You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. (Exodus 20:4; Deuteronomy 5:8)

The monotheistic religions of the West are iconoclast projects. Christianity, like Judaism and Islam, grants authority to texts and practices that are paradoxically self-subversive. That is, with one hand the tradition lays down definitive truths about God and humanity, while with the other hand it shatters the forms and formulae into which those truths historically congeal. Iconoclasm - image smashing - is the counter-canonical work that religious education must do.

This paradox bedevils those of us who bear responsibility for the institutions, practices, and curricula that impart formation to young Christians. The target of the present essay is formalism. The term form is intended here in its broadest sense: verbal formulae, formulaic practices, institutions of formal education. Form are forms because of their closure, definition, prescriptions and proscriptions. These factors are artificial and do not occur apart from human initiative. Form takes form in opposition to the constantly surprising variance of organic life and the intrinsic permeability of physical spaces. A little formalization may be good for living bodies. Form pursued for its own sake is toxic. This is the two-handed wisdom of the biblical tradition, which continues to propagate itself by fashioning forms of education that are self-questioning and open-ended. For Christians, this tradition climaxes in the figure of its crucified teacher: a body destroyed by a form - the scaffold, the cross, the necessary architecture of empire - even while overcoming the finality of that rigid structure.

Was the struggle engaged on the cross a struggle occurring between the sacred and the secular, religion versus empire? Christians may think so, and may regard the crucifixion as the ultimate resolution of that struggle. But this is a mistake. The figure of the de-formed savior is less a victory than a warning. His was not the ultimate crucifixion. The phenomenon recurs in every Christian century, sometimes because of Christians. There is an old photo of two Congolese, a man and a woman, in traditional dress. They are extending the stumps of their wrists toward the camera. Their hands have been severed by police who were sent to enforce the colonial quota of rubber production. This mutilation marked the import of Christianity into the Congo and the export of immense wealth to Brussels. The Congolese lost their hands to people who - quite wrongly - regarded themselves as beckoned and dispatched by the hand of the crucified Jesus. This mistake, this hermeneutical blunder and its horrid consequence, mocks me as I write this essay. For my own hands stroke a keypad now because of advantages bought for me through structures complicit with imperialism in the Congo and in first-century Judea. How is such a mistake to be discerned, and how are its tragic consequences to be avoided, when the very institutions of Christian education are compromised?

This essay proceeds in three steps to explore the frontier between the sedimented Christian tradition, with its educational institutions, and the human bodies who share the world today. Step one is an offering of elements from my own teaching praxis at Morgan State University in Baltimore, a port city on the east coast of the United States of America. I teach African-American students in a state-sponsored university. Most students at Morgan are from Christian families; a few are Muslims. They want to build a future with integrity in this country. But there is no single component of their cultural heritage that is without shadow, guilt, and compromise. Step two of this essay examines one of those cultural components, through an exegetical survey of selected elements from the biblical tradition about human bodies. The point of this exegesis is to establish that the defense of the body against imperial forms has been a principle of formation of the biblical canon. This principle never succeeded perfectly, since new forms accrued as old forms were overcome. Yet it helps us to understand and promote a similar dynamic to temper educational institutions. These first two steps, which are concrete and descriptive, support no conclusion. Instead, the third step of the essay sketches some memoranda for a hermeneutic that can take the body seriously.

1. Praxis in an African-American University

Institutions of public education in the United States differ from those in Western Europe in their history, ethos, and practices. Yet we surely share a concern about the social functions and dysfunctions of the schools. Overtly and covertly, through curricular content and through pedagogical practices, the schools replicate the hierarchies of class and race that characterize society. But at the same time, schools remain our best hope for challenging those hierarchies. Teachers, using their ingenuity and imagination, routinely produce such challenges.

This ambiguity is a standard feature of all institutions in Western society, to a greater of lesser extent. Churches are no exception, but I will confine my remarks and examples to my own current situation, which is a non-ecclesial one. I teach African-American students in a state-sponsored university. It is what we term an HBCU ("historically black college or university"), that is, an institution founded during the era of racial segregation that now retains its special character and mission of educating black people with particular attention to the distinctive history, culture, difficulties, and aspirations of this group of Americans. I teach in a Department of Philosophy, and each year I have about 180 students in a required class called Ethics and Values. Typically the students are 17 to 20 years of age, although some are older. Typically they come from Christian homes, they have greater biblical literacy on the whole than white students do, and they have no hesitation about discussing their experiences in church. The Muslim students, a minority, tend to be more guarded when mentioning their religious convictions or involvements.

I feel no obligation at all toward Christianity or Islam, as such, in my work. I regard these traditions rather as resources and repertoires of material which can be used to promote the flourishing of the students in their full humanity. This fact, however, does not brand me as a post-Christian secular humanist, for reasons to be argued below. Furthermore, I feel no obligation at all toward furthering the entry of African-Americans into middle-class social positions, a practical goal historically embraced by my university and even cited as a criterion to measure its past success. I would rather see my students enter American society like leaven, changing it for the better and making it rise. To accomplish the latter, I cooperate with the former.

