Miskotti on “Resistance”
Photo by ALEXANDRE DINAUT on Unsplash
My simple purpose here is to introduce to readers the singularly peculiar work of a Dutch pastor-scholar during World War II. The pastor-scholar is Kornelis Hieko Miskotti (1894-1976), a Reformed pastor who served congregations and, after the war, lectured at the University of Leiden. In 1941 he was commissioned by a church body along with another Reformed pastor, Jan Koopmans, to prepare a study guide for instruction of church members in the Bible. Miskotti’s work turned out to be Biblical ABCs: The Basis of Church Resistance, now recently and happily republished in English by Lexington Books Fortress Academic Press.
Three most elemental claims pertain to the structure of Miskotti’s theological stance. First, he readily undertook a relation to Judaism at a time when Jews were being sought out by the Nazis. He became a trusted teacher of Judaism, and understood that vigorous attention to the Old Testament was his best way of articulating solidarity. His scholarly work largely concerns a Christian take on the Old Testament, much informed by his attentive study of the great Jewish teachers in his own context. Second, he understood that the ultimate threat to a meaningful world was the threat of nihilism, the readiness to obliterate all meaning and all possible viability of human community. He understood that Christian faith is a mighty resistant against nihilism and that biblical study, especially of the Old Testament, was an urgent antidote to nihilism. Third, he was committed early to a socioeconomic stance of socialism, as he understood the solidarity of the entire human community.
Over time Miskotti published three books, most notably, When the Gods are Silent. My present report on Miskotti is due to the republication of his book, Biblical ABCs, a simple, direct manual for teaching the Bible to ordinary church people. The editors who have prepared this republication have fully understood that Miskotti’s witness against and resistance to Nazism and nihilism is especially pertinent to our time and place, as we face a contemporary threat of nihilism expressed by a restless right wing evoked by the pernicious rise of fascism in the United States
Miskotti’s approach in his educational manual for church people is to go directly to the heart of the theological claims of the Bible, and not to linger at all over historical critical or contextual questions. My anticipation is that many contemporary readers of the book will find its presentation to be, as I have found it, not only simple and direct, but also compelling in its confrontation with the core mystery of faith, namely God and God’s name.
By way of an introduction to his book, I hope the reader will find it useful if I simply highlight some of the remarkable notations he offers about the God of the Bible.
Most compelling for me is his statement on page 40:
Like the Name itself, the attributes—the virtues—are proclaimed by the Lord for all time in the moment of divine revelation.
By citation of Exodus 34:6-7, he refers to the characterization of God as merciful, gracious, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, capable of both forgiveness and punishment. Miskotti takes his stand on this lyrical characterization of God as the primary truth of the Bible and the disclosure that matters most to a culture facing nihilism. Then he offers this breathtaking sentence:
It would hardly have been the same if the following had been written instead: “Lord, Lord, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent…”
Miskotti boldly and frontally juxtaposes two ways of speaking about God on which everything hinges:
The relational qualities of covenantal interaction that become “embodied” in Jesus of Nazareth;
The philosophical abstractions that endlessly shape the cool theological claims of the world.
He has no hesitation in the matter, but sees that biblical faith concerns a real personal interaction with a God who can only be articulated in the rhetoric of the personal and interpersonal. He refers to the three abstractions of “omni, omni, omni” as “enlargements.”
From a general idea, rooted in natural thinking, [that] would bring the revelation of God into a closed system,
destroying the order
darkening our soul,
perplexing our conscience,
robbing us of the joy of salvation,
extinguishing the praise and worship
of the congregation and the silent
ecstasy of the individual (43).
Thus the abstractions are killers of serious faith, and therefore of life and human possibility. They end in hopelessness. I have no doubt, moreover, that he would see that the “omni” formulations are on the road toward nihilism. He sees the contrast clearly in scripture which is holy instruction,
the road of our knowledge runs from the particular to the general, from quality to quantity, from the moment to the outlook of ages, from the particular Name to the Godhead of God, from the particular power, revealed in cross and resurrection, to omnipotence over the world with an eye toward the future, from the particular forms of presence as the following: the Temple, the Word, the Sacrament, to omnipresence; from the particular foreknowledge of election to omniscience (44).
