Essays on Biblical Interpretation by Paul Ricoeur
Chapter 2: Toward a Hermeneutic of the Idea of Revelation
I. THE ORIGINARY EXPRESSIONS OF REVELATION I will begin on the side of revelation and my first remarks will be
2. NARRATIVE DISCOURSE
For these reasons, we must not limit ourselves to simply identifying revelation with prophecy. And the other modes of discourse bear this
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out. To see this, we need surely to begin by considering the narrative genre of discourse that dominates the Pentateuch, as well as the synoptic Gospels and the Book of Acts.
What does revelation mean as regards these texts? Should we say that as with the prophetic texts, these texts have a double author, the writer and the spirit that guides him? Should we really attend above all else to the question of the narrator? Theoreticians of narrative discourse have noted that in narration the author often disappears and it is as though the
events recounted themselves. According to Emile Benveniste for
example, historical assertions, that is the telling of past events, exclude the speaker’s intervening in the story.1 Every linguistic form of
autobiography is banished. There is no longer even a narrator: "events are posited as though they were produced to the extent that they
appeared on the horizon of history. No one speaks here. The events tell themselves."2
Can we annul this specific feature of narration by advancing the trivial argument that someone nevertheless wrote it and that he stands in a relation to his text analogous to that of the prophet and the double author of prophecy? I am not unaware that when the Nicene Creed proclaims "who spoke through the prophets," the creed engulfs narration into prophecy, following the tradition that Moses was the unique
narrator of the Pentateuch and that he was the prophet par excellence.
But in following this route, has not the classical theory of inspiration missed the instruction proper to the narrative genre? What I am hereby suggesting is that we should pay more attention to the things recounted than to the narrator and his prompter. We then see that it is within the story itself that Yahweh is designated in the third person as the ultimate actant — to use the category of A. J. Greimas3 — i.e., he is one of the personages signified by the narration itself and intervenes among the other actants of the goings on. It is not a double narrator, a double subject of the word that we need to think about, but a double actant and consequently a double object of the story.
Let us follow this trail. Where does it lead? Essentially to meditation on the character of the events recounted, such as the election of Abraham, the Exodus, the anointing of David, etc. in the Old Testament, and the resurrection of Christ for the early church. The idea of revelation then appears as connected to the very character of these events. What is noteworthy about them is that they do not simply occur and then pass away. They mark an epoch and engender history. In this vein, the
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Jewish scholar Emil Fackenheim is correct when he speaks of "history- making events." These events found an epoch because they have the twofold characteristic of both founding a community and of delivering it from a great danger, which, moreover, may take diverse forms. In such instances, to speak of revelation is to qualify the events in question as transcendent in relation to the ordinary course of history. The whole faith of Israel and of the early church is tied up here in the confession of the transcendent character of such nuclear founding and instituting events.
As Gerhard von Rad has established in his great work, The Theology of the Old Testament, and principally in volume one, "The Theology of Traditions," Israel essentially confessed God through the ordering of its sagas, traditions, and stories around a few kernel events from which meaning spread out through the whole structure.4 Von Rad believes he has discovered the most ancient kernel of the Hebraic Credo in a text such as Deut. 26:5b-10b which says:
"My Father was a wandering Aramaean. He went down to Egypt to find refuge there, few in numbers; but there he became a nation, great,
mighty, and strong. The Egyptians ill-treated us, they gave us no peace and inflicted harsh slavery on us. But we called on Yahweh the God of our fathers. Yahweh heard our voice and saw our misery, our toil and our oppression; and Yahweh brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and outstretched arm, with great terror, and with signs and wonders. He brought us here and gave us this land, a land where milk and honey flow. Here then I bring the first-fruits of the produce of the soil that you, Yahweh, have given me." (Jerusalem Bible)
Notice how the recitation first designates Yahweh in the third person, as the supreme actant, then raises to an invocation that addresses God in the second person: "Here then I bring the first-fruits of the produce of the soil that you, Yahweh, have given me." We will return to this change from the use of the third to the second person when we discuss the hymnic literature. First, however, let us continue our examination of the narrative form.
What is essential in the case of narrative discourse is the emphasis on the founding event or events as the imprint, mark, or trace of God’s act.
Confession takes place through narration and the problematic of inspiration is in no way the primary consideration. God’s mark is in history before being in speech. It is only secondarily in speech inasmuch
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as this history itself is brought to language in the speech-act of narration. Here a "subjective’’ moment comparable to prophetic inspiration comes to the fore, but only after the fact. This subjective moment is no longer the narration insofar as the events recount themselves, but the event of narration insofar as it is presented by a narrator to a community. The word event is thus emphasized at the expense of the first intentionality of the narrative confession, or rather the confessing narrative. The latter does not distinguish itself from the things recounted and the events that present themselves in the story. It is for a second order reflection that the questions "who is speaking? who is telling the story?" are detached from what is narrated and said. For this reflection the author of the narration comes to the fore and appears to be related to his writing as the prophet is to his words. The narrator, in turn, may by analogy be said to speak in the name of. . . , and then he is a prophet and the Spirit speaks through him. But this absorption of narration into prophecy runs the risk of voiding the specific feature of the narrative confession — its aiming at God’s trace in the event.
To recognize the specificity of this form of discourse, therefore, is to guard ourselves against a certain narrowness of any theology of the Word which only attends to word events. In the encounter with what we could call the idealism of the word event, we must reaffirm the realism of the event of history — as is indicated today by the work of a
theologian such as Wolfhart Pannenberg in his attempts to rectify the one-sided emphasis of Ernst Fuchs and Gerhard Ebeling.
Then, too, narration includes prophecy in its province to the extent that prophecy is narrative in its fashion. Indeed, the meaning of prophecy is not exhausted by the subjectivity of the prophet. Prophecy is carried forward toward the "Day of Yahweh," which the prophet says will not be a day of joy, but of terror. This term, the Day of Yahweh, announces something like an event that will be to impending history what the founding events were to the history recounted in the great biblical narratives.
There is as well, however, a tension between narration and prophecy that first occurs at the level of the event in the dialectic of the prophetic event. The same history which narration founds as certain is suddenly undercut by the menace announced in the prophecy. The supporting pedestal totters. It is the structure of history which is at stake here, not just the quality of the word which pronounces it. And revelation is implicated in this now narrative, now prophetic understanding of
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history.
Did we say understanding? But this understanding cannot be articulated within any specific form of knowledge or within any system. Between the security confessed by the recitation of the founding events and the menace announced by the prophet there is no rational synthesis, no triumphant dialectic, but only a double confession, never completely appeased; a double confession that only hope can hold together.
According to the excellent phrase of André Neher, from his fine book on the prophets, a gulf of nothingness separates the new creation from the old.5 No Aufhebung can suppress this deadly fault. This is why this double relation to history is profoundly betrayed when we apply the Stoic idea of providence to it and when the tension between narration and prophecy is assuaged in some teleological representation of the course of history.
Such sliding over into teleology and the idea of providence would no doubt be unstoppable if we left the narrative discourse and the prophetic discourse of history face to face. Reduced to this polarity, the idea of revelation indeed tends to be identified with the idea of God’s design, the idea of a decreed plan that God has unmasked to his servants and prophets. But the polysemy and polyphony of revelation are not yet exhausted by this coupling of narration and prophecy. There are at least three other modes of biblical religious discourse that cannot be inscribed within this polarity of narration and prophecy. The first of these is the Torah, or instruction, conveyed to Israel.