A brief account of narrative identity: Ricoeur and Frei

Without giving a full-orbed treatment of the philosophical and theological issues related to narrative identity, it seems appropriate to give an overview of narrative identity as it relates to the project at hand. For it is the manoeuvring between agent and action, or between the ‘who’ and the ‘what’, that gives purchase to the concept of identity or identification. The question of narrative identity, especially as it relates to literature, and in this case, the biblical story, presses beyond the what question – ontic questions pertaining to nature – to the who of narrative identity as presented in the temporal flow of a narrative sequence. Thus, the description of a character's identity is made more readily available as one begins to look at the sequence of actions the character performs literarily as a display of the person's character.

Though several scholars, mostly theologians, have made express use of the category of narrative identity, I will briefly examine only three: Bauckham, Ricoeur and Frei.Footnote ³ Attention turns first to the recent use of narrative identity by Richard Bauckham in his small, but rich, work on christology, God Crucified.Footnote ⁴ Bauckham suggests that too much attention in the history of christology has been placed on the ‘What’ question – questions pertaining to nature – at the expense of the ‘Who’ question – questions related to identity. Ultimately, the Jesus described within the narrative accounts of the Gospels and the descriptive passages within the Pauline literature (especially Phil. 2) is an intricate part of the unique identity of God. God's actions and Jesus' actions overlap dramatically in the identity description of both. To gain further purchase on this idea, Bauckham turns specifically to the import of Isaiah 40–55 and the Servant motif as background for this claim about Jesus' unique divine identity. Bauckham states, ‘For the early Christians, these chapters of Isaiah, above all, were the God-given account of the significance of the events of eschatological salvation which they had witnessed and in which they were involved.’Footnote ⁵ I will explore and elaborate on Bauckham's contribution in the following section. Bauckham's use of narrative identity is dependent on the philosophical work of Ricoeur and the theological approach of Frei so I will focus first on these two figures.

Within philosophical circles, Ricoeur's work Oneself as Another stands at centre stage in the recent discussion of narrative identity.Footnote ⁶ Ricoeur places the discussion of identity, or self-hood, in categories of ipse and idem. Ipse is understood most properly as ‘self-hood’, whereas idem reflects the more static concept of ‘sameness’. Within the realm of identity as idem, the highest order of signification is that of ‘permanence in time’.Footnote ⁷Idem-identity emphasises the unchanging nature of one's self and reflects a more static concept of identity. Ipse-identity, on the other hand, reflects no ‘unchanging core of the personality’ and is not a static category but a dynamic category of self-hood.Footnote ⁸ Ricoeur's category of choice is that of self-hood or ipse.

Ricoeur seems allergic to the description of human action under the rubric of ‘impersonal event’.Footnote ⁹ The questions ‘what?’ and ‘why?’ (idem-identity) reflect an attenuated understanding of the agent of the actions or the ‘who?’ (ipse-identity) and so lead to static and impersonal conceptions of identity. In other words, understanding personhood or narrative identity is not best attempted by dislocating queries related to motivation (why?), actions (what?), or agents of actions (who?) from one another, but by understanding these perspectives as interrelated and informing of one another.

Ricoeur moves beyond this attenuation, the separation of the ‘what?’, ‘why?’, from the ‘who?’, by placing the discussion in the realm of narrative. For Ricoeur, personal identity can only be articulated in ‘the temporal dimension of human existence’.Footnote ¹⁰ It is precisely at this point that the dialectic of the idem and the ipse comes to the fore. Ricoeur states his hypothesis in the following way:

It is in the dialectic of idem and ipse that character is revealed. Ricoeur passes beyond the entrenchment of the self as sameness by placing the self in a temporal narrative, as in a literary novel, where one's character is displayed in different temporal activities with all its discordance and unpredictability. It is within the temporal narrative that character displays itself in different fashions and in different circumstances. Thus, the question of the ‘who?’ is related to the question of the ‘what?’ If one is able to answer the question ‘who?’, then one must be able to analyse and observe the ‘what?’ of a person's character as displayed over a temporal sequence of events (the overcoming of the opposition of character as sedimentation and identity as self-constancy). Ricoeur emphasises the reciprocating relationship that each of these questions has to one another: the ‘who?’, ‘what?’ and ‘why?’ The guiding principle through the morass of difficulties related to each one of these questions is not to treat them in isolation but to bring them together in a dynamic understanding which is most illuminated by the narrative's revealing of one's identity.

