Salvation History and Textual History: A Twofold Heilsgeschicte (Sacred History)

Intro

While I have done other posts on biblical studies (Gen 1 here and here)and even one whose title was partially directly on biblical studies, this is really only the second of my posts on my actual “career” as a “scholar” in biblical studies (the post on sapientia in biblical studies was at least a much about my theory of literature on the whole, although the parts of that that relate directly to sapientia in biblical studies definitely are meant to dovetail with something like this post). And it is really the only other post I have to write on that “career” … just the two posts. The first was the Once Upon a Dissertation post, which was the snapshot of where I saw the research of my dissertation project going. This one, on the other hand, is a synthesis of what it was I tried to do in the classroom when teaching Intro to Old Testament while a doctoral student and then PhD candidate (in a PhD program, at least in the States, your designation changes once you pass comps and get your proposal passed by the committee). So, this sort of sums up the other half of what I once was going for in trying to be a scholar (two halves: writing and teaching), and the teaching should be at least as important as the writing.

I did not have everything in this format when I taught, and particularly I had not lit on this concept of a “twofold Heilsgeschicte.” I don’t know that it would have been the best concept to introduce in that specific terminology at the undergrad level (although I probably would have tried to do so; I tended to have a “pitch” problem, as it was put by the faculty who came in to review my teaching after several semesters of low numbers on the SEEQs). But having the basic structure down might have helped in focusing, but such is life.

So, there is this German term that gets translated roughly “salvation history,” Heilsgeschicte (I will keep to the German convention of capitalizing nouns in German): Geschicte is the noun “history”; heil is the adjective for “sacred” (yes, as in “Heil Hitler”); in German, the genitive (possessive) case is made simply by putting an “s” at the end (so, heils = “of sacred” or “of the sacred”); and German has this thing of slapping noun X on the end of noun or adjective Y in the genitive such that “XsY” means “the Y of X,” and thus Heilsgeschicte means “history of [the] sacred.”

[Side note: The German genitive adds the case ending “s” in a way that is thought of by English speakers as changing the spelling of the word itself, whereas the tendency of native English speakers with English itself is to think of our possessive as being simply adding apostrophe-“s” onto a word that remains pretty much the same in spelling (whereas, say, with “who” we tend to think of the genitive/possessive “whose” and the objective “whom” as a different words with different spelling, rather than as the same word with something simply tagged on). But that apostrophe actually stands in for something more similar to the German genitive. In old English, which would have developed from the same parent language as German, sometimes called “Old German,” the genitive ending was “es.” We still see this in our weekday name “Wednesday,” which is Odin’s day, or without the apostrophe, Odenes day (the vowel between the “d” and “n” drops while the “e” of the genitive is retained, which is unusual for English … funky things happen). Native English speakers who have not specialized in language have a tendency to think that the apostrophe for possessive is something completely other than the apostrophe in contractions, where we replace the second “o” in “do not” with an apostrophe to make “don’t,” but they’re actually the same function, standing in for a vowel that usually naturally drops out in actual spoken pronunciation. Also, I have a pet peeve as a copyeditor that I call the “German Semicolon,” which means when authors use semicolons to run sentences together with no real connection such that it starts to look more like a data string than an English sentence (which is fine for citation grammar in notes, but not for sentence grammar), and I call it that on the analogy of the German genitive “s” and the fact that, as I like to quip, the Germans will put fourteen words together using thirteen genitive “s”s, throw a “-heit” or “-keit” on the end for good measure, and call it a new word. END SIDENOTE]

So, Heilsgeschicte sometimes gets translated “salvation history.” As far as I can remember, the firs person to really use the term in this way was Gerhard von Rad, a nineteenth-century German scholar in Old Testament studies. What is meant by it is a trait of the Hebrew Bible that distinguished it from the holy writings and origin stories of all the surrounding nations. At least in that area of the world, religious thought centered on sacred mythological topography. There was usually a sacred mountain at the center, as the axis mundi, the center of the world, on which the gods lived. What von Rad noted in the Hebrew Bible is an emphasis not on a center, access to which was usually controlled by the priests of that nation, in a spatial arrangement, but on a series of saving acts by God, a temporal/historical emphasis. Deuternomy 29:5b–10 is a prime example in a very tight poetically structured piece (nice repetition of series of three things … very tight).

The situation of the Hebrew Bible as a whole is actually  a bit more complex than that and probably best summed up in Jon Levenson’s Sinai and Zion (I use the term Hebrew Bible here because Levenson is a Jewish scholar and that is what his book is about, not about the Christian OT reading). The Sinai traditions are the Heilsgeschicte thinking but there are also the Zion traditions, which are much more like the topographical emphasis of the mythologies of the surrounding nations (the temple on Mount Zion and the king as semidivine, although in 2 Sam 7 it is more along the lines of adopted by the divine). The thesis of Levenson’s book (which well deserves its fame and the bountiful royalties I am sure it generates as the intro-level book used by many MA level intro to OT courses, and probably a fair number of upper-level undergrad courses in OT) is that the real theme of the Hebrew Bible is the tension between these two perspectives.

[SIDENOTE: In his awesome book The Discarded Image, which I just finished reading for the Inklings book club I am in and cannot recommend highly enough, C. S. Lewis took some pretty serious issue with the idea that Israel was so radically focused on history while everybody else was so dominated by spatial mythological topography, and he gets kind of snarky at points. I can see his point, and he does have some good evidence to offer from outside the ancient Near East, stuff from the northern European realms that he and Tolkien studied so extensively. While I think his criticisms should be heard if one takes the Heilsgeschicte line too radically, thinking that Israel thought only in this way and every polytheistic religion  thought only ever in the topographical way, as von Rad might himself have thought (hard to tell sometimes), I think my immediately previous paragraph and Levenson, himself Jewish, provide a lot of nuance that avoids that. And I do think that it is true that the lines are much sharper in the Hebrew Bible and produce a unique tension between the two different models in play, such that it is apt, or at least allowable, to use the Heilsgeschicte as the architectural term for my own exposition of my thoughts on the place of historical critical studies of Scripture under the guiding hand of Christian theology. END SIDENOTE]

MY THESIS:

My idea is that maybe a proper relationship between studying the Bible as flowing from living revelation and studying its compositional history  on the human level could be formulated as studying a dual-layered Heilsgeschicte, sacred events. The primary is the history of the saving acts of God. The secondary, though, is the history of the giving of the text, the history of its composition as a series of divinely orchestrated events, beginning with direct reception of revelation (Moses on Sinai and the disciples with Jesus) and then the journey through oral traditions and written traditions and canonization of text all going on within an institution spawned by that revelational event and through the authority of that original recipient.

