"Being Bound to God: Covenant and Participation"

Justin Holcomb
Respondent: Graham Ward

(Holcomb’s abstract:)

Participation for Radical Orthodoxy and covenant for the Reformed theology function as the central theological frameworks or organizing principles by which they understand the Christian faith. This paper explores the significance of these two motifs regarding theological method, apologetics, and common grace. To get at these issues more clearly, this paper outlines theological response to the rejection of meta-narratives. Some reformed theologians argue that the faithful and proper theological response to postmodernism is to reject the rejection of meta-narratives, because the Christian faith is argued to be one. Following the reformed emphasis on covenant, the Christian faith is not a meta-narrative in the technical use of the term. If Christianity is not ultimately a “meta-narrative,” one must nevertheless explain why it so often looks like one.

(Holcomb’s presentation:)

1) Overview of the goal of RadOx

2) Brief review of participation

3) Exploration into covenants

4) Lyotard an metanarratives.

My aim is not to challenge RadOx, but to investigate its hermeneutical logic. It encourages other Christians and Jews and Muslims to make similar critiques through faith. This paper is also about constructive responses to problems articulated. RadOx sees the eucharist as a model of participation. Reformed theology also has an emphasis on the eucharist plus covenantal dimensions of the eucharist.

RadOx’s central theological framework of participation can be strengthened by including the Reformed focus on covenant. Reformed theology can answer the call of RadOx to analyze culture through our grammar of faith.

Participation and covenant are theological frameworks. They outline the theological response to a rejection of metanarratives. Some Reformed say that the response to postmodernism is to reject the rejection of metanarratives. Christian faith not a metanarrative. The critique of metanarrative doesn’t fit, but Christianity wants to make a similar claim towards secularism.

1) RadOx is not simply returning in nostalgia to the premodern. It visits sites that secularism has visited and resituates them. RadOx doesn’t have a manifesto. It’s not the answer but a methodology to read the signs of the times. It is radically critical of secular modernity . It rejects the idea that theology must justify itself before a court of secular standards. It rejects the idea of fixed secular standards.

Participation: Whereas the liberal watchword was reason, and it’s revelation for neo orthodoxy, participation is the word for RadOx. Moreover, metaphysical participation is the only basis for social participation. RadOx resists the ideals of inevitable secularization. Rather all things come from God and find their ultimate being in God. Humans find meaning as they participate in divine life. Discourses about anything can have meaning only if they acknowledge participation in the transcendent. All of this sounds strangely familiar to Reformed readers:

1) common grace, truth encompasses every dimension of creation
2) secularism--making claims on borrowed capital
3) the impossibility of the contrary
4) the belief that Christianity offers the necessary conditions for the intelligibility of anything
5) [[. . .?. . .]]
6) the only way to think of the Creator/creation distinction is by analogy

Before Aquinas, there was Aristotle. Aquinas added to Aristotle’s causes: final, formal, efficient, material (clay and potter).

Aquinas argues that Aristotle is necessary for Christianity. Aristotle helps affirm the sacramental and incarnational character. Reality has an integrity but not autonomy.

How do the four causes fare in modernity without participation? The final cause is lost. The material becomes materialism. The efficient moves to the foreground as power. And the formal cause--modern age is ambivalent about this, because it is through forms that the modern age controls things.

Covenant: The Jews believed in a specific God, only one, who made whole world. God was present to the world, active in it, and sovereign over it. God was not remote or detached, not a sacred dimension, or just forces in world. God was creator of all that exists. One God created all, remained in close and dynamic relation with creation, and this God called Israel to be God’s people. Sometimes linked with creation, God chose Israel for the sake of the world. In a particular history, whatever happened, oppression or suffering, the covenant family looked back to Exodus to rediscover that YHWH was their God and they were God’s people. Early Christians were under obligation to worship Jesus as God while remaining Jewish monotheists.

One God, the father from whom all things are, and one Lord Jesus Christ, a revision of the Shema.

(All these figures engaged in covenant:)
Adam, covenant role as husband
Noah
Abraham
David king, kingdom, throne
Jesus--priest, church, eucharist.
Trinity--eternal source and eternal standard of the covenant. Covenant is what God does and who God is.

Theological method is conceived, shaped, and determined by its confession. There is a redemptive, historical aspect of covenant. . . revelation is the servant of redemption.

Covenant is not an idea in general, but specific practices. It is the is culture of the people of God. It is more of a narrative to absorb the reader into the world of the text.
Covenant reorients loyalties. Its performance seems more comprehensive of theory and practice.
There is a new reality outside this text-script in which covenant partners actively participate.

Covenant is a more concrete category. There is divine and human agency. The scriptures are their own method of contextualization.

(I am not claiming that covenant is a pure concept for theology, but that covenant in scripture follows the Suzerain treaty, and is riddled with other questions.)

