557 - Asking About Who We Are

Asking About Who We Are
By W. Dow Edgerton

"Whatever we are, we are at all because God has spoken. As human beings, simply as human beings, we carry the image of God. When the time comes to tell other stories of how things are and got to be that way, when the time comes to tell stories of call, covenant, slavery, liberation, law, land exile, redemption, and salvation for all the families of the earth, it is from this story it all begins, it is this God who speaks with whom we have to deal, it is as creatures (at least once) endowed with God's own image that we may and must live. This is the source, this is the freedom, and this is the limit."

At the beginning, one must face the question of where to begin, and why. Much is at stake; the smallest detail can affect the outcome in decisive ways. "Ask me no questions, I'll tell you no lies," says the familiar warning, but we have learned that it is not only answers that can deceive; questions can, too. So what name shall be assigned to what we are asking about? Who will do the asking? To whom are the questions to be put? From where shall the answers come?

Every term one might choose to indicate ourselves (even "ourselves") has a particular nuance. Such terms as "human being," "humankind," "humanity," "mortals," "man," "a person," people," "human ones," are not simple equivalents. Each has a history, a precision, a spin; each fits differently in the pattern of the language and flows differently within the design.

Even the small interrogative with which a question might begin changes the question dramatically. "What" is different from "Who," different from "When," different from "Where," and different from "Why." Nature, identity, time, place, purpose: each aspect is distinctive. In the same way, the question changes with one's choice of pronoun. Conjugate the question: What am 1, are you, is she or he, are we, are you, are they? Who am I? Where are we? and on and on.

Whose question is it? Is it the question of a soldier in Somalia trying to make sense? Is it the question of a violated woman in Bosnia whose family cannot accept her back? Is it the question of a congregation gathered at the baptismal font, or a family at the grave?

The direction of address is also decisive. Do we ask the question of

W. Dow Edgerton is a frequent contributor to THEOLOGY TODAY. He is Associate Professor of Ministry at Chicago Theological Seminary and the author of The Passion of Interpretation (1992).

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ourselves? of others? of Another? of certain texts? of every text? In part, it is the question of who or what is able to answer, or at least to respond to our asking, in ways that help. If we are asking about all humanity, then an answer must be somehow adequate to all humanity, one in which all humanity could recognize itself (whether or not we would is a different matter). Who is sufficient to such a task? But it is sometimes the case, one must add, that what a question wants is not so much answering as asking. Sometimes the best place to turn with a question is not to someone who will answer it for you, but to someone who will help you hone the question sharper and sharper until it becomes a whole way of life. Who has the wisdom and discernment for that task?

In part it is the issue of trustworthiness. Whom or what do we trust to answer truly? As Perry LeFevre has written,

In the fundamental insecurity of all of our lives, each of us faces the question of trust. What can one finally trust? It is the question which gives all human life a religious dimension, for the question of final trust is the question of God. Is there anything which will not betray?¹

Whom do you trust to tell you truly about yourself? Whom do you trust to tell you truly about the nature, and limits and possibilities of human life? Whom do you trust to answer about us, but also for us, for our sake? As LeFevre's question so poignantly points out, the question of trust puts us face to face with the problem of betrayal. But "problem" is so mild a word! Better to call it the crisis of betrayal. Betrayal strikes at the very foundation of meaningful life. To trust inevitably means confronting the possibility of betrayal and the real shattering of one's world. Trust, as such, is always in the face of this possibility.

I

All this is to say that the question of what shall be said about us and by whom is a fundamentally anxious question. It arises in anxiety and is itself a source of anxiety. It is anxious, that is, when it is an authentic question and not merely a convention for introducing something we already know. It arises as an authentic question only when we no longer trust the answers we have known. It is anxious because it arises as an authentic question only when we no longer know how to answer.

It may be the anxiety of height or depth, breadth or narrowness, glory or horror, possibility or impossibility, wonder or shame. It may be the anxiety because we seem to be little less than gods (Ps. 8) or nothing more than worms (Ps. 22), because we hear that we have been made in the image of God (Gen. 1) or because we see that all have fallen short of the glory (Rom. 3). It may be the anxiety of all this together: the anxiety of the boundless contradiction all these together

¹ Perry LeFevre, Radical Prayer (Chicago: Exploration Press, 1982), p. 77.

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make, an experience of contradiction that takes little more than an ordinary day to encounter.

