(This is the fourth crumb in a series. Start from the beginning of the series.)
The clear light of the New Testament shines on the persons who inhabit it. The shadows of the Old Testament lie thick on the persons who inhabit it. Already in the gospels, this effect is visible: Herod is bad, Judas is very bad; the other eleven apostles are good. Sometimes they show weakness, as when Peter, fearing the soldiers and the mob, denies that he knows Jesus, but this does not indicate that Peter has fallen, only that, as in the garden of Gesthemane, the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.
A person may change in this new world: he may transform (like Judas) from good to bad or (like Paul) from bad to good—indeed, with the arrival of Paul, conversion and transformation will become central themes—but in the final tally, he must fall on one side or the other, amongst the saved or the damned.
The Old Testament is full of degrees of goodness. Moses is the greatest of the prophets, but he makes mistakes, and his life ends with the punishment for these mistakes: he must die in the wilderness, never to enter the promised land. King David is beloved of God but, at the height of his glory he schemes to have a man killed to cover up an illicit affair with the man’s wife, and for this a curse is laid on him and all his house. Saul is eaten up by murderous jealousy for David, but we see unmistakably a better nature within him and a real love for David, warring against his destructive impulses. Solomon is wise and blessed but he grows proud, is led astray, worships false gods, and as punishment for his sins, the kingdoms of Israel and Judah are rent apart, never again to be united. But Solomon is not ultimately fallen or redeemed. He lives, does some good, some bad, and then he dies and “sleeps with his fathers.”
If we tend to think of Solomon as wise and forget his faults or of Saul as wicked and forget his virtues, this is because we are engaging not with the bible but with subsequent cultural-religious traditions that have resolved the inherent ambiguity of the text into a more straightforward morality.
No such misreading is required in the New Testament. The text makes clear on which side each character falls. There is a ruthlessness to this, and a terrible simplicity. There is also a great romanticism: life, under these narrative rules, becomes a dire struggle, attains a drama that perhaps was impossible when each step was only a step, each turn only a turn.
As Josipovici has pointed out, sin and redemption in the Old Testament are not definitive and final. They refer to individual actions, they do not define entire lives: “If you sin, then, like David, you may repent, or, like Ahab, you may not. Even if you do you may, like Jonah, sin again. … When someone’s eyes are opened in the Hebrew bible it is not so that they may suddenly understand the falsity of their whole past life but only the immediate error under which they have been laboring… But for Paul, the important act is not repentance but awakening, an act of faith which totally transforms life” (Gabriel Josipovici, The Book of God, pg. 242).
More on this theme >>
No comments:
Post a Comment