Monuments to Spent Breath.

The letter killeth, and the spirit maketh alive.

And he said to me, “Son of man, eat what is offered to you; eat this scroll, and go, speak to the house of Israel.” So I opened my mouth, and he gave me the scroll to eat. And he said to me, “Son of man, eat this scroll that I give you and fill your stomach with it.” Then I ate it; and it was in my mouth as sweet as honey.

Ezekiel 3:1–3 (RSV)

Occasionally, it occurs to us that something we took quite for granted as being good, being worthwhile, and being edifying actually needs justifying, it no longer goes without saying, we can no longer assume it. So, in that vein, why write at all? Various things can motivate these thoughts. There’s the (currently) obvious worry that artificial intelligence can generate ‘writing’ at a greater rate, because it’s better than I am, perhaps, at utilising the common patterns of language. There’s the less obvious worry, on the other hand, that there’s something particularly worthless about writing when compared, for example, with the mysteries of speech and interaction, attention and listening, and communion which there emerges between two or more people gathered together.

The second worry is much more interesting and brings to light something much deeper. It also probably sheds light on the first worry, by illuminating further how our relationship to language actually is. As a way of being politically, language in both its spoken and its written form are obviously integral components of both the successes and disasters of people. The battlefield of language precedes the battlefield of blood and cold steel. But the second worry I highlighted above, that writing is something dead, is worth entertaining (or indeed demands to be entertained), that leads to a further worry. If writing needs justifying as an activity, it needs justifying as a form of technology, since writing itself is a technological activity, it’s word-craft. Physically, it involves the manipulation of tools in space. I am writing this on my computer, but I have already written what I am writing in my journal. In either case, writing is technology that is mediating, and recording, permanently (though less permanently in digital form), my thoughts.

The uncomfortable thought which follows is that calling into question the technology of writing, or in other words, going further than words as spoken and as heard and remembered, means calling into question the technological developments which follow, which depend upon the written word either wholly or in part. This class of inventions, across the last several thousand years of European history (I speak as a European), is obviously very broad. This, however, will be parked here as a discomforting thought to allow to go on discomforting, as it’s obviously too huge a question. I am aware, further, of the futility of Substack writing, but in its own tragic way it’s appropriate for a piece of this kind.

But further still, if we need to justify writing, (and I am assuming the reader shares some of my anxiety about this) the trouble affects also religion. When we think of the ‘Word of God’, what do we think of? A book, that technological crutch which replaces the centrally critical faculty of memory with the recorded data? Or the breathed-out Spirit which comes among us, that whisper of the still, small voice which welcomes us in to behold by faith God in his hiddenness? Is the Word of God a person? Or just a record? Is ‘Scripture’ identical to the Word of God? Obviously we debate many of these questions still. One reason, perhaps, is that they have essentially to do with the fact that, as Christians we are, as the Quran says, the ‘people of the book.’ We ought to be proud of this, for reasons that might become clear as I go on.

I won’t attempt to address these questions in a doctrinal mode. After all, the purpose of doctrinal clarification is to serve as a fence around the rose garden which we’re meant to be enjoying. In most circumstances, it makes little sense to stand about arguing how high the fence needs to be with our backs turned to the rose garden. But other times, the fence is proven not to be tall enough to hinder certain motivated wolves and robbers. What I want to do is to ramble for a little bit about a way of thinking about the distinction between spoken and written language I suppose existentially. By which, of course, I do not mean Satrean depression, but something attempting to contemplate a mystery, peer into a deep and hidden thing, which lies wrapped in ordinary phenomena.¹ Mind you, I don’t think it turns out to be a matter of seeing into phenomena as much as it is receiving meaning from phenomena, from what is given.

Here are some words from Scripture with which it might make sense to begin.

[O]ur competence is from God, who has made us competent to be ministers of a new covenant, not in a written code but in the Spirit; for the written code kills, but the Spirit gives life.²

Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.³

I selected the first passage because, on the most surface level interpretation, it has to do with the distinction between the form in which the covenant with Moses was given and that in which the covenant of Jesus was given. The new covenant is written upon our hearts in the Spirit, and it is a covenant of life. But why did God cause the covenant he made with Moses to be written; written, not just spoken, and then read by Moses to the people?

Well, what about this. What if the medium of writing is, itself, a parable, a picture of the promise? The Word of God is all these things: written language, spoken language, and the Person causing both to be written and spoken.

The second passage, I chose because this is what really got me thinking along the lines of this way of approaching the question of writing. It’s about death. The letter kills, it is a monument to spent breath. The Spirit, the breath, comes anew and makes alive. But you do not get the making alive without the having died. Chronologically, writing succeeds oral and aural language. But it might actually stand in this relation, that writing reveals what was essential about speech only in the act of killing it, and in the act of being made alive again speech produces the living power of writing.

