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Unfinished Business

SCHUBERT'S "Unfinished Symphony" is as well-known for its ambiguous title as for its beautiful music. Unfinished expectations often accompany artistic frustration. There is something humiliating and disheartening about leaving a project unfinished. The inconclusiveness of so much we try to do suggests a paradigm of elemental poignancy, a primal symbol of all life and personal experience-including the Bible, theology, and the church.

This unfinished syndrome is not to be confused with the sense of lost opportunities or unexplored possibilities. Robert Frost's familiar lines about "the road not taken" and "promises to keep, and miles to go" are taunting reminders of options we might have chosen and things yet to be done. But unfinished business carries the suggestion that the work in progress, for whatever reason, comes to an end and cannot or will not be completed.

I

When John the evangelist came to the close of his Gospel, the fullest and most interpretive of the four, he gives a hint of literary frustration by noting, as if in desperation, "there are also many other things which Jesus did; were every one of them written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written" (Jn. 21:25). It is a hyperbolic statement, but it would make literal good sense to librarians, archivists, and biblical scholars. It seems that there is simply not enough space to hold all that has been and will be written about the Christ figure.

There is always more to say, as every publisher's list regularly announces. Today, we can compact information in marvellous, electronic ways never before dreamed of, but the real problem is not storage or expanding accession lists but the unending telling and retelling of the old, old story of Jesus and his love. Every preacher knows what this means. Theologians and biblical interpreters stand on each others' shoulders to see a little farther, and the church seems to be here to stay and even expanding in new places. The gospel space program has never been on "hold," and if, with John, we seem to be running out of room, ever new horizons keep opening up before us.

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The author of the Epistle to the Hebrews tells us that there isn't enough time to tell the story about faithful followers of Jesus Christ. The list of names in the eleventh chapter goes on and on, and then, in exasperation, the writer says: "what more shall I say? For time would fail me to tell of Gideon, Barak, Samson..." (Heb. 11:32).

To think of extending the inventory down to our own time would require an ambitious, and perhaps naive, notion of compiling the largest mail order name list on record. All of us could add some famous names, but the ballooning list of modest, dedicated followers would read like a gigantic phone book--if we had the time just to tick off the names. When the roll is called up yonder, let us hope someone knows how to push a celestial fast-forward key. Otherwise, the sound-off ceremony could go on forever.

For all those who wonder if their own names are written in the book of life, the good news is that there is still time. Latecomers in the vineyard are paid equal wages with oldtimers, and while the Kingdom census is being taken, new applicants can be added at any time. The ultimate tally, of course, must wait for judgment day. But the Scriptures warn us against postponing important decisions. Many of us have a fatal tendency to let time slip through our fingers.

The apostle Paul knew a thing or two about language and how to devise telling metaphors and striking phrases when describing God's grace in Jesus Christ. But if the gospel story must remain "unfinished" because of the limits of space and time, language can also prove frustrating and inadequate. In the midst of a rhapsody on the love of God in Christ, the apostle stops, as it were in mid-sentence, to exclaim: "Thanks be to God for this inexpressible gift!" (11 Cor. 9:15). It isn't that there are no words available, but that the best we can find still leave so much unsaid, unfinished.

Paul would be right at home with our modern fascination with linguistic analysis, hermeneutics, and structuralism in its various forms. Without boasting, it could be said that we know more today than in any previous age about the biblical text and what lies behind it. But the text, no matter how well understood or how exhaustively scrutinized, cannot fully express the joy and wonder of God's love in Christ. Poets, perhaps more so than scholars, know instinctively that language can be a non-conductor, an insulator against the communication of truth. Any hymnal will reveal dozens of examples of linguistic frustration. "What language shall I borrow to thank Thee, dearest friend?" "O for a thousand tongues to sing my great Redeemer's praise."

II

When it comes to theology, the history of doctrinal interpretation over the centuries provides an obvious illustration of "unfinished business." Creeds and confessions of faith try to put everything together into some sort of sequential structure, and theologians write books on single

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doctrines or, greatly daring, multi-volumes on the whole corpus of the Christian faith. But the sheer continuation and perpetuation of theological analysis strongly hint that the task has so far been inconclusive, incomplete, and that the perfect, comprehensive theology is yet to be written-if, indeed, it ever will be.

