Response to C. C. Pecknold: The Unity of
Scriptural Reasoning
Martin Kavka
Florida State University
I'm grateful for the invitation to respond to C.
C. Pecknold's paper in the forum of the Journal
for Scriptural Reasoning. I should say right off
the bat that I am not an Augustine expert. Indeed,
when it comes to Augustine, I'm barely even
competent, and I have made no attempt to brush up on
Augustine in writing my response, because others will
have more cogent things to say in this regard. But
there are other important issues in Pecknold's paper
besides that of Augustine's performance of scriptural
reasoning. In fact, I think these are more important
issues, and these issues are extremely important,
important not least for our performance of scriptural
reasoning today.
Before we start to read scripture together, the
problem which we bring to the text must be as clearly
articulated as possible. The problem which Pecknold
is trying to solve is that of whether there is
anything that a diverse group of people hold together
in common. The crux of the question as to whether the
"glorious American experiment" is possible or rather
falls just short of being a sham—what Pecknold
delineates as the debate between Jeffrey Stout and
Stanley Hauerwas—is the issue of whether unity is
possible. But to inquire about this issue requires
that we know what unity means, and here Pecknold
begins with one position and ends with another.
Luckily enough, the two senses of unity which
Pecknold invokes are the same two senses that the
theorist of cultural pluralism Horace Kallen invoked
in several of his writings, but most succinctly in a
brief essay from 1946 entitled "The Meanings of
'Unity' Among the Sciences, Once More." In talking
about the unity of the sciences in terms of "a rule
of laisser faire, of a free and
uncoordinated trade among the sciences," Kallen
cautions his audience from interpreting unity in what
might be the most instinctive fashion.
A customary synonym for them [the unities of
science] is integration, with its
implication of numerical wholeness, of seamless,
static totality without fissures, without movement,
without conflict. The synonym I would prefer is
orchestration, with its implication of
diversities of instruments and parts, of movements
and pauses, of dissonances and discords as well as
harmonies, or sequences whose every new item
suffuses without deindividualizing all that have
gone before.[1]
The second sentence of Pecknold's essay, which
imagines America as centered around "the desire to
unite multiple faiths in the one, true democratic
faith," is explicitly integrative. He writes of
American democracy as uniting all faiths into
one, melting them down into their pure essence. Yet
in his last paragraph, it has become clear that the
model of American democracy that is informed by
religion is an orchestrative one, a performance of a
"politics of multiple traditions committed to
enriching, broadening, and deepening political
discussion through their own authoritative sources
and reasoning." This is not even a uniting of
multiple faiths around something, much less
into something; Pecknold posits no overlap between
multiple traditions. Indeed, the content of religious
traditions is almost completely bracketed. Simply by
virtue of referring to God as the ground of all
immanence, and thereby of political orders, religious
traditions can commingle in the public sphere so as
to steer secularized democratic states away from the
precipice of making the state into an idol. Or so
Pecknold hypothesizes.
Augustine is supposed to be the prooftext that
this hypothesis can be true. Nevertheless, the way
that Pecknold reads Augustine, as teaching the
glorious state of Rome that "glory finds its true
reference only through the humility of Jesus Christ,"
muddles the issue of unity again. Does Augustine's
askesis really have orchestrative results? Does it
allow for the dissonance that is part of multiple
traditions speaking in the public sphere? Does it
posit that political culture has "multiple sources"
(including various religious traditions) in the way
that Pecknold envisages a truer democracy doing? I
think not, at least if his reading of Augustine is
correct. If glory has one and only one true
reference, then the quest for orchestration is a
sham.
However, let's step back from the grand scheme of
religion and public life for a moment. Let's stick
with the scene of scriptural reasoning in which most
of the readers of this journal have participated. (If
you haven't, contact us!) The thought that scriptural
reasoning could be centered around a semiotics in
which something such as glory has one and only one
true reference is, to my mind, an especially
dispiriting one. If we all came to the text with such
exclusive logics, scriptural reasoning would be
nothing more than a series of members of one
tradition explaining the truth of their texts to
members of the other two traditions around the table.
While this might represent some slight improvement
over the perennialist stereotype of 1960s interfaith
dialogue, it thankfully remains the case that
scriptural reasoning is not like this. Members of the
same tradition can get into heated debate about how a
text refers. I, as a Jew, can be called up short by
hearing a Muslim give a particularly insightful
interpretation of a text. Scriptural reasoning works
precisely because it is uncoordinated; the text ends
up wherever the group of readers takes it. (Of
course, there are limits. No one will convert in the
middle of a scriptural-reasoning session. But the
latitude for uncoordination is quite wide even
without that prospect.) If scriptural reasoning has a
curriculum, it is to teach us that sacred texts are,
to invoke Pecknold's citation of Sheldon Wolin,
fugitive. They withdraw from us as we question them,
they approach us in new shapes in the course of
discussion, only to withdraw again. Even after
spending several meetings on a group of texts, over a
period of several months, we would hesitate to say
that we had clarified the text. At the most, we might
say that we had discovered in the texts some possible
strategies for problem-solving, and that these
strategies had only come along by virtue of the
orchestrative harmonies (and dissonances!) of the
readings around the scriptural-reasoning table. This
is its own kind of askesis, which not only teaches
humility, but also offers the hope of grace—the
fugitive nature of our texts verifies the
transcendence that is their content.
