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Held Together by Icons

3/31/2015

(Robert Farrar Capon from The Fingerprints of God: Tracking the Divine Suspect through a History of Images)

But the deepest difficulty with literalism is that it fails to see the principle device the Spirit uses to weave all those elements into a single story. All that wildly various wet-wash is hung on a paradoxical clothesline of imagery, not on a string of propositional truths. The Bible is held together by icons, by word-pictures like Light, Word, Water, Marriage, the Garden, the Tree, the blood of Abel, the Paschal Lamb, the Blood on the Doorposts, the Rock in the Wilderness, the Bread from heaven, and finally the City, both as historical Jerusalem in the Old Testament and as destiny of the world in the book of Revelation. It's these icons, these sacraments of the real presence of the Word himself, that make it a whole.

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"Christianity is the Proclamation of the End of Religion"

3/30/2015

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(From Robert Farrar Capon's The Mystery of Christ and Why we Don't Get It)

“The cross is not a sign of sacrifice but of execution – of a nasty bit of judicial murder that has no more intrinsic significance than the thousands of other such acts all though history. To be sure, people have turned the cross into a religious symbol; but since Christianity is not a “religion,” that sort of thing can only lead to confusion. Christianity is the proclamation of the end of religion, not of a new religion, or even of the best of all possible religions. And therefore if the cross is the sign of anything, it’s the sign that God has gone out of the religion business and solved all the world’s problems without requiring a single human being to do a single religious thing. What the cross is actually a sign of is the fact that religion can’t do a thing about the world’s problems – that it never did work and it never will – which is exactly what Hebrews 10:4 says: “For it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins.” So, if you want to theologize it into a sign, the best you can do is say that it’s the sign of the fulfillment of all that religion ever tried to do and couldn’t.”

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A Humble Orthodoxy

1/9/2014

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from Kingdom, Grace, Judgment by Robert Farrar Capon

People tend to think that unless they can arrive at some satisfying interpretation of this parable or that, the parable in question may safely be left out of account. But just as the work of Jesus (say, in his death and resurrection) has whatever effect it has quite independently of the theologies we happen to hammer onto it, so Jesus' words–simply because they are Jesus himself speaking–have whatever power he has, no matter what we may think about them. His parables are not so much word-pictures about assorted external subjects as they are icons of himself. Like good poems, they not only mean, but be: they have a sacramental effectiveness. Whether we "get" them or not, therefore, they remain first and foremost his way of getting to us. They are lights shining out of the house of faith itself, inviting us home. What we do with them as we sit out on the porch of interpretation may make us appreciate them more or less, but it cannot damage the lights, and it certainly doesn't turn them off.

As an instance of how all this applies in practice, consider how it corrects a misconception of what we commonly call the teaching of the faith. Christian education is not the communication of correct views about what the various works and words of Jesus might mean; rather it is the stocking of the imagination with the icons of those works and words themselves. It is most successfully accomplished, therefore, not by catechisms that purport to produce understanding but by stories that hang the icons, understood or not, on the walls of the mind. We do not include the parable of the Prodigal Son, for example, because we understand it, nor do we omit the parable of the Unjust Steward because we can't make head or tail of it. Rather, we commit both to the Christian memory because that's the way Jesus seems to want the inside of his believers' heads decorated. Indeed, the only really mischievous thing anyone can do with the Gospel is insist on hanging only the pictures he happens to like. That's what heresy really is: picking and choosing, on the basis of my interpretations, between the icons provided to me. Orthodoxy, if it's understood correctly, is simply the constant displaying of the entire collection.

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Left-Handed, Paradoxical Power

5/25/2013

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This is a passage from a book by Robert Farrar Capon, expanding on Luther's idea of God's use of Left-Handed Power.

