Reloquus

Binding the Strong Man, 1B

2010-03-25T12:04:00.000-07:00

Ched Myers
Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark's Story of Jesus
Part One: Text and Context
Chapter One: A Reading Site and Strategy for Mark
Section B: Why Mark?

The section title suggests that Myers will now tell us why he is addressing Mark, rather than Luke, Ruth, 1 Kings, Exodus, or Revelation, say. But in fact, this section does not answer that question, and instead answers a separate question.

The separate question is to compare the political reading which Myers wishes to give with other techniques of reading. The titled question, "Why Mark?" is addressed only by-the-way. The main question is thus actually, "What is wrong with non-political readings of Mark?"

The answer is thus to be found in an engagement of the "battle for the Bible", and specifically, the problem with strategies which regard the local, the political, the social, as irrelevancies which the interpreter's job is to look past, to find the "timeless and universal theological principle" underlying the text. Such a method is deeply embedded with the interpreter's own situation, and here we see the benefit of Myers' up-front declaration of his own hermeneutical starting places in the previous section.

Myers rejects first the theological method which suppresses the contextual and socio-historical character of the text in favor of the interior and universal. Second, he rejects the historical relic method, which attempts to situate the text so firmly in the past that it pretends an objective and timeless examination of its past character. Myers insists that the root of the argument between these two, and between him and them, is to be found in economic differences, and not in existing denominational or theological allegiances.

Myers then addresses insiders, to argue for the value of Markan study. Mark is, as he puts it, a "political manifesto", and "we" (fellow radical disciples) are in need of such texts. So if we are to find an answer to "Why Mark?" it is for two reasons: Mark is a traditional starting place for new strategies of reading, and Mark's message particularly suits the movement Myers wishes to advance.

There is then a high-level form of eisegesis going on here. Myers is aware of the risk that his strategy will control the text rather than unpack it, and argues convincingly that supposedly "neutral" readings inherently fail even more strongly by leaving unaddressed the very factors which tend to control the text. But Myers does not discuss the way in which the choice of text plays a role. Mark functions as a manifesto for his movement (or, if Myers is right, it does), but what of Matthew?

Myers will beautifully write that there is a traditioning of the story built in to Mark: "Jesus gets the gospel from God; Mark gets the gospel from Jesus; readers get the gospel from Mark." But it is not Mark in isolation which is canon, but Mark in community with the other texts in question. Luke and Matthew, in different ways, try to "correct" Mark, and we must hear both their "correction" and the original Mark. It is surely good to hear the original Mark, but ultimately, our ears as Christians do not "get the gospel from Mark" as if we did not also get it from Matthew, Luke, John, Paul, Peter, and the rest.

And so the choice of Mark amounts to the following two arguments:

Mark's politics are similar to "our" politics so we can find a useful ally,
Mark is a fun text to work with.

Myers may successfully avoid the charge that he makes Mark into his own puppet, but by choosing the voice which is, he thinks, most similar to his own, he does perhaps make the ''scriptures'' his own puppet, by listening exclusively to the voice which sounds most like his own.

Index of Comments on Ched Myers

Index of Comments on Ched Myers

2010-03-24T11:58:00.000-07:00

Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark's Story of Jesus

Part One: Text and Context
1. A Reading Site and Strategy for Mark
A. Why a Political Reading?
B. Why Mark?
C. Political Discourse and the "War of Myths"
D. Gospel as Ideological Narrative
E. A Socio-Literary Reading Strategy
2. The Socio-Historical Site of Mark's Story of Jesus

Part Two: Reading the First Half of Mark

Part Three: Reading the Second Half of Mark

Part Four: Mark and Radical Discipleship

Index of Indexes

Binding the Strong Man, 1A

2010-03-24T11:30:00.000-07:00

Ched Myers
Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark's Story of Jesus
Part One: Text and Context
Chapter One: A Reading Site and Strategy for Mark
Section A: Why a Political Reading?

Myers begins his commentary with a hermeneutical prelude. He says this is necessary for "any serious study of a biblical text." It is, however, quite uncommon, however necessary he believes it to be. As a result, he cannot appeal to a common-sense assumption that we must start with hermeneutics.

To seriously address the question of hermeneutics is to place one's presuppositions on the table, as it were: to make them clear. There is always a gap between reader and writer, and a responsible commentator will therefore attempt to be transparent in the assumptions and starting places taken. Typical once was to assume a neutral and unbiased starting place, "that someone interprets without bias." Myers will therefore interpret from an announced starting place.

He starts with two central facts: he comes from North America, from a place of relative privilege, which he describes as an imperial context. Thus, while Mark writes from a peripheral place, Myers is writing from the center. Judging that Mark will call us to discipleship, Myers is therefore interested in hearing his voice as the voice of one on the periphery, addressed to one in the center.

Myers is also allied with "radical discipleship" as a historic question, and the "so-called Christian left". He sees that this radical discipleship calls to two central practical activites. First, repentance, which requires a deliberate "turning away from empire". It is a transfer of allegiance away from the imperial surroundings of contemporary North American life. And then, resistance, which is about active steps to "impede imperial progress".

There is an ironic aspect to Myers decision to be up-front about his starting places, and in my own reading and commenting on Myers' reading and commenting on Mark. Just as Myers feels it necessary to announce his starting places, so should I, right? Just as Mark cannot simply have an "obvious" meaning, "requiring no interpretation", the same is true for Myers.

A discovery that we should think about hermeneutics before interpreting Mark thus produces the discovery that we should think about hermeneutics before interpreting Myers. And, one of the key insights in hermeneutics as a whole is the role of suspicion. The words on the page say "this is what I'm up to", but we are entitled, from our own starting place, to judge what Myers is up to, and his statements "this is what I'm up to", are only grist for the mill.

So there is a parallel here. As Myers reads Mark, so I read Myers. My starting place seems similar to Myers, but there are crucial differences. I live in a different place than he does; we are not simply both in "North America", but rather, he wrote in the mid-eighties, while Ronald Reagan was president, and before the cataclysms of the fall of communist states in 1989. The character of American imperial strategies has radically changed, and with it, the nature of radical discipleship.

I start with a clearer attachment to anarchism, which has in more recent years enjoyed some splendid writing by Christian anarchists. Jacques Ellul's Anarchy and Christianity appeared in English in 1988, and Vernard Eller's Christian Anarchy only in 1999. Likewise, while Myers came out of the peace churches (Mennonite, specifically), I was a Presbyterian as a child and adolescent, and became an Anglican as an adult. Myers' understanding of radical discipleship is thus going to be very different from mine, as we drink from very different wells.

Myers wants to provide a political reading for Mark, because he believes that it is particularly necessary to provide political readings in general, as a radical disciple in an imperial center. What kind of a reading do I give of Myers? What questions do I bring to Myers' text? One, of course, is to discover more about Mark's text. Another is to tease out the distinctions underlying Christian anarchism, Christian nonviolence, radical discipleship. The distinctions between anarchists, Marxists, and social democrats are very interesting to me, and Myers writes from a time when only Marxist and social democratic voices were heard from the left.

I am very interested in identifying anarchist readings of Scripture in general, and Myers' reading of Mark is helpful. There is the danger, of course, that Myers' affection for Mark will lead him to discountenance the other Gospels. It is perhaps a slogan that Mark is not canonical scripture, except insofar as Mark is one among four (or more!). If we read Mark in such a way as to declare the other New Testament authors erroneous then we are reading Mark uncanonically, and in a way which is thus at odds with the authority Mark has for the church. My interest in the whole canon and the whole tradition means that I am in dialogue with more New Testament texts than Myers may be, and I will be interested to see whether what he says will stand up when one holds all the Scriptures in view.

Index of Comments on Ched Myers

St. Isaiah the Solitary 12

2008-08-17T10:23:00.000-07:00

St. Isaiah the Solitary, On Guarding the Intellect, Twenty-Seven Texts

12. Our teacher Jesus Christ, out of pity for mankind and knowing the utter mercilessness of the demons, severely commands us: "Be ready at every hour, for you do not know when the thief wil come; do not let him come and find you asleep." He also says: "Take heed, lest your hearts be overwhelmed with debauchery and drunkenness and the cares of this life, and the hour come upon you unawares." Stand guard, then, over your heart and keep a watch on your senses; and if the remembrance of God dwells peaceably wihin you, you will catch the thieves when they try to deprive you of it. When a man has an exact knowledge about the nature of thoughts, he recognizes those which are about to enter and defile him, troubling the intellect with distractions and making it lazy. Those who recognize these evil thoughts for what they are remain undisturbed and continue in prayer to God.

