Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

THE MISSION OF JESUS §12.6
have to use pictorial or allusive terms, unable to assert correlation between word
and event with the same confidence as in dealing with historical time. To offer
another analogy, history is somewhat like an autumn day — I view one from my
window as I write these words — a day which begins with mists slowly clearing
and ends with mist steadily gathering again. During the day, vision before and
behind is clear enough. But in the beginning and ending periods, when it is far
from clear when 'day' has really begun and really ended, no clear sense of position
far less of direction is possible for one caught in the mists.
As an alternative mode of expression we have already mentioned Perrin's
suggestion that the kingdom be seen as a 'tensive symbol' and Wright's rebuttal
of Schweitzer for taking apocalyptic language literally. I prefer the term 'metaphor'
precisely because, as I understand it, the metaphor is not readily translatable
into something else. In the end Perrin wants to be able to unpack the tensive
symbol of the kingdom into a variety of referents. And in the end Wright equally
wants to translate the apocalyptic language of cosmic convulsion and 'end of the
world' into the concrete event of Jerusalem's destruction. 485 But if we follow
Ricoeur and Martin Soskice, metaphor is not a synonym or alternative for another
linguistic mode of description. Metaphor says what cannot be said otherwise,
at least not so effectively or so well, and possibly not at all. The metaphor
not only expresses the hope, as though for something else. The metaphor is the
hope. One can still ask what the metaphor refers to, but the appropriate correlative
question is not, What does this mean? but What does this evoke? 486 We do
not ask 'what it means' in regard to a piece of music like Beethoven's Eroica
symphony or a piece of art like Picasso's 'Guernica' or a poem like William
Blake's 'Jerusalem'; they appeal to heart more than to head. It is somewhat so
with a metaphor. The troping effect 'turns' the metaphor from its logical referent
and gives its appeal a non-rational, almost subliminal quality.
It should not occasion any surprise, therefore, when a sequence of metaphors
'describing' a particular subject do not gel with one another, for they are
always aspectival and fragmentary by their very nature, mood-evoking more than
meaning-communicative. The inherent polyvalency of the parables of the king-
485. Wright is indebted to Caird, Language 266 at this point. But in asserting that the
biblical writers 'regularly used end-of-the-world language metaphorically to refer to that which
they knew well was not the end of the world' (256), Caird is referring primarily to Dodd's realized
eschatology (253). Keck warns of similar dangers in the currently more fashionable talk of
Jesus' vocation to 'restore' Israel: 'Because "Israel" was a sacral, evocative symbol, he [Jesus]
could use "twelve" to suggest the God-given future without describing it or organizing a movement
to speed its coming or administer it when it arrived' (Who Is Jesus? 51).
486. Cf. Caird's understanding of 'expressive language': 'Whereas the object of referential
language is to clarify and convey an idea, the object of expressive language is to capture and
communicate or to respond to an experience' (Language 15-16).
486