| Scripture's past, present
and future
In the first, shaping the past, the present interpreter of Scripture controls what the past is permitted say. This is expressed by attempts, objectively to reconstruct a context, socially or politically, as the key to interpreting a text. This assumes that previously, people could not see or only partially saw what is now seen clearly for “proper” interpretation of a text. In the second, the past shaping the present, past interpreters impose on the present and even the future. As tradition or cultural conventions, past interpretations are so powerful that the present cannot override their deputed rightness and demands. The past controls any future interpretation of Scripture. Various forms of authoritarian community or fundamentalism do this. As interpreters of Scripture, do we shape the past, casting it in our own image or does the past shape whatever present and future we can experience? This could be extended to asking: Is there a past or is there a future? Do these exist apart from our interpretations? In shaping the past, there is essentially no past, only allegories that are constructed around anything from the past that is permitted in our present. The past is made whatever people want it to be. The past is ultimately in the eye of each interpreter. With past interpretations shaping the present, the present and even the future are already shaped for us by the demands of people in the past. To some degree, this is always the effect of culture or tradition, which can be interpreted stringently or with some latitude. v In biblical reality, the past is continually reimaged within the formation of faith through memory. For example, the Exodus is a formative memory that shapes subsequent memories in anticipation of the LORD’s promised salvation. This is not the past constricting the present but remembrance of the LORD who calls to be, shaping the present as coming to us from the future. In remembrance of the LORD’s call to distinction, the future is engaged within the call to faith as the only possible certainty. In the character of biblical apocalypse or revelation, the LORD is disclosed as I will be who I will be. Even in the past, God is anticipated in the future. The future reality of God is already becoming present in contrast to human life projecting its own assorted perspectives into the future. One represents something new under the sun; the other is a recipe for nothing new under the sun. The interpretive quest to determine the past from the present is entirely modern and generates various reconstructions of the past under the guise of getting to “what really happened.” It is a subtle ideology that eliminates what is awkward in the past, to establish a past that will endorse selected values of the present. It creates a fictive past and another gospel of assorted fragments forged within hypotheses of their origins, contrary to the anticipatory testimony of Scripture that always surpasses any initial context. The future of God becoming our reality in the present counters any human capacity to control the shape of remembrance—for in biblical testimony, God encounters humans from the future as creator who calls to be things that are not. The future becoming present in the reality of God necessitates hearing with ears to hear and inclining one’s being toward this reality as it exceeds any past and gives a future filled with possibility not inevitability. v A contemporary approach to history as tracing discontinuities in human life has influenced biblical studies where diversity assumedly indicates tensions and suppression of “the other,” legitimating the pursuit of discontinuities in resistance to any unifying focus in Scripture. The perception of history as discontinuities and dissonance is generated from the nun or “now” of human life that is always fragmenting as it is torn from time-present to become a new time-past. Time is fragmented because the nun itself, the only time we appear to have, is always torn between each moment of our “now” and every new past generated that is no longer now. The disappearing nun is ever creative in fragmenting time into discontinuity and dissonance in human life. The perception of history as so many discontinuities has some truth to it, but not according to biblical apocalypse. Critical plotting of supposed discontinuities only leads to fragmentation. Dissecting biblical testimony into traditions in tension and discontinuities ultimately yields fragments that have no story apart from those given in contested hypotheses. Testimony to the LORD, who in excess loving-kindness or grace is disclosed to Israel in many and varied ways through novel surprises, is effectively neutralised. Contrary to theses of fragmentation and dissonance as primary forces of life and society, significant continuity is always present, even within time, which coheres in recollection that shapes anticipation. Without such continuity, there would be no identity and certainly no relationships. Memory and hope are powerful sources of coherence in human identity and community. As God gives time, God gives continuity as the past, present and future of any time in human existence. Given time in grace, humans seek, work toward and enjoy continuity in communities of nurture and relationships, within coherence that is also in varying degrees of health and dysfunction. Awareness of dysfunction or compromise suggests that we yearn for continuity and wholeness. How time is approached is crucial. Time given to an anxious quest for an elusive nun can enhance authoritarian interpretations in quest of continuity. In reaction to this and equally imperious, assertions of relativity dismiss continuity in focus on fragmentation. Relationships are invariably destroyed, either by over-bearing authority or by exalting discontinuities and dissonance. An approach to time—either as deference to the past in shaping the present and future or as a quest to reshape the past in determining the present—is implicit in the tension between authoritarian and fragmentary interpretation of biblical testimony. v Eschatology or focus on the future reality of God was rejected in early nineteenth century gospel scholarship. The past was made wholly subservient to a perspective of progress that was optimistic about its capacity to overcome the vicissitudes haunting human existence. At first, eschatology was excised as belonging to Christian retention of Jewish motifs. Later, eschatology represented an unbridgeable divide between modern life and Christian origins. Twentieth century experiences of world war, Holocaust and Hiroshima, or recently, September 11, have given plausibility to eschatology. Biblical eschatology is a constant reminder of the precariousness of human ideals and projects before God—the only source of durable hope for human security and wholeness. Scripture’s excess memory and anticipation cannot be corralled into neat allegories of context in order to render the past manageable and innocuous. The living word of Scripture does not remain in the past, for God the creator, living LORD, whose life is demonstrated supremely in the resurrection of Jesus, is always coming from the future as God who calls to be things that are not. The life of God cannot be confined
to the past as if in the past, God only left footprints, either as traditions
or fragments, but invokes no true presence or creative future. God who calls from
the future is not corralled by interpretations that either control or fragment.
Neither the past shaping the present nor the present shaping the past but the
apocalypse or disclosure of God in the creativity of grace is normative for interpreting
Scripture. |