Continuing the topic of vigilance from the previous text, we hear now of prerequisites for vigilance and the results.

Guarding the intellect is a matter of two things. First, it is the remembrance of God, dwelling peaceably within us, which enables us to "catch the thieves" who steal in. Remembrance is not just a momentary remembering, a thing which comes and goes, but rather the habitual resting of the soul in God. If we wish to be vigilant--and surely we do!--then we must cultivate this remembrance. Here lies the essence of spiritual practice, of discipline: to cultivate this resting, this remembrance, this ongoing practical knowledge of the peace of God dwelling within us.

For it is indeed knowledge that is at stake, as the second prerequisite makes clear. We can ward off the thieves only when we know which thoughts are thieves and which are not, and this is a matter of knowledge. It is a subtle knowledge, however. It lies not in the realm of propositions and things of which we could be convinced. It is more in the realm of acquaintance, of intimate relationship.

This text marks a transition to a more mature spiritual life as well. We are promised rest, and lack of disturbance--how different from the holy anger of the first text this is, and how striking is the shift from battle to recognition. It is as if, once we have acquired the knowledge and the remembrance of God, we no longer need to battle the enemies which assault us.

Instead, we recognize them, and can prevent them from making even an initial enemy. What a blessing this is, because with it we are no longer in the need to engage them. We already knew that with God's help they could not hurt us, if we willingly fought them, if we had the holy anger that St. Isaiah's first text calls for. But now we have a stronger promise: if, with remembrance and knowledge, we recognize them before they even enter, we will be at peace.

Index of Comments on the Philokalia

On the Use and Interpretation of Scripture: Private Prayer

2007-11-17T18:03:00.000-08:00

Having completed my discussion of the use and interpretation of Scripture in liturgical contexts, I can turn to the remainder of the topic, beginning first with private prayer.

Lectio Divina

A particular famous and important use of the Scriptures in private prayer is of course the practice known as sacred reading, or in Latin, lectio divina. This has sometimes been worked up into a fairly detailed four-stage method of prayer, but this is perhaps not true to its real nature.

Instead of the most common description of sacred reading as being about particular stages, I want to look "under the hood," as it were, and see what is particular to this form of the use of Scripture which can perhaps illuminate other non-liturgical uses.

The primary thing we notice in attending to this monastic practice of sacred reading, is that it is not merely the text which is sacred, but the manner in which it is read. Moreover, there is reason to think that for monks this was for a long time the only way to read a text, rather than merely one, that it was what it is to read a sacred text.

The conviction then is that the proper way to read the sacred text is to do so in a particular way. Only later does that way become understood as a particular method of prayer. So embedded in this particular method are some convictions about what it is to read properly.

First, and most clearly, reading is done with no particular goal beyond edification. The reading is not targeted at reading any particular amount, or to establish some point or other, or to address a particular question. Of course, these had always been ways Scripture is used, but the prayerful sacred reading of Scripture, as practiced by the monks, was not this.

The assumption is made that God will be met in the text, and if that assumption is correct, if God will be met there, then it will be the transcendent God who cannot be controlled and refuses to be at our beck and call. Indeed, the more sure we are that we will meet God in our reading of the text, the more careful we inevitably will be that we approach without a presupposition of what we will find.

The reading is undertaken slowly as if we were savoring every bite. (And the word ruminatio, rumination, is associated with this practice, after all.) There is an attitude of reception, of waiting, of hearing. This is very different from exegeting Scripture for the purpose of proving a point, or just the scholarly task of hearing what the text says.

Prayers

Scripture also forms a great source of material for private prayer. The psalms are not merely a great source of prayers for liturgy, but they are also prayers which can be used at need as one's own prayers.

And there are of course a whole host of quasi-liturgical devotions, whose words are substantially from the Scriptures, for example, the rosary, the angelus, novenas, and so forth. As a general rule, the observations I have already made about the Scriptures as liturgical source texts apply here.

But there is an additional aspect to the use of the Scriptures as sources of private prayer, and that is that they are chosen by the individual in a way that the liturgy is not. (And for quasi-liturgical devotions, there is a spectrum here.)

The private use of the Scriptures as prayer then is something chosen, and the question of how the individual can adopt the words of Scripture as her own prayer becomes manifest. What remains, however, once a given text is used and is appropriate, is that it can be a tremendous asset to many to have words provided. This is particularly true at times when words fail, or with individuals who may not know how they feel until they find words for it.

Translation

The question now is what implications the use and interpretation of Scripture in private prayer may have for the remainder of the church's life. In one sense, the answer is not at all, and in another, it is immeasurable in every way.

In the former sense, the understandings reached in private prayer have no authority for the church. What one encounters in sacred reading, or the understanding one uses in taking a text as one's own prayer, is not therefore the correct use of the text in preaching or otherwise ordering the church's life. As I have already argued, the liturgical use is primary, and therefore cannot be dependent upon the private use.

This does not mean that the preacher's private prayer and encounter with God in Scripture is irrelevant. It simply means that, once the prayer is over, the preacher must now ask the questions of what must be preached, and there is no question of taking the encounter in private as normative in public. What is to be preached must be judged on a liturgical basis (as I have already argued) and is not to be subject to any particular private encounter, even that of the preacher himself.

But if the prayer is genuine, it will also be that the encounter with God in the text will be transformative, as any true prayer and encounter with God can be expected to be. And this will in turn bear its fruit in all areas. As a Christian becomes more and more conformed to God, especially through prayer and contact with God, we can expect that all their life will become more embued with the will of God, and this applies to their use of Scripture no less than the rest of life.

On the Use and Interpretation of Scripture: Index

On the Use and Interpretation of Scripture: Supervening Liturgical Authority

2007-11-11T07:05:00.000-08:00

We turn now to the last liturgical category for the use and interpretation of Scripture: its use as an authority prescribing or prohibiting liturgical actions.

For some, this follows from a general rule that Scripture must be the authority for all of life. In this of course there is broad agreement, though the exact parameters of what it means in practice are highly controversial. So we will do well, in accord with my general procedure in this series, not to attempt a general, over-arching account, but rather to attempt merely to understand this one small piece.

Positive Obligations from Scripture

We can of course find in Scripture some positive commands regarding worship. For example, that we pray, that we confess our sins, that we give thanks to God, that we celebrate the sacraments, all these are commanded in Scripture.

Beyond this, Scripture occasionally commands certain texts, for example, the Lord's Prayer, as normative for prayer. I have already noted the importance of the Lord's Prayer and lamented its neglect by some churches which proclaim a very high view of the importance of the Scriptures.

What is striking, however, is that the positive obligations from Scripture are so spare. The tractarians as well were impressed by this fact, and concluded from this and from minor references to liturgical practice that the apostles taught liturgical practice, but it was not the role of the epistles (let alone the Gospels) to command this practice to the church.

Here we see a striking variance from the historic position of the Reformed, who proclaim that only what is commanded may be done. As evidence of this, they point to the strong language in the Old Testament which seems to absolutely prohibit any human invention about how to best worship God. For the Reformed, God tells us what God wants from us in worship, and that is the end of the matter.

But of course this is a useless doctrine when it comes time to write a prayer. Did God command this or that particular sentence of thanksgiving? No, of course not. The Reformed plead that God did command, for example, thanksgiving. Yet, the Scriptures do not tell us what the sentence must say. So if we are actually writing a liturgy, we cannot possibly hope to find complete instructions in the Scriptures.

At best we find general heads, and we are left to fill them out. But then we have a loophole through the Reformed principle which is big enough to drive the entire Tridentine liturgy through. We are left then with the Lutheran position.

Adiaphora

The Lutheran position then is that some things are obligatory, and some things are prohibited, and in between them are things indifferent. One may do them, but one may not make them a condition of church unity. Of course, the problem with that, again, is that they are a condition of church unity, when we look at the actual folks in the pews.

The exact language of a thanksgiving prayer will serve again as example. The exact wording is an adiaphoron. Now, think of the average worshipper: it is a condition of their participation that they pray that particular prayer, because that simply is the prayer the group is using. And there may well be no other church around for them to attend.

The actual worshipping dynamics of congregations, as I have argued before, always involve people who decide what will happen and other people who simply must take what is offered and do not get to decide. And precisely because of this, talk of "freedom"--or adiaphora in the Lutheran fashion--is quite out of place.

The Authority of the Church

And so who will write that thanksgiving prayer? We cannot find it in Scripture. We cannot say that because it is not in Scripture, anything orthodox will do, without stepping on toes, since the priniciple of adiaphora preserves the right of all to reject the practice without losing unity.