Everything is at stake in this difference and this contrast. Miskotti’s sustained appeal is to the God who traffics in the personal and interpersonal.
I take it that this elemental distinction by Miskotti provides ground from which we may more boldly and fully exercise our capacity to attest this God of specificity who is not hemmed in to our safe formulations of knowledge and power. It is this God in all identifiable specificity who is loosed in the world through the wondrous narrative of crucifixion and resurrection.
On page 58 Miskotti avers that “as a congregation” we will,
discard the old dogmatic terms, or cast them in the crucible, and make ourselves more childlike and receptive to the Teaching, that is, the continual instruction of Scripture, including, first of all, its grondstructuur or ground-structure, its method, its language, the sound of its speech, the unity of its witness (58).
He intends that we should take the Bible on its own terms as a direct disclosure of the way of the emancipatory God without the pretended facade of complicated theological formula. In this formulation Miskotti eschews both abstract theology and biblicism. He comments about a fresh perspective on the Bible through a rush of mixed images:
Perhaps it would benefit us to experience shock again at the Bible’s original color and impact. Many nowadays (e.g., in preaching) are voicing these raw accents again, in order to let the Bible speak, and so to break the spell of its dignified silence; to cut loose the ribbon on the decorative bouquet that the Bible has become. Some will say at this point: such an approach reveals the Bible’s actual bloodiness—it is anything but an edifying story! Violence, lust, and passion reign within it. The prophet becomes a whirling dervish, the spirit of the Lord descends in a frenzy. The parables of Jesus feature grifters, scoundrels, and lowlifes. What is senseless and abhorrent in Scripture does come into view. In such a situation, we understand the desperate urge to flee (the awful) and pious atmosphere of conventional “Bible studies.” There is nothing wrong with that urge—so long as we hold fast to the unity of Scripture in spite of its kaleidoscope variety; so long as we observe the order of God’s virtues in spite of their wild abundance, so long as we keep before our eyes the direction and climax of God’s acts in spite of their arbitrariness. In other words we must get off the promenade of doctrine—but so, too, must we desist from the Charleston dance of biblicism. Neither felt slippers nor (very artistic!) clogs will do us any good (59).
He urges a clear distinction between “God” and “conceptual ideas about God.”
Sounding much like Barth, Miskotti observes that human beings are made human by the reality that “they have the word”:
Language uncovers the mystery of non-loneliness, of address as a Thou, which belongs to the paradise state. Humans speak because they are spoken to. They answer, the call out—they call upon God, this God whose Name we spell, whose virtues we know, whose acts we discern in this otherwise strange and oppressive life (71).
Here Miskotti asserts the dialogic nature of biblical faith and the like dialogical character of well-lived human life. The wonder of biblical faith is that in being addressed as Thou and in answering back to this Thou, we are in our speech claiming our own life in the world. Miskotti’s words here are reminiscent of those of Martin Buber who, in one his nearly ecstatic utterances, simply reiterates, “Thou, Thou, and Thou” many times in the personal claim of human existence. Miskotti judges that it is the peculiar work of the church to engage in this ongoing exchange with this hidden but forceful Thou:
Preaching, confessing, praying, dogma and sacramental formulae, singing and teaching, pastoral care, catechizing, glossolalia (speaking in tongues) and ecstatic testimony; they are each eminently a work of language (73).
Miskotti’s words are an invitation for us to think again and appropriate anew the reality that our engagement with the God of the gospel is indeed a conversation, an exchange that can and must be acted out in the public domain. It is this non-negotiable gift of such an exchange that is the most elemental practice of the church. Miskotti understands that such an exercise is a risky practice because it “plunges into the luminous abyss of mystery” and away from “the pool of babbling and vaunting” (p. 74). Miskotti sees that such practice is an embarrassment to skeptics and scholastics who do not imagine (or practice) anything as primitive as conversation with the Holy One; so we devise euphemisms to tone down such directness. He also understands that such risky open-ended exchange is a danger from which we flee to packages of certitude that close off the risk and the danger.
