Christian Figural Reading and the Fashioning of Identity.
Davies, Lloyd G.
By John David Dawson. Berkeley: University of California Press,
2002. ISBN 0-520-22630-5. Pp. x + 302. $50.00.
One of the great surprises for any Christian upon exploring the
intricacies of Jewish textual study and halakhic observance is that
practices so different from those of Christianity can nevertheless
derive from the same source--the Hebrew Scriptures. Latent within the
unity of that text are the divergent ways of normative Judaism and
Christianity, ways of reading and living that have been richly
productive of cultures so distinct that sometimes it seems the two
communities exist in completely different worlds. And yet, beneath the
difference, or prior to it, there are the same Hebrew words, words that
both traditions accept as sacred, divinely inspired, constitutive of
their lives-and words that, despite their sameness, mark the very origin
and locus of difference.
Interpretive disagreement between the Jewish and Christian
traditions regarding their shared Scriptures has provoked much
antagonism throughout history, with often murderous results. But it has
also forged a relationship and commonality--a kinship--that, in the
sobering aftermath of the Holocaust, has led to a new kind of dialogue,
as between equals, over those differences. Today, in an alliance against
a newly militant Islam on the one hand and a frivolous, secular
entertainment culture on the other, serious Christians and Jews show new
promise of achieving a mutual appreciation for the different ways their
traditions have opened up the meaning of a common Scripture. John David
Dawson's Christian Figural Reading and the Fashioning of Identity,
despite its often plodding academic style, is a timely contribution to
this ongoing dialectic between Jewish and Christian hermeneutics; it
deserves careful attention by anyone wishing to understand more fully
what is at stake in the way Christians read the Scriptures.
Dawson writes at an historical moment when the legitimacy of the
Christian Bible--Old and New Testaments--as a morally viable, coherent
unity is under attack. The attack revolves around the charge of
supersessionism--the idea that the New Testament interprets the Old
Testament in such a way that Christianity supersedes Judaism, that
Christian Israel replaces Jewish Israel. In a supersessionist
hermeneutics there is no place for a distinct Jewish presence within a
newly constituted Israel, for "Judaism has been completely
displaced from the Christian Bible" (2). For some critics of
Christianity the necessary theological preconditions for the Holocaust
are already set in the New Testament, and Christian history need only
run its course from Paul, the Apostle of "neither Jew nor
Greek" to its consummation in Hitler's final solution to the
problem of Jewish existence. Dawson believes that this disturbing
critique of Christianity should be taken seriously, but he also
recognizes that the idea of a transformed Israel "seems central to
classic Christian self-identification" (3). Can Christianity
maintain its own sense of participating in a divinely inaugurated
transformation of Israel's history, while at the same time escaping
from the charge that it denies to Jews an independent identity? Is a
non-supersessionist Christian reading of the Hebrew Scriptures possible?
Christian Figural Reading and the Fashioning of Identity is an
extended investigation into just such a hermeneutic rehabilitation of
traditional Christian reading, focusing on the classic form of
interpretation known as "figural" or "typological"
Dawson's task is to demonstrate that Christian figural
interpretation of the Bible does not necessarily lead to non-literal,
allegorical readings that efface Jewish existence. This is a defensive
book, particularly in its response to Daniel Boyarin's Jewish
critique of Pauline hermeneutics, but Dawson also revisits Erich
Auerbach and Hans Frei, giving voice to their secular and Christian
points of view as well. Interwoven in Dawson's discussion of each
of these modern thinkers are the ideas of Origen, the major
representative of Alexandrian allegorical hermeneutics and one of the
founding fathers of Christian interpretation. Origen provides Dawson the
historical distance to bring modernist assumptions about reading and
textuality into question; for instance, Dawson makes a distinction
between textuality and historical action, claiming that true Christian
reading is not exclusively about texts and their meanings but rather
concerns the "intelligibility of a divine performance" (11).
Dawson's subtle, sustained discussions of Boyarin, Auerbach,
and Frei are excellent introductions to each of these thinkers. In his
analysis of Boyarin's A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of
Identity (1994), Dawson uses Boyarin's arguments against Paul to
highlight the difficulties that Christian readers face in answering
charges of supersessionism. Dawson's reading of Auerbach reminds us
once again of the brilliance of the twentieth century's preeminent
literary scholar. Auerbach's "Figura" from Scenes from
the Drama of European Literature (1984), is the crucial text in this
discussion, but Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western
Literature (1953) shows its central relevance, both aesthetically and
historically, for understanding what Dawson calls "a unified
European humanistic culture" a culture "rooted in a uniquely
religious mode of representing reality--the Christian tradition of
figural interpretation of the Bible" (84). Dawson uses Frei's
The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative (1974) to show that modern
Christianity has good reason to avoid allegory: just as Christian
allegorists once neglected the literality of the Old Testament in favor
of its fulfilled "meaning" in the New Testament, so too
modernists can subvert the literality of New Testament accounts of
events such as the resurrection of Jesus by substituting an allegorical
meaning for the literal sense of the story. To Frei (like the New
Critics), the meaning of a text is inseparable from its narrative form,
and thus he cautions against the "subversion by meaning" of
the Gospel narrative (160)--that is to say, the story of Jesus always
takes precedence over any possible meaning. When meaning can be attained
independently, narrative loses its revelatory power to communicate real
knowledge; instead, the text simply acts as a stimulus to thought, and
meaning becomes "indistinguishable from one's own
all-too-human subjectivity" (187).