Covenant is helpful because the content of theology is already defining its methodology. Now we need a covenant that defines theology as church’s reflection of its own identity.

Lyotard. The metanarrative charge doesn't stick. It’s rather a claim that RadOx wants to make about secular culture. In The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard looks at the flow of information, the language--game where speaking is participation in a game whose goal is . . [[?]]. . It is a modern move to designate any science that legitimates itself with reference to a metadiscourse as an appeal to grand narrative . . .

The famous line here is, of course, that the characterization of postmodernity as incredulity toward metanarratives.

The crisis of modernity owes much to the uncritical acceptance of the enlightenment metanarrative. For Lyotard, the hero of the enlightenment metanarrative works toward universal peace. The enlightenment narrative is the illusion that human potential and happiness are unlimited. It frees the self from superstition. Modernity emphasizes autonomy etc., and is the opposite of participation and covenant.

Now, some feel we must defend metanarratives to justify Christianity.

According to Lyotard, there is a collapse of the grand metanarrative schemes in our era. We are left with incommensurable language games. We shouldn't’ judge any one discourse according to the standards of another. We should maximize first order natural pragmatic narratives. Therefore, anyone who rejects these, and upholds the enlightenment, must be arguing form a totalitarian standpoint. Faith in metanarratives is shaken by social developments, which raise profound questions about the centrality of metanarrative.

Metanarratives are overarching beliefs, which function to legitimate autonomous humanity. A big story that legitimates us. Non universal views are masked as if universal. It contextualizes to legitimize. It lays bare the bankruptcy of the modern narrative.

The Postmodern Condition indicates that humanity can’t function as the subject of an all-encompassing history--a plethora of competing stories.

Eschatological response. The biblical narrative shows us that history not our story. It denies that history goes somewhere , but is rather a realization of God’s purpose. God who stands at the end of human story is already in grace ordering the cosmic story towards its intended goal.

Christianity does ground meaningfulness--but it is not a metanarratives. It doesn’t legitimize itself. The problem is when a metanarrative interprets reductionally, and in an autonomous view--immaculate perception.

1) By metanarrative, Lyotard means a big story in which we place the little stories of our lives. Christianity seems to fit, but metanarrative signifies a difference of level, not just of size. Second level discourse is not directly about the world but about first level discourse. The story about creation. . . is not a metanarrative, but rather belongs to first order Christian discourse, proclamation, participation, repetition, proclamation.

Metanarrative is a second order discourse to legitimize secular modernity, regarding knowing in the state.

[[mba: the terms “first order discourse” and “second order discourse” were used occasionally throughout the conference by Reformed speakers. I am certain that I did not always understand where they were going with these terms. On the one hand, this presentation seem a somewhat reasonable distinction. But at other times, first order seemed to refer to those [ideological] assumptions we have decided not to problematize, those whose authority we accept, and second order referred to those assumptions we can dismiss as optional, “theological,” and lacking in appropriate authority. I could use some history, context, and clarification on how these terms get used.]]

2) Legitimization links modernity and metanarratives. Modernity finds itself needing to legitimate its new authorities and resorts to narratives. The irony is that modernity hitched its wagon to science, but to legitimate itself, science needs a story of progress. The enlightenment project is inseparable from self-legitimizing metanarratives.

Lyotard takes the production of these legitimating narratives by philosophy to be the essence of modernity.

3) The issue of the origination of other differences between the Christian story and metanarratives. The teachings of Christianity have their origin in revelation, not human subjects (individual as bearer of rights, humanity as fulfiller of history). Secularism talks with itself, telling itself stories that enable it to be confident.

Christian teachings also judge us (as well as coming from outside us). The critique of metanarratives is made in the Bible--prophets. We should be suspicious of narratives which legitimize us. Christianity legitimates only one kingdom--the kingdom of God, the fullness of the covenantal unfolding. Secularism’s metanarratives legitimize us. Christianity is not Lyotard’s target.

In conclusion: Metanarratives in the strict sense are master plots by which the enlightenment legitimates itself. Christianity did not spring from the mind of human imagination, nor did it begin in the 18th century, and it is not self-legitimizing. Lyotard is talking about the nature of the claims these narratives make. Yes, there are some affinities. We can look at which place others within a mastering design or story. The Bible looks like a grand narrative that incorporates other literary forms within it. The Christian theology of Aquinas repeats the biblical exercise of mastery by incorporating other disciplines. The Christian story does legitimize the church and the knowledges associated with it. Christian faith has a vision of the whole.

In short: if Christianity is not ultimately a metanarrative, one must explain why it so often looks like one. It is aa question of use?

If Christianity is just a little narrative, it can’t have disproportional massive and monstrous consequences. One possibility might be to speak of metanarrative and macronarrative (which might be Christian narrative as it bears formal properties of other narratives, but transcends them by being ground in Christ--this would be both grander and more modest than modern metanarratives). It would be a vision of everything, but with revelatory language full of paradoxes. Christianity is and is not a grand narrative. It depends on how we define the term and on the range of application.