One focus of our educational efforts is the self-image of the student. The term "self-image" stands for both a concept entertained in consciousness, and a repertoire of routines and practices to be activated in response to environmental stimuli. Self-image is recursive, in that each performance of it reinforces or reinscribes the image. Self-image is acquired very early in life, by contagion as it were, from the communicative environment. Parents, teachers, peers, and the media all cooperate to infect the young person, whose role initially is passive reception.

In the fall of 2002, my students and I were reading the work of the African American cultural critic who uses the pen name bell hooks.⁽¹⁾ Her thesis is that African Americans have been disabled from loving by certain historical traumas inflicted through the internalization of meanings. Specifically, she points to three contributory processes: the definition of gender roles through rap lyrics, the shaming of children through parental ridicule, and the colonization of minds through propagation of belief in white supremacy. All of these - gendering, shaming, colonizing - promote the incarnation of restrictive meanings into the flesh and the bodily routines of young people.

The metaphor of colonization is appropriate. The meaning-content of the colonized mind resembles the socio-economic infrastructure operative in a colony, in several respects. This complex of meaning is labeled "white supremacy" by bell hooks. In essence: all that is good and worthy is white, and all that is white is good and worthy; while black is second-best and things of lesser value naturally are to be assigned to black people. This meaning, she says, invades and organizes the mind before one is even aware of what is happening. It extends its tendrils into every facet of life. Having occupied the mental landscape, this complex of meanings operates to the advantage of the colonizers. It taps and exploits the energy and resources of the colonized person, diverting them for the benefit of the colonizer, to the detriment of the colonized.

Ridding the mind of this meaning-complex is difficult, just as it is difficult for a nation to evict the conquerors and reclaim its own resources for itself. The tactics needed will include both direct assault, and oblique resistance. A meaning can be defeated and unseated only by another meaning. Therefore bell hooks recommends a campaign to recover those expressions of self-esteem that traditionally sustained the black community during past times of oppression. This authorizes me, as teacher, to present some meanings gleaned from the religious heritage of African Americans.

I will now offer two examples of how I confront the resident colonial meaning with powerful semantic antidotes. The colonial meaning, white supremacy, is already consciously and verbally rejected by my students. They are able to say that it is incorrect. However, it remains operative in many bodily practices. For example, women students will agree that black skin and features are quite beautiful, yet many continue to apply chemical process to their hair to straighten it. Men will verbally affirm the ideal of black family life, yet most continue to express workaholic ambitions or to disparage women and each other with vulgar epithets: "niggah, bitch, ho."⁽²⁾ Colonization persists because the practices and expectations are still governed by the colonial meanings, even though these students give lip service to a rejection of white supremacy.

Only a meaning can dislodge a meaning. The colonial meaning will seem correct for as long as black faces seem ugly; and conversely, a habit of viewing black skin and features as unattractive or flawed is the concrete mechanism for reinscribing the colonial meanings of white supremacy. So, I try to interrupt this reinscription mechanism in ways such as the following.

Exercise one: a Christian meaning. I ask some individual students how many mirrors they have in their homes, how often they look in a mirror each day, and for what purpose. I ask what mental messages they may give themselves at those times. Then I tell students to look at another black face in the room. They are not to look at my face, which is white. They are to stare at another student. I guide them in a meditation: Look at those eyes. Their color is perfect. They are designed by their Creator to receive the beauties of nature, and to perceive the faces of family. Those very eyes are perfectly fashioned to look in the face of Almighty God one day. Look at those lips. The Creator designed those lips perfectly to give smiles, to give kisses, and to speak creative new words and ideas that no one else has ever spoken before. Those lips are perfectly fashioned to give these expressions. Look at those shoulders. A being of tremendous power and light, the guardian angel, is even now enfolding this person in love and care. Use the eyes of your heart to visualize this being. Jesus says that this angel right now, at this very moment, is looking into the face of Almighty God. And such a magnificent being has been assigned to watch over each breath and each thought of the person whom you are regarding. I continue on in this vein for several minutes, praising the wisdom of the Creator's design, and thereby affirming the intrinsic beauty and value of the very features whose disparagement is required for the maintenance of the colonial meaning.

