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Who is Isaiah's Servant? Narrative identity and theological potentiality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 May 2008

Mark Gignilliat
Mark Gignilliat*
Affiliation:
Beeson Divinity School, 800 Lakeshore Drive, Birmingham, AL 35229msgignil@samford.edu
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Abstract

The question ‘Who is the Servant?’ is one which remains a debated topic among many interpreters of Isaiah 40–55. This article seeks to address the same question with the aid and perspective of narrative identity. Narrative identity, as explicated by Ricoeur and Frei, is a means of understanding a character within a literary plot, or real life, as displayed in a narrated sequence of events. A person's identity, especially within literature, is the constancy of the self in the tortuous events of a narrated sequence over time. This article seeks to adjudicate the question of the Servant's identity by observing the character of the Servant within the plot of Isaiah 40–55. The conclusion drawn is that the Servant is the unique means of God's reconciliation of both Zion and the nations. Also, the divine action and description of YHWH and the Servant begin to bleed in such a way that the Servant can be described as a unique member of the divine identity.

Type
Research Article
Information
Scottish Journal of Theology , Volume 61 , Issue 2 , May 2008 , pp. 125 - 136
Copyright
Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 2008

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References

1 A form of this article was delivered to the Biblical Studies Seminar at the University of St Andrews in the spring of 2004. Many thanks to those who offered insights and constructive criticism – namely, Bruce Longenecker, Jonathan Pennington, Ian Warrit, Matt Morohl, Steve Mason and Don Collett.

2 Brevard, Childs, Isaiah (OTL; Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 2001), p. 385Google Scholar.

3 Notably, Jenson, Robert, The Triune Identity: God According to the Gospel (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2002)Google Scholar; Bauckham, Richard, God Crucified: Monotheism and Christology in the New Testament (Carlisle: Paternoster Press, 1998), ch. 1Google Scholar; Ford, David, Self and Salvation: Being Transformed (Cambridge: CUP, 1999)Google Scholar; Thiemann, Ronald F., Revelation and Theology: The Gospel as Narrated Promise (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985), chs 5 and 6Google Scholar; Vanhoozer, Kevin, ‘Does the Trinity Belong in a Theology of Religions? On Angling in the Rubicon and the “Identity' of God”’, in First Theology: God, Scripture, and Hermeneutics (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2002), pp. 45–70Google Scholar.

4 Bauckham, God Crucified.

5 Ibid., p. 47.

6 Ricoeur, Paul, Oneself as Another, trans. Blamey, Kathleen (Chicago: Chicago Press, 1992)Google Scholar.

7 Ibid., p. 2.

8 Ibid., p. 2.

9 Ford, Self and Salvation, p. 87.

10 Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, p. 114.

11 Ibid., pp. 118–9.

12 Campbell, Richard L., Preaching Jesus: New Directions for Homiletics in Hans Frei's Postliberal Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1997), p. 15Google Scholar; Frei, Hans, The Identity of Jesus Christ (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1975)Google Scholar.

13 Campbell, Preaching Jesus, pp. 15–16.

14 Frei, Hans, Types of Christian Theology (New Haven, CT: Yale Press, 1992), ch. 6, esp. p. 81Google Scholar. John Webster, leaning on Barth as well, makes similar statements regarding theology and modern hermeneutical theory. For Webster, modern hermeneutical theory must be viewed as a tool to do the job. Anything other than this functional use of hermeneutical theory presses beyond the theological account of the task of Christian theology/exegesis. Webster, John, ‘Hermeneutics in Modern Theology’, in Word and Church: Essays in Christian Dogmatics (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2001), pp. 71–2Google Scholar.

15 Frei, Types, pp. 85–7.

16 Ibid., p. 90. Statements such as the one quoted above have brought Frei and George Lindbeck under critiques such as the following by John Webster: ‘Whilst no serious Christian theologian will ignore Frei's warnings against the transformation of literary description “into an explanatory scheme using abstract concepts and categories” (p. 125), some such scheme is, I believe, indispensable. However “second-order”, however analytic of the primary narrative presentation of Jesus, Christological categories such as substance, nature, an- and enhypostasia are, handled properly, a way of identifying what is happening in the narratives, without supplanting them or making them into illustrations of a conceptual scheme. They have, moreover, proved themselves capable of facilitating protest against the very thing which Frei himself disputes: the reduction of Christology to Christian spiritual or moral experience.’ John Webster, ‘Response to George Hunsinger’, Modern Theology 8 (1992), p. 130. See also George Hunsinger, ‘Hans Frei as Theologian: The Quest for a Generous Orthodoxy’, Modern Theology 8 (1992), pp. 103–28. In conversation with Lindbeck, though appropriate in the discussion with Frei, Brevard Childs expresses the danger of an overemphasis on ‘intratextuality’ at the expense of the text's character as witness to something beyond itself (Brevard, Childs, The New Testament as Canon: An Introduction (London: SCM Press, 1984), p. 545)Google Scholar.

17 Frei, Identity, p. 37.

18 Ibid.

19 Ibid., p. 38.

20 Ibid., p. 44.

21 Ibid.

22 Ibid., p. 89.

23 Ibid., p. 91. It would be interesting to note the divergent approaches of Frei with someone like N. T. Wright who is rather committed to an orthodox understanding of the person and work of Jesus Christ. Surely Frei would question the validity of a move to reconstruct the historical Jesus on the basis of held aims and intentions which do not flow from the realistic narrative itself but from the reconstructed world of Second Temple Judaism. This was the conversation piece of the Scripture and Theology seminar at the University of St Andrews during the autumn term 2002. Many in the seminar tended to land on Frei's side.