The Anglican solution is to argue that particular churches have the right to order their ceremonies as they see fit, and impose them on worshippers, but must do nothing contrary to scriptures, and must not require to be believed what cannot be proved from the Scriptures. Notice that requirements about practice can be imposed--which is a good thing, since public worship necessarily involves the imposition of requirements about practice.

But this still leaves unsaid why the church should have this authority. And here, we appeal a good old Tractarian idea: the ministerial commission. As we all know, the talk about lay ministry in the Episcopal Church has not replaced the central authority of the rector over worship, nor could it. Indeed, I will subscribe to that hoary old Tractarian conviction that there is a ministerial commission, given to the church, and to particular individuals within it, to order the life and worship of the church. This commission resides in the bishops and the lower clergy to whom they have delegated that task through ordination.

Interpretation?

So now we can get to the point! What does this tell us about the use and interpretation of the Scriptures when it comes to their role as the authority for our worship? It tells us that the task of deciding what must be done, when the scriptures do not give us prohibitions or commands, falls upon the clergy, and primarily upon the bishops.

But the interpretation of the Scriptures is controversial. Not everyone will agree on which points have been prohibited or commanded by Scripture. (For example, some believe that blessing same-sex marriages is prohibited, others disagree.) Who is to make the authoritative determination for the church? For either we do the controversial practice or we do not; someone must decide.

Clearly there is no way to separate this deciding (what do the Scriptures require or prohibit for our worship?) from the first one (what should we do when the Scriptures leave us free?). There is no way to constitute an authority for the second which will not, ipso facto be determining the first.

The bishops (and the lower clergy under their deputation) thus for the first time in these essays have a distinctive magisterial role, but one which is entirely practical. (Homiletic, already treated, is another, but does not involve authoritative statements in the way liturgical decisions do.) The bishops have an authoritative role in interpreting the scriptures as far as necessary to determine whether a given practice is commanded, prohibited, or left open to the church to decide: and in the last case, to make that decision.

This process requires that the bishops act with integrity. It is not plenary authority to do what they please with the liturgy; it is an authority constrained by the Scriptures. But, and this is absolutely crucial, the recognition of that constraint is not imposed by someone else. One might disagree with or object to the bishops' decisions about some liturgical question, or biblical interpretation weighing in upon it, but the determination of what to do still resides in the bishops' hands, and they are not acting illegitimately simply because their interpretation differs from one's own.

On the Use and Interpretation of Scripture: Index

St. Isaiah the Solitary 11

2007-10-06T18:53:00.000-07:00

St. Isaiah the Solitary, On Guarding the Intellect, Twenty-Seven Texts

11. The demons cunningly withdraw for a time in the hope that we will cease to guard our heart, thinking we have now attained peace; then they suddenly attack our unhappy soul and seize it like a sparrow. Gaining possession of it, they drag it down mercilessly into all kinds of sin, worse than those which we have already committed and for which we have asked forgiveness. Let us stand, therefore, with fear of God and keep guard over our heart, practising the virtues which check the wickedness of our enemies.

From the initial counsels about freeing the intellect and becoming at rest, we turn now to a crucial warning. It is tempting to think that, once freed, one has no enemies. Isn't this just what happens after great military victories? But the elation of V-E day yields shortly to the realization that the true enemies are not so quickly vanquished.

The modern tendency is then to say that the true enemies are internal, and in a sense, this is right. But the mythological language here, of demons, is helpful. Don't get caught up in metaphysics! The point is that the forces which plague us are not, truly, internal, but rather, external, and they succeed by a cooperation between the internal and external. What makes the external demons able to accomplish their nefarious task is an inward readiness for them.

And, alas, that readiness is what happens if we "cease to guard our heart, thinking we have now attained peace." It is the consequence of the spiritual pride, which would say, "I have now purified the intellect, and I am at peace," and that suddenly makes it possible for the true reality: that freedom and peace are not so simple.

It is when we think that we have nothing more to do that this warning comes to play. The spiritual pride of thinking that we have reached our goal is precisely the thing which opens us to even greater dangers.

Index of Comments on the Philokalia

On the Use and Interpretation of Scripture: Ritual Object

2007-09-08T06:20:00.000-07:00

We move on to a perhaps surprising topic for some: the use of Scripture as a ritual object in the liturgy. Here we are concerned with the physical object rather than the particular words within it.

For some, Scripture is so primarily and only a text, that it ceases to be a thing, an actual written thing. Some react to the reverence shown the book of the Gospels (especially by the Orthodox who enthrone it) as tantamount to idolatry. (These are, of course, the same Christians who reject statues and bowing to altars, and such.)

Now what is odd here is that our monotheistic fellows in other Abrahamic religions, with far more stringent rules about the veneration of material objects, do not shirk when it comes to their sacred texts. We know of Torah scrolls, made with painstaking care by specially trained scribes, kept in special chests, and treated with much reverence. Muslims always place the Koran on the highest shelf and treat it with special respect in a variety of ways.

So how does Christian liturgy treat the Bible as a ritual object, and what can we learn from this?

Size and Dignity of Book

Bibles are famously large. In the modern age we have perhaps missed this, with inexpensive printing on very thin paper, but any look (still) at a so-called "pulpit Bible" will show that making a Bible on good weight paper at a large size for public reading means making a very large book indeed.

Rubrics commonly direct that biblical readings be made from dignified volumes. Moreover, as a general rule, readings come from complete bibles or from lectionaries, and should not come from random sheets taped here and there. By using as a ritual object a complete text (or a complete lectionary) one knows that this is an excerpt, and perhaps more importantly, that the reading comes from somewhere, indeed, comes from something which existed prior to this reading!

Signs of Reverence

In the Middle Ages, the very best illumination was reserved for the text of the Scriptures. This was not a kind of sumptuary legislation, as if decoration of other books would be wrong, but it was an indication of importance: with limited time and money, start on the most important book.

Particularly books of the Gospels are decorated splendidly, and given special honor in liturgy: they are carried in processions, and serve as signs of Christ's presence, the idea being that they carry the words of Jesus. Indeed, the Western liturgical tradition objects to the use of a processional cross in the gospel procession precisely for this reason: it is the book itself which is the marker in that procession. (For a like reason, processional crosses should not be used when the paschal candle is in the procession, but the candle should come first.)

Many churches arrange to have candles mark the reading of Scripture; either the Gospel alone, or all the readings. Special reading desks, reserved for this purpose are commonly seen; one very popular style in the United States is to have a grand eagle-shaped lectern to hold the text.

Ordination Rites

Of particular importance is the use of the Bible in the ordination rites. In the western liturgy, this is generally the only time the Bible is given prominence outside of its use as a source of text for proclamation.

In the historic western pattern for the ordination of a bishop, the period of silent prayer before the laying on of hands features deacons holding the open book of the gospels over the head of the kneeling candidate. In contemporary Anglican rites, the Bible is given to all candidates for ordination (of whatever order). In neither case is the text being used to read from: it is instead being used as a pure symbol.

(This does not mean the written words are far from mind: in the historical episcopal ordination rite, the book of the gospels is the one from which a reading has just been proclaimed a bit earlier; in the Anglican rites the handing of the Bible is accompanied by a formula which often relates to the text, if only obliquely.)

Non-liturgical Uses

Notice the image of the fundamentalist preacher holding his bible as he speaks. Do we not see here as well the use of the Bible as a ritual object? He may turn through it, read it, but we also see its use as an object. The English cliche of the "Bible-thumper" shows this as well.

Also to consider, with some interest, is the general tendency of Christians not to show particular reverence to the text of the Scriptures outside the liturgy. One used to see a "family bible" placed in a position of honor in some households, and there are those who imitate Muslim practices by wrapping the text in cloth and storing it specially.

Some conclusions

What do these scattered observations tell us about the use and interpretation of Scripture? I list them first, if only to remind us that the use of Scripture includes these uses even if they do not involve reading.

But beyond that, these uses express the community's love for the Scripture, and highlight it as important. When these uses are not in place (allowing for liturgical expression to vary from place to place, of course), when there is really nothing special done for the physical objects, we can properly wonder if we are seeing a community which does not value the words as much either.

For this reason, liturgical leaders should take seriously the injunctions to read from dignified books, and should relish opportunities to show such signs of honor as fit in a particular liturgical context.

We also see, in the ordination rites, that the Scriptures are particularly associated with ordained ministry. By no means as if I were saying that lay people need not be concerned, but rather, that ordained ministry is being associated particularly with the text. As a source of inspiration, as a guide, as a mark of authority: in all these ways, the community indicates a relation of intimacy and importance between scriptural text and ordination.