At this point, I fear that I have implied that
scriptural reasoning is a particularly un-Christian
kind of activity. I don't believe it is (although not
being a Christian, I cannot testify to this one way
or another). Indeed, I think that the uncoordination
of scriptural reasoning is embodied in the very
verses from Paul's epistle to the Philippians that
Pecknold describes as underlying Augustinian
politics. Let's cite most of them again:
Let the same mind be in you that was in
Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God as something to be
exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a
slave, being born in human likeness. And being found
in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient
to the point of death—even death on a cross.Therefore
God also highly exalted him and gave him the name
that is above every name, so that at the name of
Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth
and under the earth. (Philippians 2:5-10)
The kenosis or self-emptying of God the Father is
magnificent in part because it muddies the entire
metaphysical map. The transcendent God does not
simply transform God's self into immanent form, but
retains transcendence in immanence, and this is for
Christians the most conclusive evidence for
transcendence. The strangest word for me in these
verses is the διο, the "therefore" that begins
Philippians 2:9. Transcendence transcends
because it is immanent. What could possibly be
more uncoordinated and more radical? (Indeed, the
entire oeuvre of Thomas J. J. Altizer is
committed to unraveling the philosophical stakes of
this central Christian claim.) But what is at stake
in this claim is that transcendence means nothing
without immanence, because transcendence in the
Christian narrative refers to immanence. Because
"Christ" refers to, among other syntagms, "the one
who was crucified," the boundary between
transcendence and immanence is anything but stable.
And because Good Friday always recurs in the
Christian liturgical calendar, a Christian cannot say
that the boundary is permanently re-ordered on Easter
Sunday; if it is, this ordering lasts only through
the Eastertide season, and then a Christian
liturgically returns to ordinary time.
To return to the Augustinian atlas—but not the
Augustinian politics—that Pecknold has introduced
into the issue of religion and public life, I suggest
that Philippians 2 can be read as indicating that
Jerusalem means nothing without Babylon. Jerusalem
only transcends because Christ has commingled with
another city that is deprived of the fullness of God
(i.e. it works with another referential system that
make no mention of Jesus as Christ). Pecknold has
correctly claimed that Rome is not totally other than
Jerusalem. But Philippians may very well go farther
than Augustine does, in suggesting that we cannot say
in advance that Babylon is not totally other than
Jerusalem. Because of the Roman cross, which, because
of the 'lust of rule' that the institution of
crucifixion represents, never ceases to be
Babylonian, therefore (διο) Christ is exalted.
So if there is to be "a conversation between
political cultures that have access to deep sources"
as Pecknold imagines, this need not be a
unidirectional conversation in which Christians steer
America toward Jerusalem and away from Babylon, a
conversation in which America only utters the short
sentences of Socrates' victims in the early Platonic
dialogues.Christians can be humbled not only by the
judgment of God, but also by "the judgment of the
other," by multiple representatives of other cities
that have their own analogues to the Christian system
of reference. Pecknold acknowledges this all too
briefly in the penultimate paragraph of his paper,
but without emphasizing this aspect of politics, his
eschatological vision of democracy threatens to
become a fugitive that leaves no tracks for us to
pursue.
Finally, I want to address Pecknold's belief that
both Stout and Hauerwas are correct on the issue of
the relationship between religion and the public
life. I have to confess that I am absolutely puzzled
by his claim here. If one were to choose both
democracy and a robust ecclesia, the logic would work
as follows. Insofar as one of Stout's heroes in
Democracy and Tradition, Walt Whitman, wrote
of the poet of democracy that "he sees eternity in
men and women"[2], he (Whitman) also
implicitly knew of the complex relationship between
Jerusalem and Babylon to which Philippians 2 attests.
So there is no reason why the choice for Stout cannot
be a choice for the Christian ecclesia.On the other
hand, the logic of Philippians suggests that the
ecclesia has no fixed boundaries; it is not
necessarily any different, in content or in forms of
reasoning, than the "secular" culture in which it
finds itself. So there is no reason why the choice
for the ecclesia cannot be a choice for Stout. But
notice that I did not say that there is no reason why
the choice for Hauerwasian ecclesiology cannot be a
choice for Stout. It is Hauerwas who insists on the
firmness of the boundary between an unfragmented
Christian narrative and a fragmented culture. So the
choice is not between Stout and Hauerwas. The choice
is rather between Stout, scriptural reasoning, and a
reading of Philippians 2 on one side—all of which are
expressions of a glorious uncoordinated trade between
voices—and Hauerwas on the other. To conceptualize
the choice in any other way is to be distracted from
the matter at hand.
Now I admit that there may be better internal
textual reasons to read Philippians 2 in another way.
I even readily admit that I omitted any reference to
Phil. 2:11 ("and every tongue should confess that
Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the
Father") in order to avoid problems, simply because
I'm not sure whether reading that verse
eschatologically is valid. That would require
Pecknold and I to sit down together with the Greek
and talk, or at least have an intense email
conversation. I do hope we do this, not only to
deepen our friendship, but also because I dearly hope
that I can read the Philippians text in the manner
that I have briefly articulated above. If not, then
the activity of scriptural reasoning becomes evidence
only for a particularly uninteresting kind of
unity—the unity of its participants' own nerdy love
of complex texts—and not for the unity that attests
to a fugitive transcendence that can give confidence
to eschatological hopes. And if that is the case,
then the knot of religion and public life will only
grow tighter as various voices of integration seek to
amass more and more power. It threatens to choke us
all.
ENDNOTES
[1] Horace M. Kallen, "The
Meanings of 'Unity' Among The Sciences, Once More,"
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 6:4
(June 1946), 495-96.
[2] Jeffrey Stout,
Democracy and Tradition (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2004), 41.
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