24 Frei, Identity, p. 92. See also Dawson, John David, Christian Figural Reading and the Fashioning of Identity (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002), p. 161Google Scholar.

25 Seitz, C. R., ‘“You are my Servant, You are the Israel in whom I will be glorified”: The Servant Songs and the Effect of Literary Context in Isaiah’, Calvin Theological Journal 39 (2004), pp. 117–34Google Scholar.

26 Bauckham, God Crucified, pp. 50–1.

27 Wilcox, Peter and Paton-Williams, David, ‘The Servant Songs in Deutero-Isaiah’, JSOT 42 (1988), p. 95Google Scholar.

28 Ibid., p. 95.

29 Bauckham, God Crucified, p. 51.

30 von Rad, Gerhard, Old Testament Theology, vol. 2 (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1965), p. 257Google Scholar.

31 Again, see Seitz, ‘You are my Servant’.

32 In the LXX, that most slippery of entities, the Servant is ultimately led to death: (Isaiah 53:8).

33 One cannot help but be reminded here of Barth's small print section, ‘the judge who was judged’, in CD IV/1, pp. 224–8. See also the discussion of Stellvertretung in German scholarship (namely, Janowski and Hofius) by Daniel Bailey, ‘The Concept of Stellvertretung in the Interpretation of Isaiah 53’, in Bellinger, W. H. Jr., and Farmer, W. R. (eds), Jesus and the Suffering Servant: Isaiah 53 and Christian Origins (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 1998), pp. 223–50Google Scholar; Bernd, Janowski, ‘He Bore our Sins: Isaiah 53 and the Drama of Taking Another's Place’, in Janowski, B. and Stuhlmacher, P. (eds), The Suffering Servant: Isaiah 53 in Jewish and Christian Sources, trans. Bailey, D. P. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2004), pp. 48–74Google Scholar; Otfried Hofius, ‘The Fourth Servant Song in the New Testament Letters’, ibid., pp. 163–88.

34 Westermann, Claus, Isaiah 40–66 (London: SCM Press, 1969), p. 93Google Scholar.

35 Childs, Brevard, ‘Retrospective Reading of the Old Testament Prophets’, Zeitschift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 108 (1996), p. 376Google Scholar.

36 Christopher, Seitz, ‘How is the Prophet Isaiah Present in the Latter Half of the Book? The Logic of Chapters 40–66 within the Book of Isaiah’, in Word Without End: The Old Testament as Abiding Theological Witness (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), p. 190Google Scholar.

37 Ibid., p. 190.

38 Ibid.

39 Childs, commenting on Isaiah 53:2–3 states, ‘The figure who is portrayed appears in every way to have been a historical personage’. At the same time, the language begins to transcend a simple historical reconstruction (Childs, Isaiah, p. 414). D. J. A. Clines has moved to a more reader-orientated view of Isaiah 53. He concurs with Westermann's view of the intentionality of the veiled language. Clines argues that the enigmas of the poem were intended to ‘create another world, a world indeed that is recognizably our own, with brutality and suffering and God and a coming-to-see on the part of some, but not a world that simply once existed and is gone for good. The poem's very lack of specificity refuses to let it be tied down to one spot on the globe, or frozen at one point in history: it opens up the possibility that the poem can become true in a variety of circumstances – that is its work’ (Clines, D. J. A., ‘Language as Event’, in Gordon, R. (ed.), This Place is Too Small for us: The Israelite Prophets in Recent Scholarship (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1995), p. 172)Google Scholar. Though raising questions pertaining to the logic of prophecy, Clines's proposal is interesting and takes into account the poetic implications of the fourth servant song. However, the fluidity of its application may press the passage beyond its own abilities. Gerhard von Rad argues against the servant as historical figure position. Von Rad believes the biographical frame, especially that of the fourth servant song, cannot hold the picture of a historical personage. ‘The picture of the Servant of Jahweh, of his mission to Israel and to the world, and of his expiatory suffering, is prophecy of the future, and, like all the rest of Deutero-Isaiah's prophecy, belongs to the realm of pure miracle which Jahweh reserved from himself. It is, of course, probable that Deutero-Isaiah included a number of his own experiences during his prophetic ministry in his picture of the Servant. That is not to say that he and the Servant were one and the same person’ (Von Rad, Old Testament Theology, vol. 2, p. 260).

40 One should resist the reductionistic move of relegating meaning to the text's historical sense alone. See, Neil B. MacDonald, ‘Illocutionary stance in Hans, Frei'sThe Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: An Exercise in Conceptual Redescription and Normative Analysis’, in After Pentecost: Language & Biblical Interpretation: Scripture & Hermeneutics Series. Craig, Bartholomew, Greene, Colin, and Möller, Karl (eds) (Grand Rapids MI: Zondervan, 2001), Vol. 2, pp 312–28Google Scholar.

41 Jenson, Robert, ‘The Bible and the Trinity’, Pro Ecclesia 11 (2002), pp. 334–5Google Scholar.