Testimony as Witness

As a general, pastoral observation, we Catholics are not in many cases able to, ‘always have [y]our answer ready for people who ask [you] for the reason for [y]our hope’, as I Peter 3:15 exhorts. This is despite the fact that as early as 1975, in the apostolic exhortation Evangelii Nuntiandi,^{Footnote 13} Pope St Paul VI stressed not only the importance of Christian witness, but also stated that ‘this always remains insufficient… if it is not explained, justified’.^{Footnote 14} In other words, witness of life is not enough; we need to also be able to articulate our faith verbally. This verbalization should also, I suggest, be in a suitably mature and contemporary manner to be understood by its hearers and thereby communicate some content of faith. Testimony, when undertaken within the community of faith, is an excellent practice to both develop and effect such verbal witness.

Much could be said about this, but here, I suggest three significant aspects helpful to understanding testimony as an expression of witness. Two are identified by Paul Ricoeur in his work The Hermeneutics of Testimony.^{Footnote 15} The first is, its divine origin, and the second, the orientation of testimony to proclamation. Ricoeur identifies both with bringing an ‘irruption’ of new meaning.^{Footnote 16} which he associates with the prophetic and kerygmatic character of Scripture. The third aspect of witness is that it is an expression of desire, and this will be explained after Ricoeur's definitions are explored in greater detail.

Ricoeur describes testimony to the divine in terms of being ‘a faithful witness’.^{Footnote 17} Such witness has its origins in the One to whom it testifies. As he puts it, ‘It comes from somewhere else’, since the one who testifies is sent to do so. It is therefore also true that since testimony originates from God it has a universal, human application too, because it is Godself ‘who is witnessed to in the testimony’.^{Footnote 18}

Ricoeur is talking explicitly about the witness of the testimony in sacred Scripture. It is reasonable to ask if the terms ‘prophetic’ and ‘kerygmatic’ can appropriately be applied to contemporary Christian testimony as a form of witness. To do this, we need to return to Ricoeur's exposition, and develop his conclusions theologically.

Ricoeur notes that early Christians never perceived any fundamental difference between the eyewitness testimonies of the life of Jesus and the encounter with the risen Lord. Thus, he concludes, ‘there is no intrinsic difference between the facts and gestures of Jesus of Nazareth or between the appearances of the resurrected Lord and the manifestations of the Spirit in the Pentecostal communities’.^{Footnote 19} In that sense, the story and actual presence of Christ continues in his witnesses, both within Scriptural accounts, and beyond, in the lives of early Christians and their communities, and beyond, even to this day. Indeed, the continuing presence and authority of this witness we acknowledge today in the Catholic Church as what makes it ‘apostolic’ and is what underpins Catholic Tradition. It also affirms the revelatory and normative status of Scripture for Christian faith. I will return to this point later.

Within the context of the New Testament, the continuity of identity in testimony-witness ‘proceeds from [the] direct engagement of the prophetic inspirations attributed to the living Christ and the memories of the eyewitnesses’. This, Ricoeur explains, is what gives rise to the distinctive feature of this form of testimony, whereby there is an ‘integration of fact to meaning, of narration to confession’.^{Footnote 20} The coinherence of fact and meaning is evident in the two inseparable aspects of testimony thus understood: it is both a testimony of the sense, as eye-witnesses to events, and at the same time has the interior, reflexive aspect of the engagement of the witness with what they attest.

Witness as Desire

It is this latter aspect that underpins the next characteristic of testimony to be examined, namely, that of desire. Desire is the drive which underpins the inward turn of testimony, as well as its outward articulation. Pope Saint John Paul II, in Dominum et Vivificantem,^{Footnote 21} gives an assessment of faith as being ‘in its deepest essence… openness of the human heart to the gift: to God's self-communication in the Holy Spirit’. The openness is itself an expression of expectation, having within it a forward orientation of hope.

One is open ‘to’ someone or something, and this is also ‘for’ something, based on a need or desire, even if this is not identified as such. For Gerald O'Collins, in his study on revelation,^{Footnote 22} openness presupposes the mutual interaction of knowledge through revelation, with ‘loving and the imagination of hope’. The desire for God is consistent with our knowledge of God only as mystery, that is, as a disclosure, or the unfolding of a truth too great to completely grasp. This is divine revelation as a verb, rather than a noun. It is a disclosure that, sought in love, is realised in the lives of persons who receive it, as O'Collins puts it. Thus, the openness of faith is an orientation and expectation of desire by which we receive the Holy Spirit as God's presence, and self-disclosure to us, and by which we ourselves come to share in some sense in God's own mystery, as an unfolding disclosure in our lives, of God's transforming presence and grace.