Dawson maintains a running dialogue with Origen throughout his
book, for it is Origen's emphasis on spiritual transformation that
Dawson finds central to Christian figural reading: "Where Origen
most excels, [...] and where each of our three modern thinkers falls
short, is in his awareness that classical Christian life is a life of
continual transformation of what already is into something
different" (214). Dawson maintains that this desire for a new life
need not involve the replacement, rejection, or repudiation of the old;
instead, Christian figural imagination, like historical narrative, takes
on a structure in which both past and future form a coherent whole as
one discovers one's identity through development and change.
In these readings of Boyarin, Auerbach, Frei, and Origen,
Dawson's own voice is curiously muted; one could desire a more
personal, even polemical, engagement with the issues he raises rather
than his continual deference to other authors. Because of his reticence,
it is difficult to know Dawson's own position when, for instance,
he notes in a discussion of Frei that "Christians insist that the
figural reading of the Old Testament is precisely the reading that
extends the meaning of Hebrew Scripture when that meaning is adequately
grasped" (163-64). Here the divide between Christianity and Judaism remains obscured behind a kind of hermeneutic blindness, which is
linked, ironically, to the Christian insight into the linear form of
narrative. Christian insight into story centers on the Gospel accounts
of divine acts, rendered intelligible as the anticipated fulfillment of
earlier prefigurations; the meaning of the Gospels depends upon a
figural reading of both texts--Old and New Testament in their literal
sense. This commitment to narrative realism is achieved, however, at a
twofold cost: New Testament fulfillment tends to overshadow Old
Testament type/figure, and the linear structure that moves from figure
to fulfillment gives to biblical narrative a dangerous precedence over
biblical law.
Christian figural reading does indeed extend and grasp a narrative
meaning in the Hebrew Scriptures, but to assume that "the meaning
of Hebrew Scripture" can be grasped adequately through a figural
reading alone is to ignore the grasp of meaning in the Hebrew Scriptures
that is extended properly only in rabbinic Judaism. Christians who
restrict Old Testament meaning to a narrative culminating in the Gospel
story fail to grasp adequately the meaning of halakhah, which, like
narrative, is also inseparable from its performance. Dawson charges
Boyarin atone point with "displacing an activity with a
meaning" (31), but Christians too readily assume that the Jewish
activity of observing the law can be legitimately displaced through a
recognition of its inner, spiritual meaning--a classic, insidious
instance of "subversion by meaning" Just as the meaning of
resurrection is dependent, finally, upon its actual, bodily performance,
so too the meaning of circumcision requires a literal and physical
cutting. I suspect a Christian hermeneutic tends to reduce biblical
narrative itself to a mythos of sweeping historical patterns, while
neglecting the ordinary, mundane activities performed by each individual
in his or her own particular life. But a concern for story is,
ultimately, inseparable from what Wordsworth calls those "little,
nameless, unremembered, acts of kindness and of love"--actions that
are the very focus of halakhic observance. The embodied meaning of
Torah, as it is enacted in the halakhic life, provides an invaluable
counterweight against the tendencies in figural reading for a
disembodied meaning to supplant and subvert the literality of Scripture.
If the divergence between Judaic and Christian readings of Hebrew
Scriptures revolves around the importance of narrative for Christianity,
so that historically "Christianity ended up privileging haggadah
over halakhah" (173), Christianity nevertheless remains
covenantally bound to a Scripture that also can be read halakhically. It
is incumbent upon Christians, as responsible readers of the Hebrew
Scriptures, to explore their relationship to Judaic reading and to
"return to the linguistic forms--midrash, peshat that characterize
the biblical reading of [Judaism]"; in so doing they will face what
Frei calls "the unpredictable consequences of learning the
`language' of the Jewish tradition" (174). Dawson states, in a
rare moment of self-disclosure," I suspect that few contemporary
Christians even begin to encounter, respect, and engage Judaism at the
level of concreteness to which the figural imagination of the New
Testament itself commits them" (217). While this book does not
itself undertake such an engagement with Judaism, it persuasively argues
for its necessity and lays the preliminary groundwork. One can only hope
that Dawson himself is committed to that project; if so, we can look
forward to a sequel exploring how the figural imagination of
Christianity intersects with the halakhic imagination of Judaism.
Lloyd G. Davies
Western Kentucky University