Word made Song

Brian Brock begins his Singing the Ethos of God: On the Place of Christian Ethics in Scripture by noting how foreign Augustine found the Bible. Brock doesn’t want to familiarize the Bible: “It is as strange and eternally different from our common sense as is Christ himself.” There is no “exegetical or devotional method [that] can overcome God’s proper otherness . . . . God is not foreign to us on some general criterion, but as another person . . . . The Psalms are foreign because they open into the manifold life of the trinitarian God.”

The point is not to smooth out the strangeness but to “thematize” it “in a theologically illuminating fashion.” Even more, though, Brock’s intention is to explore how Scripture can be appropriated as morally formative, formative of affections and senses as much as of intellects. We are not to make Scripture familiar but “to become attuned” to it. Singing is a metaphor but not mere metaphor. Praise is the proper form of exegesis, and praise is the morally transformative form that the Bible takes: “Praising God transforms the many rationalities and languages of this world. Praise leads Christians out of conformity to this world by forming perception and knowledge so that we may discern what God intends for us, the good and acceptable and perfect.”

Such praise has a critical edge, more critical than critical theory can ever be. Praise reveals “how this song of superabundance really does differ from other songs and languages, and so from other ways of life . . . . The loss of desire and ability to sing is the captivity of the community of faith, a captivity of thought to ideology, of action to futile pursuits.”