It is an anxious question, also, because, when human identity is really a question, one can begin to see the harm previous answers have caused. One begins to see how much is at stake and for whom in answering. Our own time alone has given desperate testimony to the deadly power that flows from defining who and what is (fully) human. We have seen repeatedly that the definitions make a life and death difference. The conferral of "humanity" is concerned with more than curious taxonomy; it constitutes webs of obligation, relationship, right, responsibility, value, recognition. If "home," as Robert Frost observes, is where they have to take you in, then "human" is who must be taken in.

We have seen how the identification of our humanity with certain aspects of our bodies, minds, functions, or social roles can serve (ironically) to de-humanize. The wonderfully ambiguous language of Genesis 1 declares humankind to be made in the divine image but refuses to specify precisely what about us that is. This ambiguity is potentially a powerful positive source and limit: a source of affirmation, openness, and healing; a limit and a warning not to speculate upon the specifics but to receive and honor the mystery. Rather than a source of affirmation, inclusion, mystery, and healing, however, this has often proven a source of anxiety. This anxiety, in turn, has provoked attempts to remove the ambiguity and close the openness.

Take but a single example: the identification of the image of God in us with intellectual reason. This both grew from and led toward powerful perspectives on the relation and value of mind and body, and on the humanity of children and women and others not identified primarily with such reason.² These perspectives have reached deeply into virtually every aspect of the human lives they touched, and, aware or unaware, we struggle with their legacy every day. What is at stake in all this, therefore, is most basic.

...[W]hat is at stake are basic issues of identity and meaning. What is the story that tells us the truth? Who are we and how do we know? Upon what reliable meaning can we found our life? What meaning is adequate to the life we know and claim in our own time? How do we sift between the truth of our texts and the truth of our lives? Such questions are as basic as bread.³

II

There is no single unified doctrine of humanity in the Bible.⁴ There are patterns and harmonies, a deep coherence, but it is not the coherence of a unified theory. Systematic unity is achieved the way it

² See for example Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica 93.3.1,4.
³ W. Dow Edgerton, The Passion of Interpretation (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1992), pp. 11-12.
⁴ Hans Walter Wolff, The Anthropology of the Old Testament (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1974), p. 3.

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always is: by privileging certain texts and reading others through them. That is useful and often necessary; the Bible itself does so from time to time. Yet it must always be done modestly, for as Paul insists, the motives and methods of God are impenetrable. "Who has known the mind of God? Who has been [God's] counselor (Rom. 11:33-34)?"⁵

The Bible elucidates human complexity rather than reducing it to categories. In text after text, the human situation is displayed through the special history in which it is disclosed, in a multitude of forms and a multitude of images, metaphors, and metonomies. Each text has its particularity and, through that particularity, opens upon the question with new urgency and new possibility.

Texts not only offer different ways of responding to the question, they offer different methods for asking. A hymn of praise pursues the question differently than a lament. A parable has a different method than a proverb. A hymn of the beginning works by a different method than the chronicles of a king. A sermon is different from an oracle. They have different kinds of authority, make different claims, address the reader in different ways, appeal and invite the reader to different participation.

The difference matters because each is a different way of knowing. I know the truth differently when I sing than when I argue. I know the truth differently when I lament than when I puzzle out a parable. The very ways in which the multiple kinds of texts speak lead us into unique paths. To honor the form of the text means, first of all, to follow its special dynamics, to be conformed to its special way of knowing, its special way of living the question. That means, I believe, taking up the task of the text oneself One does not simply read the text, one reads with the text. One turns toward what the text turns toward, and in the way the texts turns, to see, hear, touch, taste, and feel-not just what is written-but what is being written about that can only come to expression in this way. The concern is not finally to understand the text but through the text to understand. One turns most properly to the Scriptures, first of all then, to learn how to ask the question, to learn how to ask it as a living question, to learn how to recognize the question in the many forms it takes when the Book is closed and you look out the window of the bus to see what is there.

Consider, for instance, the approach of Psalm 8, from which comes the famous verse "What are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?" Here the question of human identity is set within a hymn of praise. The tone of the psalm is one of wonder, perhaps even a kind of dizziness. The psalmist looks at the great work of God in creation and, then, at the dizzy pinnacle of power upon which humanity has been set. Why has humankind been entrusted with such god-like authority? What is our place within all that God has made? Here, indeed, is the anxiety of height, and it is a

⁵ All Bible citations are from the NRSV unless otherwise noted. Alterations in brackets reflect the usage of the Inclusive Language Lectionary.