Miskotti knows that honest speech in faith requires utterance beyond orderly and controlled reference to God. In a puckish resistance to such “safety,” he writes:
YHWH does indeed boast of being the Spoilsport the first and the last. I read somewhere that a person who professes to be a Christian first and Dutch second should be considered a saboteur. Well, this confession is so self-evident that the church has never thought otherwise; this confession belongs to the church’s very being. It is nonsense to dispute this obvious truth, but for the unchurched it is not obvious (89).
And then he adds:
It is not the people who believe, but rather God who is from the outset Saboteur, Underminer, Disperser, Lampoonist of nature when it inflates itself to godhood. God is the great Mutineer (Isa. 8:13), because God desires to be the Savior and Redeemer of the poor, afflicted creature (89-90).
Miskotti intends that our interaction with the God who occupies the text should and must be one of fresh and daring probes that run roughshod over the niceties of “religious manners.” The God who is alive and at work in the world impinges upon real people:
God seizes them and awakens them from the indolence of the flesh; God takes them and gives them a view of God’s virtues and actions. God sets them apart and shows them the road that God travels, the way of the Anointed One. God addresses them and gives them the word and puts praise in their hearts. God lays a hand on their body and teaches them, so that their members no longer serve “impurity and greater and greater iniquity” but rather “righteousness for sanctification” (Rom. 6:19).
That calling may be a long road, like a trek through the desert, or like running a racecourse, except that what happens reaches further and proceeds faster. The Bible says something from God happens to a person, around a person, and it is wonderful; an ordinary human receives an extraordinary assignment, which upholds itself, how exactly, nobody knows, least of all that human. The person is God’s servant, God’s “fellow worker,” God’s child, and the apple of God’s eye, although in and of themselves, such a one is nothing too special. The Bible shows no great interest in substances, properties, characteristics, principles. Instead it attends to what has happened; is happening. It matters that something happens (93-94).
Finally, of the notes I will reference, on page 133 Miskotti notes that from such a text in the life of the church—in small groups that are open and familial—“kernels of empowerment may arise.” Bible study for Miskotti is the inverse of piety or of literalism. Rather, it is in the interest of having the power (resolved courage) for an assignment, for a vocation in the world. We are reminded that Miskotti’s work was to shock the church in its capacity for resistance to the threat of nihilism via the Nazis. He observes that “two things must be done”:
proclaim the gospel with strong, broad strokes to the fallen and feral peoples, and pursue mission along several fronts, including a mission that proclaims the truthfulness of God’s wrath;
form, protect, and strengthen core groups of people in the community who are called to the lay apostolate (138).
He notes that the easy propensity of people under threat is to fall back into paganism and retreat in the church into elemental religion. It is exactly the work of Bible study to resist and refuse such a temptation, and to insist on a bold vocation to otherwise.
This wondrous and perplexing book has been republished by its contemporary translators,
Eleonora Hof and Collin Cornell, with an attentive eye on our current context of faith. In their preface to this republication in translation, the editors are quite upfront about their interest. At the beginning of their preface, they state:
We are writing this preface in the days after January 6, 2023—the day when armed supporters of Donald J. Trump breached the US capitol building to interrupt Congress’ certification of the election of his presidential rival and successor…All these sources show that this was a Christian event…It was also and at the same time a demonstration of white power, white violence, and white impunity…But as Christian theologians, it is this one aspect of the episode in particular that demands our energies: the fusion of the Good News about Jesus Christ into Herrenvolk ideology. Teasing these two apart, and finding resources within the Christian faith to oppose white supremacy is a theological project that we have been pursuing for some time (ix)
In their conclusion these translators assert:
We pray therefore that our work will bolster Christians in their resistance to the deeply rooted and freshly ascendant power of white supremacy (xiii).
It is my bet that many church people and pastors will find this book bracing and encouraging. It is not an easy read, because translation renders some of it awkward and a bit obscure. The direction of the argument, however, is quite available. The book aims at nothing less than a church that is alert to its public vocation and its alternative way in the world, grounded in the address of God and our response to that generously given abundance. We may be grateful to the translators and the press for its republication. And we do well to remember quite specifically such a pastor-scholar as Miskotti who before us mustered truth-telling courage.
Walter Brueggemann
June 29, 2023