Heilsgeschicte 2 (history of the text) within a Christian understanding of Heilsgeschicte 1 (history of saving events, including Christ as the definitive revelation)

An important aspect to keep in mind here is that, in a Christian reading of “history,” the present and the future are included when speaking of Scripture as a record of “salvation history.” There is system of medieval exegesis of Scripture called “the quadriga,” meaning the fourfold sense. It is a rule of typologically interpreting particularly the Old Testament (I’m going to prescind from the question of calling it by the distinctly Christian designation “Old Testament” or by the term “Hebrew Bible,” which I mentioned in passing when talking about Levenson above and which I’ll address a little bit below in talking about the difference between the “literal sense” and the “original sense”).

The fours senses are the “literal,” the “allegorical,” the “moral/tropological,” and the “anagogical.” To use probably the most common example used in discussing these matters, in the “literal” sense, the Temple is the real Jerusalem Temple constructed by Solomon and the Second Temple constructed by Ezra and Nehemiah after the return from the Babylonian exile. The “allegorical” sense is always about the fulfillment in Christ, and so we have passages like that in John in which Christ talks about destroying the Temple and it being raised in three days, with John interjecting directly that he was speaking of the Temple of his body. The “moral” sense is seeing the element in the literal sense as a prefiguring of the individual believer’s life in Christ, and so we have Paul’s famous “do you not know that your body is the Temple of the HolySpirit.” The anagogical sense is the eschatological sense, the final sense, the sense of the next age. So, the Temple is Heaven, the new Jerusalem to which we are traveling as pilgrims.

[SIDENOTE: There is a further sense that is added particularly in Patristic times called the “mystogogical” sense. This relates to the seven sacraments of the Church as fulfillment of the foreshadowings in the Bible. So the Eucharist fulfills the manna in the wilderness and the rock struck in the side and pouring forth water at Horeb, baptism fulfills the flood and the Red Sea, and so on. The two volumes that I have had to study on this are Enrico Mazza’s Mystagogy and Jean Danielou’s The Bible and the Liturgy, although there is a lot of good material in two of Mazza’s other major works: The Origins of the Eucharistic Prayer and The Celebration of the Eucharist. Mystagogy is a typological method by nature and Mazza and others detail how and why it was largely replaced by “sacramental realism” in discussing the sacraments after about the fourth or fifth century. END SIDENOTE]

Possibly the most important thing to note in the Christian reading is that all points of history are part of the Heilsgschicte, not just the events in the Old Testament. The Geschicte of events that are heil includes everything from the creation of the world to the entry into the next world, with Christ at the center and the Church and individual believers (the moral sense) as equally important alongside the literal sense of the Old Testament (I haven’t worked that out into a tight system, but there is no way that that story is not chiastic).

Thus, since the primary Heilsgeschicte (the actual historical events) includes all times, it would include any and all events in the giving and transmitting of a text believed to be divinely inspired (see more below), which is precisely the secondary Heilsgeschicte (the history of the texts as record of revelation). The former always has to be primary and the necessary context of the latter to understand it properly. The reason to study the history of the transmission and progressive literary formation of the text is that the giving of the text by God is the point of exploring the material means by which it came to be; the point is to study the “how” of the giving, which is one of the many events in the primary Heilsgeschicte.

An important question here is that of “inspiration” of Scripture by the Holy Spirit: can the workings of the institution begotten by the Mosaic revelation (the circles of prophets coming down to the circle of prophets that scholars believe brought with them their library of traditions carrying what was revealed in the Mosaic encounter from the north to the south just before the destruction of Samaria, the capital of the northern kingdom, by Assyria in 721/722 BC … see below for more detail) be thought of as falling under the operation of inspiration? It’s a tricky question and one to which I do not have a ready-made answer at present (I have a very useful volume on my shelf called Catholic Theories of Biblical Inspiration since 1810, by James T. Burtchaell, but I did not discover this volume until reading of it in an article I was copyediting a number of years after having discontinued my degree, but I have not gotten around to reading and processing it fully). As I said, the primary Heilsgeschicte has to remain primary, and only in this context does inspiration of Scripture make sense, as an event within that primary Heilsgeschicte. Beyond that, whether the hypothetical institutional actions that transmitted traditions and then formed them into writing and canonized them happened with guidance at the concrete level id s very nuanced question indeed. It seems to me that they have to stand in some relation to it, which is why it is important that they have an institutional authority derived concretely from the one to whom original revelation was made: Moses (whoever he was historically or however his factual existence, in which one must believe in some form or another, as well as the factual existence of a unique and distinct event of revelation to him, relates to the portrayal of him and the events in the text), the prophets such as Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, and finally the revelation to the Twelve apostles through Christ. But I do not pretend to have those things worked out. I am simply trying to make sense of what I know of the faith concerning the matter of revelation and the teaching of the Tradition, especially in the papal teachings beginning with Leo XIII’s Providentissimus Deus (1893, the first of the encyclicals dealing specifically with the historical critical methods in the wake of there rise in nineteenth-century Europe) and up through Benedict XVI’s Verbum Domini, the latter of which popes (Benedict) has made it pretty clear that there must be some engagement with the findings of the historical critical methods (some of that engagement is that careful attention should be paid to whether certain Enlightenment principles are impacting the findings, but it also includes taking their findings seriously as possibly true).

