Nehemiah Blake
restoring England’s Christian literary traditionArchive for Prophetic in literature
Are you prophetically illiterate?
The following are the words from the 17 score to Imagine:
Imagine waking up tomorrow morning
and all the music has disappeared.
…What is more you cannot even remember
what music sounded like or how it was made.
You can only remember that it had existed and that it
had been important to you and your civilisation.
And you long to hear it once more.
Then imagine people coming together to make music
with nothing but their voices, and with no knowledge of
what music should sound like.
For Bill Drummond, this leap of the imagination leads into his project The 17. But it is still an act of the imagination. For Nehemiah & Blake, this state already exists in many people with regards to spiritual literacy in the prophetic voice of the Bible. To paraphrase The 17,
You wake up each morning
to a world in which the prophetic word has disappeared.
…What is more, you cannot even remember
what the prophetic world sounded like or how it was uttered.
You can only remember that it had existed and that it
had been important to you and you civilisation.
The question is, do you long to hear it once more?
What Nehemiah & Blake desires to achieve is to bring together writers like you who can answer yes to the question above. And despite your having no knowledge of what the prophetic voice sounds like, to come together and learn to hear and write that word together.
The prophetic voice
“Protesters are everywhere, but I think the world is desperately in need of prophets, those little voices that can point us toward another future. [...] Protesters are still on the fringes like satellites, revolving around the system. But prophets and poets lead us into a new world, beyond simply yelling at the old one. In many ways, protesters fit into the dominant system, legitimizing the current order with carefully compartmentalized dissent. A one-dimensional society can absorb dissent in a way that even further empowers its domination.”
— Shane Claiborne, The Irresistible Revolution, p.309-10
What is the prophetic voice that Nehemiah & Blake seeks in its writers? Shane Claiborne’s definition sums it up: It’s “those little voices that can point us toward another future” and that go “beyond simply yelling” at the system.
Fiction as “lectio divina”
Karen Armstrong notes in her book The Bible (2007) that lectio divina is the “peaceful, leisurely perusal of the [scriptural] text” in which a reader finds “a quiet place in [the] mind [...] to hear the Word” (128). In lectio divina, scripture is not studied as a historical-linguistic text on the one hand, or as a fundamental proof text on the other, but as a prophetic window upon the here and now. This style of “reading” was developed by monks at the end of the pagan Roman Empire as a means of spiritual formation, whereby the “rhythms, imagery and teaching of the Bible became the substratum of their spirituality, built up incrementally and undramatically day by day, year by year, in silent, regular meditation” (ibid). The purpose of such an inworking was to be able to live as close to the movement of the Spirit as possible, perceiving the Spirit’s words, thoughts, groans and inner desires. The daily liturgy, with its scripture readings and Eucharist became, in Karen Armstrong’s terms, the illiterate “laity’s “lectio divina” (130) by which the lay folk were incrementally and undramatically brought to the knowledge of Christian faith.
Today, illiteracy is again beginning to pervade the lower stratum of UK society. But this illiteracy is also an illiteracy at the story level on the one hand, where the Christ story has all but passed out of knowledge for the vast majority of people in the UK, and at the “reading” level on the other, where liberals and conservatives jockey for media positioning as they joust with their respective historical-linguistic interpretations and fundamental literal proofs of scripture. For neither side is the scriptural text a prophetic breathing into contemporary reality, but a dead text to dig up or eat. As a consequence, the laity have not been nourished with the Christ story. The Bible goes unread, and its interpretation is put back in the hands of religious authority. Yet It was just this authority that the first monks sought to escape when they went into the desert. Karen Armstrong makes the insightful point that the beginning of the monastic tradition coincides roughly with the establishment of the Christian Roman Empire (115). The monks became the new martyrs, not martyrs to death through persecution, but martyrs to state established religion. While the church developed its society-controlling doctrines, the monks lived and breathed the texts that were eventually to form the corpus of the Bible.
If the religious authorities of our day are the liberal and conservative theologians (consider the current Anglican spat over whether to be at Lambeth, or not to be at Lambeth), then who are the monks? Well, if lectio divina is the peaceful, leisurely perusal of a text, what text today but the novel better fits that description? And what community today but the reading group more aptly describes a group of monks reading a text in unison in search of its rhythms, imagery and teaching for internal meditation.
There is some truth to the argument that the novel replaced the Bible as the culture’s central “text” and that the literary canon has since Victorian times been put forward as a surrogate of scripture. Literary theory has been justly unkind to this proposal, and the English canon itself is in as much disrepute as the Biblical text. As such, few today read the Bible, while not many more read the canon. Rather, reading groups have taken fiction into their own hands:
If 500 of this country’s most fervent readers have got it right, the past 25 years have been a golden age for classic fiction, the past 15 years have been even better and the past five years have verged on the platinum.