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height loud with echoes of other heights. There is the height of Babel. There is the height in the wilderness where Jesus was offered lordship over all the world. There is the height of heaven, which offers no more hiding place from God than the depths of Sheol. There is the height of the city set on a hill, which cannot be hid. There is the height from which Satan fell like lightning. If height is lifted up and exalted, and if it is indeed a mark of God's mindfulness and care, then it is also precipitous and exposed and the place where one's identity is tested and revealed. If God has set humanity on such dizzy heights of honor and power, exposure and danger, then (the reasoning seems to go) it must somehow be part of God's gracious intent for all of creation. But the psalmist wonders "How can this be?"

The question, however, is not in the form of a general musing. It is part of a hymn of praise addressed to God. Surely it makes a difference to ask of another who we are that this other should be mindful and care. That is far different from asking Who are we that we do certain things? or What is the distinctly human? In the psalmist's question, there is already a claim, a context, and an affirmation that stands over (even over against) whatever answer to human identity might be supplied. It is not the question, Do you care? but Why do you care?

Although the psalm as a whole may be considered a hymn of praise, the center toward which it leads and from which it flows is this question. The psalmist's eye looks all around at the heavens and the earth and humankind's place in it and finds that all this has somehow turned back to implicate the looker. To see what God has made and to hear the name of God chanted throughout the earth provokes the question of who we are.

But the form of the psalmist's question is more than merely rhetorical; it is a method. The method, strictly speaking, is prayer. That is to say, the method is founded upon a kind of speech already fraught with meaning. Insofar as it is a hymn of praise, the speech is the overflowing of recognition, delight, a kind of echo of the glory unfolding all around. But insofar as it is prayer in the most essential form-that is, insofar as it is asking-then there is a nakedness and urgency to it. If it is truly this kind of prayer, then it is about need, about lack, about absence. Not knowing who we are, how can we fulfill God's gracious intention? Not knowing why God should care for us, how can we care for ourselves and what has been entrusted to us?

We find in this psalm, then, a transformation. The song of praise becomes a search for human vocation in creation; the recognition of the gift becomes the search for how to live out such giftedness. In Christian terms, we could call this a deeply eucharistic psalm in the way it holds together the gift, the giver, and the gifted. It is eucharistic also in the sense that it invites one both to praise and sacrifice, the presentation of oneself as living sacrifice in response to the grace of God (Rom. 12:1-2).

To follow the way of knowing of this psalm, therefore, means to

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attune one's eyes and ears to the glory and testimony, both inscribed and reverberating around us. It means to tune one's own voice to join in, so that this glory and testimony flow through us. But it means chiefly to nurture the recognition of our place in creation until it becomes a powerful and persistent question of how to live, a question addressed directly to God. To follow the way of knowing of this psalm means refusing to close the question with an answer, and pressing more and more deeply to discover the human vocation of boundless gratitude.

III

Simply to follow the indications of this single text presents work enough for a lifetime. Indeed, it would be possible to begin here and, in time, to encounter all the great themes and issues of Christian doctrine-creation and fall, providence, election, redemption, last things-yet they would all take on a different tone and relationship because of the nature of the search through which they were met.

Other texts and methods, however, lead into other ways of knowing. Consider the creation narrative of Genesis 1:1-2:4 as an example. In some ways, it is thematically similar to Psalm 8. It addresses the question of human identity in relationship to the mystery of creating and creation, the order of life, vocation. There is also a certain formal resemblance in that both may be understood as liturgical texts. But in Genesis, we have a poetic narrative, not a hymn of praise. We have a recitation of first things, foundations, but not as principles or truths. Rather it is as a story from which all stories flow. To change a familiar doxology, "Praise God from whom all stories flow!"

As a liturgical text, the narrative functions as a charter of the world. God called the world and all that is in it into being. At the climax of this work, God called humankind into being, in God's own image. God spoke to us and blessed us in our bodies and our needs. And seeing everything that had been made, God said it was very good (my colleague Victoria Garvey is fond of pointing out that the Hebrew carries in it a kind of divine lip-smacking!). This is the starting place, the poem declares. Whatever we are, we are at all because God has spoken. As human beings, simply as human beings, we carry the image of God. When the time comes to tell other stories of how things are and got to be that way, when the time comes to tell stories of call, covenant, slavery, liberation, law, land, exile, redemption, and salvation for all the families of earth, it is from this story it all begins, it is this God who speaks with whom we have to deal, it is as creatures (at least once) endowed with God's own image that we may and must live. This is the source, this is the freedom, and this is the limit.

