biblical narrative and true theological statements

Yesterday I finished reading Placher, The Domestication of Transcendence: How Modern Thinking about God went wrong and began reading Gavrilyuk, The Suffering of the Impassible God: The Dialectics of Patristic Thought. This brief reflection stems from my trying to connect the end of the former and the beginning of the latter.

I was quite taken by Placher's description of "how modern thinking about God went wrong," perhaps because he is right, or because I was already pretty sure that modern thinking about God has, as a whole, gone wrong, and Placher gave an articulate, logical argument from Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, and a handful of modern thinkers that I know even less well than these medieval and Reformation theologians. One of my strongest hopes is that, as I continue reading Thomas, I will still be convinced of Placher's (minority) reading of him: that Thomas's rigorous logical arguments took place within the context of his denial that humans can, in our current state, understand how the claims that we make about God are true. We know what "good" is, and we, by faith, claim "God is good", but we do not fully understand what we mean when we say this. God's goodness is beyond all created goodness, not in the sense of having the greatest amount of goodness but of goodness on a different plain. God is still good--this is a true statement--but we know it to be true only by faith. This is the most important thing I learned from Placher, and I hope that he is right that this is what Thomas meant.

In the last two chapters of the book, Placher moves into suggestions for contemporary retrieval. In this process, he discusses biblical narratives as mode of revelation in a section worth quoting at length:
To say that the biblical narratives constitute revelation, then, is to say (1) that they claim to be defining of all reality, and (2) that their internal sense of things is in turn defined by the identity of the character they call "God," about whom they claim to provide trustworthy language to use, even as the divine nature remains utterly mysterious. If God's identity has this defining role in the stories, and the stories claim a defining role for all things, then to read these stories is to be addressed by a claim on one's life from this God. This is how things are, they say; this is the context in which your life, or anyone's life, has whatever meaning it possesses--in the context shaped by the character called "God" whose identity is herein narrated and who is the transcendent, sustaining beginning and end of all things. Scripture constitutes revelation from a subject both because it presents God as an agent acting in its stories and [...] because the personal agency of the Holy Spirit shapes our acceptance of them. To accept scripture as revelation of God, however, is not to think that we have grasped the divine nature, but to trust that, in ways we cannot understand, we will be speaking rightly of God if we tell the stories these texts recount and cautiously note, in creed and theology, some of the character traits we perceive of this God, without ever letting the results of such reflection take the primary place of the stories themselves (189).

I'll make a really shocking move here and say that his points would be better served if he actually read some texts and demonstrated how this is true. I think, in the process, he would find not only that there are a variety of genres that might confuse exclusive reference to "narrative" (which he recognizes but concludes that narrative seems to be the one form of writing that can, in a way, absorb the others), but also that a challenge of not "domesticating the transcendent" in modern exegesis is that the character Yahweh really does walk around and talk and act like one character among many in the narrative. While statements like "Yahweh is good" appear in scripture on the level of derivation from claims like "Yahweh brought us out of the land of Egypt, the house of slavery," Placher seems to leave our knowledge of the latter without qualification. He asks that we cannot trust that we know the divine nature fully from this act, but he doesn't seem to say that we don't really know even how it is that Yahweh acts in this instance. What do we imagine when we read, "God sent Moses to Pharoah"? Do we not imagine something similar to when a mother sends a child to the neighbor with a message? It seems that we shouldn't, if we want to avoid presuming that God acts as one agent among many. But how do we avoid such reduction in our reading of "God sent Moses to Pharoah," and does "narrative as revelation" finally help us accomplish this?

In biblical theology, widespread observation that Yahweh moves and acts like an agent among many is often contrasted with the so-called "Greek" understand of God as immutable or impassible. As Gavrilyuk rightly notes in his Introduction, this has led modern scholars to denounce the immutable God "of Greek philosophy" in the name of the impassioned Yahweh who loves, repents (nahams), and becomes angry. Gavrilyuk suggests that the binary of biblical-God-who-is-passionate vs. Greek-static-God is not true to the church fathers, who believed that divine impassibility was consonant with biblical narratives. Moreover, Placher would suggestion that this modern contrast is inconsistent with how pre-seventeenth century theologians viewed theological language. In Placher's terms, I might suggest that it is precisely at the point of divine impassibility that the church fathers were the most clear: the word "impassibly" in "God suffers impassibly" functions precisely to say that what we declare to be true of God is not true by way of a comprehensible analogy to other things. "God suffers, but God does not suffer as we do" seems very similar to "God is good, but we do not now understand what 'good' means with respect to God." If I'm right that these statements are extremely similar, then an appropriate question is, "Why did the church insist upon being so precisely clear on this point rather than another point?" To that question, I don't yet have an answer.

I was going to write more here, but I'm beat! It's been far too long since I've written thoughts that aren't meant to be lecture notes or grading comments.