Richard Bauckham's study of the Gospels as eye-witness testimony^{Footnote 23} reads the implications of this for the apostolic witnesses by describing them as ‘people whose on-going engagement with what they had witnessed qualified them to speak with authority about its significance’. I emphasise the ‘on-going engagement with what they had witnessed’, because this describes the sustained nature of personal reflection required to make sense of faith experience. Each ‘speaking out’ of what has been experienced increases, though never exhausts, the knowledge and understanding of it to the speaker, as well as their hearers.

How could this inform contemporary understandings of testimony, of believers who are not New Testament eye-witnesses, but who nevertheless claim to be able to attest to the truth of the Gospel through their lived experience? Who are, in other words, able to give an account for the hope they have? For surely, this hope cannot rest on repeated facts, learnt by rote, but only on a living relationship with Jesus as risen Lord, who is professed to be encountered in Word and sacrament, in other people, members of His body, imago dei, and, indeed, all creation. How might these lived, Christian experiences be articulated in terms of testimony described in these ways?

Testimony and Scripture, in Community

For a practical account that starts to open-up the theological and pastoral contexts of testimony, I turn to a Pentecostal example, this time of a group Bible study, explained by Jackie David Johns and Cheryl Bridges Johns.^{Footnote 24} In this context, testimony is an element of a community-situated model, in which encounter with God is the primary source of knowledge of God, mediated by the Holy Spirit. The encounter takes place in the context of community, in which testimony is shared, Scripture is searched to discern God's word and those gathered ‘yield to the Spirit’, since the Holy Spirit is the agent of divine encounter.

‘Yielding’ to the Spirit, or, in terms more familiar to Catholics, ‘docility to Holy Spirit’, gives rise to conviction, understood as ‘the response to the call to live in [God's] presence, resulting in transformation’.^{Footnote 25} From this process a new testimony emerges, now being also a testimony of the community gathered, in which all ‘confess what we have seen and what we have heard and what we are compelled to be and do’.^{Footnote 26} In this context, testimony is therefore communal as well as personal, and is made possible by the shared prayerful, reflective engagement with Scripture, which is expectant that the Holy Spirit works equally between all three elements – persons, community and Scripture.

What I find of great significance from this example, is that the individual experience of divine encounter shared in testimony, is ‘translated’ - both moved and interpreted – into the context of an ecclesial community. As Johns and Johns explain, the emergence of ‘a new testimony’ takes place in the context of ‘shared critical reflection and thereby contribute[s] to the corporate testimony of the group and community’.^{Footnote 27} Thus, personal testimony becomes communal ecclesial testimony. I will explain further the theological and ecclesiological significance of this last point after presenting the final aspect of testimony to be examined, which is that it is a ‘story’.

Testimony as Story

A key quality of testimony is its narrative form, a form of first-person history. Recounting what happened to me, or what I experienced is most naturally recounted as ‘story’, or sequence of events. Clearly, as such, it is not intended to be presented or heard as fiction, or fantasy, which is a certain bias that can cling to the use of the word ‘story’.

This was anticipated by the social historian Anne Muir in her oral history of the early years of the Iona Community.^{Footnote 28} She used the narrative testimonies from the memories of the founding members, incorporating the anecdotes they recounted and stories of community. In so doing, however, she was mindful of the objection that these could be discounted as ‘just stories’. Defending these accounts, she states in the preface to her book, that, ‘stories are all we have’.^{Footnote 29} Citing St Paul's first letter to the Corinthians where he says, ‘now we see through a glass, darkly’ (I Cor 13:12), she identifies in εν αίνίγματι - often translated as ‘darkly’ - the root meaning for stories. Thus, she holds, for the present, stories and metaphor reflect the world and the human condition for us. In other words, it is only through stories that we have knowledge of ourselves and reality.

Such a justification informs my presentation here of testimony as a form of constructive narrative theology. In this understanding, testimony as a form of story-telling is reflexive. The one who testifies ‘re-lives’ the experience recounted by remembering and re-telling. Thus, both conceptually, as remembering, and as practice, through its performative dimension, testimony is generative of new meaning. This is because the story is more deeply understood with each re-telling.

As Richard Bauckham, in his work on the Gospels as eye-witness testimony,^{Footnote 30} explains of testimony, it is a re-calling of events, spoken of with conviction of their significance. It is also, for those who testify, a form of ‘speak[ing] out of their ongoing attempts to understand’.^{Footnote 31} As such, it is not closed to the generation of meaning, since each re-telling progresses its understanding for both speaker and hearers.