It has long seemed to me that recognition of the liturgical nature of the narrative has had little impact upon the Christian liturgies with which I am familiar. Yet the recitation of the story of the beginning is such a powerful way of knowing, such a powerful way of experiencing the foundations of faith. If to follow the indication of Psalm 8 means

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a seeing, hearing, and wondering, to follow the indication of the beginning of Genesis means telling and repeating. To follow means to insist upon affirmation as the first word, and to tell all subsequent stories in such a way that this story remains. To follow means that every understanding of what it means for God to speak is rich with the resonance of creation, affirmation, and blessing. Even when the Word of God is "No," it is for the sake of "Yes." To know ourselves in this path, then, is to begin our story always at the beginning as those created, marked, blessed, addressed, and commissioned to life.

If we follow the indications of the Book of Job, the path is different once again. Against the advice and reproaches of his various comforters, against the warnings of piety, Job takes the path of lament. For example, in Job 7, Job characterizes human life as pressed service, delusion, grief, days that never end, mornings that never come, concluding finally in endless death. Job, too, asks why God is mindful of humankind, but asks in a way sharply different from the writer of Psalm 8. Job asks why God should make so much of us, scrutinizing, testing, relentlessly punishing. His insistence is that, if humankind is called to be righteous, then God is also called to be just. And the question of justice for Job has less to do with the punishment of the guilty than with the protection of the innocent.

Job is surely one of the most fascinating and resistant books of the Bible in terms of extracting a univocal reading, and each reader will have to decide how God's speeches and Job's final reply are to be understood. That may, indeed, be inscribed by the very method of the writing. To follow Job is to join in the sharpest possible dialogue of suffering and justice. To follow Job is to weigh the answers of piety or orthodoxy against flesh and blood and tears and to see which weighs more. To follow Job also means that the question is put most forcefully to God as the cry of lament and the call for God to answer. Giving voice to the suffering of the innocent is a way of knowing, too, of course. In this story, God answers with the voice of the whirlwind. In others, it is with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. In another, it is with angels to minister. In another, it is with the cross. To follow the path of Job in the end may well be the path of the Beatitudes in which Jesus teaches, "Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted."

In text after text is offered a distinct way to live the question. Ponder the stories of Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar, the stories of Saul, of David; follow the path of Psalm 139, or Psalm 22; balance the weight of Adam and Christ in Romans; dream the holy city seen of John. The first task is not that of ordering, but reading, hearing, seeing, touching, smelling, tasting, eating. The first task, that is, is living the question.

IV

It is so easy at the very start to lose heart. So much is at stake that it is tempting to say nothing rather than risk misspeaking. It is tempting to

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say only what can be said without embarrassment, to use language that does not leave us exposed and vulnerable, language that seems seamless. And it is tempting to say only what is so safe as to eliminate all possibility of offense (were that possible)-even the offense of the cross. At the same time, precisely because so much is at stake, it is crucial that one think aloud and try to give an account of the path one has chosen, so that others may understand themselves better and even more readily reach their own judgments.

One of the gifts I have received from John Calvin is a basic hermeneutic of suspicion. Whether or not his account of the fallen state of humanity and our depravity is finally adequate, it has seemed true enough in my experience, and it has important implications for the content, form, and process of theological reflection. This does not have a chiefly negative implication for me but becomes an emphasis upon the properly partial, provisional, and modest nature of our judgments. Right understanding is a gift of the Holy Spirit, whether that be understanding of the Scriptures, the world around us, or ourselves. And because, according to the Apostle Paul, the gifts of the Spirit are many, diverse, and given to the whole body for the sake of the whole body, the method of reflection must reflect this same dynamic. Some may experience this as simply a strategy of obfuscation and querulousness, an antinomian attack, an attempt to deny and subvert a single unchanging truth. I consider it, however, at the very least to be a counsel of humility; at the most I consider it an imperative laid upon us by the biblical witness itself. My interest is less in the universal and systematic and much more in the particular and the constructive.

By "particular" I mean a reflection grounded in the full who, what, when, where, why, and how of the question and the questioner. Who questions? To whom is the question put? What is being requested? What counts as evidence? What counts as a response? What is the time and timeliness of the question, and how can it be described? In the midst of what story and at what moment of the story are we? How do we name and understand the place from which we ask? For what purpose is the question pursued? What is the relationship to others who ask and to what they learn? What do all these together make? All this is most basic, of course, and therefore difficult.