Exercise two: a Muslim meaning. I remind the students that the holy book for Muslims is the Qur'an, which is written in very poetic classical Arabic. It refers to God - Allah - by praising various divine attributes: the Merciful, the Compassionate, the Almighty. Many centuries ago, a pious Muslim scholar went through the Qur'an and gathered as many of these names for God as he could find. He counted 99 divine names. I write the numerals 99 on the board. This number itself is beautiful and interesting. It equals 81+18. These numerals, too, are symmetrical and beautiful when written. I inform the students that Arabic uses a different script for these numerals. Our 8 looks like an inverted V. I write on the board: ^1 1^. The ancient scholars, I continue, began to look for this pattern in the world around them, to see where God may have written his name. Then I tell the students to turn to a partner and look at the palm of his or her hand. The pattern is found there in the creases of the palm: ^1 on the left palm and 1^ on the right palm. Astonishment always follows. After a moment, I hold up my own white palms and ask whether they can see this pattern. Actually, they cannot, because my pale skin has insufficient pigment in the creases for the pattern to be seen easily. Black people have darker pigment in the creases of their hands; and the darker the skin happens to be, the more clearly the names of God stand out on the palms. Here, too, I am disrupting the habitual reinscription of the meaning of white supremacy. I am over-writing it with a traditional religious meaning that affirms the dignity of all human hands, but especially of the blackest hands.

These two examples illustrate that correct words - orthodoxies - may be powerless to impede the propagation of shame, colonization, and gender oppression through bodily practices. We have to find ways to get at the body, the behavior, the routine practices and perceptions.

2. Exegesis of biblical views on body versus empire

Now in playing my little skin games, as described above, am I adapting a secular psychological technique as an ingenious (but theologically suspect) delivery mechanism for religious content? Or, is my practice itself canonical? That is, can warrant and precedent be found within the biblical canon itself for a practice of reclaiming and reinscribing the human body?

This part of the essay seeks to establish that the process of canon-formation transpired historically in relation to, and in resistance to, imperial practices analogous to the "colonization" of black students' minds and bodies as described by bell hooks. I will look at four contexts:

(a) the imperial court of Solomon, likely context for the composition of the "Yahwist" narrative and the creation account of Genesis 2;

(b) Babylon in the sixth century BCE, place of exile for the Judeans and likely context for the creation account of Genesis 1;

(c) Greco-Roman Galilee under the Herodian dynasty, remembered as the context for the certification of Jesus through the wager offered to John the Baptist in prison, Matthew 11:2-5;

(d) Roman Judea in the late first century CE, likely context for the claim that the conviction of Jesus by religious authorities had been overturned through the interruption of the execution of the capital sentence by his early resurrection, Luke 22:66 - 23:5; 24:1-12; Matthew 26:57-66; 28:1-7.

A careful reading of these passages will detect criticisms of empire and descriptions of how God breaks the power of empire in favor of human bodily life. "Decolonization" seems canonically mandated. Repeatedly, the tradition overhauls or even cancels its own forms and formulae in favor of a newly arising need.

2.a. Genesis 2:4-24. The so-called dry creation narrative is the older of the two found in the book of Genesis. By convention its author is called the Yahwist. The context in which the Yahwist crafted this tale was the imperial Davidic court, probably during the reign of Solomon. It likely was part of a written document, which subsequently was edited and expanded to become eventually the text that we recognize as the five books of Moses. The narrative, as composed in the tenth or ninth century BCE, featured some themes that addressed conditions in the imperial court in the era when David and Solomon were expanding the borders of the kingdom by conquest and by treaty. Solomon had hundreds of wives and concubines. Wives were the coin of political alliance. These women came to the court as pledges of allegiance to Solomon by his homeland and foreign vassals, according to ancient custom. His power was both demonstrated and secured by the acquisition of wives, that is, by taking other people's daughters and their future labor and their future children for his own aggrandizement.

Thus when seen in that context, the Yahwist account presents a pointed critique of this political practice. For the Yahwist, it is God who makes the garden (read: empire) and then makes the human being, the "adam," to tend it (read: the king). It is God who gives to the adam everything that he needs. When the adam is lonely, it is God who supplies a bride. The bride arrives not by conquest, or through any deal-making, but by God's own hand, out of the body of the adam itself. "Bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh." She is no foreigner. The reader notices that God has supplied one woman for the adam, not 600. One is enough. The adam begins to speak, in Hebrew, when confronted with his own woman, and they become a people.

This story is more than a critique of polygamy. It is a critique of an imperial power gambit. The misgivings attributed to the prophet Samuel concerning kingship in Israel (1 Sm 8:11-18) have all come true by the time the Yahwist composes this story. Israelite men are being impressed into forced labor gangs to fight Solomon's wars and build his palace. Israelite women are being forced into domestic service in the royal court. The slave conditions of Egypt have been reproduced in the Promised Land. That is the social and political context for the writing of the first creation account. That is the situation which the story means to contest.

2.b. Genesis 1:1 - 2:3. Some four hundred years later, the political situation was drastically altered. The territory controlled by the Davidic dynasty had shrunk considerably with the secession of the northern tribes, after Solomon's successor determined to continue his oppressive policies. Judah, the much reduced southern kingdom, was overcome by Babylon. Its leading citizens were deported to that great city, where they were treated rather well. For the first time the people of Israel came into contact with the arts and sciences of an advanced literary culture.⁽³⁾ The generation of Israelites born "in exile" was trained in the technologies, the sciences, and the literature of their conquerors. They learned to track the stars in their courses, and decipher the workings of natural laws. The mythic cosmology of Babylon was the language in which these sciences and technologies were acquired. The "scientific" names of the sun and the moon in Aramaic were also names of deities.

