“As I see it, “yes” to life takes care of the “no” to death- by complexifying the “no” as well, by making one say a kind of “no” that includes a confident “yes”… We llive toward death as those who are suspended over nothingness all along; even our liveliest moments could have not been. How long will God keep nothingness from swallowing us? Contingent as we are, we live because a “no” to death- our own “no” and God’s- in the form a “yes” to life, is being enacted across the entire span of our life.”
In his book Glimmerings: Letters on Faith Between a Poet and a Theologian (written with Christian Wiman), Volf speaks about the paradox of one of the apostle Paul’s central convictions, that the “present form” of this world is passing away (1 Corinthians 7:31). A present form defined as what? Death, Paul says. Or more pointedly, the “Powers” called Sin and Death.
This is precisely what leaves Paul with that lingering observation- is Death part of the present form of the world we inhabit? Yes. But this is also the basis for Volf’s stated “no.” Would it be true to say that any and all form of life is passing away? This then, is the paradox. Here Volf cites Heschel saying, “Death is the end of a prelude to a symphony of which we only have a vague inkling of hope.” Hope in what Heschel would call the renewed or new creation.
Of course, Christians see this renewed creation as having arrived in the person and work of Jesus, namely the died, raised, and ascended incarnated Christ. Christian Theology then, is ultimatley about the ways in which these three things relate to eachother. To this end, Volf goes on to unpack a common Protestant approach, which tends to see the resurrection as illuminating the crucifixion, as though small letter death is in fact the point and epi-center of the story of Jesus. As is often assumed in this approach- something has to die for justice to emerge. What typically flows from this is a conception of the death of Jesus enacting a “saved from this world in order to go to heaven” version of salvation, with small letter death, defined as non-existence or the end of life itself, existing as some form of a just punishment by a good God for human sin.
Pushing back against this is the idea that it is through death, the central quality of an enslaved creation, that the resurrection reveals a new creation reality. In this view death is not the point of the person and work of Jesus- nor is it a quality of God or the good, new creation is. What flows from this narrative is a conception of the resurrection of Jesus bringing about a renewed world, one that is liberated from the enslaving Powers of capital letter Death. This is what human participation is responding to- it is not about eternal versus infinte existence, but about the fundamental shape of reality itself.
Looking back at that aforementioned quote from Volf, the question such narratives hinge on is, can we name Death. Or in Volf’s language, can we, or do we, say no to death. This might seem like an odd question, but in actuality the whole of life hinges on it, whether we recognize it or not. Where the percieved illusions of prosperity and progress reign here in the West, we have been taught that such a question is no longer necessary. After all, the great human project we have come to call to the Enlightenment has effectively solved the great problem that nature imposes on our endless potentials, and through our great ambitions and abilities we have brought about a world of greater lifespans, the eradication of disease, and technological marvels. What quietly slips into this picture is this whispered call which seeks to justify this percieved progress by nudging what Volf calls the biggest question (of truth and meaning) off to the side, where it need not and cannot interfere with this human agenda.
And yet (there is always an “and yet”), one of the outcomes of this whole endeavor is this quiet collapsing of any such coherent definitons and categories that allow us to distinguish between death and life. In this grand Enlightenment narrative, to live is to die and to die is simply recast as “life.” Our ability to attend to the problems that emerge from reducing such words to what is at it’s core a materialist assumption based on crude and non-sensicle (impossible to define) definition becomes eroded and challenged. We fail to see that Death is in fact a word that soaks into every aspect of what we would, if properly attending for that which is “lived,” call Life.
In this Enlightenment view it has become trendy to accuse the old nature our humanity has now overcome of enslaving us to the “old” gods, conjured up illusions meant to satisfy our inate fear of death. But this is never what fear is actually rooted in, certainly not in a world where, as the proper physicalist/materialist must insist, the old threats to our survival have been eradicated. What modern psychology and neuro-science tells us is that fear, detached from the threatened eradictation of a reductionist take on the physical or biologically defined life, just as easily, and perhaps more accurately, turns inwards towards the fundamental questions our conscisousness pushes us to consider- what is Life and why does it matter to the act of living. As it would seem, or as it turns out, take away the immediate threat to our biological definitions of life, and what emerges from it’s midst is the world itself, telling us that Life and Death never accorded with such reductionist terms in the first place.
In other words, every step, every observation, every choice, every action, every circumstance and every interpretation of that circumstance, every value, every conviction, all of it necessarily distinguishes between Death and Life precisely by revealing the ways in which these words hand us coherent categories and definitions to distinguish the living within a reality framed by Death.
This concern is what lies behind the fascinating dialogue between Volf and Wiman. What was really interesting to me, now having finished the final quarter of what was a beautiful book, is what really comes to a head at the climax of their cordial but honest, sometimes tense conversation about God and Jesus and faith, is how all of these disparate parts that emerge along the way come tumbling back into the picture at once, where finding some sense and clarity is sought- to make sense of life leads to bringing in Jesus. To make sense of Jesus inevitably brings in the scriptures and Tradition. To make sense of the scriptures and Tradition leads to bringing in Jesus. To make sense of Jesus leads to bringing in life.
And, as it is, to get stuck or mired in one of those aspects of the larger discussion is to find onesself unable to flesh out the other (or to abuse it). And if there is a single revelatory point that bursts through all of this, it is the simple idea that at it’s heart lies that fundamental truism- learning that Death is not Life and Life is not Death is essential to making sense of any of it.
And, perhaps this should not be surprising, but as Wiman demonstrates, the biggest obstacle to this end tends to be the scriptures (or scripture and Tradition). As Volf puts it, “What is “sacred” about the book (or Tradition) in which those portrayed as moral examplars behave in what seem to us morally repugnant ways. Why should we elevate the Good Book (or Tradition)…” Here, to elevate means to elevate as a means of dealing with and defining the tension that exists between Death and Life.