This is, perhaps, the most important reason for expecting ordinands to have serious training in the Scriptures. Whatever value that training may have in preaching and other tasks aside, there is independently a value placed upon the leader knowing the text. And here, for the first time in this series, do we see a role emerging for private study and its importance: in the use of the book of the Scriptures at ordination, we see an expectation that such private study will occur.

On the Use and Interpretation of Scripture: Index

On the Use and Interpretation of Scripture: Source Text

2007-05-03T12:51:00.000-07:00

Next we are concerned with the use of Scripture in providing a corpus of texts for other purposes. Hymns, poetry, prayers, and so forth, all draw from Scriptural roots, often borrowing phrases quoted whole, modified slightly, paraphrased, or alluded to. The Scriptures form a set of images, stories, metaphors, and such, which can be deployed in other and different contexts from where they began.

Scripture in Prayers

The use of Scriptural text in prayer is ancient, but often neglected today. It is difficult in an ex tempore prayer to effectively make use of Scripture, and the result is that churches which laud ex tempore prayer as the only genuine prayer tend to have a fairly low dose of Scriptural content in the prayer. (Ironically, such churches are often found to hold very high doctrines of the importance of Scripture!)

We are not concerned here with whether prayer is "Scriptural" in some sense of being obedient to it. Of course, prayer ought to be orthodox; and if orthodoxy is captured by being "Scriptural", then prayer ought to be such. Instead, the concern here is whether the language of Scripture is also the language of prayer.

Perhaps the most important example here is the Lord's Prayer. As Anglicans have always pointed out, when Jesus was asked to teach how to pray, he responded with a set form of words and a rubric ("go into your closet and shut the door"). The wholesale use of prayers from Scripture as one's own prayer is deeply embedded in the traditions of liturgical worship. The Lord's Prayer, the psalter, canticles, and so forth, must always have pride of place.

The use of Scripture as a source text for prayer is not only however that it gives us texts to pray; it also gives us phrases and ideas. So prayers do not merely refer to the contents of the Bible by treating the Bible as a source of true statements about history and theology, but also as a source of images, metaphors, and so forth. "Here I raise my Ebenezer" went the traditional words of "Come thou font of every blessing." The Episcopal Church has now dropped those words, under the (surely correct) assumption that almost everyone who sings them has forgotten—or never learned—1 Samuel 7.

Meaning and Interpretation

Immediately with all these uses of Scripture as source texts runs the worry that the text will be taken in a way which does violence to its meaning. I believe that this worry fundamentally misunderstands the nature of scriptural interpretation. It operates with the idea that there is a "meaning", which is determined separately and apart from the actual use of the text in the Church, and which the Church's use in prayer must then be respectful of. This is the right description, because if interpretation is not to be separate and apart from the actual use of the text, then we would see the actual use of the text as source material as precisely one of those things which interpretation must take into account, rather than judge over.

But this does not mean that a text cannot be misused in quotation. Of course it can be. What it means is simply that the judgment whether it has been misused cannot be made on the basis of fidelity to some separately acquired meaning. And the caveats about historical continuity now apply. We must be extremely cautious about deciding that a traditional use of a text in quotation is a misuse. If we are tempted to say that indeed it is, we must now step back and re-evaluate that perhaps it is rather our criteria for judging use and misuse which should be amended.

Two examples will make the point. The liturgy grabs one verse of Psalm 118 and embeds it in the Eucharistic Prayer, in which it functions as an acclamation of Jesus Christ, the one who "comes in the name of the Lord." And many worshippers have gone further and re-interpreted the text as referring to themselves. (This is a convenient modern idea, but has no basis in liturgical history; it then drives the text to be re-translated to avoid the "he" since the worshippers are both men and women.) But this is not what Psalm 118 means, the Biblical Scholar proclaims; it does violence to the psalm; the psalm is a Royal Psalm, about King David, and not about Jesus.

The second example of the use of Scripture as quotation is the celebrated quotation of Isaiah in Matthew, in which we are told that a "virgin will conceive", now applied to Mary. Not even a mis-applied quotation (since in Isaiah, we are told, it was about Ahab and the immediate political context), but a misquoted and mis-applied quotation, since Hebrew almah does not imply virgin, as Matthew is using it.

What to do?! Notice now the validity of the historical caution. If we decide that the antecedently determined meaning must control all use in quotation, then we must jettison not merely the Benedictus in the Eucharistic Prayer, but also large stretches of the New Testament—for starters. This should tell us that the rule being proposed is the wrong rule.

Many adopt a quite bizarre rule, one which says that it's ok for Scripture to misquote and misuse Scripture, but not ok for us to do so. This cannot be right. Instead, what we must give up on is the idea that these are misuses or misquotes at all.

Matthew is quoting Isaiah, we must say. We can comfortably say that Isaiah never intended what Matthew gets out of it, but so what? Isaiah does not own the text, and have we not learned that "authorial intention" is the shakiest of grounds to base a hermeneutic upon?

But once we say this, that Matthew is quoting Isaiah, we must also say that this is not the only way one may quote Isaiah. The other ways remain; the other uses of Scripture remain. If one is worried that we will not be able to hear about Ahab and his situation because Matthew has altered the meaning of the text, then this worry can be put to rest. Since we are not engaged in a search for "the meaning of the text", we need not worry that affirming Matthew means discarding other uses and interpretations.

On the Use and Interpretation of Scripture: Index

On the Use and Interpretation of Scripture: Homiletics

2007-02-22T21:25:00.000-08:00

One of the primary means of using Scripture in the liturgy, after the reading of it, is preaching based upon it. The primary role of the liturgy is thus underscored not only by reading it in liturgy, but in regularly commenting on it in the context of the liturgy. This is then the primary means by which the Scripture is commented on in the Church. But it is specifically liturgical; and some features of this commentary are particular to that context.

Objective Setting

By the objective setting, I mean those features which depend not on the particulars of a given congregation or preacher or moment. We are concerned then with the ritual context in which the homily is found, the particular liturgical festival or occasion, and so forth.

A homily is intended not merely to explain a given text, but to explain it for a purpose, that is, for the purpose of its setting in that particular liturgy. A Eucharistic homily thus differs from a homily preached at an office. Preaching at an ordination differs from preaching at a funeral. Preaching in Easter differs from Christmas, and both from Lent or Advent.

There is no question, therefore, of giving a homily which simply explains a text as a written commentary might; the homily is necessarily directed to the occasion and setting. Moreover, because of the priority of liturgy in the Church, the liturgical homily, with its particular setting and role, stands over written commentary.

This is not to require that every use, to be appropriate, must be preachable. Many are not, and indeed, this is the point. It is the preachable uses which enjoy priority. The homily is not intended to give a comprehensive explanation of a text, and there are explanations of the text which are not appropriate for homiletic. Perhaps a given text is read only on a particular sort of occasion, which occasion does not provide for a given interpretation. One might suppose that this is to be lamented: that the text should be taken some other time, so that the proposed interpretation can be preached.

But this would be to understand the priority of liturgy and liturgical use incorrectly. There is no antecedent correct interpretation which it is the job of the liturgy to enact or preach. Rather, the liturgical interpretation has priority (though without replacing the other uses), and that priority has its own integrity.

Crucially, liturgical contexts are given antecedently. Except on rare occasions, one does not begin with a homily and then seek a liturgy in which to embed it; likewise, liturgical procedure chooses readings first and only then begins consideration of homiletic: and the choice is made (generally not by local communities) with regard for the entire year and not simply a single occasion.

Nothing wrong has happened because a given text is read and not homilized about, or that a homily can only say some things and not everything. This is, in fact, of the nature of liturgical preaching, and it does not mean that liturgical preaching is only of secondary importance to some understanding of the text reached before; rather, it means that liturgical preaching enjoys a priority, with these characteristics as part of why it has that priority.

Subjective Setting

Different communities differ, as do different preachers. One day it may be raining; the deceased at a funeral may be well known or indigent. Appropriate preaching is responsive to all these various changes in communities and situations.

The dynamic of liturgical preaching is driven then by the relation between the fixed text of Scripture and the dynamics of actual liturgical communities, as mediated by liturgical designers who have done their work without knowing the details of the particular community.

Different interpretations are made in a homily, as a result, depending on all these factors. What establishes the correctness of the homily must be judged by the internal canons of liturgical appropriateness, and not by fidelity to some antecedent interpretation of the text or of the particular liturgical situation. One preaches on 1 Corinthians 15 at many funerals, but the content can and should vary appropriately.