That sophisticated expatriate generation might well be expected to set aside the antique tales in the Yahwist document. Yet they did not do so. Instead, they wrote a "scientific" preamble for it. Hence we have the "wet" creation account of Genesis 1, which parallels the mytho-scientific cosmology as learned in Babylon but gives it a twist. One notices immediately how Genesis 1 disrespects the gods. The sun and the moon and the stars are deprived of their proper names. They are, respectively, a bigger light, a smaller light, and an afterthought (Gn 1:16). It is Israel's God who hovers over the primordial waters, and he doesn't have to struggle to bring forth the land. He creates by first thinking about it, and then imposing distinctions to sort out chaos. Time itself is up and running long before the sun and moon appear.

The climax, of course, is the creation of a divine image: human being, male and female (Gn 1:26). This will be the only image of God tolerated in Israelite tradition henceforth. Israel's God hates whatever defaces this image, and he hates any image that would rival or subjugate this image.

The critique of imperial power in this account is obvious. It is written in Hebrew, thus not for consumption by the Babylonian neighbors, who read and write Aramaic. It accepts the basic format of Babylonian science, without fear, without suspicion. Yet it confidently insists that Israel represents and answers to another power, which is infinitely superior to the powers that support the very impressive political regime of the Babylonians. Soon, this confidence would be confirmed when Cyrus came from the north to defeat Babylon. He is hailed as God's anointed because he allows the Judeans to return home and rebuild Jerusalem.

The returning exiles include learned scribes who are adept at the techniques of literacy. They carry a text that is closer to the Biblical text that we know, a rewritten and expanded version of the Yahwist account. The way they have treated their sacred text, as well as the things they say about text, become canonical for us. The way in which they have treated their sacred text has been to revise it in response to new learning in Babylon. But what have they said about texts?

To understand this, we must first notice something about the technology of writing that they used. There were no computers. There was no paper. They wrote on animal skin. They used a sharp instrument to scratch the letters into the skin. They referred to this action as cutting or carving. The word for writing was the same as the word for carving. The written word was a carved thing. Hebrew pesel, a carving, is the term for "idol." To say that the only image of God is the living human being is to depose all other carved things that would injure the flourishing of the human being. Thus we have the prohibition against idols in the ancient Mosaic code. But the aversion to graven images extends as well to designs carved into parchment or vellum. The written word, too, is suspicious and therefore secondary to the one image that is permitted: our human being, in our relations one to another, male and female. It is through our sexuality and our family life that we produce images of God - not through our carving or our writing. Words spoken among living people take precedence over words carved into dead skin. Written words are tolerated when they promote human flourishing, and only then. This is "canonical"; this is what the scriptural canon says about itself.

2.c. Q and the synoptic gospel tradition. Turning to the New Testament, we may ask whether the Jewish scripture continued to be known, affirmed, and obeyed by the friends and earliest followers of Jesus. We find that it was. Many examples could be given, but let's consider the portraiture of John the Baptist in Q - that is, in the gospels of Luke and Matthew. Matt 11:2 places John in Herod's prison. He hears of Jesus there, and suspects that this may be the Promised One. John therefore sends messengers to Jesus to ask whether this is the case. The response attributed to Jesus in this story is instructive in several ways. Jesus declines to answer the question directly, but refers to his own actions. "The blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised" (Matt 11:5) On one hand, these observations fulfill certain written predictions about a messianic age (Isa 35:5-6). They are the fulfillment of texts; and therefore the texts are appropriated as messianic credentials for Jesus. On the other hand, regardless of texts, these actions are rehabilitations of the image of God, in that they are healings of what has injured and impeded full humanity. The implication of the narrative is that John in jail should recognize this immediately.

From the standpoint of our consideration of the canon, this story indicates that it is not enough to point to authoritative texts alone.⁽⁴⁾ The synoptic gospels decline to rely on text alone to certify the identity and mission of Jesus. They always point beyond text: that is, beyond the Hebrew scriptures and also beyond their own narratives. Their strategy is not merely "intertextual" in referring back to traditional documents, but "extratextual" in referring the reader away from text and toward living phenomena.

Thus if John the Baptist is portrayed as a model teacher, we must take note of how he behaves. He draws from the ancient textual tradition only a question. He addresses that question to present experience. He relies on others to observe and interpret that experience.⁽⁵⁾ It is not out of place to quote Hubert Halbfas in this connection:

. . . [W]e must understand that the word of history culminating in Jesus of Nazareth is not objectively demonstrable "in itself" as the "word of God" but can only be conceived in terms of the community which has accepted this word as the word of God and has continued to propagate it. To that extent the word handed down to us in writing as the word of God can only be perceived if [people] consider it against the background of the history of the effects of that word (including the history of the church).⁽⁶⁾

Halbfas here is invoking the notion of the "effective history" of a communication, as proposed in the hermeneutical theory of Hans Georg Gadamer. But this is too timid. The canon supports a more radical formulation. The human activity of certifying the word anew through living experience is not instigated by the word. The written word did not come first. The image of God came first: human communal life, the flourishing of human beings in community. The written word was produced out of that image and for the sole purpose of sustaining and defending it. The written word is validated if and only if it promotes practices of cherishing the living image of God and combating whatever diminishes that image. The scriptural word is so radically iconoclastic with regard to rival images that it will undercut even itself in favor of human life.

