INTRODUCTION

The process of writing about Jesus of Nazareth, from the Gospel of Mark to the 19th century, as instanced in Renan's life of Jesus, may be described as a decline from the epic, the great celebratory prose poem, to the novel (ETOM, 81).1 In Renan,2 or his modern Japanese equivalent, Endo Shusaku,3 perhaps more than in any other "biographer of Jesus", style is certainly an "alibi, a technique of evasion and of eluding the profounder levels of meaning, an excuse, an absolution from everything, especially from historical reflection" (ETOM 71). It may be suggested that more jejune and banal types of "inculturation" fall into the same trap, succumb to the same temptation to substitute style for meaning in an unhistorical attempt to be relevant.

The present response is part of an article I have been trying to write for almost 20 years, an illative attempt to take some insights from the French writer on communication systems, Roland Barthes, and to suggest their relevance to an understanding of Form Criticism and Redaction Criticism, as a prelude to some exploratory remarks on the form of a genuine inculturation. Not originally conceived as a response to Fr. Chiang's paper, my remarks, nevertheless, do have a bearing on at least some of his points.

THE GOSPEL AS MESSAGE

Inasmuch as the Gospel is a message, one may consider its source of emission, its channel of transmission, and its point of reception (cf. IMT). A study of the Gospel's source of emission includes a study of the provenance of the Gospel in the widest sense, including: background, authorship, purpose, occasion, time, place. Such a study is basically a certain kind of sociology.

The same is true of the Gospel's point of reception. A study of the point of reception is a kind of sociology, though here we might rather say that there is required a sociology of sociologies, in as much as the Gospel, and even, we may say, any one of the four Gospels, attains a new understanding, actual or potential, in a new age and new culture. Inculturation of Christianity, then, is in some degree an insertion into a certain social order, with all its complexities and with the complexities inherent in the task of insertion itself.

When one speaks of the Gospel's channel of transmission, however, some precisions have to be made. The Gospel, including but not exclusively the written Gospels, is the message and not just a vehicle of the message - and so Redaction Criticism replaces Form Criticism. Hence, to quote Barthes speaking about the photograph in contrast to the film, the movie, we may affirm that a Gospel is "not simply a product or a channel but also an object endowed with a structural anatomy" (IMT, 15). In virtue of the incarnation principle, then, the "Johannine nature" for example of the Gospel according to John is not merely an instance of possible or actualized alternatives (IMT, 82, note 1). No Gospel is to be accepted as an alternative to the others, and hence the "Johannine nature" of the Gospel according to John is part of the message of the Gospel, though not part of John's message. Whatever inculturation means, it cannot mean the insertion of the Gospel into a culture in ways which would destroy or even simply ignore the Matthean, Markan, Lukan or Johannine nature of the written Gospels.

When K.L.Schmidt in 1919 distinguished the Markan framework and the contents of that framework, he was proposing an image that could have been exploited in terms either of framework or of content, or as heuristic structure intent upon the meaning inherent in either. This image itself could be further elaborated in terms of architecture as in McKenzie's Dictionary of the Bible,4 and this elaboration allows us to use Barthes' comment on architecture to push forward our understanding of the relationship between Form Criticism and Redaction Criticism: "Architecture is always a dream and function, expression of a utopia and instrument of convenience" (ETOM, 6).

The obvious application of this would be to consider Form Criticism on the one hand as concerned with the dream and the utopia inherent in the contents, and Redaction Criticism on the other hand as concerned with the function and the instrument of convenience. It would, in fact, appear to have been this obvious application which, formally if not materially, drove biblical criticism along the way of Form Criticism first.

Nevertheless, I would suggest that the opposite of this obvious application is the truth: the ultimate expression of the dream and the utopia was in the framework, in that which became the central concern of Redaction Criticism, while the concern of Form Criticism was the function, the instrument of convenience.

This last point is perhaps only open to proposition and not to exposition. But there are enough implications in the literature of biblical criticism to suggest, if not to persuade, that over-concern with the Sitz im Leben der Kirche meant that Form Criticism should concentrate on the function and instrumentality of the pericope and should derive its understanding from that concentration: in the beginning was the sermon (Dibelius).

Be that as it may, we may continue to suggest that Form Criticism was concerned with the "obvious" meaning of the text of Scripture in Barthes' sense of the word, the meaning which, as it were, leaps out from the page to confront the reader.5 Here, too, however, I would add the modification that it is not precisely meaning as clarity but meaning as clarion (challenge) which arrested the attention of the existentialist Form Critics. They revealed specifically that the Gospel pericope is presented not for clarification but for adherence. An over-insistence on the pericope as its own totality, however, tended to ignore what Barthes calls the "obtuse" meaning, the "third meaning". For Barthes suggests that there are three meanings in any text, whether the text is literary or visual. The first meaning is informational, the second meaning is symbolic, the third meaning marks the passage from language to significance.6 In as much as Matthew is exegete as well as recorder, conveyor, evangelist, catechist, he reveals to us his aesthetic skill in presenting the Gospel to us not only as informational, not only as symbolic, but also as propaedeutical, not only as imperative but also as reflexive (IMT, 70). Perhaps any inculturation of Christianity must be concerned with the third meaning inherent both in the Bible and in Christianity as a religion, while the inculturation of theology must be concerned with the third meaning inherent in the classical theologies of the Fathers, the Scholastics, and then, if necessary, in modern theologies of liberation, feminism or whatever.