Moreover, what is said in one community about 1 Corinthians 15 may be quite different from what is said in another. This does not result in any question of which is correct, merely because they may disagree in the words spoken. The job of a homily—which is a liturgical job—is to be part of a particular ritual, just as much as the lighting of candles, playing of music, or reading of prayers.

This does not mean that all preaching is equally appropriate, of course. One must judge the homily, but the judgment must be with respect to the liturgical situation in all its particularity, rather than to some idealized reading of a text or even of a liturgical context.

Locality of Reference

Any given homily is only about certain parts of the Bible. Because of the necessarily contextual setting of a homily, there is no need for the sort of consistency required of other uses of Scripture. Because a text may have many meanings; because, that is, there may be many hermeneutical filters which could illuminate it; because there is no interpretation of Scripture prior to the homily which could judge it—there is no reason that a given text must always be given the same explanation, or even compatible explanations; still less that one text must be given an explanation compatible with that given a different text.

Two points are crucial here. First, that there is (in general) no violation of appropriate homiletic in giving different readings of the same text on different occasions, or giving readings of different texts on separate occasions which could not be joined into a single homily. This follows necessarily from the reality that there is no antecedent correct interpretation to be found, which in turn follows from the priority of the liturgical use of Scripture.

Second, this places hermeneutical filters and techniques at the service of the homilist and not as a master. Moreover, because a homilist must be attentive to the objective and subjective contexts of the homily, it is unlikely that any hermeneutical filter could be determined in advance without, on some occasion or other, producing bad homiletic. (One thinks here of those Lutheran preachers who feel constrained to preach justification by faith alone in every sermon.)

The Judgment of Homiletic

I have insisted that homiletic cannot be judged by fidelity to antecedently chosen hermeneutical criteria or preceding interpretation. I have, however, been vague and inspecific about what the criteria are which distinguish good from bad homiletic.

Homiletic, embedded in the liturgical context, must function together with that context. It cannot, therefore, operate as a challenge to the basic assumptions or mechanisms of the liturgy. (If such a challenge is necessary, then one has an obligation to stop engaging in the offending liturgy rather than enacting it while criticizing it.) This is true both for objective and subjective factors.

A homily must serve the rite, offering words that enable the hearers to more effectively participate in the liturgy. A homily which so enrages the hearers that they leave (or stay only through a mistaken sense of propriety) is a failure, even if the words would be true on some other occasion. Or rather, such a homily may be successful, but not as a homily; that is, its interpretation of text has failed to be what it should be, and thus is no longer a use or interpretation of Scripture in that community.

A homily must be responsible, both to the wider Church, and to the ongoing life of a given congregation. Even when a homilist is invited to preach in an unfamiliar community and expects never to return, the homily should be responsible as if the preacher needed to stay around and deal with fall-out, as if the preacher were prepared to be judged for the content of what is said.

Finally, a homily is not a lecture, nor is it bible study. Homilies which are so inattentive to liturgical context that they are lectures have left the liturgy entirely. Likewise, homilies which are really introductions to group bible study (so-called "dialogue sermons," for example) have deviated so strongly from their liturgical moorings that they are no longer homilies, but something else. While in both these cases they may be very good lectures or bible studies, they no longer enjoy the priority properly ascribed to the homily.

On the Use and Interpretation of Scripture: Index

On the Use and Interpretation of Scripture: Readings in the Liturgy

2007-02-19T21:12:00.000-08:00

The primary criterion of Scripture is its use in the liturgy, specifically its use as the key readings in the liturgy. From this comes the essential criterion of canonicity, as well as the other uses of Scripture in the church.

Canonicity

Only some books are read and not others. Because the question of what is read must be made: one either reads a given book, or not, the question is inescapable. The practice of course derived from the synagogue with its own practice of readings. Immediately one notices some qualifications necessary.

First, there are readings from non-biblical literature. These are most often found in the morning office, as patristic readings. They were prescribed by the Rule of Saint Benedict, and are found in other liturgies as well. Recently some Anglican liturgies have made their use optional. Special services, especially weddings, often find such readings.

We can note some facts about these additional non-Scriptural readings which explain why, despite their use in the liturgy, they are not thereby Scripture. They arose only later, and always surrounded with the rule that they can augment, but never replace, the Scriptural readings. Second, they are limited to only some services and not used in others, while Scriptural readings are used in nearly all services.

A second qualification is the use of hymns from non-biblical sources, especially in contexts where biblical texts are normally found. For example, in the Anglican office one finds the use of the Te Deum and the Gloria in Excelsis as canticles for some days and not others. We should note, however, that in the Roman Office, the Te Deum has its own place, and the Gloria is not found in the office at all. Perhaps even more interesting is the extensive use of "canons" of antiphons in the Orthodox services, which have come to replace almost entirely the singing of the biblical canticles with which they were associated.

However, we can see that these hymns are used as the expression of the worshippers: quite rather than being read to the worshippers, they are sung by the worshippers themselves as their own prayer. And, most importantly, while some of them have come to replace or even supplant biblical texts, they are not allowed to introduce upon the readings in the liturgy proper.

So the liturgy marks out, by particular forms, certain texts, which are read from the Scriptures at particular moments, and surrounded by particular ceremony and responses. These texts are taken from the normative canon of Scripture, and it is this selection which determines the canon.

Choice of Books

The texts chosen vary from church to church. Different churches have made different judgments about canonicity, with different reasons. Broad agreement was reached fairly early, with disagreement arising in the sixteenth century about the "apocrypha": Jewish texts in the Greek and Latin Bibles but not in the Hebrew.

One can judge that what a church reads in worship, as a canonical reading, is what that church takes to be canonical. But there are some constant worries. For example, Anglicans have always read from the apocrypha, but have a rule that the texts thus read are not to establish points of doctrine. The Orthodox have always admitted the Revelation of John as canonical, but do not read it in services.

So the actual practice of churches is a bit fuzzy. I judge, however, that the choice to read a text in church as scripture establishes its canonicity for that community; while a decision not to read it is determinitive neither way. So we must say that the apocrypha are canonical for Anglicans, and we must understand the decision not to base doctrine upon them in some other way. The Orthodox, who insist that the Revelation is canonical, must be taken at their word, though it is not read in services.

For every church cannot read everything, or at least, thus has been the case.

Choice of Readings

The choice of readings offers the fear that we establish a canon within the canon. Such choices are made often for practical reasons, but an examination of lectionaries will show that other concerns are also often present.

Sometimes a text is excluded because it is ugly: this is often the case with various psalms in various liturgies. More often, it is excluded from reading because, essentially, the compilers of the lectionary do not know how it could be read and understood as Scripture by their community.

They express, thus, a sort of half-doubt about canonicity. They do not wish to read texts about which the worshipping community will react with marked hostility; in this they reflect (or try to) the judgments the community itself makes. It is just this which is invoked to exclude the Revelation of John from Orthodox liturgy; and likewise, one can imagine just such motives behind the particular omissions from various New Testament epistles in the Daily Office lectionary of the Episcopal Church.

However, the lectionary compilers are not excluding such readings from the church. One finds that, in fact, no broad exclusion is made; merely that the particular reading is not included in the lectionary. But the actual practice of the churches allows readings outside the lectionary for various purposes; importantly, no judgment is made that the text is in principle incapable of being used as scripture, merely that it is pastorally inadvisable in the particular setting.

One must always be wary, however, that a continued practice of this sort does result, ultimately, in a loss of canonicity for that community. Lectionary authors are therefore advised to be extremely careful with such cases.

Liturgical Honorific

The readings are marked by particular honorifics. Most notably in the West is the acclamation "thanks be to God" after readings; in recent years this is preceded by the declaration of the reader: "The Word of the Lord." Moreover, liturgy renders an honorific immediately by the near constant use of Scripture in liturgy. Nearly every service has a reading, even if reduced to a single sentence or two. (And, in those cases, it is still regarded as a reading.)

One finds directions about reading from dignified books, elevated platforms, surrounded by lights, and so forth. The reading of the Gospel, in particular, is associated with special honor played the Gospel book and the management of its reading in liturgy.

In these ways and more the church confesses something about the reading of Scripture. But most importantly, what it confesses is that Scripture should be surrounded by reverence. It should be treated as important, and this is crucial. Nothing is so strange to the liturgical worshipper as the fundamentalist preacher holding his Bible, with no actual reading having occurred, as he pages around in his sermon identifying bits and explaining them. It looks so undignified; the text is being made to serve the speaker. At no point can the text simply be heard.

The Puritans insisted that a homily should be associated with every reading, but Anglicans followed liturgical tradition in refusing. In particular, we trust that the reading, by itself, is capable of doing something. In not demanding a homily at each reading, we mark a conviction about the power of the text itself.

