 8.29). The Good News is that Christ summons man to respond to this predilection of eternal presence—man's presence to God's eternal love and wisdom—from within his properly historical self. Man never was and never is absent from God; however, God will ordinarily be present to many only intermittently, as a prevailing intention seeking varied and multiple expression, within the limits of the human consciousness' ability to sustain the presence of another.
page 327 note 1 Lonergan, Bernard, De Verbo Incamato (Rome: Gregorian University Press, 1960)Google Scholar. He sees the historical mission of Jesus as that of making the ineffable more and more effable. The idea is developed in Eschatology, Onley, Daniel, Ed., based on Lectures of David Tracy (Washington, D.C.; Catholic University of America, 1967) 1 pp. 183–185Google Scholar.
page 328 note 1 Fabun, Don, Communications (Beverly Hills: Glencoe Press, 1968), p. 4Google Scholar.
page 328 note 2 ibid.
page 329 note 1 ibid., p. 5.
page 330 note 1 ibid., p. 8.
page 330 note 2 See Greeley, Andrew, The Persistence of Religion (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), p. 173Google Scholar. Religion is man's view of ultimate reality, a view learned in community and generating community, a view which demands the involvement of the whole man and thus embodies itself in myth and produces, in some form or other, a sense of the numinous or the transcendent.
page 331 note 1 Novak, Michael, ‘Culture & Imagination’, Journal of Ecumenical Studies (Winter 1973). X, pp. 138–140Google Scholar.
page 332 note 1 ibid., pp. 134–8.
page 332 note 2 ibid., p. 131.
page 333 note 1 Niebuhr, Richard R., Experiential Religion (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), p. 78.Google Scholar Religion, for Niebuhr, arises as human reaction and answer to the state of being affected totally (p. 31).