I’ll wrap up this section by giving the distinction (or at least what of it I have been able to process of what seems to me to be the situation) between the “literal sense” in the technical quadriga meaning and what I call the “original sense.” The literal sense is the actual events themselves, and so it can actually include the fulfillment in Christ, since Christ’s role in creation etc is part of the ontological being of those events. The “original sense” is what it meant in the context of the original composition of those texts before the coming of Christ, their sense particularly as the “Hebrew Bible.” For example, when God says “let us create man in our own image,”  in a Christian fuller reading, this refers to the Trinity. But we take it seriously that there is a radically new revelation in Christ of the Trinity as the true nature of God, and not before Christ. If the “original sense” of that verse in Genesis 1 meant the Trinity, then a human author before Christ would have had to have known of the Trinity before it was revealed in Christ, and that makes the revelation in Christ pointless, reducing the Incarnation to the purely juridical act of atonement for sin (I’m writing in the only way that I can, as a Catholic: for at least certain strands of Protestantism, there is viewed to be nothing wrong with reducing all to the juridical aspect, but the Catholic Church has always taught that the Crucifixion is the culmination of the whole process of the Incarnation, not that the Incarnation is simply the mechanical means to the end of the Crucifixion achieving the juridical act of atonement). Another example is the doctrine of creation ex nihilo, which I don’t think is in the original sense of Genesis 1. For one thing, the particular concepts of “being” in that doctrine were not around until the Elean school of philosophy, the pre-Sorcatics, about 500 years before Christ, after the formation of the Genesis material. I don’t think that them not meaning creation ex nihilo means that they did mean that matter is eternal, as in the Greek doctrine of “prime matter.” I think it was simply not on their radar as a question. Their construct was not “being” versus “non being” (the first instance of which we get in 2 Maccabees 7, using the language of distinguishing “things that are” from “things that are not” borrowed from the Elean school); their construct is order versus chaos. I DO think that, once those categories have been introduced and developed, and particularly once Christianity has picked them up from Greek philosophy by way of Jewish thought having intersected with Greek thought in the 300 or 400 years before Christ (2 Macc 7 being a big piece of evidence for that), creation ex nihilo is a distinctly valid translation of the order-versus-chaos thinking in the original sense of Genesis 1 into those new categories of thought (it should be noted here that the two primary examples I know of in Patristic thought addressing the question of Genesis 1 in relation to the creation ex nihilo issue, Augustine’s On the Creed and Basil’s Hexameron, are purely negative and defensive moves: they do not argue that Genesis 1 concretely contains the doctrine, but rather that the language of “formless and void” there cannot be used to support the Greek doctrine of “prime matter” as eternal, as Porphyry and other pagan thinkers tried to argue that it can be, saying “see, even your own holy scriptures support our doctrine in this language of ‘formless and void’”).

Example of Compositional History Provided by Historical Critical Methods

This is the “broad strokes” version of the best that I was able to piece together of the compositional history of the Law and the Prophets, the first two sections of the Hebrew canon, known as the TaNaK (see below under “Story Time” for a fuller explanation of that), to which Christ witnesses when he says, “on these two commandments hang the whole of the Law and the Prophets” (most likely, the third section, the Writings, was still in a greater state of canonical flux at the time, there but more fluid), the textual mass containing the history from creation through the Babylonian exile. Some of my presentation here is condensing material into the narrative that seems to me to make the most sense and to be the most widely accepted, but there are always at least some important voices objecting to any given part, advocating distinctly different theories (one or two of which I describe at the end of this section).

Historical criticism does not seriously address Moses as the material source of the content of the Pentateuch except in the form of dismissing that idea as historical. Some scholars early on still assumed it and incorporated it, but it pretty quickly dropped out as a discussion topic, at best. To the best of my knowledge, aside from the sketchy pictures of the Jahwist source being around 1000 BC in the southern kingdom, the Elohist source in the northern kingdom in the 9^th century BC, and the more concrete pictures of the Priestly source in the late 5^th century BC in the south after the return from the exile, the most pertinent material for the formation of major canonical blocks concerns the D source, the Deuteronomistic source (this is all from the classic four-source theory put forward most definitively by Julius Wellhausen).

The story goes something like this. In the northern kingdom there was a circle of prophets who had a collection of traditions (some written, some orally transmitted) concerning the giving of the Law, the conquest of the land by Joshua and the twelve tribes, and the unified kingdom under David and Solomon. Sometime not long before the fall of the northern kingdom and its capital city, Samaria, to the Assyrian Empire in 721/722 BC, the prophets realized what was about to happen and flew to the southern kingdom, Judah, with their collection. There, during the reign of Hezekiah, who was a righteous king with whom they thought they could work, they coalesced certain pieces from their traditions into a written work that was the “Book of the Law,” roughly our present Deuteronomy chapters 12–26 (Wellhausen was the one to claim that core as the Deuteronomic Law, or DL for short, but these theories get much more complex in the form of later hands also interjecting material into the DL, such that no historical critical scholar sees everything in 12–26 as being original to this northern school’s work under Hezekiah, but that is the broad line identification).

After Hezekiah, Manasseh came to the throne in Judah, who was an evil king who basically went on a rampage to convert the kingdom to polytheism. At this point, the circle of prophets hid the Book of the Law in the Temple, as it was in disuse by Manasseh. After Manesseh came Josiah, a truly righteous king. At this time, Hilkiah the priest found the Book of the Law in the Temple and brought it to Josiah, and Josiah had it read by Huldah the prophetess and obeyed it and had the people obey it in what is called the “Josianic reform” movement. So the immediate descendents of the original prophetic school that came from the north, who still had the collection they had received from those prophets, went to that collection and pulled together out of it a narrative work that, as a hypothetical work, scholars call the “Deuteronomistic History” (DH), the story of the conquest of the land by Joshua all the way up to the great religious reform of Josiah the king of Judah. The similarity in the names was not missed: Joshua and Josiah were the two bookends of this epic. They were the two military leaders who did what the Book of the Law said (in Deut 17) a king/military leader is supposed to do: listen to the prophet expounding the Book of the Law (Joshua listening to Moses and Josiah listening to Huldah) and lead the people in religious reform. The fact that Josiah is the culmination is seen in the fact that he receives the highest accolade possible: both Hezekiah and Josiah have the text say about them that there was no king before or after who was like them, but only Josiah is described as loving the Lord God with his whole heart and soul and might, the great commandment given under the Shemah in Deuteronomy 6.