On the Use and Interpretation of Scripture: Index

On the Use and Interpretation of Scripture: Index

2007-02-19T18:10:00.000-08:00

A series on the use and interpretation of Scripture.

1. Prolegomena
2. Liturgy: Readings
3. Liturgy: Homiletics
4. Liturgy: Source Text
5. Liturgy: Ritual Object
6. Liturgy: Supervening Authority
7. Private Prayer
8. Private Study
9. Canon Law
10. Dogmatic Polemic
11. Dogmatic Foundation
12. Conclusion

Index of Indexes

On the Use and Interpretation of Scripture: Prolegomena

2007-02-19T16:52:00.000-08:00

What is the correct way to use and interpret Scripture? This is a very important question, and part of what makes it difficult is the way that presuppositions are made which prejudice the results, presuppositions which are taken as obvious, so obvious they need not be stated, and yet which, when stated, lack defense.

So in this series of posts I wish to explore this question for two purposes: to outline what I believe is the correct way to understand the use and interpretation of Scirpture, and second, to explore the way that hidden presuppositions can color the results.

This impinges upon me the need to describe where I start.

Historical Continuity

I take it as a given that the Church is a historically continuous entity, and that nothing can be essential for all Christians which did not exist for some. (This leaves open the possibility, of course, that something can be essential for all Christians after some point; to defend such a possibility in a particular case requires a clear explanation of what changed at that point.)

We are investigating the proper use and interpretation of the Scriptures within the Christian Church. There may be uses and interpretations of Scripture which are found outside the Church; nothing here prevents such investigation, but neither can that investigation be relevant to the ecclesiastical task.

We necessarily find, therefore, that the Church existed before the New Testament; that it is incorrect to state that the Scriptures give birth to the Church. The Church existed fully and completely on the Day of Pentecost; moreover, no word of the New Testament was penned except by members of the Christian community seeking to inform or govern other members of the community, and the text was received as such as any other communication from the same author would have been. (We can see this in Paul most directly, who clearly writes as if a live communication would have the same authority as a written, and indeed, stresses that his written communication should be received as if he were present in person. Clearly, then, the written text of Paul's letters derives its authority—at least for its first hearers—from the authority of Paul, and had no particular additional authority that other forms of communication from him would not share.)

Under this heading also, we must be committed to a robust conviction of the historical continuity of the Church in its use of Scripture. Just as we cannot unchurch the first generation of Christians, we cannot unchurch the rest. We may well have criticisms to make, but we cannot make them in such terms that we render unrecognizable the Church of a given age, or rather, to make a criticism of a certain depth requires that we cease recognition of this or that group as being the Church. And, if this in turn means we must see a fundamental break in the continuity of the Church, we must go back and reform our criticism. It is thus that historical continuity is a brake upon arbitrary claims of new understanding which render all previous understanding unimportant. (Such a break happened, for example, in the thought of the Protestant Reformers; their accusation that the medieval Church simply was not the Church must tell us that in fact their accusation was incorrect [or the historical continuity of the Church would be lost].)

Finally, historical continuity operates in a "softer" fashion, requiring us to examine the use and interpretation of the Scriptures throughout the history of the Church and not merely at present. We are not obliged to sanction every practice, but we must be very hesitant about jettisoning this or that as being a fundamental misunderstanding; this would be very close (if not too close) to saying that the practitioners in question have made such a fundamental misunderstanding that they are unchurched.

Liturgical Priority

Because the Canon of Scripture was initially determined specifically with reference to what is read in church, we must not lose sight of this fact. The Canon is simply and plainly, what is read in the church as Scripture. What distinguishes the Bible from other books is, in the first instance, that it is used liturgically in a different manner from other books. Only as a secondary question comes the use of the Bible as a doctrinal or juridical standard, as a tool in private prayer, and so forth.

Whatever ascriptions of authority the Church makes for the Scriptures are made in virtue of this primary liturgical use. It is because the text is received and heard in this manner that it can be confessed as Scripture. Two consequences follow: first, the Church is not of one mind about what can be read in this way, and second, the exact bounds of the Canon admit some curious flexibility.

Any description of the use and interpretation of the Scriptures which insists on a clear bright line rule, or that the Scriptures are self-authenticating (as John Calvin and Karl Barth seemed to think) must fall. We would be forced to do violence to the historical continuity of the Church if we begin asserting that the disagreements about the bounds of the canon are determinative for the being of the Church. Likewise, we must take account of the complex ways the Scriptures are used in the liturgy, in all their actual complexity. (For example, we must note that the Orthodox accept the Revelation to John, but do not read it in services; we must note that Anglicans do read the Apocrypha in services, but do not permit doctrine to be established from it.)

Actual rather than Ideal Use

We must focus on the actual use and interpretation of Scripture in the Church, in all its breadth, and not on only some small subset. Barth, for example, writes in KD 1/1 as if the principal point of the Scriptures is to ground homiletics and dogmatics. True enough that the Scriptures are importantly used for those purposes. But we must also consider that the Scriptures are used as sources of prayers, as material for lectio divina, as historical information, as a source of artistic and literary material, as the occasion for Bible study, as liturgical objects in their own right (consider the book of the Gospels!), and so forth.

We may well judge that a given use is inappropriate, but we must not simply disregard certain uses, or start with the assumption that this or that use is inherently determinative. This focus on actual use exists in some tension with the liturgical priority rule. If we find that we are using the rule of liturgical priority in such a way as to preclude an independent look at some other use of the Scriptures, we have gone too far. Likewise, if this independent look cannot be related faithfully back to what is done liturgically, then we must be prepared to mount a criticism of the liturgical practice (which may, in turn, do violence to the insistence on the historical continuity of the Church), or else we must criticize the independent look.

Thus, the liturgical priority becomes not a way to judge all other uses, but rather a way of ensuring that the other uses are interrelated and not with violence to each other. The liturgy functions as the hub of a wheel.

Public Interpretation

All seem to be always agreed that the Scriptures are not of private interpretation. But the issue here is not about whether the ideas are published; the question is whether they have authority. To agree that the use and interpretation of Scripture is a public task, one which must ultimately be responsible to a public standard, is to grant the legitimate use of authority in determining the bounds of that use and interpretation.

This grounds the canon and the liturgy as well: canonical text is that read as Scripture in the services of the Church by the authority of the Church; the liturgy is that public worship which is officially done by the Church as such and not simply the particular worship of this or that group. In both cases, the existence of authority is central to the normative status of the result.

Moreover, while the Scripture is often appealed to over and against a local authority (local in time or space), it is in the last analysis the job of that very authority to judge the question. If the authority judges wrongly, we can only (in extreme cases) separate ourselves from it: and if we do so in such terms that the historical continuity of the Church is threatened, we can know that it is we who are in error.

The process by which the authority of the Church established the canon of Scripture is continuous with its authority in other matters: there is no special "Scripture-sanctioning" authority in the Church, nor are the structures and procedures for its exercise radically different in these cases than in others. As we have seen, the Church establishes the canon by liturgical legislation.

We cannot therefore begin by assuming any particular priority of authorities. It is incorrect to say that the Church stands under the Scripture, if we mean by this some transhistorical judgment of the Church by the Scripture. At most, we can use this language of "standing under" only as a recognition that the Church must be responsible to its own past (historical continuity) and its present (structures of authority). And nothing about those qualifications is limited to the Scriptures: the obligation to be responsible to the past may also apply in the case of creeds, immemorial liturgical customs, and so forth.

Incorrect Starting Places

We must not start by thinking that the job of the Scripture is to communicate truths from God to human beings. This immediately restricts the use of Scripture to being primarily or only a question of determining the meaning of what the text says.

We must not assume that any single hermeneutical category will suffice for the entire Scripture, or for all uses and interpretational goals, or for all time. There is no question (at least, not at the outset) of presuming that we can find a "hermeneutical key" which will shed light on all the Scripture. Most importantly, the "discovery" of such new categories, if they are intended as totalizing statements of the correct method or procedure for interpreting the Scriptures, will do great violence to the historical continuity of the Church.

If we are led to a negative hermeneutical category—one which tells us not to read a text in this or that way (examples include Bultmann and Spong)—we must be particularly attentive to the historical continuity of the Church: if that way of reading was once permissible and is so no longer, we must hesitate until we have a clear indication of when the change occurred and why. We cannot allow ourselves to simply dismiss earlier reading as uninformed, primitive, or "culturally alien".

