Reexamining Deconstruction and Determinate Religion: Toward a Religion <i>with</i> Religion

Reply 1. The Liturgy of Hermeneutics: Midrash as Open Religion with Religion — A Response to Bruce Ellis Benson

229 Chapter5,Reply1 The Liturgy of Hermeneutics Midrash as Open Religion with Religion —A Response to Bruce Ellis Benson DrewM.Dalton n his extended mediation on the enigmatic “not far” of Mark 12:28–34, Bruce Benson invites the reader to think of the truth of the kingdom of God not as some propositional content but as emergent within the strife and tension such difficult statements as the “not yet” evokes. The Gospel message, he assures us, is therefore not one that closes off discussion or debate. It does not operate like a period, finalizing, defining, and completing discourse. Instead, it operates like a question mark. It functions to open a cognitive space and invites the reader to still more discussion and interpretation. The truth of the kingdom of God, it seems then, is not so much an ending, some final home or resting place, as a beginning — an aperture that does not invite rest but provokes movement within the reader. Jesus’ statement in the passage in question is not the promise of some eventual satisfaction for the scribe concerning his query, but the transference and eternal postponement of that satisfaction. This, of course, should come as a troubling message to those who turn to the Gospel looking for peace and satisfaction—those who are washed up on the shores of the kingdom exhausted from the tribulations of life and looking for a safe haven, for, claims Benson, I 230 Drew M. Dalton the routes to the kingdom are not broad and easy, but narrow and difficult. It is a journey, then, that will continually frustrate those who begin it with the hopes of finding easy answers or programmatic formulas. For the truth of the Gospel cannot be boiled down to the statements contained within it. Instead, this elusive truth seems to lie, Benson suggests, between these words, precisely in the tension that the sometimes conflicting statements create—hence Benson’s assessment that Christianity, understood properly, is an inexorably self-disruptive transcendence. Understood thus, the Scriptures could be read as somehow radically incomplete—pointing always away, beyond themselves to something still about to come, something not yet here though “not far” off. This is the messianism of the scriptural truth and the kingdom of God, one might say. But if this is the case, where are we to look to find this messiah? How are we to orient ourselves in the disruptive (should we read “deconstructive”?) space that is the Gospel message ? Or are we left utterly directionless by these tensions, disoriented and lost within the shifting sands of a contentless “religion without religion”? At this point, it becomes difficult to know how to read Benson. On the one hand he seems to affirm with someone like John Caputo that given the inherent tension the Gospel invites, “there is no such thing as ‘religion,’” and that nothing resembling an “institution” or “system” can adequately testify to the disruptive movement of the kingdom. We are simply “not there” and can never hope to “get there”—can never hope to construct a creed or cult that can properly give voice to the tension of truth. In this regard he seems to point to precisely the kind of “religion without religion” to which this volume critically responds. But, of course, this is not the final word of Benson’s essay, for he concludes the essay by reminding us that though we are “not yet there” we are still “not far”—that though we may never achieve some final “formula” that can contain the truth, we are not left entirely floundering. We are instead invited to a new way of being, one that recognizes and welcomes this disruption. Perhaps this is the “religion with religion” hinted at in the title of this volume. But at this point Benson leaves off, refusing to formulate what this “new kind of human existence” to which we are invited might look like—refusing, in other words, to give the reader some final answer The Liturgy of Hermeneutics 231 or definitive recipe. Instead, Benson’s essay leaves us asking our own questions. But questions are not meant to throw us into dumbstruck apoplectic awe—they demand answers (at least provisional ones). They are not meant to provoke worship, necessarily, but discussion and debate. And perhaps it is in this recognition that some provisional answers to Benson’s questions lies. So let us honor the questions posed in...