This was all one work not broken out into the separate books we known now, but it comprised Joshua, Judges, 1 and 2 Samuel and 1 and 2 Kings up to the reign of Josiah. But they didn’t circulate this DH on its own like that. They took the DL that there immediate ancestors had done and put it on the front as a preface, as a “key” of sorts to understanding what the key themes were that should be understood in the (the law of the king in Deut 17, the law of the central sanctuary in Deut 12, which is the basis for the Jerusalem Temple). Over time, this “preface” also got padded out and better connected with narrative material (also drawn from the collection of traditions inherited … it is a key component of religious belief in these matters that none of this material was invented whole cloth; it all came from the collection of traditions that were attributed, ultimately, to beginning with Moses, although the material on the kings is taken from sources that are actually mentioned on the page [“he did much else that is recorded in the Annals of the Kings of Juda” or Israel … there is even such a sources listed for the works of Solomon]). Eventually the first five chapters of Deuteronomy would be a summary version of the history of the people from the time of the revelation at Horeb (the name in Deuteronomy for the mountain that is called Sinai in Exodus) to the entry into the land as described in Joshua.

But the stability under Josiah didn’t last, and four kings later, the nation was in exile. At this point, a religious reader in the exile, sitting reading the DH had to ask the question of why, if Josiah’s reform was so righteous, God had had to send the people into exile in Babylon. It was not an acceptable thing to say that Babylon conquered because they were more powerful, since Judah is the nation of the all powerful Lord God, and so if the people went into exile, it was because of God’s decision, not Babylon’s power, and it must have been punishment for some wickedness. So they pull from their materials on the kings after Josiah, materials collected by them during that time, and added the last four kings as wicked kings who, along with Manasseh (who was so wicked that not even Josiah’s righteous reform could make up for it), led the people into an apostasy and brought God’s wrath in the form of the Babylonians and exile.

Actually, everything I have just described about the first edition ending with Josiah is called the “double redaction theory” of the DH. The original form of the theory as put forth by Martin Noth saw only one redaction, done in the exile, with the point that monarchy in general is bad. Noth saw no good kings: the people had been slated for exile ever since they asked for a king in the first place (and, admittedly, he has some strong support in 1 Sam 8 in Samuel’s speech form God criticizing the people for asking as a rejection of God himself). There are a lot of things that intersect here and give rise to numerous theories about, for instance, the relationships between the DH and the book of Jeremiah, which original prophet was operating on the ground at the time of Josiah’s sons and remained in the land after the majority population. For another instance, Isaiah 36–39 are roughly identical in content to 2 Kings 18–20. So, who borrowed from whom, the disciples of Isaiah’s school recording his words and forming his book, or the “author” responsible for 2 Kings?

But one way or another, all who propose any version of the DH theory, whether single or double redaction, see it as completed in the exile. So the people return from exile with a book roughly equivalent to Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, 1 and 2 Samuel, and 1 and 2 Kings. In this crowd is one or several members of a “priestly” circle who have also been carrying around their own small “library” of traditions, mostly from the Jahwist and Elohist sources, but also thought to go back to the original revelation to Moses by way of oral tradition. And this group develops a new project. Treating the book of Deuteronomy now as a final chapter (it ends with the people just outside the land but ready to go in under Joshua, just as the people in the exile are about to return to Judah from Babylon with the priestly class now leading), they fill in the story from Deuteronomy back to the creation of the world (again, from their received traditions, not whole-cloth invention). And this is the work that we now call the “Penteteuch” (the five-book) and ascribe to the authorship of Moses: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy.

There were other theories—major theories—along the way that are a challenge to the major narrative of composition I have just described (original D school does the DL under Hezekiah’s reign; immediate D descendents do the DH under Josiah’s reign with the DL on the front end as a preface; further descendents of D school in exile do a second edition with the Manasseh material and last four kings; after the exile, P combines his own material and J and E with Deuteronomy into our present Penteteuch). The most prominent one was called the “Hexateuch” theory, and its main opening advocate was Gerhard von Rad, the lad famous for using the Heilsgeschicte term. He said that it made no sense for an original major work to begin with the promise of the land to Abraham but end before they even enter the land in fulfillment. Therefore, the original major work must not have been a five-book, but rather a six-book, a hexateuch, that ended with Joshua finally in the land with the people. And that theory had a pretty good literary argument in support of its reading in the form of a very thorough chiasm covering those six books, and anybody who reads further in my blog or has read it before this should know how much I like chiastic readings. In the end though, I still side with the DL/DH theory and the theory of P doing what I call “the tetrateuch that never was.” There was a theory that what is now contained in the four books of  Genesis–Numbers was originally an independent work that was then appended to the front of the DL/DH combo. I tend not to buy this, but I do think the four books have a certain cohesion simply from being what was put together, from the start, to append to the front of the DL/DH, so I call it “the tetrateuch that never was.”

In all this, I always like to emphasize the centrality of Deuteronomy as a sort of hinge between these first to big major parts of the TaNaK: the last book of the Torah but also sort of (in its contents and in its compositional history, if those theories hold water) the preface of the Prophets.

