Finding Grace with God. Rose Ellen Dunn
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is the kerygmatic proclamation that is present in the biblical text calling the reading community into possibility; this is a proclamation that must be reinterpreted in each new context. In using a phenomenological hermeneutic, this chapter will explore new possibilities for reading the text of the Annunciation as an “awakening” and a “call” into divine possibility that both address and constitute the self.
Situated in, and fully engaging the “theological turn” of phenomenology, chapter 3 introduces the phenomenologies of Jean-Louis Chrétien and Michel Henry. Chrétien’s phenomenological description of the call and the response, as well as his phenomenology of prayer as a response to the divine call, provides creative possibilities for interpreting the divine call and Mary’s response in the text of the Annunciation. For Chrétien, the human person is continually beckoned into subjectivity through the call that is ever present in the world; Chrétien, in decidedly theological language, affirms this call as a declaration of divine love: “The world in its entirety merely forms one immense declaration of love, the declaration which the God who is Love makes to us.”28 Through the call, the human person is gathered into divine love, and through the response, becomes the manifestation of that love in the world. Henry’s phenomenology of life and his insistence on immanence as the essence of transcendence, contributes to an interpretation of the Annunciation as the celebration of human life as being-in-divine-life. Using the mystical theology of Meister Eckhart, Henry develops a philosophy of Christianity that suggests the divine is manifest—and is experienced by the self—through the auto-affectivity of life. The self-manifestation of the divine, for Henry, is the sheer givenness of an absolute self-revelation of divine life. Henry’s philosophy of Christianity is a radical phenomenology affirming, in the words of Meister Eckhart: “God engenders himself as myself [Dieu s’engendre comme moi-même].”29
Chapter 4 develops an interpretation of the Annunciation as a moment of Gelassenheit through a theoretical framework that interweaves a phenomenological theology with the work of Luce Irigaray, Jean-Luc Marion, and Jacques Derrida. Luce Irigaray’s feminist philosophy provides a way to think about Mary as a gendered subject, as an example of a feminine incarnation of divinity. Marion’s phenomenology of givenness offers a means to consider the mutual gift of possibility that is given in the text of the Annunciation. Derrida’s interpretation of testimony and apophatic prayer invites further thought on the text of the Annunciation as well as the text of the Magnificat. With this theoretical framework in place, this chapter explores an interpretation of the Annunciation as an event of Gelassenheit—as an event springing from a mutual gift of love and overflowing with possibility.
Finally, the conclusion to this manuscript interprets the text of the Annunciation as theopoesis—as a theopoetic reflection on the enfolding and unfolding of divinity. In thinking toward a phenomenology of theopoetics, I first explore a theopoetics of en/unfolding through the phenomenology of perception developed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whose work provides an example of en/unfolding through sensible perception. Through our participation in the chiasmic intertwining of perception, Merleau-Ponty suggests, perceiver and perceived cross and intertwine—each participating sympathetically with/in the other—in the rhythm of perception. Perception unfolds as perceiver and perceived enfold one another: “My perception is the impact of the world upon me and the catch of my gestures toward it.”30 Language arises then as the expressions of the embodied perceiving subject since perception—always unfinished—“gives us a world to express.”31 While the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty is not itself theological, his understanding of language and his brief discussion of religious faith provide the possibility for interpreting theological language as expressive speech—as a creatively unfolding language that intertwines with and in the world as “language capable of conveying the relations of religious life.”32 Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of language is further interpreted through Heidegger’s poetic understanding of the “without why” of the concealing and unconcealing of Being; and the constructive theology of Catherine Keller contributes to a theological exploration of divine enfolding and unfolding. This book then concludes with a reflection on the Annunciation as theopoesis.
The significance of this work lies in its creative juxtaposition of phenomenology, theology, and feminist philosophy, and the opening of biblical interpretation toward theopoetics through a hermeneutics of grace. Reading the narrative of the Annunciation in conversation with these disciplines opens this text to new interpretive possibilities. As Merleau-Ponty asks, “what if language expresses as much by what is between words as by the words themselves? By that which it does not ‘say’ as by what it ‘says’?”33 Through phenomenology, this manuscript is attentive to “threads of silence”34 in the text, developing an interpretation of the text of the Annunciation as a description of a mutual gift of Gelassenheit that, following Ricoeur, continually awakens and calls the reader into “the imagination of the possible.”35 One “possible” that can be imagined through a theopoetic interpretation of the Annunciation is an awakening and a call into an extraordinary gift of life—a gift that is given through the grace of Gelassenheit.
1. See Luke 1:26–38. Unless otherwise noted, biblical texts are cited from the NRSV. Greek New Testament texts are cited from the SBLGNT.
2. Cf. the Greek: Μὴ φοβοῦ, Μαριάμ, εὗρες γὰρ χάριν παρὰ τῷ θεῷ. This manuscript plays with the translation of the Greek word χάριν as “grace” as well as “favor”: “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found grace with God.”
3. Cf. the Greek: Πῶς ἔσται τοῦτο, ἐπεὶ ἄνδρα οὐ γινώσκω; literally: How can this be, seeing that I do not know a man?
4. See Warner, Alone of All Her Sex.
5. Johnson, Truly Our Sister, 26.
6. De Beauvoir, Second Sex, 160.
7. Daly, Gyn/Ecology, 85. See also Daly, Pure Lust.
8. Hampson, Theology and Feminism, 74.
9. See Johnson, Truly Our Sister, for a very helpful and detailed history of Marian interpretation.
10. Ibid., 26.
11. Ibid., 308.
12. Gebara and Bingemer, Mary, 37.
13. Ibid., 174.
14. Schüssler Fiorenza, Searching the Scriptures, 11.