The Future of the Word: An Eschatology of Reading

Conclusion

Conclusion This book has argued that texts’ meanings are founded on the future of the word of God, on the future of Christ, the word who became flesh. That eschatological future—the glorious plenitude of the community of the new creation—is texts’ expansion of meaning within the expanding love of the Trinity for the glory of God. God grants us participation in the future of the word through our participation in Christ, in whom we live and move and have our being. In reading, we cultivate and keep texts for their futures in the kingdom of God. In the time of the not yet, of course, our reading is fraught with sin as our reading’s necessary but dangerous judgments trouble textual futures. We curtail the future of texts by presumptive judgment of textual evils or glories; we abandon texts in limbo in our refusals to draw out their meanings. This double bind of judgment, however, is reconciled in the word, in reading that seeks forgiveness in the dissatisfied hope of the Come, Lord Jesus. When we persevere in reading through judgment, not abandoning the text, but seeking it out further in its pasts, presents, and futures, we are offering forgiveness—the restoration of relationship between text and reader as God reconciles all things to himself. We reconcile with texts when we receive from them—or receive through them; when we hold them to be, to paraphrase Ricoeur, restored to a capacity 275 for acting.1 We reconcile with texts when we give to them—or give through them, the meaning of the word, which is forgiveness. Thus through failures, the texts’ and our own, the Come, Lord Jesus of Revelation is announced within the openness of text, in which the future of the word is made manifest. The process that I have described through this book is clearly illustrated by—and would be neatly tied up by—a work such as Flannery O’Connor’s “Revelation.”2 In that story, a judgmental woman receives a revelation of her own corrupt and fallible judgments, which results in her having a vision of the eschaton. Mrs. Turpin visits a doctor’s office with her husband; her thoughts and clichéd small-talk during the wait show how her self-righteous judgments, condemnations, categorizations, and dismissals of everyone in the office fix all those around her with a horrible lack of charity. Mrs. Turpin’s world is shaken, however, and her judgments called into question when one of the patients in the waiting room, an ugly and troubled college girl, gets fed up with her platitudes and throws a book at her, calling her a warthog from hell. She returns to her farm, somehow certain that the girl’s judgment is a true message and revelation to her. As she contemplates how she could possibly be both a saved woman—a good Christian—and a warthog from hell, she receives a vision of God’s different, eschatological judgment. She sees in the sunset sky the saints marching into glory with herself last and all those she judged first. She “lean[s] forward to observe them closer.”3 O’Connor writes the story in free-indirect discourse, which allows the reader to fall into the same net as Mrs. Turpin. Our judgments of Mrs. Turpin’s vapid, clichéd thoughts are the same in kind as her judgments of others, but only as we reach the end of the story and see Mrs. Turpin’s vision do we realize that she is saved. Our judgments (undeniably condemnatory) judge us, and, we realize, the proximate judgments of God will leave us, too, wanting, THE FUTURE OF THE WORD 276 making her first to our last. We see our own reading within the reading of Mrs. Turpin and O’Connor—in our judgment, we are judged and offered an opportunity to repent for our own lack of charity, receiving ourselves the revelation of God that the text offers to Mrs. Turpin. This story shows a metaphor, perhaps, of what we may do as we read—allowing our judgments of texts to judge us, persevering in reading as in receiving of a revelation from God, and being aware always of the supreme and surprising judgment of God. Yet texts don’t often end with such an explicit vision of the last judgment, the saints marching in with their virtues being “burned away.”4...