This links the reflexivity of faith as both experienced and reflected upon by the speaker to the listening and discerning community who receive and respond to it. In this sense, testimony becomes an action and element also of the life of a community, and therefore, also part of its ongoing experience. The listening and discerning community will, as noted above, in reference to the example of a Pentecostal prayer group, test and evaluate the personal testimony against the context of Scripture and the community's practice and belief. In a Catholic context, this would include our sacramental practice, Tradition, and doctrine.

I wish to add one more quality to the aspect of testimony as story. This arises from the necessary contextualisation of testimony within a discerning and interpreting community of faith if it is to be truly understood as a testimony of faith. How this may be so, and the dynamics and relationships it generates can be described, can be found in a literary critical device called ‘mise-en-abyme'. This French term literally means ‘cast into the abyss’. As a literary technique it is the situation of one story within another, as a form of ‘self-reflexive repetition of a text’.^{Footnote 32} So, for example, the play within a play, in Hamlet. Visual examples also exist: in heraldry, it refers to the device of an escutcheon containing a smaller escutcheon. A more mundane example may be the old Quaker Oats box which showed a figure holding a box of Quaker Oats.

Andre Gide, who is generally credited with the modern revival of mise-en-abyme, described the experience of looking at a work of art, observing both the function of relation and scale of the whole to itself. As he put it, ‘I rather like to find transposed, on the scale of the characters, the very subject of that work’.^{Footnote 33} He adds that this ‘establishes the proportions of the whole’. The images Gide cites are paintings of the early renaissance and later interior scenes which include ‘a small convex and dark mirror [which] reflects the interior of the room in which the scene of the painting is taking place’. One such example would be ‘The Betrothal of the Arnolfini’ (1434) by Jan Van Eyck, in the National Gallery. A young couple are standing in their bed chamber. They are shown full length and frontally, being slightly turned toward each other. A convex mirror is visible on the back wall, shown in the space between them, which is bridged by their extended, lightly touching hands.

The mirror at the back of the room provides a totally different perspective of the subjects standing in the foreground, and even includes a glimpse of the artist at work. The smaller image in the mirror is thereby offering another view of the picture, and not a mere repetition. Almost like an event, which, witnessed by different people, is inevitably presented variously, suggesting varied perspectives, values and priorities.

There is also the issue of scale. Gide holds that this smaller image in the mirror ‘throws a clearer light… and establishes the proportions of the whole’. In other words, the smaller image is not merely derivative from the larger, contextual image but in some sense conditions the very identity of the larger picture, conferring on it, according to Gide, truer proportions and clarity. Added to this is the relationality established between the parts by which each discloses and metaphorically ‘holds’ the other. Each needing the other to create the complex and relational whole that exists ‘en abyme’, in the infinite interplay between them.

This is somewhat reminiscent of how Pope Francis has several times used the image of the polyhedron to describe the relation of parts to the whole.^{Footnote 34} Francis uses this image to describe the infinitely varied, and cumulatively beautiful contributions made by the ecclesial presence of each person and their inculturated and personal identity. But it also has resonances with mise-en-abyme, speaking of parts which reflect the whole and exist in connection while maintaining their distinctiveness. The whole is acknowledged as greater than the sum of parts, but Francis also emphasises the importance of what seems little or insignificant, namely, the poor, and local dimensions; things, that is, that are on a smaller scale. This image is also inclusive of diversity, as Francis puts it, ‘Even people who can be considered dubious on account of their errors have something to offer which must not be overlooked’.^{Footnote 35} All of these for Pope Francis are therefore loci theologici.

Holding this, I propose that interpreting individual testimony as witness and as one story of the individual told within the larger context of another, namely the Church, can be understood theologically to contribute to the larger, ecclesial context of the story of the Church, as an exercise of the prophetic office of the baptised.

To do this I turn first to passages from two Conciliar documents, Lumen Gentium,^{Footnote 36} and Dei Verbum,^{Footnote 37} before presenting a brief examination of discernment and how testimony exemplifies aspects of discernment.

Lumen Gentium

Lumen Gentium Chapter 2, paragraph 12 describes how the holy People of God (that is, all the baptised) share in the prophetic office of Christ. In the first paragraph that prophetic office is described as ‘a living witness’ to Christ of a life of faith, love, and praise, offered by each of the baptised and by the ‘whole body of the faithful’, who thereby ‘have an anointing’. This refers to the anointing with chrism at baptism, receiving the gift of the Holy Spirit.

