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Alice and apocalypse
Biblical testimony invokes something more than participation in a literary world. God is involved in the particulars of human life, not as mythic or poetic sentiments but as dynamic, eventful and redemptive reality in which tangible decisions affect human destiny. The ‘literary world of the Bible’ was embraced as a means of avoiding the modern focus on historical scrutiny. By situating the Bible within a literary world of myth and poetry, any assault on biblical veracity was assumedly avoided. Yet biblical testimony consistently challenges the unreality of mythical perspective and surpasses cultural categories of expression through the pervasive tone of apokalypsis or revelation. Apocalypse appeals to imagination and is wholly tangible, while surpassing the demands of historical scrutiny as anticipation of new possibilities in grace. Apocalypse is often equated with Revelation and similar writings known as apocalyptic writings, yet these do not define its scope of expression. Apocalypse concerns God who is disclosed as saviour in whom we are called to trust. Whether in story, prophetic word, song or letter, apocalypse encompasses remembrance of every “today” in which God’s salvation is anticipated and invoked. Apocalypse pervades biblical testimony and presents creation’s true future as the redemptive reality of God encountering humans in the response of faith. Apocalypse calls forth response, anticipation in faith and proclamation of God’s saving reign becoming explicit as tangible for humanity within creation. v However the images are projected, apocalypse as testimony to the reality of God anticipated and becoming explicit exceeds our scope of knowing because the future remains unknown, despite attempts to frame it with predictability. Precisely as tangible, the future is fantastic because it arrives as surprise and crisis, otherwise we do not generally noticed its arriving. The future intrigues and frightens; it haunts with spectres and visions of terrifying possibilities; it can arrive as a nightmare in actual experience. The characteristic images of apocalyptic writings are not amiss in casting the future in surreal imagery, for the future represents an impervious wall to our penetration with sure knowledge. It is the realm of anticipation, yet it arrives otherwise than human anticipation. Even in our anticipation, the future comes as surprise. People change and settled configurations of human expectation are upstaged and contested daily. Within small communities and whole societies, the future never arrives entirely as expected, even if small shifts in our expectations do not occur as crises. Relationships are a source of surprise and crisis. The many vocative encounters and volitional possibilities initiated by others are not predictable by the ratio of cause and effect that is evident within natural phenomena. In their freedom, humans can be tragically unpredictable and delightfully surprising. Even more so, the vocative call of God to humanity exceeds in surprise and implications, any other vocative experience within human life. Apocalypse does not give us Alice in Wonderland—a literary world we might enter in order to experience another reality, only to return again to our own world, perhaps with a magical vision of the way things could be. Apocalypse gives us our world as violent, with the horsemen of The Apocalypse, yet also surprising in grace as events of faithfulness and joy lived toward the reality of God. Apocalypse gives reality itself as fantastic because it is haunted by human sinfulness with its bizarre twists and turns in assuming to be wise only to invoke wrath in the midst of life, imposing its effects on the culpable and innocent alike. Apocalypse is also joyous with the call to repentance, opening a realm of redemptive possibility that exceeds the constrictions of human limit and weight of mortality as it presses down on life. This is fantastic and tangible at the one time. It is not another literary world of myth and poetry but the disclosure of reality, fantastic reality, which exists in the midst of life. Redemptive reality can only be disclosed, which is why apocalypse is revelation and its announcement, for ears to hear. v If the Bible is merely a literary world into which we enter in order to gain a different perspective, this is no different from any number of ways in which people gain another perspective through engagement with the arts in general and literature in particular. This approach nurtures a general religious or spiritual sensibility that is concerned with believing in the magic of believing as an important activity of human life. Believing, in this sense, may consist of an imaginative vision but it does not give a world in which God acts redemptively. It only gives a vision with which we ourselves may or may not change our existing world. If the biblical vision is not redemptive and transformative, any literary vision derived from it will only become an empty cipher that is given content through other ideals—social, political and religious. In the absence of redemptive possibility and transformation, any spiritual vision for a different kind of world inevitably, will be attached or linked to some vision within society about the world as it should be. There is no shortage of such visions and various systems in which they are expressed. A selected vision from biblical literature can be given expression through a particular partisan vision of ‘the world as it is should be.’ While the end may be laudable, the partisan means thwart it. Such is the propensity of human idealism to scuttle its own possibility of the good through partisan contest and compromise within projections of the way things should be. A literary vision that is linked to an existing social ideal is inevitably dominated by this ideal, which becomes an adjudicative means of determining what vision is actually derived from the many images in biblical literature. A social ideal, with its invariably partisan agendas, will adjudicate on which biblical images are supposedly useful and which are not in the forums of social contest. A contemporary social ideal offers something assumedly more tangible than an ancient literary vision. Any vision derived from the literary world of the Bible can therefore be assimilated into another extrinsic social possibility, conveying a mere reminiscence of the biblical world, while it gives vociferous voice to a possibility extrinsic to faith. A social ideal therefore becomes a dominant paradigm while any redemptive possibilities of biblical testimony slip into a sense of unrealism, even if these are given lip-service. v What then is missing from a ‘literary world of the Bible’ deployed as a locale of imagination that is assumedly impervious to critique? God, the sovereign lord of creation and humanity—who calls to be things that are not, redeems and makes new—is missing. God of Jesus Christ, who is crucified and risen, recreating through the transforming power of the Holy Spirit, is missing. Merely as a literary world, biblical testimony is another version of Plato’s Cave, where reality is only human activity casting shadows on a cave wall. It may have aesthetic appeal, simulate spiritual sensibilities or become a focus of general religious conjecture and debate. Yet it will not give testimony to the Word that was with God in the beginning, who is expressed in grace and truth as the Word who became flesh to make a tangible difference to humans in anticipation of God as the redemptive hope for humanity. This hope is disclosed as a reality for human life in Jesus Christ. |
