Michael Mears Bruner - A Subversive Gospel: Flannery OConnor and the Reimagining of Beauty, Goodness, and Truth

FLANNERY
OCONNOR
AND THE
REIMAGINING
OF BEAUTY,
GOODNESS,
AND TRUTH

InterVarsity Press
P.O. Box 1400, Downers Grove, IL 60515-1426
ivpress.com

2017 by Michael Bruner

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Scripture quotations, unless otherwise noted, are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA.
Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations on page vii are from the Douay-Rheims Bible.

Excerpts from Introduction, Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV from The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery OConnor edited by Sally Fitzgerald. Copyright 1979 by Regina OConnor.

Excerpts from Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, and Part VI from Mystery and Manners by Flannery OConnor, edited by Sally and Robert Fitzgerald. Copyright 1969 by the Estate of Mary Flannery O'Connor. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Excerpts from One, Two, and Three The Violent Bear It Away by Flannery OConnor. Copyright 1960 by Flannery OConnor. Renewed copyright 1988 by Regina OConnor. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Cover design: David Fassett
Interior design: Beth McGill and Daniel van Loon
Images: Flannery OConnor: Joseph De Casseres/Getty Images
pattern: EnginKorkmaz/iStockphoto

ISBN 978-0-8308-9036-1 (digital)
ISBN 978-0-8308-5066-2 (print)

This digital document has been produced by Nord Compo.

To my wife, Jenna, and my two children,
Arabelle Rose and William Smiley

Tarwater clenched his fist. He stood like one condemned, waiting at the spot of execution. Then the revelation came, silent, implacable, direct as a bullet. He did not look into the eyes of any fiery beast or see a burning bush. He only knew, with a certainty sunk in despair, that he was expected to baptize the child he saw and begin the life his great-uncle had prepared for him. He knew that he was called to be a prophet and that the ways of this prophecy would not be remarkable. His black pupils, glassy and still, reflected depth on depth his own stricken image of himself, trudging into the distance in the bleeding stinking mad shadow of Jesus, until at last he received his reward, a broken fish, a multiplied loaf. The Lord out of dust had created him, had made him blood and nerve and mind, had made him to bleed and weep and think, and set him in a world of loss and fire all to baptize one idiot child that He need not have created in the first place and to cry out a gospel just as foolish.

Who hath believed our report? and to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed?

And he shall grow up as a tender plant before him, and as a root out of a thirsty ground: there is no beauty in him, nor comeliness: and we have seen him, and there was no sightliness, that we should be desirous of him:

Despised, and the most abject of men, a man of sorrows, and acquainted with infirmity: and his look was as it were hidden and despised, whereupon we esteemed him not.

And from the days of John the Baptist until now, the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent bear it away.

But the sensual man perceiveth not these things that are of the Spirit of God; for it is foolishness to him, and he cannot understand, because it is spiritually examined.