Therefore the Word dies and rises again. It dies as it becomes letter, when it is given finite form in space as well as time. Spirit enters the world in time, but not in space. Space is the fundamental form of the enfleshment of God in his incarnation but as enfleshment, this means death. Christ was born to die, in being born, limited himself and emptied himself, in order that, being risen, he would therefore fill all things. Only through such a death can true life be restored. Unless the Word surrender to the grave and become writing, become the harsh sign above the bloodied Sacred Head which designed the universe – IESVS NAZARENVS REX IVDAEORVM – it cannot truly come forth, to us, as the Spirit of the living Word. We had to see God die in order to confess with the centurion, ‘Truly, this man was the son of God.’

The Word lacked nothing in himself. He was perfectly sufficient unto himself in and through his love-relation to the Father and the Spirit. The Word therefore enfleshes himself, becomes material form, becomes space, wraps himself in finitude, for our sake; that in the finite Word, comprehended under space and time, suffering the death of lettering, we might find the Spirit of Life, the eternal Word echoing through the ages, the silent Word by which all sound is comprehended.

The doctrine of Sola Scriptura therefore becomes existentially necessary (in the sense I defined above).⁴ Sola Scriptura therefore becomes the promotion and proclamation of the cross, the X, some x definitely standing in particular some space and time, the single, mediating variable which shows itself as the only true constant. It does this because its specificity is so acute, its insignificance so apparent, a baby born to a poor family in a livestock shed, who dies a low, ignominious, and humiliating criminal’s death, having spent his life preaching and healing in the most parochial, down-at-heel, areas imaginable. Yet, this, and this alone, reveals the universality and magnificence of the Holy One of Israel’s victory over sin, death, and the power of the Devil.

In that same hour he rejoiced in the Holy Spirit and said, “I thank thee, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that thou hast hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to babes.⁵

The cross is the letter that kills, the final form of the written covenant. IESVS NAZARENVS REX IVDAEORVM. Only inasmuch as the cross is the letter that kills can it reveal the Spirit that makes alive. Accordingly, it was well said that when God calls a man, he bids him come and die. Unless one dies, one perishes eternally. Unless one enters into the death of the letter, one presumes the possession of Spirit, and it departs, and one returns to the ground. One loses both time and space even as one enters into eternal death with no possibility of the recovery of Spirit.

But if one surrenders to the death of the letter, falls to the ground and dies, in the Word from the cross (‘It is finished.’), in that finitude alone does one find life. In forsaking life, one finds it. It is finished. In the Word from the cross alone is it possible to grasp the eternal. When the followers of Jesus ask him, ‘What is the work of God?’, what does Jesus tell them? ‘To believe in the one he has sent.’ This work will never be finished, because it IS accomplished. It is finished. This is the declaration of the Word from the cross, and so we remain engaged in participating in that work, enjoying it, delighting in the Word of God for the sake of none other than it itself, him himself. The cross is the end of all accomplishment in a finite sense. It is the end of all deeds of faith in an infinite sense, too, as the only reliable τελός is found in the Word from the cross: τετέλεσται.

The sacramental relation to God follows from this, and reveals the wisdom of the Fathers of the Church beginning with the Apostles in selecting the notion of the μυστήριον to represent it. The “sacramental” concept enters the covenantal valence into the picture. The mysteries are God’s testimony to us, the covenant which he himself performs and ratifies. There are no terms on our part. The mysteries are the signs of the binding oath which God has sworn to us, which led him to the cross. Sacramentum in ancient Latin usage referred to various kinds of civil oaths and contracts in primarily judicial and military language, but in late Latin as it began to be adopted as a language of theology, it came to mean something which is kept sacred, kept hidden, and thus equivalent to μυστήριον. The covenant is made in blood, the living blood of the living God which he sheds for us. This death is the revelation of Spirit.

Therefore, I will consider writing in this existentially cruciform way. I am in the business of putting to death the inspiration of thought, imprisoning it in form, and in this act of restriction in form I am giving it the chance to speak wider and higher and deeper than I could have envisioned it in the act of putting these thoughts to death. These words might speak much more than they merely appear, from the left of the page to the right, in their right order, to be saying. Even what I mean, therefore, might be less important than how Spirit comes alive in them, as the thoughts have been crucified in the signs of the μυστήριον of language.

Words are monuments to spent breath, dust and ashes into which life is breathed. They are sown in order to be raised and given Spirit on the voice, expressions of our living being as living beings inspired by the expending breath of God. We rely entirely upon the silent Word of his mouth that sings softly, ordering all things, with which he never fails to sustain us. We are sub-creators, in other words.

1. al la J.G. Hamann

2. 2 Corinthians 3:5–6 (RSV).

3. John 12:24 (RSV).

4. For more on what I mean by Sola Scriptura and how I go about thinking about it, see the following: In Defence of Sola Scriptura; Is Sola Scripture Self-Refuting?; When Your Words Came, I Ate Them

5. Luke 10:21 (RSV).