Living in the penultimate

In the Spring of 2003, when I began at Columbia Seminary, I took the last class Walter Brueggemann would teach to non-doctoral students, before his apotheosis into an emeritus faculty. Cousin Cheryl was in that class, as well as some other friends. We took a class on Old Testament Theology and our text was Walter's book on Old Testament Theology - his magnum opus that looked at the older testament as a meeting place of testimonies with divergent trajectories of justice and purity, testimony and counter testimony, where the text creates a world of 'differance'. One of the things I took from this class is the impossibility of having the last word - or in some ways, the danger of presuming the last word. Ecclesiastes says that of the making of books there is no end, and She's right: this verse is descriptive of the ancient perception that a last word is impossible. Impossible in these ways: such a last word's use becomes inadequate to explain the quandaries of tomorrow; such a last word becomes irrelevant the longer it is untested by new circumstances - that is, such a last word becomes an idol. In this way, such a last word becomes a mask that hinders looking at the thing itself. And so it is that a last word is non-resistant to evolution.
The problem is that people demand certainty. Certainty I believe is the graven image that God warns us about in the ten words.
And so we're opened up into a world of questions, where even authority is questioned. Authority depends on inerrancy, but where inerrancy is questioned there is freedom. It will be sometimes claimed that authority grants some special freedom, but that is the freedom it wants you to have. What is that exactly?
I've posted two images of the same painting: "out of chaos" that I painted during chapel week in 2005. Each image is of the same state, yet different color ratios obtain. I can not tell you which is the final word on this image. Even if we should determine a correct color ratio, questions of scale would remain. Over the passage of time, with the possible loss of the originals, such questions proliferate.
Hence the need to state and restate. That is the freedom penultimacy gives us, the freedom to reexamine and evaluate. Of course this feels uncomfortable: in the midst of change individuals cling to things stated as certain, wanting to conserve some absolute place where things are as they remember them. Such a place is an idol, an illusion.
Why has God put us in such a world? A world where we are exiled from the certainties we grew up with. A world where we find ourselves in search of new orientations.