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
3. PRESCRIPTIVE DISCOURSE
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.
external command.
The idea of dependence is essential to the idea of revelation, but really to understand this originary dependence within the orders of speaking, willing, and being, we must first criticize the ideas of heteronomy and autonomy both as taken together and as symmetrical to each other.
Let us concentrate for the moment on the idea of heteronomy. Nothing is more inadequate than this idea for making sense of what the term Torah has signified within Jewish experience. In order to do justice to the idea of a divine Torah, it does not even suffice to say that the Hebrew Torah has a greater extension than what we call a moral
commandment and that it is applied to the whole legislative system that the Old Testament tradition connected with Moses. By thus extending the commandment to all the domains of life of the community and the individual, whether moral, juridic, or cultic, we only express the amplitude of this phenomenon without thereby really illuminating its specific nature.
Three points are worth emphasizing.
First, it is not unimportant that the legislative texts of the Old Testament are placed in the mouth of Moses and within the narrative framework of the sojourn at Sinai. This means that this instruction is organically
connected to the founding events symbolized by the exodus from Egypt.
And in this regard, the introductory formula of the Decalogue
constitutes an essential link connecting the story of the Exodus and the proclamation of the Law: "I am Yahweh, your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery" (Exod. 20:2). At the level of literary genres this signifies that the legislative genre is in a way included in the narrative genre. And this in turn signifies that the memory of deliverance qualifies the instruction in an intimate way. The Decalogue is the Law of a redeemed people. Such an idea is foreign to any simple concept of heteronomy.
This first comment leads to a second. The Law is one aspect of a much more concrete and encompassing relation than the relation between commanding and obeying that characterizes the imperative. This relation is what the term "Covenant" itself translates imperfectly. It encompasses the ideas of election and promise, as well as of menace and curse. The idea of the Covenant designates a whole complex of relations, running from the most fearful and meticulous obedience to the
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Law to casuistic interpretations, to intelligent mediation, to pondering in the heart, to the veneration of a joyous soul — as we shall see better with regard to the Psalms. The well-known Kantian respect for the law, in this regard, would only be one modality of what the Covenant
signifies, and perhaps not the most significant one.
This space of variations opened by the Covenant for our ethical feelings suggests a third reflection. Despite the apparently invariable and
apodictic character of the Decalogue, the Torah unfolds within a dynamism that we may characterize as historical. By this we do not mean just the temporal development that historical criticism discerns in the redaction of these codes, the evolution of moral ideas that may be traced out from the first Decalogue to the Law of the Covenant, on the one hand, and from the Decalogue itself through the restatements and amplifications of the book of Deuteronomy to the new synthesis of the
"Holiness Code" in the book of Leviticus and the legislation subsequent to Ezra, on the other; more important than this development of the content of the Law is the transformation in the relationship between the faithful believer and the Law. Without falling into that old rut of
opposing the legalistic and the prophetic, we may discover in the very teaching of the Torah an increasing pulsation that turn by turn sets out the Law in terms of endlessly multiplying prescriptions and then draws it together, in the strong sense of the word, by summing it up in one set of commandments which only retain its being directed towards holiness.
Thus the book of Deuteronomy, to cite one example, proclaims long before the New Testament gospel: "You shall love Yahweh your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength. Let these words which I urge on you today be written on your heart" (6:5-6). This inscription on human hearts gave rise to the proclamation of a new covenant by some of the prophets, not in the sense of the proclamation of new precepts, but in the sense of a new relational quality as expressed precisely by the phrase engraved on your hearts." Ezekiel wrote, "I will give them a new heart and I will put a new spirit in them; I will remove the heart of stone from their bodies and give them a heart of flesh . . .(Ezek. 11:19).
Without this pulsation in the Torah, we would not understand how Jesus could have, on the one hand, opposed the "traditions of the elders,"
which is to say, the multiplication and excess load of commandments put forth by the scribes and Pharisees, and, on the other hand, have declared that in the Kingdom the Law would be fulfilled to its last iota.
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For Jesus, the Law and the Prophets were summed up in the Golden Rule from Deuteronomy: "So always treat others as you would like them to treat you; that is the meaning of the Law and the Prophets"
(Matt. 7:12). In this sense, the Sermon on the Mount proclaims the same intention of perfection and holiness that runs through the ancient Law.
It is this intention that constitutes the ethical dimension of revelation. If we consider this instituting function of revelation we see how
inadequate the idea of heteronomy is for circumscribing the wealth of meaning included in the teaching of the Torah. We see also in what way the idea of revelation is enriched in turn. If we may still apply the idea of God’s design for humans to it, it is no longer in the sense of a plan that we could read in past or future events, nor is it in terms of an immutable codification of every communal or individual practice.
Rather it is the sense of a requirement for perfection that summons the will and makes a claim upon it. In the same way, if we continue to speak of revelation as historical, it is not only in the sense that the trace of God may be read in the founding events of the past or in a coming conclusion to history, but in the sense that it orients the history of our practical actions and engenders the dynamics of our institutions.