It is easy enough to say what Chris Green’s The Fire and the Cloud is: to describe the book’s design and to indicate its rationale. This review pursues these easier tasks first. It is more demanding to say what Chris Green’s The Fire and the Cloud does – the ‘holy affections’ (p. 5) it aims to induce, whether grief and contrition or wonder and longing. The review approaches this dimension of the book through several examples. In closing, it considers the book’s relative success.
The architecture of The Fire and the Cloud is clear and schematic. It is a series of readings, and specifically, readings of Israel’s scriptures. But not just any miscellaneous scriptures, and not scripture at large and entire. This book is neither an omnibus nor an introductory textbook. Its readings focus on travel narratives: accounts of characters going out, turning around, and coming home. Each section of the book lays out a flight of chapters in this triplicate pattern, and the whole book, in turn, contains three such sections. The first traces out Cain’s exile, followed by Abraham’s pilgrimages, followed by Joseph’s settlement in Egypt. The second follows the exodus from Egypt, the wilderness wanderings and the settlement in Canaan. The third winds through the scattering of exile, the kindling of hope in captivity, and the pilgrimage back home, the last using the book of Ruth.
The procedure of each individual chapter in The Fire and the Cloud follows much the same format. Each chapter first provides a close reading of a scriptural text. Green’s own work here is often supplemented by literary scholarship, especially from modern, Jewish authors: the names Avivah Zornberg, Robert Alter, and Yair Zakovitch cluster in the notes at the chapter fronts. The chapter next introduces an interpretation from the history of Christian reception. The profile of these varies widely. Sometimes they are ancient (e.g., Augustine’s interpretation of Cain or Ephrem’s interpretation of Moses). Sometimes they are more recent (e.g., early twentieth-century Southern Pentecostal interpretations of the Joseph story, or Robert Jenson’s commentary on Ezekiel). The wilderness wandering chapter features Johann Georg Hamann, the Prussian progenitor of Romanticism. Then the final, third step of each chapter is even more diverse and diffuse, but it presents an integrative and christological meditation.
The rationale of The Fire and the Cloud reflects several commitments. At the heart of the book is the goodness of Jesus. Green says in the preface that his prior book, All Things Beautiful, engages Christology from the vantage of beauty. But this aesthetic interest accounts for only the first of the three classic Christian transcendentals; the other two, goodness and truth, remain outstanding. The Fire and the Cloud represents Green’s attempt to write a ‘biblical Christology, focused on the goodness that Jesus brings to bear’ (p. xi). A future work will prosecute a Christology in the key of truth.
Straightaway, however, the prospect of showing the goodness of Jesus out of the scriptures faces a difficulty, namely, that Christians have often sought to demonstrate his worthiness by way of contrast. Christians have argued that Christ is superior – in comparison with Jews and Judaism. We have scaffolded supersession into our praise. We have read Christ over against Israel’s scriptures. Green writes: ‘Despite our intentions, our professedly Christ-centered exegesis of the Old Testament describ[es] Jesus and the gospel of his kingdom in ways that set him in more or less direct opposition to the “God of the Old Testament”’ (p. 3). The Fire and the Cloud repents of this doxological strategy. It relishes Christ’s goodness not by way of contrast but of confirmation, emphasising God’s faithfulness to Israel and reminding Christians that Jesus lies out ahead of us rather than being our blessed possession. The journey motif of The Fire and the Cloud makes sense in just this context. Christians are, alongside of Jews, still en route.
Frequently, therefore, the chapters of The Fire and the Cloud correct against examples of Christian reading that sunder Christ (and Christians) from Israel. In this mode, their affect is penitential. John Calvin and American Pentecostals both, for instance, posit deep disjunctions. For Calvin, human obduracy and divine wrath are ultimately partitive; he is resigned to a final separation from which no homecoming remains possible – whereas another Frenchman, Benjamin Fondane, subsequently murdered at Auschwitz, refuses the finality of any exile. Or again: American Pentecostals understood Joseph as a type of Christ, and his brothers as typical of Judaism, since they did not recognise him. Green contends that these readers ‘blanch the text with a kind of artificial light’ (p. 99). They neglect darker hues – Joseph’s ambition, his collaboration, his lack of consultation with God – to which Jewish readers attend because they see Israel’s sojourn in Egypt as partial and preliminary. At other times, The Fire and the Cloud draws positive inspiration: Origen and Robert Jenson occasion a more celebratory affect.
The form of The Fire and the Cloud matches its content. It is about journeying, and it stages a journey. It resists false closures, and it is full of loose ends. It embraces a Christ who is indirectly available in Israel’s scriptures, and it operates by indirection. Green acknowledges: ‘I do not offer summary statements at the end of each chapter because I am convinced that that would be at odds with the ways in which Christ actually appears in these texts and how his goodness takes shape in us as we read’ (p. xii). The book’s intent is thus mystagogical more than explanatory. I suppose it succeeds, given that at times it astonished and moved me. Still, I wished some chapters had pulled connective and christological threads closer to the surface. I enjoyed the close reading sections most – sometimes they psychologised (Cain was lovesick; Moses sympathising with Joseph), but they yielded up many exegetical insights; they were also easier to follow.