Thus, following Barthes' analysis of drama and films (IMT, 70-71), we could say that Form Criticism insisted on the tableau, the still, the single photograph, whereas what is finally important in a film is not the individual frame but the filmic, the "movement" which is the "framework of a permutational unfolding", constituted by an "inarticulate third meaning". By insisting on the pericope and ignoring the framework as integrative, the Form Critics were asserting what Barthes finds in the work of the German playwright Brecht and the Russian film director Eisenstein, namely:

"All the burden of meaning and pleasure bears on each scene, not on the whole. At the level of the play itself, there is no development, no maturation; there is indeed an ideal meaning (given straight in every tableau), but there is no final meaning, nothing but a series of segmentations each of which possesses a sufficient demonstrative power. The same is true in Eisenstein: the film is a contiguity of episodes, each one absolutely meaningful, aesthetically perfect, and the result is a cinema by vocation anthological …… (IMT, 72).

It is the validity of Redaction Criticism that it demonstrates that the Gospels are not "by vocation anthological". As a theory of the still photograph is necessary in order to talk properly about what constitutes a film as an artistic form (IMT, 67), so, of course, Form Criticism was necessary to reveal the centre of gravity within the "shot" (the pericope), the peculiar "accentuation" within the fragment. It is for this reason that Form-critical terminology is still valid in as much as it is descriptive, and invalid where it sets out to be evaluational (cf. IMT, 85, note 2).

By the same token, inculturation must not be "by vocation anthological". Continuing our metaphor, it must be concerned not with the still photographs of particular moments of God's truth but with the filmic of salvation history.

If there is a continuity between Jesus and the Gospel, as between object and image in the photograph, and if this analogy allows us to call the Gospel a first-order, denoted, message, then (perhaps) the mistake of Form Criticism is precisely in the transposition of its analysis from the second-order, connoted, message(s) to the first-order one. Have attempts at inculturation made the same mistake, attempting to make a second-order concern into a first-order one? I ask the question to help further reflection.

Furthermore, since Mark, for example, meant to present to us Jesus and not what the early Christians were saying about Jesus, it follows that the Sitz im Leben der Kirche of any passage is not the objective correlative of the image which is the Gospel, but rather part of the "surround". It follows also that we do not have any record of what the Sitz im Leben der Kirche was - we only have Mark's individual and unthematic, and hence unconscious and unselfconscious indication, compared with that of Matthew, Luke and John, of what the Sitz im Leben der Kirche might have been. The Stiz im Leben der Kirche would be to the Gospel as the film is to the photograph, for example, or perhaps as the "pose" is to the "message" (IMT, 22). Therefore we have no revealed Sitz im Leben der Kirche. Inculturation would consequently be a discovery, perhaps a creation, of a new and relevant Sitz im Leben der Kirche.

In the connoted message of the Gospel there is a plane of expression and a plane of content, thus necessitating a decipherment (IMT, 20), a hermeneutic and its consequent exegesis. However, we must for the purpose of this response, part ways with Barthes' analysis. For Eisenstein formulated his concept of the shift in centre of gravity from "between the shots" to "inside the shot", in reference to the possibilities of audio-visual montage, whereas, as Barthes' analysis presupposes, there is no audio-visual montage in the still. The Gospel pericope is not "still life" but quite radically audio-visual, even if the auditor is reader and the organ of vision is the eye of the mind. Thus it is important to affirm that the Gospel pericope, as with the still, is, to use again Barthes' terms, "not a sample but a quotation" (IMT, 67).

REDACTION CRITICISM AND THE THIRD MEANING

In his analysis of Eisenstein's films, Barthes suggests that it the third meaning which "structures the film differently without …… subverting the story" (IMT, 64). Form Criticism demonstrates that the Gospel writers were free and able to structure the message differently without subverting the story. Inculturation can do no less.

Redaction criticism, we might say, is an attempt to recover the obtuse meaning, the third meaning, of the Gospel pericopes. While that is simple, and simply put, however, the relationship of Redaction Criticism to the third meaning is not quite so simply delineated, for the third meaning is,in Barthes' words, "theoretically locatable but not describable" (IMT, 65), whereas Redaction Criticism sets out, not merely to locate, but to demonstrate and describe or explicitate.

CONCLUSION

I have made some passing remarks on inculturation, but you may still ask what all of this has to do with the topic of inculturation. It would take several more hours, days, to elaborate everything in detail, but let me make two concluding remarks, the first one somewhat brief, the second one rather longer and complex.