The story of the question and answer of "Jailhouse John" comes from imperially occupied Palestine. The jail was that of Herod Antipas, Rome's puppet administrator of territories including the Jordan River where John was preaching. This Baptist has not yet met and identified Jesus (as he does in the Fourth Gospel.) He is not in a position to ask the right questions until he is thrown into jail, awaiting execution. The forces of occupation, in person of the dancing daughter who carries the bloodlines of both Herod and the Hasmonean collaborators in Jerusalem, seek to silence John by cutting off his head (Matt 14:1-12). But he has managed to get off a few last words, which have sent his disciples to Jesus and to the observations that certify the identity of Jesus. The civil authority, backed by Roman power, has struck John down, but the very penalties that were meant to suppress the good news become the source of the gospel-generating question.

2.d. Overturning the death sentence of Jesus. Claims of resurrection for Jesus present another instance where body is privileged over authoritative word. Rabbinic writings and archaeological excavations disclose the rhetorical and judicial import of those claims. A resurrection for Jesus makes sense, rhetorically, insofar as Jesus was considered a convict undergoing a death sentence for which he was judged liable by the Jewish court.⁽⁷⁾ The stories of the emptied tomb, considered from a rhetorical perspective, assert that a death sentence sanctioned by Jewish jurisprudence has been interrupted.

The death penalty in early rabbinic times was understood to involve rather more than mere death. While there is no evidence that the Jewish court did or could actually execute anyone in the first century, at issue here is the legal understanding of what the death penalty entailed, theoretically. In fact, this punishment entailed death plus custody of the body in a tomb controlled by the court, preventing the initial rites of mourning.⁽⁸⁾ This custody coincided with the decay of the flesh. This was thought to be a painful process, but a purgative one, since the flesh contained the record of all the sins during life. Just as words were written on animal skin in a scroll, so the deeds of one's life were thought to be written into the body. Rotting of the flesh prepared the bones for resurrection, when God would restore flesh and life - much as the rollers of a scroll could receive a freshly inscribed skin after old, defectively inscribed vellum was removed. The practice in first-century Jerusalem was to treat the cleaned bones as ready for resurrection. They might be retrieved and arranged carefully in an ossilegium, a box not unlike that designed to hold scrolls, or they might just be swept into a pit with the bones of the ancestors.

This "second burial" occurred one year after death. Accordingly, that was the point in time when the process of capital punishment was considered to be completed, and the bones could be returned to the family for final burial, with appropriate rites of mourning. Thus for the death penalty to be carried out, the criminal had not only to die, but to rot as well in the custody of the court. Plausibly, this is why the gospel story includes some details that seem curious to us. A member of the Jewish court applies to the Roman authorities for custody of the body of Jesus and places it into a special tomb (Luke 23:50), without regard to the wishes of the family and friends of Jesus, who must spy on his activities to find out where this tomb is (Luke 23:55).

To first-century readers who were familiar with the relevant legal provisions, the claim that God raises Jesus on the third day means that God commutes the death penalty before it is completed. God acts to prevent the rotting of the flesh of Jesus. In effect, this asserts that the deeds and words of Jesus during his lifetime were not sinful. Jesus did not need a new skin with new meanings written on it. He was ready for resurrection, just as he was. These readers already believed that all righteous persons would rise from the dead. The divine intervention, as they perceived it, would be to speed up the timetable for Jesus in order to vindicate him and vacate the verdict of the Sanhedrin. God's act in raising Jesus is depicted as a hermeneutical act, because it is a reinterpretation of his life. God is said to repudiate the interpretation of Jesus' life that had been made by the learned authorities in Jerusalem, on the basis of their expert familiarity with canonical texts.

Once again, then, body wins over authoritative canonical text, and this happens in a situation of imperial occupation. Later Christians would conclude that the Jerusalem judges simply misinterpreted their texts. But at the time, the learned judges probably made the best and most faithful reading possible, consulting their best scribes (Luke 22:66). Yet they did their reading in a position of social privilege that was maintained through cooperation with the imperial Roman occupation forces. They collaborated with the Romans in order to insure the survival of the community. There is no blame in this.