We must not assume that every use or interpretation of the Scripture will yield a consistent "meaning". We must not assume that a given passage (or the text as a whole) has "a meaning"; we must not say that an interpration of passage X is incorrect because it yields an answer different from the interpretation reached of passage Y. We must allow, as well, that interpretations can differ as the uses of Scripture differ: a use may be permissible in homiletics but impermissible in dogmatics. (For this reason, the Barthian clam about dogmatics as a check upon and a monitoring of homiletics must be partially incorrect.)

We cannot adopt maxims such as sola scriptura or let Scripture be interpreted by Scripture itself except as they can be justified as any other hermeneutical principle must be. In particular, we must be attentive to the use of such maxims as negative principles, often intended to exclude prior strategies of reading the text; these must be rejected when they amount to an assault on the continuity of the Church.

Interpreting the Prolegomena Itself

The principles (both positive and negative) which I outline here are not theological starting places; they are principles which can be defended. They are not assumptions but merely indications (with some reasoning attached) of what I believe are the only appropriate places to start this investigation.

On the Use and Interpretation of Scripture: Index

Church Dogmatics, I.I.4

2007-02-17T15:50:00.000-08:00

Karl Barth
Church Dogmatics
The Doctrine of the Word of God
Chapter I: The Word of God as the Criterion of Dogmatics
Section 4: The Word of God in its Threefold Form

"The presupposition which proclamation proclamation and therewith makes the Church the Church is the Word of God. This attests itself in Holy Scripture in the word of the prophets and apostles to whom it was originally and once and for all spoken by God's revelation."

The Word of God Preached

Barth rightly identifies that merely intending to proclaim is not sufficient; we must distinguish in principle between true and false proclamation, and what makes proclamation real proclamation is its being a proclamation of the Word of God. This is a presupposition of dogmatics because dogmatics assumes that the Word of God has been spoken and heard; its task is not to prove that it has been.

Barth here then explores the relation between the Word of God and proclamation in what he calls four "concentric circles". The first circle is the commission in virtue of which the proclamation is made. Proclamation is not made in response to objective needs "imminent in the existence of man"; nor is it made in response to subjective needs in the personal convictions of human speakers. Rather, while such motives are present and cannot be excluded, proclamation is proclamation (that is, is properly related to the Word of God) when it originates is the command and decision of God. Thus, in order for proclamation to be the Word of God, it must be the Word of God.

The second circle is that proclamation must be of the Word of God. I am not entirely confident that I have grasped Barth's point here, but it seems that the basic idea is that what makes the proclamation the Word of God is that the content of it, the thing which is preached, is itself the Word of God, with its foundation not in "metaphysics or psychology" but in the communication of God to human beings.

The third circle is that of judgment; that proclamation is judged by God and God alone, that it must be obedient and is subject to the authority of God.

And finally, the fourth circle is that of a genuine disclosure of God to human beings in the activity of the proclamation; without the human factors vanishing, the proclamation simply is God's proclamation.

So what distinguishes preaching, true proclamation, is then these four: the commission, from God and not from human concerns or the preacher's aims; the content, which must be God's Word; the standard under which it is judged, which is God's; and the revelatory content in which God himself becomes the actor of the preaching event.

The criticism to be levelled here is natural and immediate. These are the standards of prophecy. Barth's characterization of preaching conflates it with prophecy, and this is natural given the decision to begin with proclamation as such. By elevating the importance of preaching beyond all appropriate measure (as we saw in the preceding section), it has become something more than preaching: it has become prophecy. Now prophecy is a very good thing, and a great blessing for the church. But it is not simply the same as preaching, and I think we have not really gotten the argument here that preaching ought to be prophecy.

The Word of God Written

The second circle of contact between preaching and the Word of God was the content, which Barth explains as "recollection of past revelation and...expectation of coming revelation." The past revelation is the written Word of God, which is specifically the Bible.

Here Barth attempts to tackle the questions I raised in addressing the second section of the Introduction. Barth recognizes the Scriptures as having a Canon which was decided by the Church, but in terms of the Church's recognition of the status of these books. That is, the Church is not the author of the text, it is the recipient and receiver of the text, which it always experiences as given to it.

I cannot see how this could actually be true; it is a sensible enough understanding of how the Church understood these texts at the time the decisions about canonicity were being made, but the Church predated those decisions. Did Paul conceive of his writing as a source or as a recipient? It seems difficult to read the letter to the Galatians as being anything other than Paul's communication, undertaken in his own voice. Insipired we may confess it to be; but we cannot conceive of Paul having the attitude towards the text which Barth says we must have. As such, either Paul is not really part of the Church when he writes, or the Church has a double role, both as originator and recipient of the Biblical text.

Moreover, the very givenness of the text is hard to make convincing when there are multiple Canons among which to choose. Barth does not touch at all the question of which books are in the Canon, and this is disastrous for his presentation of the material. If he did answer that question, he would be making himself (and dogmatics), or his confessional tradition, the judge of which texts count, and thus not purely recipient. So he must not, making it possible to pretend that the text was given, and that his role and the Church's today is simply to receive.

Barth's objection to a teaching succession and an ongoing apostolicity found in the pastors of the Church as teachers is that in so doing, the past becomes the mere puppet of the present. He says, in fact, "Naturally it might also have pleased God to give His Church the Canon in the form of an unwritten prophetic and apostolic tradition propagating itself from spirit to spirit and mouth to mouth"; the argument that he has not done so is its consequence: "In unwritten tradition the Church is not addressed; it is engaged in dialogue with itself."

However, this only works if we have bought into the fictive view of the Biblical text as purely address to the Church, rather than as documents written by the Church. We have in the Biblical text an emissary from the earliest days of the Church and before; we hear the apostles speaking to us, but we still hear the Church speaking to the Church. Barth demands that there must be something undergirding preaching which is not the "Church speaking to itself"; and we get this in the Bible. But actually, this simply is not what the Bible is, no matter how many fanciful tales we spin. If the Word of God is in the Bible (and I confess it is!) then it is so in the same way that it may or may not be in preaching. The Bible is of the same character as preaching; the confession that it is the Word of God is not a confession that it is radically different in nature from preaching, but simply that it is authoritative and binding preaching. We confess that it is the Word of God (in the full sense of Barthian proclamation), in just the way that a given preaching event hopes to be the Word of God. When that preaching succeeds, it is the Word of God in just the same way and to the same extent that the Bible is.

We have, from Barth, only the magical statement that "The Bible is the Canon just because it is so. It is so by imposing itself as such." Calvin tried to say much the same thing, and it doesn't work now any more than it did then. I have on my shelf three Bibles; one with the Anglican Apocrypha, one with the (shorter) Roman Catholic Apocrypha, one with neither. Which of them "imposes itself"? How do I recognize this?

The Word of God Revealed

Preaching is based upon the received past revelation recorded in Scripture and in promise and hope for revelation to come; now we are confronted with the revelation itself. Preaching and the Bible are witnesses to revelation, preaching to future revelation and the Bible to past revelation. Present revelation is also the Word of God; it is the Word of God to which preaching and the Bible seek to give witness.

Since they are always and only pointers, we must consider what they point to; this is the fundamental content of the Word of God: "God with us", which is both a thing that has happened, "Deus dixit", but also something which is present here and now. There is then always the direct action of God revealing God's self to us, and this is itself the Word of God to which preaching and the Bible give witness.

We say "God with us", and we identify that this divine act is present now, and also fully and completely fulfilled and done in the person of Jesus Christ. Thus the content of revelation, properly speaking, is Immanuel, God with us. It is this which preaching and the Bible are concerned.

Now this is nice to see; it is much more helpful than the Lutheran restriction at this point to simply "the forgiveness of sins" or "justification by faith".

What is perhaps objectionable at this point is the way in which the only pointers granted here are proclamation, are preaching and the Bible. The sacraments are allowed as proclaimers as well, but this is where the catholic spirit wants to rejoice and say that the sacraments are not merely proclaimers, but enactors of revelation. The Eucharist is the Body of Christ, is God with us; it is Jesus who baptizes in every baptism. These acts are not merely servants of preaching, "seals" which are placed at the end of the homily to label it "God's"; they are independently means by which God communicates his grace to us.

Barth cannot have this because he wants to preserve God's freedom; but the self-limiting and self-emptying of God is just at this point the point of the "God with us". Barth sees in a catholic doctrine of the sacraments here a domestication of God, who is no longer free but bound up with the Church and its activity; by contrast, preaching is supposed to be free and always able to be what it will be. Perhaps this is simply because the words variable? Preaching, always, either will be or will not be the Word of God, and this is actually Barth's point: the catholic sacraments are always "God with us", not just now or then, not just "if God happens to make it so this time", but always, by God's own promise.