The starting point is always in the middle. We begin in the middle of a discussion, of a story, of a sentence, a meal, a night; in the middle of a day, a sickness, a family, a house, a history. One begins thinking always inside a certain skin, among certain people, as a particular body. By imagination or reflection, I may attempt to reach backward toward some other beginning, a viewpoint more solid seeming and fundamental, a standpoint more worthy seeming or blessed. I may reach back to something less embarrassing, more properly originary, which seems more serious because it is more detached from my particular fragility and odd persistence. In the same way, I may imagine or think myself

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forward toward something more full and mature, something with the feel of completion to it, the peculiar shine and invulnerability ideas have when they are not yet embodied. I may attempt to think myself outward with no recognizable reference to myself, only speaking about texts "in themselves" as I suppose. I may think myself inward by means of a kind of reflection, which I feet is purely interior, intellectual, uncompromised by the flesh I am and the world I walk in. The time and place of the question, however, and the identity of the questioner all disclose new dimensions of what the question means. The particular embodied and embedded life, for all its embarrassing concreteness and entangled ambiguity, remains the real source and the necessary starting point. This is why it is vital that the question always be considered from the perspective of particular places and times, particular events and questioners. There, I believe, is where the Spirit is given.

By "constructive" I mean a thinking that is for the building up of faithful life. The author of Ecclesiastes writes, "Of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh" (Eccl. 12:12). There is, indeed, a life of study that is weariness to the flesh. There is a life of study that is weariness to the mind, as well, and to the spirit; there is a life of study that is weariness to the community. Why is it a weariness? Because it is not for the sake of life, not for the sake of wisdom, not for the sake of faith, not for the sake of healing, not for the sake of community, not for the sake of transformation.

But there is another life of study, a life of a very different kind. As Psalm 19 depicts it, it is a life of study that has everything to do with testimony and praise; everything to do with being seen, known, found and found out; everything to do with a journey of transformation; everything to do with humility; everything to do with prayer, hope, and freedom.

For the church, there is a reason that the question of human identity, or any other theological question for that matter, is pursued. It is for the sake of new life, the life that our witness, liturgy, and preaching are constantly attempting and failing to name. All the different ways of speaking, all the different images are testimony to the necessity and urgency of trying to say what cannot be said. Resurrection, new creation, life in Christ, eternal life, the realm of God, the feast upon the holy mountain, the assembly of the Lamb in the holy city-the deepest poetry of the faith is the meeting of this poetry of promise and transformation with the hardest poetry of human longing, expressed essentially in the single word, "Come!"

As distinctly Christian theology, as reflections of a community created by and for the gospel, there is no such thing, therefore, as a disinterested enquiry into human identity as such. There is a decided direction of the gaze, a distinct lifting of the eyes to the horizon. When we ask the question of identity, it is for the sake of the future. When we ask about the beginning, it is for the sake of the end. We speak of sin

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for the sake of forgiveness, of brokenness for the sake of healing, of death for the sake of life.

To think as a Christian does not necessarily mean that the approach to understanding ourselves must always and only be through christology. The work of Karl Barth (especially in Church Dogmatics III/2) shows that it can, indeed, be done, although his approach is not much in favor at present and, unfortunately, probably not much read. But it does mean that it must also be done, and, until we have brought our understanding of human identity into decisive dialogue with the story of Jesus the Christ and its meaning and promise for the life of the world, it is not yet sufficiently particular or constructive.

This, it seems to me, is the most difficult challenge. On the one hand, it is the challenge to speak of the only life we know in the truest terms we can, that is, honestly and immediately (to speak what we feel, not what we ought to say, to borrow from Shakespeare). On the other hand, it is the challenge to listen, to interrogate, and to be interrogated with the same kind of honesty and immediacy by the story of Jesus the Christ. The difficulty of this is that it provokes the possibility that one's most precious understandings of oneself and the story will be brought into confrontation and mutually transformed. It provokes the possibility that the familiar will become strange, the puzzling reflections even more puzzling, the mystery of the walk of faith more mysterious yet. This difficulty also offers the great possibility of living into the truth that may set one free.

V

All this and more stand at the very beginning as features of the ground to be crossed. Any and all of these may be seen as obstacles, but also as sources of help, markers, warnings, signs. There is genuine wisdom in understanding that obstacles are not what stand in the way of the journey; they are the journey. And the journey is not chiefly an intellectual or theoretical one. "The map is not the territory," as the saying goes, and living in the territory is what matters. The history of cartography alone is enough to show us that good maps may be as different as charts are from charts, as a polar projection from a web of knotted string steering ancient sailors across the ocean.

"We are daily living solutions for which we have no theory," is a saying that has been given as a gift by Christians in Latin America. To think particularly and constructively is to think in the midst of and for the sake of such living solutions.