Ours is not to re-try the case of Jesus. Ours is to notice the process of the growth of the scriptural canon, which at this point produces a branching of the Christian Bible away from the Jewish Bible. The resurrection of Jesus, asserted as a legal claim, is the point at which the scriptural tradition splits into the two streams that we know today. If we wish to go with the stream that affirms the resurrection of Jesus - that is, if we choose to stand on the Christian side of the tradition - then we are affirming the priority of bodily life over text.⁽⁹⁾ In other words, the resurrection of Jesus is not prophesied in the Hebrew Bible, nor is it a logical implication of Hebrew biblical texts. It is, rather, the claim that the text does not and can not present a sufficient revelation of the mind and will of God. The text points to extra-textual acts of God. As a text, it merely reflects the real image of God. This fact, then, is asserted in the text as it grows to assume the form in which we recognize it as our Bible today: the Christian Bible, in several versions, indebted to a Jewish heritage.

It is sobering for us today to realize that our own social location as credentialed teachers is analogous to that of the Sanhedrin, the official religious authorities in Jesus' day. Participants at the Leuven symposium have the expertise to study the biblical texts, owing in part to the privileges that we have enjoyed at the expense of the labor and the natural wealth of colonized peoples. Our intentions are worthy, but so were those of first-century exegetes who concluded that their sacred texts condoned the death of that poor wretch Jesus at the hands of the occupying power. For Belgians, colonial experience is in the past. For me as an American, imperial incursions by my country into other lands are continuing and escalating. I am profoundly troubled by the fact that I accept a check from the government every other Wednesday, to pay me for my teaching, to pay me for writing this very essay. I am troubled because I know that the Law is a text about God's actions to save suffering human bodies from text-brokering experts.

These four examples suffice to illustrate the canonical authority of a practice of the privileging of bodily flourishing over text-based correctness. The genuinely canonical hermeneutic is one of self-subversion by the text, in favor of the living image of God that is human being: humanity as it flourishes in community life.

3. Hermeneutics of the body

The first two parts of this essay provided concrete examples of a hermeneutic impulse that consistently privileges the human body over the various texts that apply to it, including both secular and biblical texts. At this point we find ourselves at a loss, if we attempt to harness this impulse to the mainstream hermeneutical theories of today. There is a problem, having to do with a deficit on the side of philosophical hermeneutics. Body-based hermeneutical theories were suppressed in Germany under National Socialism because their premise of interpersonal empathy led to politically unacceptable conclusions in the cultural aesthetics and phenomenology of the time. This suppression cleared the way for the development of language-based hermeneutics, especially the works of Martin Heidegger and of H.-G. Gadamer, who thus became the principal philosophical mentors available to theological and catechetical writers in the twentieth century.

A recovery of the suppressed tradition of empathy theory would lead us back to names such as Theodor Lipps, Edmund Husserl, Moritz Geiger, and Edith Stein. No such full-scale retrieval is possible here. Instead, two memoranda are offered with regard to the body. The first has to do with the body's complex capabilities for transactions with meanings, and the second has to do with the distinctive constraints and possibilities of physical space. Memoranda are notions that must be borne in mind, and both of these reminders will emphasize realities that exceed the capabilities of text as such.⁽¹⁰⁾ Curiously, text-based hermeneutics has appropriated terms that apply literally only to the body and to space, and so it uses those terms in a metaphorical sense. One often reads about "spaces of discourse," "displacements," "performances." These metaphors disguise the truncation of the theory, and thus they hide the way in which the imposition of such theory truncates our understanding of the capabilities and liabilities of real bodies in real spaces.

The first memorandum asserts the oxymoronic character of the term "individual human body." Actually, there are no discrete, separate, self-contained human bodies.⁽¹¹⁾ Each organism has grown out of another and depends on others for its survival. That obvious physical connection carries through into three further areas: sentience, the mind, and the personality. Our minds, which are not spatially distant from our bodies but coincide with them, share notions and understandings of affairs in the world. This occurs through the media of language, and we are constantly trading meanings. Our sentience is open to that of others as well. "Sentience" is the sphere of feeling, that is, of animate reactive life, where pain and comfort register. Sentience is co-extensive with one's own physical body and its organic systems, but is also undeniably "in touch with" the sentience of others with whom we have no physical neural connection. Pain experienced by one body can induce physical changes in another body who perceives the injury. The reality of this sort of empathy is empirically demonstrable. Thus our sentience comprises another threshold of access among us, in addition to that of the mind. And actually, the threshold of sentient contact is prior to that of mind. This is not only because it works even in the absence of shared language, for babies, the disabled, and among those of different tongues. Sentient contact is a precondition for the acquisition of language, which even in the abstracted form of text it still evokes meaning through mental resonance with sentient empathizable experiences.

