Something I am currently writing about (in a new book) is the way in which humans, in our weakness, desire a master we can dominate. In other words, we seek someone who will say what we want to hear (e.g. if you pray your daughter will be healed) yet who we can blame if what is said is no longer useful or effective (my pastor said my daughter would be healed and she wasn’t).

In The Fidelity of Betrayal I touch on how the Judeo-Christian narrative pushes back on this desire, inviting us to take responsibility for our own thoughts rather than placing them onto another. In short, every time we attempt to master the master (e.g. understand the true meaning of the text), the master pushes back on us (slipping out of our attempts to reduce its truth to some set of facts).

The biblical text can be said to draw the sensitive reader into a tense and passionate debate with its content designed to facilitate responsibility and change. Here is an excert from The Fidelity of Betrayal that touches on this idea,

The idea that faith involves engaging in an ongoing transformative dialogue instead of seeking some static, final understanding of God and the world can be seen to inform the Jewish anecdote that speaks about a young man who is seeking out an old and learned rabbi to be schooled in the wisdom of Hebraic logic. The story goes that after a prolonged search the young man finally finds a suitable rabbi and asks if the rabbi would be willing to tutor him. But upon seeing this youth the rabbi simply smiles and says, “You are too young and have too little life experience for the lessons that I have to teach. Come back to me in ten years.”

But the young man is full of a confidence that borders on arrogance and so responds, “I may be young but I have already mastered Aristotelian logic and symbolic logic. Test me. Ask me any question you want and I will prove to you that I am ready.”

The rabbi thinks for a few moments and then chooses a question: “Two men descend a chimney. When they get to the bottom, one man’s face is covered in soot. Tell me, which one washes his face?”

In response the young man immediately says, “Why, that is easy. It would be the one with the soot on his face.”

In response the rabbi turns to leave, saying, “Of course not. What are you thinking? It is the man without the soot who washes his face, for he sees his friend’s complexion and thinks that he too must be dirty.”

“Please don’t send me away,” replies the young man. “Test me again. Any question at all.”

And so the rabbi thinks for a moment and then says, “OK, listen carefully this time. Two men descend a chimney. When they get to the bottom, one man’s face is covered in soot. Tell me, which one washes his face?”

“Why, the man without the soot on his face,” replies the young man.

Again the rabbi shakes his head, “You are not listening in the right way. It is obvious that it is the man with the soot on his face who washes. He sees the reaction of his friend upon reaching the ground, can taste the soot from his lips, and can feel it stinging his eyes. Now leave me in peace.”

“Please,” replies the young man, “test me one last time, as I think I have it now.”

“One last time,” replies the rabbi. “This time I want you to really listen. Two men descend a chimney. When they get to the bottom, one man’s face is covered in soot. Tell me, which one washes his face?”

“The first answer I gave,” shouts the young man, “but for different reasons.”

“No, no, no,” says the rabbi as he leaves. “They both wash their faces. How could someone descend a chimney and not think that their face would be covered in soot?”

Here we encounter the idea that before the young man could ever begin training in the deep wisdom of the tradition he must first learn how to give up the desire to reduce truth to some single, defined, unchanging, propositional system. He must learn to dialogue, to debate, to rethink, to critique. Only then can he begin the journey toward a mode of religious understanding that goes deeper than epistemological insight (the realm of the scientific disciplines)—discovering a truth more profound than mere intellectual claims.

It is all too common for Christians to attempt to do justice to the scriptural narrative by listening to it, learning from it, and attempting to extract a way of viewing the world from it. But the narrative itself is asking us to approach it in a much more radical way. It is inviting us to wrestle with it, disagree with it, contend with it, and contest it—not as an end in itself, but as a means of approaching its life-transforming truth, a truth that dwells within and yet beyond the words.

Tags: Fidelity of Betrayal, Parable, Peter Rollins

This entry was posted on Monday, September 15th, 2008 at 4:14 am and is filed under Parables, Philosophy/Theology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.