My first concluding remark is to repeat in a different mode something I have said earlier. If the inculturation of Christianity in China has not yet succeeded as we would have hoped, perhaps it is because, in the various suggestions for using ren, or tao, or li, or qi, etc., as the inculturating principle, we have been unconsciously following the path of Form Criticism and have yet to discover how to develop the systematic of Redaction Criticism and apply it to the task of inculturation. That would require a disjunction of theological, religious and cultural parameters which would be far beyond the scope of this seminar. I may venture to suggest that Sr. Maria Kwong's doctoral thesis (in press) is a major step in that direction, at least but not only in the fact that she has distinguished, in a significant and significative way, the realms of meaning within which elements from Chinese cultural thought can provide the basis for an inculturated theology of the Holy Spirit. Sr. Kwong has already graciously acknowledged Fr Chiang's inspiration and his influence on her thought.

My second concluding remark concerns an inculturated theology. If '"Hellenistic Theology", or indeed any theology including "Pauline Theology" or "Johannine Theology", can be reduced to the simple sum of its sentences, then perhaps an inculturated theology could be attained by the substitution, for example, of Chinese sentences for Greek sentences, and would eventually end in the reductio ad absurdum of mere transliteration - an expedient that has been tried in the transliteration of Buddhist terms from Sanskrit into Chinese, the early transliteration of Christian terms from Portuguese, Latin, Spanish, Italian into either Japanese or Chinese.

Any such reduction, blatant or subtle, explicit or implicit, ignores the fact that any theology is a hierarchy of instances, where horizontally linked statements relate to a vertical axis (IMT, 87) and where there is a higher integrating viewpoint.7 A mere understanding of instances within any theological system is no guarantee that the reader has understood the vertical axis (objective pole) and much less that he or she has accomplished the personal appropriation which constitutes a higher integrating viewpoint within his or her intellectual pattern of experience, where that personal appropriation is to be identified with the conversion which marks the transition from theology in oratione obliqua to theology in oratione recta, from mediated theology to mediating theology.8 If it is true that there is a similar formal (homological) organization ordering all semiotic systems (IMT, 83), and if theology is a semiotic system, then, while there are many theologies (systems), there can be only one Theology or homological organization. As the relationship between the (uncreated) Word of God and the disparate (created) words of God, between Verbum and adverbium in Eckhart's terminology, can be expressed as unicity of proposition in relation to a plurality of expressions,9 so too the one Theology is the proposition while the theologies are the expressions, and only deserve the analogical name "theology" in as much as they are adequate and authentic expressions of that Theology.

In this case, Theology would not be "faith seeking understanding" (fides quaerens intellectum) for that would be a definition of the disparate theological systems or theologies. Theology would rather be what come from God's side and would essentially be identified with the biblical (and possibly cosmic) word of God, and finally with the incarnate Word of God. In the term "Theology", then, the element "Theo-" would be subjective not objective.

Inculturation, then, cannot simply be the replacing of one expression (for example, a supposed "Hellenistic theology") with another (for example, a "liberation theology" or a "Chinese theology"), bereft of some profound consideration of whether the parameters of Theology can be discerned in whatever theology (or, it may be, theologies) was original and therefore originating in the actual historical development of the Church's understanding and doctrinal expression of its faith in the Apostolic and immediately consequent ages. This makes inculturation an ethical and doctrinal affair.

If inculturation were merely a sociological question, or, worse, merely a social question, merely localization, then anything would do. Precisely, however, because inculturation is an ethico-dogmatic question, only that which is perennially, and hence transcendentally, true will do.

1. For the purposes of this reply, the following works of Barthes will be quoted: BARTHES R. (transl. by HOWARD R.), The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies (NY: Hill and Wang [abbreviated here as ETOM] 1979).

BARTHES R. (transl.by HEATH S. ), Image, Music, Text (London: Fontana [abbreviated here as IMT] 1977).

2. RENAN E., Life of Jesus (1863).

3. Endo Shusaku, (transl. by SCHUCHERT R.), Life of Jesus (Tokyo: Tuttle 1978).

4. McKEnzie J.L., Dictionary of the Bible (Milwaukee: The Bruce , s.v. Literary forms 1965) 513.

5. The obvious is that "which comes ahead …… which comes to seek me out", IMT (54).

6. "blunted, rounded in form", IMT (55); it is the "passage from language to significance", IMT (65).

7. On higher viewpoints, cf. Lonergan, B.J.F., Insight (London: Longmans, Green 1957) 13-19, 233-234, 257, 374, 439. There is also the danger of a merely higher viewpoint. A higher viewpoint which does not integrate lower viewpoints would be merely a "superior" viewpoint, with the unacceptability which that term implies.

8. Cf. Lonergan, B.J.F., Method in Theology, Ch. 5 (London: Darton, Longman & Todd 1972)

9. On the distinction between proposition and expression, cf. Insight (141, 271).