Story Time

As with everything I do in writing posts on this blog, I try to tie things together with other central posts I have written on the blog in the ongoing (and will be until I die) project of trying to figure out how all the various parts of what I think of as “meaning in this world” fit together. Here it relates to the post I once wrote called “Story Time,” but not the particulars of that post (although I did use some biblical examples there to expound what I meant by kairos and chronos), mainly just in the importance of “stories,” of plots, to us as humans trying to process meaning.

The line that I used to give my undergrads was that “we’re all looking for a story.” There are two primary canons of the Old Testament: the Hebrew TaNaK, which stands for the Torah, Nevi’im, and the Ketuvim, the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings (the primary witness of the TaNaK canon being the Hebrew Masoretic Text, usually referred to as MT for short, in its primary witness, the text known as codex “Leningradensis”); and the Greek canon of the Septuagint, the translation commissioned by Alexander the Great sometime in the third century BC (usually referred to as LXX for short, which is the Roman numeral for 70, on the legend that 70 translators wore put in70 isolated cells for 70 days and all came up with exactly the same Greek translation).  The difference in them and their “stories” can be seen in the instance I gave above of the Deuteronomistic History. This is the books of Joshua, Judges, 1 and 2 Samuel, and 1 and 2 Kings. Notice … Ruth does not appear after Judges as it does in the Septuagint canon, and thus the Christian canon. In the TaNaK, Ruth is in the Writings, the third major section, not the Prophets, the second. The Septuagint has brought Ruth up to after Judges because that is where the content fits historically. Especially in the Christian use of this canon (there was a lot of politics going on: at the time of Christ, the two canons were equally respected in Palestine, but when Christianity began to use the LXX so prominently, the Jewish council of Javneh in AD 90 made a decisive move, at least in Palestine [versus other centers of diaspora Judaism, as in Greek Alexandria] to using only the Palestinian Hebrew canon to sharply distinguish themselves from Christianity), the story is of everything leading up to fulfillment in Christ, and therefore the canon that had everything in the order of the historical setting of its contents was the one used by Christianity.

The TaNaK canon has a different plot. It is the story of how a revelation and the establishment of a relationship moves out in concentric circles (as far as I know, this is my own formulation; if somebody has published it before, I apologize for not remembering or finding out and crediting them, and conversely, I take full responsibility for anything erroneous in this formulation, whether it be the core theory itself or the specific formulation). The Law is revealed to Moses and this establishes the relationship of the people of Israel to God. This happens as nomads, on the way to a home promised by God but still wanderers (I love that Chaim Potok titled his history of the Jewish people Wanderings). Then, they come into, conquer and inhabit, the land and become a kingdom, and the Prophets, the second major section, tells the story of that existence as a political nation being in relation to the other political nations around them, from Joshua’s conquest to the promise of dynasty to David to he splitting of the kingdom into two and to the conquering of northern kingdom by Assyria and the southern kingdom by Babylon. Then, once that political identity has been demoted by the loss of the throne in the exile, the Writings section is about the interaction with the broader world in the broader spectrum of thinking in things like the Wisdom literature.

My endpoint of that little talk when teaching undergrads was the historical critical methods as developed in a unique way in the nineteenth century. Those scholars were also looking for a story: How did this text that has had such an impact on me come to be within the religion in which it began and how did that religion feed into my own religion, which is the immediate path by which it has had so great an impact on me?

Unfortunately scholars from that school sometimes restrict it to this level, to a level of the “history of religions” approach, and very often with a strong temptation to seek it in a radically isolated psychology of religion way. I think that that is a very important level, and indeed I do think that it sells the project of studying the Bible short to neglect it. I think it is a valuable tool, but at the end of the day, I agree with Joseph Ratzinger / Benedict XVI that study of the Bible must go beyond this level and address the text as communication of record of revelation by God with a properly theological telos or goal. It must be taken as theo-logy, as word of God, based in the Word of God, the revelation of the Trinity in the second person, the Logos, Christ. Which is to say, as I emphasized toward the beginning of this post, that the Heilsgeschicte of the development and composition of the text must be put in the true context of the Heilsgeschicte of salvation and full revelation in Christ.

Star Wars and Literary Causality

So, I will start by saying that, while this post jumps off from the new Star Wars trilogy, it's not primarily about expositing material from those films. It's about the issue of referentiality or allusions in literature and an interesting idea that came to me in thinking about all of Last Jedi's allusions to the first trilogy, particularly but not solely to Empire Strikes Back, and the question of what forms of referntiality are ok in literature and what forms become derivative in the bad sense or self-referential in the bad sense, since one of the criticism's voiced about Force Awakens is that star killer base as the new death star is a form of self referentiality within the franchise that ruins any literary credibility of the film. I don't agree with that reading of Force Awakens, but that is sort of beside the point for this post because what this post is really about is intersecting the general practice of literary allusion with the ancient Aristotelean doctrine of fourfold causality that gets taken up most famously by Thomas Aquinas in his classic "proofs" for the existence of God.

The first thing I will do just as sort of basic material is list a few of the obvious allusions in Last Jedi (SPOILER ALERT!). There are escapes from attacks on bases reminiscent of the escape from the Hoth base at the beginning of Empire. There is a young Jedi seeking and receiving training from an old hermit jedi in a remote location (and one where the X-wing is submerged, although it is not brought back out in Last Jedi). Luke fades at the end of Last Jedi in the same way that Yoda fades at the end of Empire. Luke fades looking on a sunset of two suns, alluding to that iconic shot in New Hope where we see him looking out on the two-sun sunset in the desert (just as Rey's trek on her speeder bike when we meet her in Force Awakens has a long panoramic shot from a distance just like the one of Luke in his land speeder when we are first meeting him in New Hope). Not only does Last Jedi end with an escape on the Falcon; that escape on the Falcon has (and this is one that I thought of only on this third viewing, which is why I go to see films multiple times  in the theater, so that I catch more of these that arise only in the gripping experience of watching the film) a wounded person being cared for in the sleeping birth on the Falcon: in Empire, it is Luke with his hand cut off, and in Last Jedi, it is Rose being cared for by Finn. Lastly, when Luke enters the rebel hold-out base in his avatar form in Last Jedi, the visual (mysterious cloaked figure entering an underground base silhouetted by sunlight behind) is framed like his entering Jabba's palace in Return of the Jedi.