As Christians believe, though, God did eventually show up on the property himself for the express purpose of completing the project in the person of Jesus, the messianic King, he announced that he was bringing in the kingdom and, in general, accomplishing once and for all every last eternal purpose he ever had for the world. And, as Christians also believe, he did just that. But at the end of all the doing, he simply disappeared, leaving – as far as anybody has been able to see in the two thousand or so years since ‒ no apparent city, no effective kingdom able to make the world straighten up and fly right. The whole operation began as a mystery, continued as a mystery, came to fruition as a mystery, and to this day continues to function as a mystery.

Since Noah, God has evidently had almost no interest in using direct power to fix up the world. Why? you ask. Well, the first answer is, I don't know, and neither does anyone else. God's reasons are even more hidden than his methods. But I have seen enough of the results of direct intervention to make me rather glad that he seems, for whatever reason, to have lost interest in it.

Direct, straight-line, intervening power does, of course, have many uses. With it, you can lift the spaghetti from the plate to your mouth, wipe the sauce off your slacks, carry them to the dry cleaners, and perhaps even make enough money to ransom them back. Indeed, straight-line power ("use the force you need to get the result you want") is responsible for almost everything that happens in the world and the beauty of it is, it works. From removing the dust with a cloth to removing your enemy with a .45, it achieves its ends in sensible, effective, easily understood ways.

Unfortunately, it has a whopping limitation. If you take the view that one of the chief objects in life it to remain in loving relationships with other people, straight-line power become useless. Oh, admittedly, you can snatch your baby boy away from the edge of a cliff and not have a broken relationship on your hands. But just try interfering with his plans for the season when he is twenty, and see what happens, especially if his chosen plans play havoc with your own. Suppose he makes unauthorized use of your car, and you use a little straight-line verbal power to scare him out of doing it again. Well and good. But suppose further that he does it again anyway ‒ and again and again. What do you do next if you are committed to straight-line power? You raise your voice a little more nastily each time till you can't shout any louder. And then you beat him (if you are stronger than he is) until you can't beat any harder. Then you chain him to a radiator till.... But you see the point. At some very early crux in that difficult, personal relationship, the whole thing will be destroyed unless you ‒ who, on any reasonable view, should be allowed to use straight-line power ‒ simply refuse to use it; unless in other words, you decide that instead of dishing out justifiable pain and punishment, you are willing, quite foolishly, to take a beating yourself.

But such a paradoxical exercise of power, please note, is a hundred and eighty degrees away from the straight-line variety. It is, to introduce a phrase from Luther, left-handed power. Unlike the power of the right hand (which, interestingly enough, is governed by the logical, plausibility-loving left hemisphere of the brain), left-handed power is guided by the more intuitive, open, and imaginative right side of the brain. Left-handed power, in other words, is precisely paradoxical power: power that looks for all the world like weakness, intervention that seems indistinguishable from nonintervention. More than that, it is guaranteed to stop no determined evildoers whatsoever. It might, of course, touch and soften their hearts. But then again, it might not. It certainly didn't for Jesus; and if you decide to use it, you should be quite clear that it probably won't for you either. The only thing it does insure is that you will not ‒ even after your chin has been bashed in ‒ have made the mistake of closing any interpersonal doors from your side.

Which may not, at first glance, seem like much of a thing to insure, let alone like an exercise worthy of the name of power. But when you come to think of it, it is power ‒ so much power, in fact, that it is the only thing in the world that evil can't touch. God in Christ died forgiving. With the dead body of Jesus, he wedged open the door between himself and the world and said, "There! Just try and get me to take that back!"

And here is where this long, slow curve starts to curl in over the plate. Just as, in the whole of the Bible, it takes a while before God's preference for paradoxical rather than straight-line power manifests itself ‒ just as God seems to do a lot of right-handed pushing and shoving before he does the left-handed but ultimately saving thing on the cross ‒ so too it seems that, for quite some time, Jesus puts himself forth in the Gospels as a plausible, intervening, advice-giving, miracle-working Messiah before he finally reveals himself as a dying, rising, and disappearing one.

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Held Together by Icons

"Christianity is the Proclamation of the End of Religion"

A Humble Orthodoxy

Left-Handed, Paradoxical Power

Robert Farrar Capon

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