Scot,
This is great stuff. Isn’t the presence of the Holy Spirit in some sense related to the idea of Torah Kelulah? All of Christian life is driven by, led by attunement with God through the action of the Holy Spirit as God’s real presence with us?
Seeking to become attuned to God is not conformity to written word, but living in the Spirit. A hard concept because we do not have a concrete rule book with all dilemmas or choices capable of predetermined resolution.

I know that Von Balthasar used the word “Attunement” (German equivalent) quite a lot in the context of his discussion of Justification and related matters.

RJS, Fishbane didn’t appeal to “Spirit” or “spirit” often enough to make me think he’d explain Torah kelulah that way. He could have. But a Christian theologian can easily make that connection. A major idea going on here is that Scripture/Written Torah is an “instantiation” of Torah Kelulah, which means Scripture is a local, particular instance of a much larger bed of truth and which humans must discern.

Faith in the full Christian sense can be nothing other than this: to make the whole man a space that responds to the divine content. Faith attunes man to this sound; it confers on man the ability to react precisely to this divine experiment, preparing him to be a violin that receives just this touch of the bow, to serve as material for just this house to be built, to provide the rhyme for just this verse being composed. This was the reaction already envisaged when the Covenant was made on Sinai: ?Be holy, because I am holy.?
(Glory of the Lord: Seeing the Form, I:220)
http://www.washtheocon.org/Love's%20Dynamic%20%20Attunement.pdf

I think that the Christian connection with this idea is in some sense with Spirit.
The more I think about it – the more I like your description of scripture as “wiki-story,” although it needs to be nuanced somewhat…
I was listening this morning as I drove to NT Wright lecturing on Romans 5-8, thinking about this post, Jewish approach to theology in the first century, yesterday’s post on artists, and the nature of inspiration related to doctrine of scripture. (Rather amazing that I made it in safely.) I think that American evangelicalism gets so much wrong because we expect scripture to be something that it is not and was never intended to be and refuse to accept the reality of the Spirit of God. A provocative statement I realize.

This sounds great. I love me some Heschel.

The first quotation in the last paragraph of your post reminded me of the third verse of Frederick Lehman’s great hymn, “The Love of God”:
Could we with ink the ocean fill,
And were the skies of parchment made,
Were every stalk on earth a quill,
And every man a scribe by trade,
To write the love of God above
Would drain the ocean dry.
Nor could the scroll contain the whole,
Though stretched from sky to sky.
My surfing today reveals that Lehman’s hymn is based on an 11th century Jewish poem called Hadamut, written by a rabbi in Worms, Germany, which says, in part:
Were the sky of parchment made,
A quill each reed, each twig and blade,
Could we with ink the oceans fill,
Were every man a scribe of skill,
The marvelous story, Of God?s great glory
Would still remain untold; For He, most high
The earth and sky Created alone of old.
from which I conclude that the thought is not original with Fishbane.

Bob, but thanks for this.
When I read Fishbane I thought of “intertextuality” with the Christian hymn as sung by Shea in the Billy Graham crusades. I originally mentioned that in my post but then deleted it because I didn’t know enough about the origins of that Christian hymn.
But your comment shows that the intertextuality begins in a medieval Jewish author who may have influence Lehman.
A revelation that intertextuality is an ongoing affair.

In EOrthodoxy, a theologian is the one who prays, and prayer is viewed as communion with God.
I have only read “God in Search of Man”, but I have dipped a little into “The Prophets”. Totally awesome. I fully expect to meet Heschel on the other side of the curtain.
This description made me cry, Scot. Not only for the beauty of it as itself, but also for what it points toward in my life right now.
Dana

In college I read Buber and Heschel. They appealed to where I was spiritually much more than did Niebuhr and Tillich who were very popular reads in the early 1960′s. I was so moved that I joined Hillel for a while and was warmly received. This was also the period when I had visited Birmingham, Alabama, staying at my fraternity brother’s house. In Birmingham, I saw the horror of segregation for the first time. While there, I visited both white and black churches and white and black schools. This was a transformational period for me.
For me, spirituality has always involved awe, mystery, experiential awareness of the sacred plus the Jesus creed. On the other hand, doctrine has always made me feel cut off from those things. So it’s easy why to see why I liked Buber and Heschel. Heschel appealed to be beyond spirituality. My spirituality felt shallow if I wasn’t working for social justice, and Herschel modeled that, too. To respond to a question. Theology is verbal faith because, like a map, it attempts to represent something far richer and complex than the map itself. A map does represent a finite describable territory, whereas theology tries to represent something indescribable, ineffable.
Doug

Is it possible that there is a link between the Unsayable and the inner revelation or self disclosure of God featured in the much persecuted so-called Spiritualists of the reformation period?
Something of God is disclosed to person X. Either person X or person Y verbalises or writes of that experience of the Divine. Person Z and perhaps millions of others may read of this disclosure under the label of scripture and interpret it as best they may.
Perhaps the story of the call of the boy Samuel could stand as an example. By his (and Eli’s) responses to the disclosure, events which changed the course of human activity and perspectives occurred. However, the essential nocturnal event remembered in the consciousness of young Samuel no doubt carried in it aspects which were never said, or were ‘unsayable’.
I’m in sympathy with RJS above. It is when a community homes in on the verbalised version and turns it into something detrimentally doctrinaire – e.g. orthopraxis (right practice) in Judaism in Jesus’ community or orthodoxy (right belief or opinion) in Christianity in, say, Luther’s time which sets the stage for so much misunderstanding and persecution in the name of religion.
After all, Jesus’ belief that his vocation was as Messiah could/must be said to have arisen in his consciousness as from such Divine disclosure, but in scripture only the briefest of notes in the Gospels pointing to that consciousness have to suffice the reader of scripture.

thanks for this, scot.
i’m taking a course on Israelite Religion this semester and this book looks like it might be a valuable resource for me.