So, those are all a bunch of nice little literary allusions that call up all our warm nostalgia for the first trilogy (and I mean that only in a positive sense: I love the first trilogy and I love how they have worked so many literary allusions to it into the new films; I think it gives these films a real unique texture). Now my second stage in this exposition is to give a primer in the classic/Aristotelian doctrine of fourfold "causality." I put it in quotes because it is hard to understand from a modern mindset, in which we have really lost the concepts of all but "efficient" causality as any type of "cause" (and that is another part of the fun of a post like this for me if any strangers happen to stumble across my blog and posts in random searches, to spread a little of what I have learned in my own studies and broaden awareness of these philosophical concepts that have been so lost in the modern world).

So, the four "causes" are the "formal," the "material," the "efficient," and the "final." When teaching this material when covering Aquinas's proofs for the existence of God in a freshman-level intro-to-theology course, I found the easiest way to convey what is meant by "cause" for a very unfamiliar audience was to say to replace the word "cause" with the word "explanation," and I liked to use the table  or desk at the front of the classroom as my example. The "formal" cause/explanation of a table is the basic form of "tableness": a solid horizontal surface supported by vertical legs (or even a single leg, if we're going to allow the form of "pedestal" to be part of tableness, but we also might say pedestal has to be separate, and we might even want to say that it has to be three or more legs to be properly a "table" because, with a two-legged thing, the legs have to function like pedestals and its more like a double pedestal rather than a "table" proper ... there are various possibilities, but the point is that we're defining what we mean by the "form" of "table"). The "material" cause/explanation is the material of which this particular table is made: wood, metal, stone, or a combination of any of those (or that horrible glue-and-sawdust composite "wood" of which everything you buy at Walmart or Target is made and that only ever lasts through one assembling ... if you have to disassemble it to move, best just to buy a new one when you get to the new place). The "efficient" cause/explanation is the one that we moderns are used to thinking of as "cause": the carpenter or other tradesperson who made it. Lastly, the "final" cause/explanation is also called the "teleological" cause and really means the purpose for which it was made: to put things on while using them (materials on which we are working, plates and utensils and food dishes for a meal, and so on).

Now to the basic, distinct idea of this post. As I said, this is actually a pretty simple post that is just doing a little bit of exploration of applying the ancient concepts of causality to what we think of more as "literary" exposition these days, particularly in element of literary "allusions." The basic idea, in terms of the ancient idea of fourfold causality, is that the instance alluded to (Yoda fading) is (only) the "formal" cause of the instance in the present film in which the allusion is actually being done (Luke fading). It's not efficient causality because Luke having entered Jabba's palace in Return of the Jedi does not in any way mechanically necessitate him entering the abandoned rebel base in a particular way in Last Jedi. Mechanical/efficient causality is fine, and it is actually essential: "mechanical efficient causality as applied to a story" would actually be a pretty good working definition of "plot." But a story--a text--also needs texture, and that is what allusions provide, and that is a role for "formal" causality.

If I had to say I am making any point here, it would be that, while relying only on allusions and allegory (which I define as carrying over the plot wholesale, meaning also completely carrying over the palette of characters) winds up being derivative in a clearly bad way (but I think the new Star Wars avoids being derivative precisely by having a new slate of character types, because a plot is really things like "person A does thing X to person B," and you can't really carry over the plot if "person A" is not the exact same character type in work 2 as in work 1, for instance, the final confrontation of the next film will not be derivative of Return of the Jedi because you no longer have the three-tiered hierarchy of Sith overlord - Sith lord - child/underling of Sith Lord because Kilo and Rey have shared experiences as more like equals and they are the only two in the final confrontation, they have had conversations with and impact on each other in a way that never happened between Luke and Vader or Palpatine), referntiality and literary allusion in itself is not bad because it is really just an instance of "formal" causality in action. And the flip side is that the ancient model of fourfold causality might still have some use in discussing things like literature and elements in literature that we still find meaningful to explore, like allusions (particularly as allusions, rather than as mechanical plot elements).

Star Wars: Last Jedi review from viewing opening night

!SPOILER ALERT!

First of all: yes, it bore resemblances to Empire (escapes from bases while under assault, Jedi Temple island as Degoba, a master who evaporates, bringing before the master Sith). This was one of the things for which some panned Force Awakens, for being self referential (basically, the image of the star killer base being a repeat of the death star). That never really bothered me. The historical context has to be taken into account. Star Wars was a mythology for a generation, and Force Awakens was introducing it to a new generation, but one that is familiar with it as a second generation, so a little bit of that referencing being in the film as a tribute to the first trilogy is acceptable. Basically, star killer base or death star … they’re both the BFG (from the old days of online/first-person-shooter gaming: big freaking gun) trope, which a million others have done too (including the dreadknot ship in Last Jedi, although the actual form itself does not reference anything outside of being bigger badder star destroyers). I was much more interested to see if they made something new going foreward from that tribute, meaning this film was going to be much more crucial to whether or not I thought they were doing something good and redeeming the travesty of the prequels. And, based in some of the things I say below, I think that they have. I think that what I’ll say about having a new cast of character types changes things because it changes the narrative, and I think that that is the important thing (for instance, you never have Luke facing a counterpart at more of a same level at the end of New Hope the way you have Ray facing Kylo at the end of Force awakens because you don’t have a counterpart aspect to any character).

It was fun seeing Benicio del Toro in a Star Wars film.

The saber fight with Kylo and Ray against the guards is simply pretty bad ass.