Hans Frei's particular interest in narrative as a means of identification centres on a different set of concerns than those held by Ricoeur. Charles Campbell places Frei's seminal work, The Identity of Jesus Christ, in the context of Frei's seeking to overcome the impasse between historical-criticism and theology.Footnote ¹² A literary approach, as exemplified in Identity, is able to offer a theological reading of scripture, a reading historical-criticism has kept at bay.

In The Identity of Jesus Christ, Frei uses contemporary philosophy in an ad hoc fashion as he seeks to understand Jesus Christ's identity and presence. Frei does not allow any one particular philosophical system to rest in a hegemonic relationship to theology.Footnote ¹³ Recognising the subservient role philosophy takes to theology, Frei takes his cue from Karl Barth.Footnote ¹⁴ One must use certain philosophical categories when coming to the text or in describing Christian theology; however, these categories are tools of description which never take the place of the logic of belief.Footnote ¹⁵ This logic of belief is located in the gospel story itself, in gospel as narrated event. Therefore, any philosophical schema used is subservient to the gospel story. As Frei states, ‘The meaning of the doctrine is the story; not: the meaning of the story is the doctrine.’Footnote ¹⁶

My particular purpose in exploring Frei's framework of christology is to understand his contribution to the discussion of identity as a narrated event – for Frei this question is most pertinently related to the identity of Jesus Christ. Identity is defined as the core of a person's being. ‘Like spokes to the centre of a wheel’, one's identity is the centre toward which everything else is ordered.Footnote ¹⁷ In short, ‘Identity is the specific uniqueness of a person, what really counts about him, quite apart from both comparison and contrast to others.’Footnote ¹⁸

Though Frei does not use the categories of ipse and idem in his discussion of identity, he does refer to the dialectical tension between these two conceptual categories in the defining of one's identity. One's identity is the composition of all that makes that person unique (‘sameness’ if you will). The tension comes, for Frei, in what he terms an ‘identity crisis’. A crisis of identity comes when a person acts in disjunction with his or her past.

Frei, in a manner distinct from but similar to Ricoeur, presses beyond the identity as sameness construct by placing identity in the context of narrative.

First, Frei offers an ‘intention-action’ description. ‘For a person is not merely illustrated, he is constituted by his particular intentional act at any given point in his life.’Footnote ²⁰ The ‘intention-action’ description gives purchase to the question ‘what?’ and is demonstrated in the narrative account of one's life. Second, Frei moves to the ‘who?’ question and locates the answer to it in a person's ‘self-manifestation’.Footnote ²¹ In Ricoeur's terminology, this is the character of the agent in the narrative or that aspect of the person demonstrated in the stability of habit-formation or the sedimentation of character. An overlap with Ricoeur's concerns is evident in Frei. The ‘intention-action’ aspect highlights the narrative element of a person's identity demonstrated temporally; whereas the character of a person is the stable part of the person's identity (the overcoming of the ipse/idem polarity).

Frei takes this model of ‘intention-action’ and ‘self-manifestation’ and addresses his particular concern of the bifurcation of Jesus' actions from his intentions in the recent historical Jesus quests. For the ‘Questers’, a focus on Jesus' self-understanding became the key to understanding the historical Jesus.Footnote ²² For Frei, the question, ‘What was he like’, can only be answered by the descriptor, ‘Look at what he did on this or that occasion. Here he was characteristically himself.’Footnote ²³ Like Ricoeur, Frei stresses that plot is subservient to character. ‘A person is what he does centrally and most significantly.’Footnote ²⁴ Thus, one's identity, particularly that of Jesus, is found in the enactment of intentions. The one illumines the other and both are necessary for the identification of a person in a narrative sequence. It is in the narrative event that the singularity of the person's character is revealed in different manifestations yet with a ‘self-constancy’ that can be pointed to and said, ‘That is so and so with their own unique identity’. How then does this understanding of the organic relationship between a person's identity and a person's actions in a narrative sequence inform our understanding of the identity of the Servant? To this I now turn.