But we may have to concede that the line between metanarrative and other forms is thin. Does the proclamation of the Christian gospel not carry a danger of becoming a kind of legitimizing metanarrative? RadOx and Reformed theologies address a supposed inadequacy: only a notion of transcendent and analogical truth can make knowledge something more than a prop for power.

Ward’s Response:

This is a very good account of RadOx--In fact, it’s one of the few I can recognize!

RadOx as a form of cultural critique: There is some concern that often affects receptions of RadOx, such that John (Milbank) gets the brunt of the critique (that he is only critical) and Bell and Long don’t seem to appear as part of RadOx is what about. Bell and Long are concerned with the social and political and moral and are looking at those things in terms of present manifestations and what theology might offer as a response, not just negative critiques.

RadOx is meant to be corrective vision AND constructive projects.

I think you could go even further with why Christianity is not a metanarrative. You could make even more of the difference between meta and macro--not just because of the set of participatory practices--but also because the story is not all there yet, so can’t be metanarrative. It is still an unfolding process.

You are spot on in terms of theology (wanting to be concerned with constructing an adequate theology, not RadOx or Reformed theology):

(We don’t need a method independent of theology.)

Here’s a set of questions I’d like to pose:

What is the relationship between covenant and family?
Is heterosexuality normative for Christian sociality?

What is the relation between covenant and culture?

How is covenant to be understood as scripture’s own method of contextualization? or, covenant as hermeneutic?

I want to take up this question: “If Christianity is not a metanarrative, why does it so often look like one? You mention legitimization and power language, and, from Lyotard, the incredulity argument. We have entered a culture of incredulity, a crisis of what is credible, on a historical axis--Habermas did it in the public sphere, where debate about public opinion is important to democracy. That is now collapsing, because of a lack of information about what you can debate about. The sphere dominated by who can win public trust, who believes what and for what reasons.

We need to examine legitimation processes--by what means we legitimize things.

[[mba: This is, I think, one of my favorite themes, the topic of authority. I am also reminded of how much our current political process is dominated by the notion of “electability,” as with the current slate of democratic presidential candidates.]]

We need to find ways Christianity can respond to that culture of incredulity and its legitimating processes. There are new metanarratives--global, democracy, market. What about when Christian is used as part of legitimating process for those things. Christianity can act as form of cultural critique, because of new the visibility of Christianity in public forum , but we need to ask what is going on here when we find ourselves using these things from our tradition and practice to legitimate other things.

1) A Frenchman recently said to me: “We were shocked here (in France) when Bill Clinton had a public confession of his relationship with Monica Lewinsky. Religion isn’t that visible for us. And then George Bush Jr. opened his inaugural address with a prayer.” We have to ask what is Christianity legitimating. What kind of power game are we engaging in?

2) From Britain: Blair going to Iraq, confessing he will stand before God for the decision he made about the war. This is a new transformation of the public sphere in which Christianity is involved, and is somewhat being used as a form of legitimation.

So, back to your question, “Does the proclamation of the Christian Gospel as proclamation carry with it the danger of becoming a kind of legitimating narrative?”

Questions from the floor:

?? to Holcomb: What about the matter of covenant or participation? I didn’t hear you answer the question. [[mba: the program stated the title as asking “Covenant or Participation?”]]

Holcomb: It’s a typo. It’s not meant to be OR. It’s supposed to be AND.

There are boundaries in covenant--for the purpose of identity. But in Isaiah, covenant is particular for universal redemption--a light to Gentiles. On identity and relevance, how do you negotiate between the two, what gives us our identity You can’t just do both. You have to choose identity, but it’s a universal goal. The Noahic covenant is a particular boundary identity with Noah’s family FOR all of creation.

??What about friendship as covenant-less legal character?

??What about negotiation as a participatory practice.

Ward: In cultural critique negotiation is the furtherance of the kingdom of God.

Ward: on the ontological in relation to participation. The relation is analogical. Ontology is not univocal. The being of the world is derivative and dependent upon the true being and nature of God. So ontological participation is within that being which is God in so far as we are finite creatures and are able to participate in analogically. Nyssa would never disassociate analogy from anagogy. Anagogy often comes in any description of the analogical. It is not a proportional relation. This is a notion of analogy in which you are involved in an operation which raises you anagogically into participation in God.

Both participation and covenant are about relationality, negotiating relationships, whether with God (Barth’s vertical notion) or with one another (Barth’s horizontal relationship/covenant).

The criterion for me in negotiation is: does this foster better relationality--not a privative, but a good--a site for operations of grace, which are that which binds participation to covenant.

Posted by Margaret at September 15, 2003 08:31 PM