The broken light saber is nice on three counts: in the first KotR game at least building your own light save was a stage you had to pass, building your own light saber; it mirrors Luke building a new saber in Jedi: and it symbolizes Kylo’s theme of letting go of the past. And probably one should interpret whatever Ray has to do now as having to adapt that theme in a new positive way. Overall, I think they have worked the light saber symbol well: the continuity of it being originally Anakin’s and now having it’s breaking symbolizing a forced (pun intended) break with the past, as well as the fact that, at the end of the day, there is some basic incompatibility between the sides.

The allusion to Return of the Jedi in Luke’s avatar entrance into the underground fortress was a nice touch (it looks like when he entered Jabba’s palace), and the reappearance of old man Luke after the avatar was, at least for me, moving … it sort of put new lines of character into the face.

They managed to keep Luke in character better than I thought they would, same as they did with Han Solo, with whom I thought they might have had a hard time pulling it off after decades of playing a stock type that is fairly different from Solo/Frisco-Kid/etc.

Possible weak points:

Could Kylo have fooled Snoke? Answer: it’s definitely a possible weak point, but that would be based whether being that strong and controlled is consistent with how they have portrayed Kylo up til now, because they do provide a plausible mechanics of mental cloaking which is that he focuses his force will, or force intention, whatever it is that you want to call it that Snoke is reading, on “turning the light saber toward my enemy to kill them by igniting it, like with Han” thing, which fits Snoke as well.

Could Luke have projected that well? Answer: yeah, it’s plausible, as it is their own mythological place and they have established mind tricks and force vision across distance [Snoke connecting Ray and Kylo] or whatever “Star Wars sounding force power names” you want to put on it, if you’ve played the KotR games and are into thinking what different force powers are and can do etc … I mean, he’s on the ground of the first Jedi temple, that has be a big force power booster right there, and then he does the Yoda vanish, which could be having put forth all that force power that it totally consumed him, and all those things that people who like to think about the “physics” of magical/force type worlds like to think about … I think it’s believable as a consistent part of the construct of that world.

Now the serious stuff.

The thing most impressing to me is that they have set up the third movie to really be its own new Star Wars story by unmooring it in at least ways: No more back story theories; the original trio is dead; a new palette of character TYPES (not just individually new character, but new character types). Those are what follows and then there is a big long belabored nerdy thing at the end. So, for here, before I start that, lest I lose anybody with my belaboring, I’ll say that the heart of my review on the first viewing is that it is good, among many thing, for unmooring this trilogy at this point. It allows continuity with the first trilogy, but now it also allows the finale to be something really its own as well.

1.       No back story intrigue: One of the tropes of “Star Wars” when defined as the larger phenomenon, including fandom, is theorism. The same thing happened with Harry Potter coming up to book 7, and I think it’s a fine thing and I hope that nobody’s feelings got hurt by theorism being so roundly rejected by Last Jedi. But I think that it’s clear that there will be no “theories” proven by the end and that that line of secret connections and ciphers just isn’t what they’re doing (at least not Johnson, who lists on the credits as both writer and director). The two biggies on which a lot of youtube time was spent coming up to Last Jedi and ever since Force Awakens are the questions of who Ray’s parents are and who Snoke is. In addition to the obvious possibility that Ray is Luke’s daughter, there were theories that Ray is the granddaughter of Palpatine (I have to admit wondering about this one when watching Force Awakens again the night before because they based this theory on the argument that her saber fighting style relies heavily on a two-handed high thrust that has only ever been seen by Darth Sidious, and it’s true that she uses that move a lot, and it’s not that ciphers make stories bad, just that when there is nothing more than ciphers, it’s a bad story, and I could see a possibility of a hat-tip cipher in the form of saber fighting style … authors do give cipher clues, like Rowling using six mentions in book 6 of the first ever potions lesson in book 1 as a clue that Snape was stoppering Death for Dumbledore, since Snape mentioned “putting a stopper in death” in that lesson in book 1 … other people did that sleuth work between books 6 and 7; I’m not that clever on that sort of thing by half), and theories that Snoke was Darth Plagus and that Plagus was Palpatine’s mentor, or that Snoke was the very first Jedi ever and secretly lasted all this time, or that Snoke was Mace Windu secretly back from the dead and gone dark. All that goes out the window. Ray’s parents were no-names who sold her into work to get money to drink, and it doesn’t matter who Snoke is/was because … he’s dead. I honestly hope that those who spent so much time on their videos on youtube aren’t offended, because they seem like really good people and they’re upbeat in attitude, and believe it or not (and this was especially the case coming up to Harry Potter book 7), I think the prediction game is one valid avenue by which people process what is there in the books/movies that are already out (making a future story as a way to figure out what you think is important in a present story, and even if the future story is the story of the future revelation of the past, the theory often involves the revelation playing some role in the actual future plot) … you just have to let go of thinking of being “right” about the prediction as only if what you predicted is what winds up materially happening.

2.       First cast dead: This is now the case de facto, with Fisher having passed away, and they’ll have to have some exposition of the Leah’s death in the third movie, but officially all three are gone, and that played into the present plot in big way, albeit maybe subtle: Kylo killing Han and Luke spending his last in the avatar fight that enabled the rebels to get away on the Falcon, and I am guessing that they were saving Leah’s death for the third film on a plan of one each of them dying in one each of the films in this trilogy … which is a nice tie out. Now they’ll have to do her death through exposition and the plot of Kylo and Ray squaring off in whatever form that takes will be the sole focus. But they still got to keep a sort of structure of one each of the original trio dying in one each of the films of this trilogy, which kind of gives a cool structure feel to the relationship of this trilogy to the original, justifying having these be 7, 8, and 9.