The Servant's narrative identity

It is within the redemptive drama of Isaiah 40–55 (66) that God's gracious acts of forgiveness and restoration are manifested in new and dynamic ways.Footnote ²⁵ YHWH's eyes of redemption are firmly placed on Israel while at the same time YHWH's hand of reconciliation is beginning the centrifugal movement of restoration to the nations (Isaiah 49:6). The figure of the Servant appears in this context of God's new act of redemption and is described in the narrative with rather astounding character descriptors. Most notably, Bauckham observes the intertextual link between Isaiah 52:13 and Isaiah 6:1.Footnote ²⁶

In both verses the terms ‘raised and exalted’ () are predicated on a particular subject. In Isaiah 6:1 the subject is YHWH and in Isaiah 52:13 the subject is the Servant. In other words, the language used uniquely to describe YHWH in Isaiah is ‘raised and exalted’ language.

Isaiah 52:13 LXX chooses the term ‘glorification’ () for the ‘greatly exalted’ () of the MT. Elsewhere in Isaiah the prophetic word has emphasised twice over that YHWH's glory belongs to none other than himself (Isaiah 42:8; 48:11). ‘I will give my glory to no other’. Yet in Isaiah 52:13, the Servant is narratively depicted as one who is sharing in what belongs to YHWH alone, that is, his glory. Wilcox and Paton-Williams observe, ‘Throughout Isaiah 1–66, the adjectives “exalted”, “lifted up” and “very high” are virtually technical terms, applied almost exclusively to Yahweh.’Footnote ²⁷ Wilcox and Paton-Williams tread lightly on this observation, ‘The implication is not necessarily that the servant is Yahweh, or even divine; but there is an implication here that the servant's work is Yahweh's work, and the language used to make the point is daring, to say the least.’Footnote ²⁸ Bauckham, on the other hand, comes to the much more startling conclusion, ‘The Servant in both his humiliation and his exaltation, is therefore not merely a human figure distinguished from God, but, in both his humiliation and his exaltation, belongs to the identity of the unique God.’Footnote ²⁹ It could be said like this: the narrative description of God's unique acts and attributes in the book of Isaiah are now being attributed to the Servant in such a way that the identity of the two bleed onto one another. The narrative identity of the Servant and of Yahweh act in a perichoretic relationship.

Von Rad gives a helpful summary of the Servant's narrative identity when he describes the Servant's actions in the following way: ‘he cleanses, he bears sickness, carries sorrows, chastisement is laid upon him, his stripes heal, he makes his life a substitute, he makes righteous, he pours out his life, he acts vicariously’.Footnote ³⁰ Coupled with these actions are the observations already given by Bauckham that the Servant is in some sense – for Bauckham ‘is’ – caught up into the identity of God himself as one who is ‘raised and exalted’ (Isaiah 52:13). God's actions and means of redemption are carried out by the Servant who is both restorer of Zion and Light to the Nations (Isaiah 49:1–6) and the narrative descriptions of both YHWH and the Servant, again, are intricately linked.

What is striking is that one finds the Servant's narrative identity in a sense developing from active agent (42:1–4; 49:1–6) to passive agent (50:4–6; 52:13–53:12). Responding to the cry for justice from the people in Isaiah 40:27, YHWH announces the role of his Servant as one who will bring justice to the nations. The so-called ‘servant songs’ are not treated in form-critical isolation – à la Duhm – but are placed firmly in the contextual movement of the narrative. Thus, the movement from the emphasis on the former things to the new things marked in Isaiah 48 begins to centre on God's work with the Servant.Footnote ³¹ Isaiah 49:1–6 reveals a commissioning of one who will minister not only to Israel but also the nations at large (‘is it too small a thing for you?’ Isaiah 49:6). This is the active work of the Servant as God's special agent of reconciliation. The Servant is commissioned with a task to be carried out.

