From Umberto Eco’s

I put “actually” and “history” in quotation marks because it is a key theological conviction of mine—following many others before me, including Cavanaugh, Frei, Barth—that to compare Scripture with “real history” is a mistake, insofar as we invest the “real history” with the value of being “true” when in fact it is Scripture which should be definitive of what we count as “historical.” That is, the true history is the narrative of Holy Scripture. We must understand the world as the world of the Bible. We live within this narrative , the narrative of God’s sovereign and gracious encounter with humanity in Jesus Christ. We must allow ourselves to be re-scripted and re-narrated according to the theological imagination of Scripture, rather than seek to conform Scripture to an external account of history which is itself an alternative imagination ungoverned by God’s self-revelation. Be that as it may, there is still value in historical criticism, because even if we recognize the priority and centrality of Scripture as divine narrative, we cannot isolate the text of Scripture from the cultural-historical context in which it arose. In other words, we have to differentiate between the theological narrative of divine-human history shaped by Scripture and the human, historical text which functions as the bearer of this narrative. To critically analyze the text does not jeopardize the authority of its witness to God’s self-revelation; it remains a providentially elected and sanctified witness to the narrative of the covenantal fellowship between God and humanity.

God in Action

God

in

revelation

God

In

revelation

in

in

revelation

in

God

Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry. When we consider a book, we mustn’t ask ourselves what it says but what it means, a precept that the commentators of the holy books had very clearly in mind.

possible existence

hope

love

creatio ex nihilo

Theology must establish that the radical nothingness of Good Friday is the other dimension of the being of the world. . . . Theology does this by establishing the distinction between the possible and the impossible as incomparably more fundamental than the distinction between the actual and the non-yet-actual. Where the distinction between the possible and the impossible is made, we are concerned with truth (as opposed to actuality). The distinction between the possible and the impossible is incomparably more fundamental because it concerns the distinction between God and the world. (110-11)

From a theological point of view, “hope in” a particular future worldly actuality is the exact opposite of the kind of hope in God alone which hopes for a future for the world. The future actuality of the world is not a matter of hope ; it is made . It belongs to the context of worldly action; it is a matter of calculation and cannot do with hopes any more than we can work with hope in constructing an aeroplane or in pursuing historical-critical inquiry into the past [!!]. The future actuality of the world is something which can be made. . . . Over against this kind of hope in the future actuality of the world which is always grounded in the world’s actuality, the justified hope in God alone for themselves and for the world. In such hope believers are righteous, for in it faith becomes an event which alone in this world participates in God’s distinction between the possible and the impossible. . . . By faith in the word of the cross, the world, through those who believe, comes to share in the divine distinction of the possible from the impossible. . . . Where the absolutizing of the dimension of actuality is overcome . . . the world is more than its own habitus; it is creation. (114-15)

In essence, the consequence of what has been proposed is the dismantling of the claim that actuality is prior to possibility, since the distinction between the possible and the impossible . . . is more necessary than that between the actual and the not-yet-actual. In actuality that which is already actual is at work as an act, which as such always proceeds from the past. . . . But in the distinction between the possible and the impossible, being is distinguished from nothingness. Such a distinction comes out of the future. . . . When the possible is distinguised [ sic ] from the impossible in such a way that the possible becomes possible and the impossible becomes impossible, then there occurs something like an origin—whether it be an origin in the beginning or at the end: in both cases it is God’s freedom as love which makes the possible to be possible. In the very concept of creation it is essential to set God’s love over against his omnipotence. God’s omnipotence concerns actuality, God’s love concerns possibility. God’s love concerns the being which is in becoming.



. . . [T]hat which God’s free love makes possible has ontological prevalence over that which God’s omnipotence makes actual through our acts. . . . As future, possibility is the concrete way in which the world is determined by nothingness, out of which God’s creative love lets being become . What can be made of the future on the basis of past and present, does not belong to the dimension of possibility; rather, as that which is not-yet-actual, it belongs to the dimension of actuality. . . . We make actuality out of that which is actual. We change, we transform. In this way, we make the future. God, however, is not one who transforms; he is the creator, who allows possibility to move towards actuality. But this possibility arises from the divine distinction between the possible and the impossible, arises, that is, ex nihilo . The world’s possibility is not within but external to its actuality. And its being is external to its futurity.



ex nihilo

incurvatus in se

ex nihilo

become

hermeneutics of charity

hermeneutics of faith

hermeneutics of hope

visio Dei

has done

is doing

will do