I’m as much a fan of catch phrases as I am of catching pretty girls. “Home is where the heart is” seems as true to me now as it did the first time I heard it. The difference today is that I no longer think of home as a place.
Paul liked the idea of home too. Christians must treat their stay on earth as temporal: that we are aliens waiting for Paradise, waiting for home. But there is something we forget about his analogy, and that is that it is just an analogy. Paul treats home solely as a place, when, or so we all intuitively (and rightly) believe, it is something much more.
For my part, I doubt Paradise will resemble the physical universe. The fact that we will have new bodies does not mean that we will have new physical bodies. These overtly literal interpretations of analogues lack imagination. A new body might occupy a new space in a kind of new quasi-universe—none of which we could even begin to formulate a meaning save through analogy. Our categories may be as such that, come Paradise, we may laugh at our former, literal dogmas. The point of analogy is not to produce dogma, but to stimulate the imagination. And it is stimulation in the form of guesswork, the use of analogy, employed by men like Daniel and John which show an exemplary use of imagination. What they saw, they did not write, for, as they say, no utterance exists of which can give an accurate description. They were limited to metaphor and simile. Why else do you think we find the duel office of prophet as poet? Prophetic literature contains as many artistic principles as apocalyptic predictions. Daniel and John were not only prophets but artists, the office of divinator as aethetictician. Modern Christians might be better off if, like our prophets, they learned to treat “above all we could ask or imagine” not only as a promise but a challenge.
All of this to say that we mustn’t depend on analogies for anything beyond a provisional theology. Upon returning to South Carolina for a visit, I realized that I missed neither my old apartment nor desired to return to my new one. Home is where I feel safe. Some people believe this to be the wood paneling or smell of their kitchen when in reality it is the sentiments attached to these things, an association with past pleasant experience. In short, home is safety and familiarity. Home is when I laugh at Colin’s antics, or cry in Susan’s heartache, or hear my Mom’s voice on the phone, so long as i am safe around these people. In that sense, i need not necessarily go home, but home may come to me. But not even this is the whole truth. For, “our hearts are restless till they rest in Thee.” Somehow our souls remember, or at least know that they should encounter the bliss of “dwelling under the shadow of the Almighty.” Paradise will be home not primarily as a place, for we cannot know what we mean by place. Paradise will be home because we will be safe and familiar, intimate and truthful with Christ.The idea of home attaches itself to the word 'in' in the phrase 'in Christ.' And home, in this sense, does indeed come to us; grace come down one might say.
“I can remember how when I was young I believed death to be a phenomenon of the body; now I know it to be merely a function of the mind — and that of the minds who suffer the bereavement. The nihilists say it is the end; the fundamentalists, the beginning; when in reality it is no more than a single tenant or family moving out of a tenement or a town.”—Faulkner
the K.H.
3 comments:
Kevin -- well-said, as ever. I am all in favor of more imaginative readings of Scripture and its beauties. You might enjoy some things by Walter Brueggemann or Ellen Davis, both of whom have written as biblical scholars highly interested in imagination as a more fitting contemporary conceptual analogy for the ubiquitous and pivotal biblical concept of "heart," which we usually think of only along emotional or instinctual lines. As much indeed as our hope exceeds imagining, I would have to plant my feet, though, and claim some fundamental continuities between the eschatological future and our earthly, fleshly present. Otherwise, if it's not us and our world, but something different, is it really hope as such? I think you are right also to sense that home is not limited to location, but is so much more. However, as an OT lover, I would have to stick up a little, too, for the specificity and concreteness of location. I think that's pretty deep in Christian tradition, too. Anyway, hope you're doing well, Kevin.
Collin, again, thanks for reading. I am sympathetic toward maintaining a continuity between 1.)our fleshly present/future and 2.) a concrete locality. I simply skeptical, however, about whether we can extend what these might mean beyond mere metaphor. I'm thinking phenomenologically. Hope 'as such' only means the affective epiphenomenon of whatever it is that is continuing, viz metaphors. And hope, therefore, does not derive from being (ontologically), but from aesthetics--something akin to John Milton's or Dante's version of Heaven. This is, in a confession of closet Platonism, the difference between affective states arising out of loving The Mona Lisa, and loving the woman Mona Lisa. I emphasize a use of the imagination because i am curious about the difference between affective phenomenology arising out of analogy as opposed to ontology. The hope of Heaven, or nostalgia for Paradise as Eliade puts it, is merely aesthetic. But i am not the O.T. scholar; i'm a professional dabbler with an unabashed opinion about everything ;)
p.s. a paper of mine got moved up 1 month ahead of schedule so the next two weeks are definitely not happening. I'll see about my schedule after; it would be great to go see you.
Kevin,
As someone who has lived in 25 different places, I concur with the thought that home is not a place. I find myself equally comfortable in a cabin in northern PA, or an apartment in Ankara, or in a sanctuary in Puebla. What makes it home is being with the Father and my "family".
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