Within each body, then, sentience and mind are also open to each other. Moreover, sentience and mind both interface with the physical organism and with the personality - the person as such. It is tempting at this point to turn to psychology to find the words and concepts with which to analyze this picture further. Yet one must be careful here. The schools of psychology that gained prominence in the twentieth century all invoke a notion of causality that is best suited to physical events. This mechanical kind of causality may well govern occurrences at the level of the body's organic systems, but it must not be transposed into explanations of the processes that occur within the levels of sentience and mind, much less the processes by which influences cross thresholds within one body or among bodies. For example, it is absurd to say that the thought of apple pie "causes" me to desire pie, or to bake pie, or even just to salivate - in the same way that heat causes apple slices to soften and emit vapor. It is absurd to say that a word of encouragement "causes" me to cheer up or to succeed at a difficult task or even just to smile - in the same way that sound is recorded on magnetic tape. To be sure, in each instance of bodily phenomena, some influence travels within me or among me and my friends. But various phenomena of meaning come into play. To reduce them all to mechanical causality is unscientific.⁽¹²⁾

One further element completes this memorandum. There is a kind of symmetry whereby the personality gives and takes across a threshold with a world of values, analogous to the way in which the physical organism gives and takes across a threshold with the physical world. The person is open to receive and to create unique values. In religious terms, the person is constituted in such a way that his or her own deepest self is a portal to the divine. While human persons do not connect directly to others - mind and sentience must mediate - persons are ported to God. Moreover, thanks to the layered and permeable structure of the body, persons are God's own portals to the material world and to the social world. These transactions between value and the living human body are no mystic revelation, but something easily inferred on the basis of the obvious non-conservation of energy within any human person. It appears that we transpose meaning into energy, energy into meaning, thanks to our sentient and minded bodies. If energy is the ability to do work, it appears that we send and receive energy by sending and receiving meaning.⁽¹³⁾

The meaning of meaning, then, is what the body does with it. Text is not a body. Text is but one device that bodies may use for conveying meaning. A hermeneutic that stops with text is of little use for religious education.

Turning now to the second memorandum, we observe that text is not space either.⁽¹⁴⁾ Physical, three-dimensional space is a necessity for the body, and it also imposes certain necessities upon the body. The spatial constraints of bodily transactions generate imperatives for religious education that are geographical, architectural, and topographic in nature. How so? Obviously, bodies require space enough to breathe, grow food, and build shelter, but that is not the point. Besides those survival requirements, the body needs physical proximity in order for its sentience to function as a threshold of connection with others. We are in closest empathic contact with those who are physically close to us. Presence is above all else a physical condition accompanied by smells, sights, sounds, and other sensations.

Presence is neither eternal nor infinite. Temporally, it transpires between an event of coming, arriving, and meeting, and a subsequent event of departing. Numerically, presence occurs when the number of bodies meeting is between two and some larger but finite number. I can have a dinner conversation with perhaps five persons. I can build a house in the presence of ten or fifteen other workers, provided a foreman circulates among us. How many is too many? Does a community of sentient contact ever form among drivers on a freeway or among worshipers in a cathedral? The point is that an increase of numbers will decrease the quality and intensity of sentient contact, and hence of the meanings that it can convey.

What is the optimal number for effective religious education? The gospels assert that Jesus chose twelve. Those twelve, once instructed, he sent out two by two. Another distinctive difference between text and real space is to be noted here. The teams were sent, and they went. Imperially occupied Galilee in their day was a built environment redesigned to promote the interests of the Roman empire.⁽¹⁵⁾ Nevertheless, architectures such as highways, villas, public offices and markets, shipping wharves, packing plants and other industrial installations all were accessible to them bodily, even as these features were expressing and implementing pro-Roman economic policies. Built environments are inherently ambiguous and capable of various modes of habitation. The lesson for religious education here is twofold. First, no specifically designed and dedicated space is strictly required for religious teaching. Second, even the most carefully designed classrooms and media centers do not automatically produce what they were meant to promote, and may even hamper it. This is because every architecture remains capable of both responsive and resistive habitations.

That said, the memorandum of spatiality is a reminder for us that buildings dedicated to religious education are contiguous with the secular built environment. Students commute between the two. Their daily or weekly trajectories trace out a choreography of relationship between their faith and their other concerns. There is a risk that this localization of faith within a distinctive architecture will make it just "one interest among others" to be visited in the course of a student's routine path.⁽¹⁶⁾ This would be the antithesis of the apostolic practice of subversive occupation of hostile spaces. School architecture can indigenize Christianity into the built environment of empire.

Or it can do the opposite. The school, in its concrete spatiality, can disrupt empire by diverting and redirecting the paths of students. As Professor Jacques Haers persuasively shows in this volume, a school enforces confrontations in which intentional modes of cooperation are forged. The architecture pulls bodies into proximity with one another, fostering and sheltering what I have termed the threshold of sentient, empathic contact among persons. Evasion is not an option. If the scriptural text is not "about" what happens among us on such a playground, then it is about nothing at all.

Christian religious education trains bodies in space. This is in keeping with the canonical principle that the body is the only image of God, more sacred than scripture and taking precedence over it. It is also in keeping with Catholic sacramental practice. We baptize people by dampening their bodies. We confirm by rubbing with oil. We eucharistize by sharing food and drink. Bodily care and intimacy belong to religious education.