Beyond that, it is surely curious to reflect that both Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth never finished their theologies. For whatever reason, they stopped within sight of the finish line. The greatest of medieval theologians and the most provocative theologian of modern times left their doctrinal symphonies unfinished.

But even the big, completed theologies of past and present seem inevitably to trail off into epilogues or reprises when they near the concluding chapters. Calvin's last book of the Institutes comes as a let-down after the earlier vigorous discussions. When Schleiermacher got to the end of his Glaubenslehre, he tied on a brief afterthought about the Trinity. The third volume of Brunner's Dogmatics and the third volume of Tillich's Systematic Theology are notably less incisive and penetrating.

Liberation theologies, black theology, feminist theology, third world theologies, narrative theology, and process theology, to name only a few current options, are clearly not even in sight of conclusions or epilogues. Many within these trends would disdain any such goal or presumption. Indeed, they italicize the "unfinished" character of theology and even make something of it.

Must we not say that there is something about theology, and also about the person of the theologian, that necessitates an "unfinished" label? When Augustine, so the story goes, observed a child on the seashore pouring pails of water into a hole in the sand, he asked the tike what he was doing. "I'm emptying the ocean into the hole." And Augustine reflected that this was no more fanciful than his own attempt to write a treatise on the Trinity.

III

It is tempting to pursue the "unfinished" theme further to include consideration of the church and the Christian in today's world. Jesus' word from the cross, "it is finished," punctuated the redemptive act, but the rest of the story must include the resurrection, Pentecost, the power and presence of the Holy Spirit, and the subtle suggestion in the Epistle to the Hebrews that the fulfillment of the faithful's destiny depends upon who we are and what we do to vindicate their faith (Heb. 1 1:40).

How, we may now ask, do we cope in faith and life with the fact of "unfinished business"? Some examples may prove helpful. One way to deal with the pressure of increasing daily responsibilities and the dread of never finishing what is required is simply to acknowledge the pressure, confess it, and share it with someone.

In the midst of her writing, lecturing, and leading religious retreats, the well-known English mystic, Evelyn Underhill (d. 1941), wrote a

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revealing, self-deprecating letter to her spiritual mentor, Baron Friedrich von Hügel. "I feel," she said, "great uncertainty as to what God chiefly wants of me.... I can't meet more than half the demands made.... There is almost no time or strength left now for study for its own sake; always giving or preparing addresses, advice, writing articles, trying to keep pace with work, going on committees and conferences.... "

On April 4, 1968, the day before he was assassinated, Martin Luther King, Jr., in an informal speech, "A View from the Mountaintop," given at the Masonic Temple in Memphis, said, "I've seen the promised land.... I'm not worried about anything.... Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord."

Musicologists are not in agreement as to why Franz Schubert never finished his Symphony No. 8 in B Minor. But Maurice Brown, in his major article in Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, thinks the reason "may lie in psychological factors" aggravated by a severe case of syphilis which left him "desperately ill."

Whatever life's circumstances, the relentless pressure of the daily schedule, as with Evelyn Underhill, the "driven to martyrdom" apprehension of Martin Luther King, Jr., who feared that J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI would make public a report on his personal life and thus discredit the civil rights movement, or the onset of a terminal physical ailment-in all such instances, and in so many more, life's purposes seem thwarted, halted, and left ineluctably unfinished.

IV

After the last episode in the vastly popular Masterpiece Theatre production, "The Jewel in. the Crown," the TV audience was treated to several interviews with some of the cast. One of the questioners asked Tim Piggott-Smith, who played the stiff-lipped Colonel Merrick, why there were so many loose ends and unresolved plots after fourteen chapters. He replied that when the British left India, some things changed for the better but that India's religious and political divisions remained and were soon. to break forth in unprecedented violence. Beyond that, the actor added, all the characters in the play were themselves divided. Their lives, he noted, were unfinished and perhaps unpredictable when the series came to an end.

Jesus' last word from the cross, "into thy hands I commend my spirit," was a prayerful commitment based on the assurance that underneath are the everlasting arms. Authentic Christian faith in every generation repeats and renews that commitment, especially when life's unfinished threads are left loose and dangling.

Hugh T. Kerr