Part of what Volf is teasing out here is to say, exploring that question requires us to attend for how it is that we view the role of the sacred to function in our lives. A curious word, “sacred.” It is not that we elevate the scriptures above what we might call the Book of Nature (or in the working equation above- life), meaning the sort of knowledge that comes through an embodied life existing in relationship to the world. The scriptures do not function as a text book of facts, ideas, science, or rules that work or act apart from life itself. Tradition is not about propositions. And yet this is what we so often attempt to do with our handed down Enlightenment script. The irony being that we actually desacralize the text/Tradition in the process. In truth, we cannot isolate the scriptures or Tradition from that which makes it sacred in the first place and still find a sacred text or sacred liturgy
What makes it sacred? The lens through which we read it. Or more importantly, the lens through which we live it. The story we are standing in as we engage the text in conversation with the whole. Thus it is never about, to borrow a common phrase my Protestant upbringing handed me, “right theology.” As Volf so poignantly states, “protracted debates about the minutiae of Biblical texts are rarely about nothing.” Which is to say, they are almost about something, and and that something which we might call the bigger (and ultimately the biggest question) informs our encounter with the text, with life, with Jesus, captured as it is within our understanding of the relationship between God and world.
The reason we see the scriptures/Tradition to be sacred is because they are reflective of a sacred practice, a way of knowing Truth. And it is that act of participation that reveals the truth of things. The story we participate in sees this world and it’s history as being shaped by the sacred reality that gives Death and Life its definition. We don’t move from the scriptures outwards, we come to the scriptures as part of a larger expression of that sacred truth and sacred dance, precisely because scripture and Tradition is in and of itself an expression of that same (messy) participation.
And here in lies one of the more profound revelations contained within this thought (for me). What distinguishes this extant story and movement as having the power to direct and inform my allegiance in the first place? What allows us to move beyond the simple and percievably defeatist observation of a world filled with contrary and contradicting “stories” into such a scandalous view, which all of us hold whether we admit it or not, that says this story which we ourselves hold to be sacred has the power to make sense of all the world’s stories? To be a measure of something True?
That’s the paradoxical nature of how the sacred works. It’s where the tension must humble us and move us to see beyond the static and false promises of our sought after exercises of desacralization, be it through secular or religious dogmas. The Enlightenment project, the myth of progress, is in fact all about de-sacralization. It sells us on a life without a governing and defining narrative while deceptively reframing the world through the lens of it’s own working narrative.
In truth, such a question can only ever begin with our experience and observation of the world. It is only here that we can begin to step into the illuminating spaces that have the power to hold our obsessive inclinations for “proofs” and “certainties” in this modernized story to account. Such obsessions always, always, always begin with the same assumption- upholding a kind of dualism that seperates the oridinary (the material or natural) world and the sacred. Why? Because it hands us a material world we can control. The great deception at play here is that such a world cannot make sense of our actual convictions, of the way we live, the way we experience, the way we value, the way we love- of the sacred. Like it or not, all of us have our “scriptures,” precisely because all of us occupy this same, shared relaity in which Death and Life stand in effective and defining tension. We all live a story.
The far more difficult thing is to enter into the ongoing conversation about the defining narratives of our lives. That’s where an active logos comes into play. That’s where genuine logos is able to speak, precisely by forcing us (or inviting us) to wrestle with the tension. For me, this is where I begin when it comes to the biggest qeustion. As someone who is encroaching on having lived nearly 50 years, one thing that I have come to learn binds all the world’s stories together is the way they all wrestle with that basic tension between Life and Death. All else flows from this. This is what story is. This is why story matters. The way into the sacred story then, is the simple acknowledgement that Life is defined by this stated yes. Life itself illuminates the necessary “no” to Death. Apart from this, the reality we all share ceases to be coherent.
If that is my starting point, this is why the particulars of my own convictions matter to how I percieve this tension taking on an embodied (or incarnate) form. For me, it is resurrection that invades our historical premise, shaped as it is by Death. I find this a powerful image, precisely because it seems to be the single uniquely revelatory and intuitive movement and desire that forces it’s way into all of our world’s stories.
And why do I find the story of Jesus’ resurrection to make particular sense of the shape of this revelatory movement? Beyond simply being compelled towards finding it as an observed historical reality, it is the one place where I have found all of these stories gain a coherent interpretive expression. Where we wrestle with matters of Life and Death, I just keep finding myself coming back to Jesus. And not just Jesus, but the story Jesus embodies as an incarnate act. The city, one of my great loves and passions, has always been contstructed, as an image, with it’s temple sitting at the center. Find it’s temple, find it’s sacred story. This simple fact is precisely what makes, for me, the scriptures use of the symbol of the city, rendered most alive in the symbol of tabernacle/temple, so compelling. To imagine a “temple-less” domain feels entirely counter-inutitive and incoherent. This is a city without an identity. And yet, this is what the story of Jesus imagines as bringing coherency to this world in which Life and Death sit in tension. In this story the city is the world (creation), and creation itself becomes the temple. And when one understands the city as creation, suddenly all conceptions of this ordinary-sacred divide become abolished. What we find in it’s place is the stated and defined tension between Life and Death and the promised new creation. Rather than the ordinary being sacred, or the related axiom “finding the sacred in the ordinary,” reality itself is revealed to be a sacred Truth, the source that embodies all of our participatory acts (our living). All the world’s stories, for me, seem to be seeking after this Truth, this awareness. This is, to borrow from Heschel, that vague inkling of hope that pervades this existence and informs its movement.
The Stories of my Life 