Sacred Attunement

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.