Theology is a kind of writing : The emergence of theopoetics
1997; Volume: 71; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0025-9373
Autores Tópico(s)Biblical Studies and Interpretation
ResumoInvent. There is no lost feast At the bottom of memory. --Robert Ganzo Many still remember when that terrible twister ripped through the Kansas flatlands. As Frank Baum remembers it, the sky turned grayer than peasant life on the prairie. From the north came the low wail of the wind and suddenly Uncle Henry stood up. There's cyclone coming, Em! he called to his wife. Toto jumped out of Dorothy's arms. The house whirled around two or three times and rose slowly through the air. Dorothy felt as if she were going up in balloon. Most know Baum's account of Dorothy's story. (1) A tornado sweeps Dorothy away from Kansas to the land of Oz. Even under the magical spell of Oz she is convinced: There's no place like no place like The lion, the scarecrow and the tin man travel with her down the yellow brick road, which she hopes will take her to the Wizard and then for no place like home. After terrifying yet exciting adventure in the labyrinth of Oz, her wish is granted and she leaves the colorful world of Oz and re-enters the drab, black and white tones of her Kansas farm. Auntie Em, Uncle Henry and the hired help gather around her bed and assure her that she is all right, that she has returned to reality. Oz was only bad dream from bump on the head. Against their patronizing dismissals Dorothy cries, wasn't dream, it was place, real, truly live place! Doesn't anyone believe me? They didn't. Many people, however, did believe her. They wanted to believe her. They needed to believe her. So Frank Baum wrote another Oz book, after the Wizard, in which Dorothy takes Uncle Henry and Auntie Em with her to Oz, where she becomes princess, far from the Kansas flatlands. Salman Rushdie, who knows much about home and perhaps too much about exile, provides this commentary on the stories of Oz: So Oz finally became home; the imagined world became the actual world as it does for us all, for the truth is that once we have left our childhood places and started out to make up our own lives, armed only with what we have and what we are, we understand that the real secret of the ruby slippers is not that there's no place like home, but rather that there is no longer any such place as home: except, of course, for the home we make, or the homes that are made for us, in Oz: which is anywhere, and everywhere, except the place from which we began. (2) Many good storytellers through the ages have joined the creative writers of Genesis in reminding us that we can never really go home. We all now live east of Eden. With the loss of the Garden many have attempted to build mighty that reach all the way to the heavens. Those become dungeons in the air and fall to the earth with the noise of the crash of Babel. Their collapse, like the first fall, is fall into consciousness: the awareness that Infinity resists and limits all historical totalities and that logos can never finally tame and tutor the wild mystery of theos. It is the awareness that the story of redemption began in garden but will end in city--not in literal Zion but in the imaginary homeland of New Jerusalem, which, like Oz, is anywhere, and everywhere, except the place from which we began. We live only what we imagine. (3) One of the happiest turns in postmodern thought for persons of imagination and faith is the turn from metaphysics to poetics. Theology as invention and imaginative construction joins the disciplines of literary theory, cultural studies and philosophy in viewing itself as a fictive enterprise with emancipatory intentions. (4) We now live east of Eden and its pure and perfect foundations. The safely detached observation towers where men once sat to colonize reason, homogenize language, unify ethics and thus domesticate the Divine have forever fallen. With this fall comes the consciousness that theology is rhetoric in its most robust sense, written and spoken by authors, not by mere auditors of self-validating revelation. …
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