Behold the cross, suspending all our presuppositions!
It is very thick, pointy, multidimensional, heavy, and dense! For me, it’s an invitation to a thick descriptive engagement with the reality around us and myself as well.Walter Brueggemann helps us to put this hermeneutical sensibility into the words-“dwelling in the thickness.” Brueggemann is indebted to Clifford Geertz in developing this idea. What the theologian needs to explicate is “a multiplicity of complex conceptual structures, many of them superimposed or knotted into one another, which are at once strange, irregular, and inexplicit; and which he must contrive somehow first to grasp and then to render. In rendering the salient features, the essential task is not to codify abstract irregularities but to make thick description possible, not to generalize across cases but to generalize within him.”[i] By this coinage, Brueggemann refers to the interpretative “act of taking residence in a text and wait there because the text is not only a 'given' entity but also a 'giver' of what is not 'given' until this particular interpreter waits there."[ii] Dwelling in the thickness is an approach that refuses settlement and watches with attentiveness for interruption. Acknowledging the semiotic density of the any text is the primary step into this thickness. It’s a kind of disruption of reductionist totalities namely; The first totalism that occupied the text to its own advantage. The totalism of church orthodoxy, a practice still continues where the text must be bowdlerized, explained away, or omitted. A second, more formidable totalism that occupies the text is the totalism of enlightenment that has largely explained away what is interesting, compelling, and embarrassing in the text. The third totalism, so powerful among us, is an impatient reduction of all of life to technical mastery. That reduction relies upon and promises quick technical fixes to all human problems and fosters a kind of bourgeois indifference or apathy.[iii] Such attentiveness requires dwelling in that thickness. That means the reading cannot be rushed, summarized, or read off the surface. Rather, the reader must take up residence in the text and wait there because the text is not only a given in the phrase “what is given there;” it is also a “giver” of what is not given until this particular reader waits there and then on occasion receives. What is received, moreover, is often other than what was expected, even though the reader dwells there with receptive anticipation. It is not, however, the case that the waiting reader is always “best friend” to the text so as to assume an easy intimacy; the text may indeed voice an interruption, even a contradiction to the receptive reader.
Therefore dwelling in the thickness is a counter cultural and revolutionary practice in our present context of belated capitalism. It is revolutionary because a technically oriented society does not want to acknowledge any thickness; it is counter cultural because a hurried productivity does not want to dwell in any way that requires waiting for being directly addressed. Both the thickness of the text and the dwelling of the reader are acts of courage, patience, and humility that defy the ways of dominant culture.
[i] Clifford Geertz, Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books,1973),10.
[ii] Walter Brueggemann, “Dwelling in the Thickness” in Adam Y. Wells (ed.) Phenomenologies of Scripture (New York: Fordham University, 2017),181.
[iii] Ibid,182.
( This is an adapted version of the essay published in Notes from Edges: Theological Intonations (New Delhi:Christian World Imprints,2021)