[...]This perspective will be news to most critics, academics and publishers, although publishers will be grateful for the boost for their newer titles. But it is the firm view of 48 book reading groups across Britain.
The reading laity have become the monks, and the literary authorities, the dogmatics. Freed then from both their roots to scripture as a story stock, and from an authorising canon, today’s novels are read “lectio saecularis” by reading groups. Nevertheless, the rise of reading groups in the UK shows that the novel remains the English culture’s central de-centred “text”, which means that somewhere inside that “text” hide its scriptural traces.
It is Nehemiah & Blake’s desire to publish works of fiction, of which Richard Wasserfall’s Apocalypse of Jude is the first, that track these traces back through the canon to the scriptures. This desire is based on the deeper desire to combine lectio saecularis with lectio divina in a way that sees the reading laity mastering both and then passing on those reading skills to the illiterate so that they can join in.
If you have any interest in finding out more about this project, then please email nehemiahandblake@yahoo.co.uk.
Unravelling the mystery of Laodicea
In the dedication of Apocalypse of Jude, Richard Wasserfall writes:
[Apocalypse of Jude] contains the mystery of the seventh star that John the Revelator saw, the mystery of the seventh golden lampstand that stands before the throne. The star is the angel and the lampstand is the church of Laodicea.
More simply put, Apocalypse of Jude contains the mystery of the church of Laodicea. It is worth quoting the entire passage dedicated to Laodicea in Revelation before seeking to get a grip on what Richard Wasserfall believes that mystery might mean:
“To the angel of the church in Laodicea write: I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! So, because you are lukewarm–neither hot nor cold–I am about to spit you out of my mouth. You say, ‘I am rich; I have acquired wealth and do not need a thing.’ But you do not realize that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked. I counsel you to buy from me gold refined in the fire, so you can become rich; and white clothes to wear, so you can cover your shameful nakedness; and salve to put on your eyes, so you can see. Those whom I love I rebuke and discipline. So be earnest, and repent. Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him, and he with me. To him who overcomes, I will give the right to sit with me on my throne, just as I overcame and sat down with my Father on his throne. He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches.” (Rev 3:14-22; NIV)
The church at Laodicea is most famous for its lukewarm character, which in the parlance of a more modern age might be construed as “cool”: too hip for its own hop. It is a characteristic that Richard Wasserfall believes is symptomatic in the broader English church as it has sought to make itself relevant to a consumer society on the one hand, and to an increasingly pluralist society on the other. However, too often verse 15 – “So, because you are lukewarm–neither hot nor cold–I am about to spit you out of my mouth” – has been (ab)used by old-school evangelism to force an inflexible, fundamentalist version of the Jesus story down the throats of believers who have been seeking out a new relevance for Jesus in the UK. Richard Wasserfall has admitted to Nehemiah & Blake that he was similarly blindsided by this narrow exegesis when setting out to write Apocalypse of Jude. But through writing, he has come to believe that how this passage on Laodicea relates to the church in England lies not in its being used to berate those who seek a fresh relevancy, but in its ability to critique how these believers have gone about seeking relevancy.
Wasserfall believes that over the past 40 years or so, UK believers have sought to justify their increasingly “old-fashioned” faith through becoming more materially “alike” to the people around them. In so doing, they have become just like them: enriched through property, goods and equity. What has been dropped in the process of becoming relevant has been the Jesus hard-sell. The shedding of this sales technique is what the old-schoolers like to drive home as being central to the failure of the modern church in England. But this is not what is being said when the whole passage on Laodicea is taken under consideration, as Richard Wasserfall described to Nehemiah & Blake:
When you read the whole passage, and ask yourself, what does Jesus want from Laodicea, you find out that he wants to eat! “Here I am!” Jesus says. “I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him, and he with me.” Suddenly, you’re asking yourself, whose door is Jesus knocking on? Who does he want to eat with? And again the text gives you the answer. He wants to eat with the “wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked.”
Realising that sent me back to the gospels, because there’s a parable where Jesus talks of a great banquet in which a man invites many guests. But their RSVPs all come back with excuses about why they can’t make it. So the man becomes angry and tells his servant to go out and find “the poor, the crippled, the blind and the lame” and bring them in. Now the man is God, and Jesus is the servant who goes out looking for the outcasts to eat with his master. And here Jesus is in Laodicea knocking on the doors of the “wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked,” who in material terms are loaded.
So what’s the mystery? The mystery is that the “cool” gospel of material relevance is extreme poverty. You don’t see it, because you are blind to the fact that the extreme poverty you see in the mediated image of the “global south” “other” is actually an image of your soul. You are numb to this fact because you have deferred its material consequences onto this “other”. This is what has happened to the people of Laodicea in my book Apocalypse of Jude.