The new work of God's activity takes a paradoxical twist in the narrative. No longer is the Servant's work described as active but passive. The Servant is identified as one who trusts God in the midst of the suffering imposed on him by others (Isaiah 50:4–6) and is characterised by his obedience to the divine summons even when the summons leads to humiliation, suffering and ultimate defeat (Isaiah 53).Footnote ³² It is in this passive movement of the Servant's giving of himself vicariously for others that God's means of forgiveness and reconciliation reaches its zenith. It is also in this context of vicarious sin-bearing and defeat that the Servant is described with YHWH language, ‘raised and exalted’ (Isaiah 52:13).Footnote ³³

The Servant's mission is God's mission (Isaiah 49:1–6); the Servant is God's means of redeeming his people and drawing in the nations. One catches a glimpse in the narrative identity of the Servant of a figure whose entire being and reason for existence is to carry out obediently the will of God's redemptive purposes (Isaiah 50:4–10). The language used to describe the Servant's obedient and passive actions are extraordinary when thought of as being tied to a human personage. However, as Isaiah reminds us, this is the astonishingly new, redemptive act of God. The Servant is God's unique means of redemption for both Zion and the nations of the world. The Servant's actions lead to ultimate rejection and possible death, resulting in a righteous offspring (Isaiah 53:10) who carry out the faithful activity of the Servant in suffering and anticipation of the new creation (Isaiah 57:1; 61:1–4; 65:13–17).

Questions pertaining to the exact personage behind the ‘Servant’ theme in Isaiah 40–55 are nigh impossible to answer from a historical standpoint. The language used to describe the Servant is ‘cryptic and veiled’ with the intention of remaining historically diffuse.Footnote ³⁴ All of the exegetical will-power summoned will not necessarily clear up this historical question of particularity. It could be said that, from a textual perspective, questions pertaining to the historical background of the text have been intentionally veiled so as to point to something greater in God's divine economy. The canonical intentionality of the text is eschatologically loaded as it moves beyond the historical context alone to its greater use as witness to the coming action of God for Israel and the nations.Footnote ³⁵

A recent nuanced reading of the identity of the Servant is given by Seitz who argues that the ‘obscurity’ of the language is not due to any particular ‘device’. ‘The reason we cannot identify the servant in these poems is that he has taken on the mantle of the prophets who have gone before in a long chain of prophets.’Footnote ³⁶ Seitz states that the Servant described is an actual historical figure, more precisely, the prophetic voice at work in these chapters (40–55).Footnote ³⁷ The Servant's identity is veiled because his particular identity is in a sense swallowed up by the ‘culmination of prophetic Israel, whose testimony he takes up and whose suffering he willingly embraces’.Footnote ³⁸ I concur with Seitz regarding the culmination of the prophetic tradition residing on this figure of the Servant. However, to argue closely for the Servant's identity as that of a prophet behind the book seems to go beyond the witness itself. In short, the witness is silent.Footnote ³⁹

Again, the historical questions pertaining to the identity of the Servant remain elusive and left to the realm of hypothetical reconstruction. It is not here being stated that historical particulars have no abiding theological relevance and must be caught up into a divine kerygma of sorts. Without doubt, Isaiah 40–55 was born out of a historical circumstance and historical criticism continues to serve in the exploration of this reality.Footnote ⁴⁰ What is being stated is that our brokering of this difficult question, ‘Who is the Servant’, needs to be answered through the textual lens itself. And the lens is quite opaque for the historically driven interpreter, while, on the other hand, the lens is rich theologically in the narrative description of the Servant as intricate member of the divine economy. Robert Jenson, commenting on Isaiah 49, makes a similar point.

Jenson's emphasis overlaps with Bauckham's in that both are looking at the description of the Servant in the narrative movement of the text itself. The conclusion drawn by Jenson, in the description of the Servant in Isaiah 49, and by Bauckham, observing especially Isaiah 52:13, is that the Servant's narrative identity – retrospectively and eschatologically reread – points to a divine identity that at a minimum hints at later trinitarian formulations.