This anointing is used to explain the ‘supernatural appreciation of the faith’ the sensus fidei, held by individuals and the whole Church. The unity of faith which this sustains in matters of faith and morals is aroused and sustained by the Spirit of Truth, and informed by the word of God and guided by the apostolic teaching of the magisterium. Thereby, each person is able to adhere to faith, ‘penetrat[ing] it more deeply with right judgement, and applied more fully to daily life’.

It is also significant that the next part of paragraph 12 explains how this life in the Spirit is lived and expressed through the exercise of charisms and spiritual gifts. These are diffuse and given widely, though in varied ways, according to the free gift of the Holy Spirit. To be ‘charismatic’, in this sense, is therefore expected of every baptised person.

This description in Lumen Gentium of the progress and experience of faith is also an exposition of Catholic understanding of the basis and dynamic of Tradition served by the sensus fidei. The Constitution on Divine Revelation, Dei Verbum, elaborates this in Chapter 2, and especially clearly in paragraph 8.

Here, Tradition - as apostolic preaching preserved in Scripture, and through apostolic succession, in doctrine, life, and worship, - is understood to ‘make progress’, with the help of the Holy Spirit by the ‘growth in insight into the realities and words that are being passed on… through the contemplation and study of believers who ponder these things in their hearts (Lk 2:19 and 51, italics added) and also ‘from the intimate sense of spiritual realities which they experience’. The next paragraph goes to say that holy Scriptures themselves are also, by this same Tradition, ever ‘more thoroughly understood and actualised in the Church’.

In both these Conciliar texts, the pneumatic dimension of the transmission of faith and growth in insight, is joined to an expansive context: it is not only taking place in the work of the hierarchy, but includes all the faithful, in the context of their lives and prayerful reflection. This prayerful reflection is a form of spiritual discernment.

Discernment

Finally, how can what I have described as testimony be understood to assist discernment, if it is to be useful in parishes? For my response to this, and to both focus and circumscribe an understanding of discernment, I draw from the work of Ladislas Örsy SJ on communal discernment, entitled ‘Probing the Spirit: A Theological Evaluation of Communal Discernment’. Admittedly, this work was written to assist discernment in communities of religious orders, but some insights can be transposed to a parish context.

By way of definition, Örsy describes discernment as that which, ‘in its proper sense means to perceive or to recognise an inspiration of grace’,^{Footnote 38} and ‘the articulation of a contemplative insight into the working of God's grace’.^{Footnote 39} Intriguingly, Örsy also uses the example from the Acts of the Apostles, of the meeting of Council of Jerusalem (15:1-35), which includes several note-worthy observations. First, that the judgement of matters could not be made by reasoning and logic alone, to decide between ‘apparently conflicting testimonies’.^{Footnote 40} The light of the Spirit was required, and for this the disciples looked for the witness of life, the ‘cleansed hearts’, as well as signs and wonders. The proposed solution offered by the apostle James Örsy describes pithily as ‘based on the words of the prophets, on the signs of the times, and on some shrewd wisdom’.^{Footnote 41} In other words, as with testimony as I have explored it, discernment takes place within the context of faith based upon revelation (Scripture, or as here the ‘words of the prophets’), taking into account the contemporary context.

Testimony as described in this paper resonates with aspects of discernment noted by Örsy. It is based upon faith experience within a community of faith, undertaken prayerfully and reflectively, is a spiritual activity which also enjoins the faculties of reason, memory, and imagination. The desire to recognise the workings of grace in life, is also an expression of the desire to be obedient to the promptings of the Holy Spirit, and to thereby come to increasingly know and love God in Jesus Christ. The generation of narrative to create a personal faith story is at the service of this end. Speaking it out, its ‘articulation’, as Örsy puts it, does not preclude its contemplative foundation. It should, in fact, increase it, as truths pondered increase both desire and knowledge for their divine goodness, and beauty, by which Christ is recognised.

As well as speaking out, there is also the need for listening, both within, and by the community. This is truly a dialogical, active listening, which, as a form of reception strengthens the bonds of individuals to community. It is a sounding-post, so to speak, at grass roots of the sensus fidelium, whereby the faith of each person resonates within the ecclesial community. In this process, as in the working of mise-en-abyme, likenesses, new images, new relationships and connections to the faith of the wider church will emerge and be tested. This testing will be made today, even as it was in the early church ‘on the words of the prophets, on the signs of the times, and on some shrewd wisdom’.^{Footnote 42}