3.       Different slate of character types/tropes. … No easy connections

a.       Luke from trilogy 1 is split out between Ray and Po, but Ray is also a good pilot, but she’s also kind of a new Han, so a mix of Han and Luke from the first trilogy (a la the main protagonist in Space Balls) … the splitting and combining characters during compositional history or between one work and another that maybe borrows elements is pretty common. For instance: the Aragorn character used to be two characters, Aragorn the king and Trotter the hobbit. Most importantly, it’s not just a matter of two plus two = four; it’s the “whole that is more than the sum of it’s parts” thing. Instead of just being the hidden king, Aragorn is now the king hidden particularly in the disguise of somebody who is itinerant, quasi-outcast, and thought of as suspicious. In Person of Interest, the fact that Jonathan Nolan was writing two characters that are basically the two parts of Batman (which trilogy he cowrote with his brother Chris), the recluse millionaire and the man in the suit, the fact that they are now separate characters means that he has some possibilities for exploring the tension in new ways (this didn’t happen as much, just I think mainly due to the difference between the TV mode of storytelling and the big screen, but the potential of new character arcs that embody character aspects and handle them in new ways is always there with splitting and joining source character types).

b.       Finn could map a little bit to Han in amoral (not immoral) nature vis a vis the resistance, but he’s really a new character type altogether … the character escaping from BEING a bad guy.

c.        The big one is the relationship between the main protagonist and antagonist coming into the third and final film. In Jedi it was a three-tier structure: Vader is Luke’s father and both Vader and Emperor are over him, and they have had no real contact with him before final confrontations (revelation of being Father at end of 2 and fight on the bridge in 3), whereas Kylo and Ray are on more of equal plane and they have shared

Having a different palette of character types changes the narrative, and the narrative is a big key for me when considering whether something is derivative or how derivative it is or how much that impacts the quality (the initial question of whether Force Awakens was self-referential to a level that ruined it). There were only ever three original ideas in the world: creation, sin, and redemption … and the only one of those for which humans can claim authorship is the middle one. So everything is going to be derivative to some degree, but there is such a thing as a difference between creative derivation and cheap derivation.

The question of complete self referentiality with the new SW trilogy to me flows along similar lines to those of looking at allegory. Tolkien was known for disliking allegory, although in reality, I think he thought it was alright in and of itself, a sometimes useful tool but a limited one, and what he was really against was seeing it as the defining core of “narrative art,” which was a very key term for him (in the essay on Fairy Stories, he all but pits “narrative art” directly against modern drama in the Shakespearean vein, and I say “all but” because I think he sticks within his real concern which is that, again, like allegory, he sees drama as one among many useful tools in doing narrative art, but a limited tool and definitely, like allegory, not the core of narrative art, and what irks him, I think, is that, whether or not it is the only effect of Shakespeare or whether there are good effects of Shakespeare alongside this one, it is still definitely a big negative impact of Shakespeare that everybody now thinks of drama as the core of narrative art). I once saw a debate between two sort of niche celebrities concerning the validity of Peter Jackson’s LotR films, and the one guy (who was defending them) got sort of backed into a bit of a corner in a Q and A portion of the debate on the question of allegory and Tolkien’s dislike and what allegory actually is and he was sort of stumbling around not coming up with a coherent definition of allegory, and I think it has to do with not getting that, when Tolkien made such a big deal of “narrative art,” this was a very precise formulation: he didn’t say “literary art,” he said “narrative art.” Narrative is about plot, and I think it’s a pretty succinct and accurate working definition of “allegory” to say that allegory is when you copy the plot. For example, the scene in the book in which the fellowship arrive at the back door of Moria and go through and Gandalf falls and the rest go on to Lothlorien is a direct lift of Moses forfeiting entry into the promise land because he struck the rock in Numbers 21 (I’ve not heard anybody else say this except myself, but I haven’t read broadly in secondary lit on it, but the correlations seem to many and to clear to deny) … but I think Tolkien is doing anything but an allegory of Moses, and I think a key factor is that he is not straight copying the plot (there are two strikings of stone/Rock in Moria; Gandalf’s action in the second directly causes the ability of his friends to enter the golden land, whereas Moses action simply bars his own entry; and it is Gandalf’s friends who get to go, rather than a next generation [Moses symbolized the first generation, both of them stuck outside the land, the first generation being stuck outside because they failed to trust God via Joshua and Caleb in Numbers 13 and it was Joshua rather than Moses who lead the second generation into Canaan after the 40 years wandering that Tolkien incorporated in the fact that Moria is 40 miles from east gate to west door … a fact of which I think Fran Walsh, and thus Peter Jackson, are aware, because I can see no other reasoning to changing Gandalf’s “we stick to this course west of the Misty Mountains for many days and many miles” in the book to “forty days” in the movie except as a bit of a hat tip to Tolkien’s artistry from being aware of some of the ways he used sources; I think the same thing is true of having Saruman say that the nine riders crossed the fjords of Isen on midsummer’s eve, because the appendix clear that they could not have done that on that day because on that day, they were using an attack to retake Osgiliath as a mask for themselves setting out to seek the ring, the thing being that, in both book and movie, the riders hit a definitive stage in a quest for the ring on midsummer’s, and why even bother putting midsummer’s eve in a screenplay unless you know that it’s symbolic but in a way you couldn’t do well on screen, so you’re tipping your hat]).

Long and short of why bring all that up here is that, with a new character palette in Last Jedi, I think it is difficult to press claims of being derivative very far because, as with allegory, the chances of “derivation” in a negative sense decrease when you’re not copying plot, and you can straight copy plot only to the extent that you have the same palette of characters because plot involves specific things doing specific actions, and if the things are different, so is the plot. You can criticize it on other aspects, to be sure, but criticizing it as particularly derivative gets harder when the plot is different (although you do have some who, I think, try to use this very fact as an excuse to claim non-derivation by basically mashing up several different sources from which they are merely derivative so that it doesn’t follow any of them exactly, but my personal opinion on the ones I have seen—namely, Eragon, the Magicians, and American Gods—is that they come out being poor art at best).

  

But to close with a Star Wars: Last Jedi example of the difference in narrative: in Empire, the saber was merely a loss, and it was the father/over figure who did it … here it is completely broken and it as was the two (sort of) equals who did it together in their struggle to get it.