Having reached no grand conclusions, this essay closes with some advice. Don't let the cognitive agenda of the school curriculum crowd out all opportunities for affective learning. Include art, song, ritual, architecture, fabric and embroidery, furniture, decorations, dance. Use multi-media. Let the young people play. Prayer is play. Students are radically open to receive influences through both "thresholds" - their sentience as well as their minds. Teachers, too, are imparting messages and life-energy in both modes: by what they say, but also by the quality of their affective engagement with the learners and with all those who share our world. Administrators, for their part, affect the teachers on their staffs by the quality of their bodily, affective presence as well as by their intellectual leadership. "Professionalism" must extend to, and attend to, all four levels: physical needs, sentience, mind, and the unique value-access of each person.

It is often remarked that Matthew is "the teacher's gospel" because of its obvious concern about teaching practices, its arrangement into five pedagogical units, its wealth of traditional material, its insistence that the whole of Torah is to be fulfilled, its job description of the teacher as "scribe trained for the kingdom of God." Therefore we may well ask of Matthew what the final exam in his course will include. He answers, surprisingly, that the final judgment will have nothing whatsoever to do with the curriculum. It will have nothing to do with how well you may have learned and observed the letter of the Law. Rather, the exam in Matt 25:31-46 consists entirely in how well you see and respond when you look at human bodies in distress.

The final exam is hermeneutical. May we all, learners and teachers alike, be found ready to pass that test.

1. This is the pen name of Professor Gloria Jean Watkins of the City College of New York. The book in question is Salvation: Black People and Love (New York: William Morrow, 2001).

2. "Ho" means whore, prostitute. This epithet in effect expresses assent to the historical sexual degradation of black women during the era of slavery in America.

3. Although Egypt during the period of Israel's bondage was arguably a society advanced in arts and sciences, there is no evidence that the Hebrew people were welcome to participate in it as they did in Babylon many centuries later. Nor were they yet "a people" as they would later become.

4. That would be the strategy discredited in the Matthean infancy narrative, Matt 2:3-6, where Herod consults "scribes" but remains unconvinced. Texts alone are not proof enough.

5. See Marianne Sawicki, Seeing the Lord: Resurrection and Early Christian Practices (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994), 66-76. This portrayal of John in the Q material, as one who provokes his disciples to question, differs markedly from the Baptist of the Fourth Gospel, who teaches from a standpoint of serene confidence in his knowledge of the identity of Jesus. The "Riverbank John" of the Fourth Gospel is quite a different character from "Jailhouse John" of Q.

6. Hubert Halbfas, Theory of Catechetics: Language and Experience in Religious Education (New York: Herder and Herder, 1971), 85.

7. Of course, the Jewish court had no power to carry out any such verdict.

8. Resurrection claims are considered here from an anthropological perspective. For a more extensive presentation, see Marianne Sawicki, "Catechesis and Resurrection," Die Wirklichkeit der Auferstehung: Biblische Zeugnisse und heutiges Erkennen, 77-91, edited by Hans Joachim Eckstein and Michael Welker (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 2002). See also Sawicki, Seeing the Lord.

9. Jews in fact make the same affirmation in other ways in the rich and complex tradition of rabbinic law. But that is another story.

10. Other philosophical memoranda for religious education are discussed in chapters 9 and 10 of Sawicki, Seeing the Lord, where the relationship of body and text is also explored.

11. This discussion of the body follows that of Edith Stein, Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities, Collected Works of Edith Stein 7, edited by Marianne Sawicki, translated by Mary Catharine Baseheart and Marianne Sawicki (Washington: ICS Publications, 2002). For further discussion, see Marianne Sawicki, Body, Text, and Science: The Literacy of Investigative Practices and the Phenomenology of Edith Stein, Phaenomenologica 144 (Dordrecht and Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997).

12. The term "motivation" is used in technical discussions to designate a coherence within the world of meaning, analogous to causality in the physical world. Motivation and causality are woven together in human affairs. See Sawicki, Body, Text, and Science, 7-8 and passim.

13. The transposition of energy into meaning and meaning into energy does not follow an exact law of the conservation of energy, as mere mechanical causality does. Meaning communicated is not meaning exhausted. A single cultural artifact or text can re-invigorate someone many times, just as it can boost the creative potential of unlimited numbers of people without "running out" of power to inspire. Though not exactly quantifiable, such effects are empirically observable.

14. More precisely, text is not real space, although it may project virtual space and thereby simulate some of the functions of real space, such as to associate otherwise independent elements.

15. See Marianne Sawicki, Crossing Galilee: Architectures of Contact in the Occupied Land of Jesus (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2000).

16. On spatial aspects of religious communication, see Marianne Sawicki, "Going to Church: A Parish Geography,"Changing Churches: The Local Church and the Structures of Change, 111-137, edited by Michael Warren (Portland, OR: Pastoral Press, 2000). See also Marianne Sawicki, "Salt and Leaven: Resistances to Empire in the Street-Smart Paleochurch," The Church as Counterculture 59-87, edited by Michael L. Budde and Robert W. Brimlow (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000).