The town in which Apocalypse of Jude is set has become a type of Laodicea: a haven of properties for the wealthy in a beautiful landscape ruled over by two real-estate “warlords”. Yet on its outskirts lies a sprawling slum of poverty, and within its boundaries, the characters experience not its material charms, but its spiritual death and decay. Paul seeks to engineer the downfall of this system in which the town’s people have their spiritual poverty exposed to the material horrors of such a poverty. Yet Paul is someone motivated, not out of love, but out of rage and envy. The church in this Laodicea has all but disappeared under the veneer of material wealth. For Jude it exists now only as an institution awaiting its antichrist to finally demolish it.
Both these story tangents offer depressing outcomes for the mystery of Laodicea. The Biblical text, however, offers hope in the form of a promise to those who overcome the trap that Laodicea springs. And this hope is best encapsulated in the story by Caul and Audrey who are found by a group of believers who themselves are beginning to give up the quest for material relevance and beginning to experience the apocalypse of spiritual poverty going on in themselves.
This reading of the Laodicean mystery by Richard Wasserfall makes his offering up of Apocalypse of Jude as a blessing to “the churches of Albion” all the more pertinent as the church in the UK becomes increasingly aware of its own spiritual poverty. But its pertinence goes further as the UK enters a period in which its economic prosperity, built on the back of a property boom, is entering a fallout that is threatening the lives of many with the impact of material poverty. In this sense, Nehemiah & Blake believes Apocalypse of Jude is a prophetic utterance of both warning and hope for the English church to speed up its transformation into a body that can feed, clothe and heal “the poor, the crippled, the blind and the lame” so that as a body itself it will no longer be “wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked” and thus not spat out.
Towards defining an archetext, part II
The Old English word “arche” is derived from Old French, and means ark (as in Noah’s ark) in modern usage. The Oxford English Dictionary quotes the following examples
c1205 LAY. 26 Noe & Sem, Japhet & Cham and heore four wiues
e mid heom weren on archen.c1230 Ancr. R. 334 Eihte i
an noe was in to
e arche cumen. a1300 Cursor M. 1843 On
The OED also cites this same usage for the Jewish ark of the covenant which held the law of God, Israel’s most sacred text. An archetext then is, additional to its previous meanings, a form of textual ark which holds a crucial legacy in terms of knowledge for those that come after a devastation, as well as being a receptacle for sacred texts that hold a community together.
At the same time, an archetext can be considered as a form of arche-writing suggested by Jacques Derrida in his seminal work, Of Grammatology. This arche-writing can be understood as writing which
“refers to a more generalised notion of writing that insists that the breach that the written introduces between what is intended to be conveyed and what is actually conveyed, is typical of an originary breach that afflicts everything one might wish to keep sacrosanct, including the notion of self-presence.”¹
More plainly put, one might consider that “originary breach” as “original sin” in which everything that Adam and Eve might have wished to keep sacrosanct – Eden and a self-present God – underwent a spacial differing – exit from Eden – and a temporal deferral – having to commune with God through sacrifice.
Because of this differing and deferral, Derrida considers meaning never to be present in a text, not even present to the author themselves. It is always deferred into the future and subject to that future’s whims.
“[B]ut when that so-called future is itself ‘present’ [...] its meaning is equally not realised, but subject to yet another future that can also never be present.”
This brings us into the realm and nature of the prophetic. Those who would have the Bible fixed in meaning for perpetuity must fail to remember that concerning the salvation of Jesus Christ, “the prophets [...] searched intently and with the greatest care, trying to find out the time and circumstances to which the Spirit of Christ in them was pointing,” (1 Peter 1:10-11). Here we have the meaning of prophecy not available in full to the prophets themselves. Nevertheless, the messiah they prophesied, in falling under the whims of a post-exilic Israel, was re-prophesied as coming as a mighty slayer of Israel’s enemies. Yet when Jesus Christ came, he was recognised as the messiah by a small group of disciples who in turn radically reinterpreted the prophets to create a new future of a coming kingdom. This process of reinterpreting and re-prophesying into a future has continued throughout Christianity’s history and continues today, as the Biblical text allows itself as ark (arche), archetype, archeological specimen, architectural construction and corpus of writing that accounts for its “presence” through the arche-writing breach, to be so practiced upon.
The Bible then is a form of ideal archetext in the same way as the Internet might be considered as a form of idea arch-e-text, always allowing its treasure stores to cross over the flood of human history into a future present to be sent again on its path over the flood.
Notes:
1. Quotes come from the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
