On Revelation
Last night, when I should have been sleeping, I was caught up in the mystery of Revelation. Consider, for example, the call of Abraham:
Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” Ex 12:1-3
Were this a liturgical reading, we would hear intoned, “the Word of the Lord” and reply, “thanks be to God.” It is the Word of God, revealed to us: Revelation. But, it is not the Word of God as revealed to Abraham.
I am not interested in arguing for the historicity of the person, Abraham, or of the development of the Semitic community that came to be known as the Israelites, or of any of the other sundry scholarly corollaries that my comments would properly require to be erudite and academically orthodox. I am satisfied with the faithful presumption that there was, indeed, a man called Abram and that he was, in fact, called out of the land of Haran and into the land of Canaan. But, how was he called?
“Go from your country and you kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.” How did God say that to Abraham? An urge towards a fundamentalist, literalist reading of the text is natural, and in many cases probably helpful for those who are capable of it. But, for some of us it is not possible, and in all likelihood it is simply not true. Abraham did not hear, in the sense that we hear one another in conversation, the Lord say to him, “Go from your country…” How does God say it? How does God reveal it?
Adrienne von Speyr, herself a woman marked by the heavy burden and special grace of charismatic revelation, describes Abraham’s sense of mission as follows:
It begins with Abraham’s having the initially unprovable certainty—in his faith and in his prayer, in his everyday attitude, and at time when he is specifically speaking with God—that he has a mission.*
By faith, by prayer, by everyday attitude, and by ‘specifically speaking with God,’ Abraham knows his mission. What is the distinction between prayer and ‘specifically speaking with God’? What is the sound of that metaphor, 'specifically speaking with God?' Von Speyr does not imagine an audio-theophany; her next sentence is, “This mission appears to him as an imperceptible sort of choseness.”
And Abraham acted on this imperceptible sort of choseness, following his God to Canaan and becoming the father of a great nation, out of which the Messiah would be born. And the seed of revelation sown in his personal experience would be shaped through the culture of his progeny, made a reference in folklore and tradition, and eventually committed to written word thousands of years later, celebrated as Holy Scripture and understood anew, perpetually, as Revelation, the Word of the Lord. By his unprovable certitude in God’s promise, the content of his mysterious and sublime revelation, Abraham’s imperceptible sense of choseness has been vindicated. In his seed was the line of David, and, as we will celebrate this coming Sunday, from the line of David "all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”
What a great mystery, Revelation.
* Adrienne von Speyr. Translated by David Kipp. The Mission of the Prophets. Ignatius Press: San Francisco, 1996.
Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” Ex 12:1-3
Were this a liturgical reading, we would hear intoned, “the Word of the Lord” and reply, “thanks be to God.” It is the Word of God, revealed to us: Revelation. But, it is not the Word of God as revealed to Abraham.
I am not interested in arguing for the historicity of the person, Abraham, or of the development of the Semitic community that came to be known as the Israelites, or of any of the other sundry scholarly corollaries that my comments would properly require to be erudite and academically orthodox. I am satisfied with the faithful presumption that there was, indeed, a man called Abram and that he was, in fact, called out of the land of Haran and into the land of Canaan. But, how was he called?
“Go from your country and you kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.” How did God say that to Abraham? An urge towards a fundamentalist, literalist reading of the text is natural, and in many cases probably helpful for those who are capable of it. But, for some of us it is not possible, and in all likelihood it is simply not true. Abraham did not hear, in the sense that we hear one another in conversation, the Lord say to him, “Go from your country…” How does God say it? How does God reveal it?
Adrienne von Speyr, herself a woman marked by the heavy burden and special grace of charismatic revelation, describes Abraham’s sense of mission as follows:
It begins with Abraham’s having the initially unprovable certainty—in his faith and in his prayer, in his everyday attitude, and at time when he is specifically speaking with God—that he has a mission.*
By faith, by prayer, by everyday attitude, and by ‘specifically speaking with God,’ Abraham knows his mission. What is the distinction between prayer and ‘specifically speaking with God’? What is the sound of that metaphor, 'specifically speaking with God?' Von Speyr does not imagine an audio-theophany; her next sentence is, “This mission appears to him as an imperceptible sort of choseness.”
And Abraham acted on this imperceptible sort of choseness, following his God to Canaan and becoming the father of a great nation, out of which the Messiah would be born. And the seed of revelation sown in his personal experience would be shaped through the culture of his progeny, made a reference in folklore and tradition, and eventually committed to written word thousands of years later, celebrated as Holy Scripture and understood anew, perpetually, as Revelation, the Word of the Lord. By his unprovable certitude in God’s promise, the content of his mysterious and sublime revelation, Abraham’s imperceptible sense of choseness has been vindicated. In his seed was the line of David, and, as we will celebrate this coming Sunday, from the line of David "all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”
What a great mystery, Revelation.
* Adrienne von Speyr. Translated by David Kipp. The Mission of the Prophets. Ignatius Press: San Francisco, 1996.
posted by Eric at 9:30 PM
1 Comments:
Eric,
thanks for some wonderful pastoral and theological insight into your wrestling with the Scriptures. Just one question, 'Is Adrienne von Speyr the woman who Balthasar was facinated with?'
d.r.
Post a Comment
<< Home