In this way, the sacraments are continuous with the Incarnation. By contrast, Barth cannot allow the Incarnation to be a present reality in this sense. In the Incarnation the Son of God consented to be mistreated, to be subject to people's manipulation. We hear of a woman healed by touching his robe in a crowd, and Jesus' response "Who touched me?" suggests that there was something "automatic" in the transaction. For this is what it is to be a human being. The self-emptying of the Word of God in Jesus Christ thus was a consent on the part of God to be present without controlling the event, to be subject to human beings.

For Barth, this ended; in the Resurrection Jesus Christ must have ceased to be subject to human beings anymore. We thus must query the doctrine of the Ascension for Barth, which must become the doctrine of the Great Absence, in which Jesus Christ is no longer "God with us" in the irrevocable and subject-to-human-misuse way he was. But the catholic doctrine insists that, in virtue of the Resurrection and Ascension, Jesus Christ is still with us, and this is where the sacraments have their character and use.

The Unity of the Word of God

Finally, Barth briefly makes clear that this triple of preaching, Bible, and revelation, are not three different things, but three forms of one thing. The relations are thus:

"The revealed Word of God we know only from the Scripture adopted by Church proclamation or the proclamation of the Church based on Scripture.

"The written Word of God we know only through the revelation which fulfils proclamation or through the proclamation fulfilled by revelation.

"The preached Word of God we know only through the revelation attested in Scripture or the Scripture which attests revelation."

The analogy to the Trinity is deliberate and intentional: the Father, revelation; the Son, the Bible; the Holy Spirit, preaching.

Now we can see more clearly the problems. First, the connection of the Holy Spirit to preaching shows that indeed the preaching office has been assimilated to the prophetic office. This is all the more crucial to be clear about as a defect in Barth's treatment because he is silent on the point: he does not defend this because he does not seem to be aware of it or of the pitfalls which it leads to. The Spirit blows where it wills, but for Barth, this is found only in the relatively free words of the preacher. Preachers are rightly bound to the biblical text, but prophets are not (as a look at the Hebrew prophets will show); prophecy is not interpretation of Scripture. The result is that Barth expects too much of preaching and too little of prophecy by making up a new office halfway between the two. (Or rather, by uncritically accepting the Reformers making up of this new office.)

The connection of the Son to the Scriptures, especially in virtue of the fact that the Bible is, for Barth, what it is precisely in its givenness and unchangeability; its specifically not being subject to human vicissitudes and misuse. We end up with a doctrine in which Jesus Christ is something which happened, but does not still happen; in which the Ascension is God's way of keeping Christ from harm.

The connection of the Father to revelation then mistakes that revelation is centrally and precisely the role of a prophet, through whom the Holy Spirit speaks. Moreover, since the Father is centrally and characteristically identified as the agent of creation and the source of divinity, this is precisely what is lost when those topics are treated.

A perhaps more felicitous analogy might be this: In the Son we have the Word of God in the sacraments and being of the Church (which is, after all, the Body of Christ); subject to the use and misuse of human beings, but also the direct and ordinary means of grace for all who come in contact with him. In the Father we have the Word of God spoken in creation and providence; accessible to all but veiled by human sinfulness and inability to simply infer who God is from the facts of the world we see (a point Barth rightly makes well). In the Holy Spirit we have the free breath of God, blowing where it will, bound by no human form and acting in all cultures and in the hearts of God's people, and animating in particular the Church and making its sacraments effective.

Index of Comments on Karl Barth

Church Dogmatics, I.I.3

2007-02-16T15:02:00.000-08:00

Karl Barth
Church Dogmatics
The Doctrine of the Word of God
Chapter I: The Word of God as the Criterion of Dogmatics
Section 3: Church Proclamation as the Material of Dogmatics

"Talk about God in the Church seeks to be proclamation to the extent that in the form of preaching and sacrament it is directed to man with the claim and expectation that in accordance with its commission it has to speak to him the Word of God to be heard in faith. Inasmuch as it is a human word in spite of this claim and expectation, it is the material of dogmatics, i.e., of the investigation of its responsibility as measured by the Word of God which it seeks to proclaim."

Talk about God and Church Proclamation

Proclamation is specifically an activity of the Church, but is also only one particular activity. It is one kind of talk about God, but not the only kind. Barth also helpfully deals with the worry that all talk is really talk about God (which, he says, it perhaps ought to be, and might well be whatever we do): such a perspective is possible from the perspective of glory, but not for fallen human beings.

Church talk about God which is not proclamation includes talk which "is addressed by man to God", and thus excised from the realm of proclamation is the entire content of hymns, prayers, and creeds. Moreover, talk based on addressing social needs or educating children is not proclamation. And finally, theology "as such" is not proclamation. (This is odd, given that theology includes proclamation according to the first section of the Introduction; perhaps we should read here "dogmatics" or place some special emphasis on the "as such".) The point is not to devalue these things, ostensibly, but simply to identify just what proclamation is by distinguishing it from other sorts of talk about God in the Church.

After some general descriptions then of proclamation, which make it what one might have called "prophecy": that is, speaking God's words to people, with the intention of doing so and as such. God is not confined to proclamation; God can and perhaps does speak to us in many other ways, but we are not therefore called to take up those ways in attempts to speak God's words. This is because God's word is spoken by human beings only in response to a commission from God to do so. So we certainly can hear the Word of God in experiences of worship, but we do not have a commission to pursue worship as proclamation.

Now this is odd, and it is perhaps only plausible in virtue of what follows, which is a dramatic and unsurprising reduction of proclamation to a very narrow category of activity. We surely do have a commission to worship, and it is extremely hard to see worship, with all of its words about God, the practice of the church in using it as a theological authority ("the law of prayer establishes the law of belief"), and that it is surely part of the commission of those so commissioned to offer prayers—complete with theological content. The point seems to be the grammatical person of the pronouns: in a prayer, God is addressed as "you", and therefore it's not proclamation. (One wonders, then why creeds are not proclamation. Of course the answer is because Barth has his thumb on the scale: creeds must not be allowed to have authority, and so despite their grammar and history, they are not proclamation.) The conviction that prayer is, in fact, the activity of the Holy Spirit within us, should put to rest the "addressed by man to God" claim for such things.

The list of what is allowed as proclamation then is this: preaching and sacrament. The former is specifically limited to homiletic exposition of texts of Scripture. Now without at all diminishing the importance of this activity, why must it be present in every service of worship? Barth cites approvingly the sentiments of his Reformed forebears who attacked ever reading the Scriptures in public worship without attaching a homily to them.

It seems rather as if a rabbit has been pulled from a hat. One must reach the Reformed conclusion that the entire purpose of services of worship is preaching and sacrament (and that a minister is, as the Presbyterian Church has it, a "minister of the word and sacrament"). And so we get there by first, excluding the cognitive and proclamatory content of every other element of worship, on the basis that it is "addressed by man to God" rather than the other way round. The result is a rather disturbing dualism. The possibility that a prayer is in its primary content addressed by the community to God (not just "man", ambiguously singular), and then secondarily by some in the community to others in community, is one which is excluded. Because such an act is not primarily addressed to human beings, but only secondarily, Barth draws the conclusion that it is not addressed to human beings at all.

So many rabbits are being pulled out of so many hats, that we cannot help but try to find the real reason for limiting proclamation to preaching and sacrament. The short answer is, I submit, this. We must find a way to confine proclamation to the individual preacher, whose words owe nothing to any human authority. The argument is driven entirely by its conclusion: we must find that the Word of God is transmitted by preaching and Scripture and, in the ordinary covenanted course of things, by nothing else whatsoever.

We must arrive at that conclusion because thus we can exclude the Modernists (who want to say that God speaks in an ordinary and covenanted way through reason and emotion too) and the Roman Catholics (who want to say that God speaks as well through the traditions and prayers and doctrinal history of the church).

We will, then, find that here is being layed the groundwork for the polemic against the Modernists and the Roman Catholics, but also that no argument whatsoever is being laid to support that polemic. What is here is not a sufficient argument, it's a rabbit out of a hat. It was pulled out this way and not some other way, precisely so that we would be able to make the "necessary" polemic when we get to that point. So we must not be tricked into thinking that what is, in fact, a wildly circular assertion is actually an argument, and we must consider that, when all is said and done, nothing has been done to effectively limit the commissioned and covenanted transmission of the Word of God to only preaching, the Scripture that preaching necessarily uses, and sacrament.

Dogmatics and Church Proclamation

Proclamation is again ratcheted up to the highest degree; here it is the Church's "most proper responsibility"; it is "the one thing needful"; it is "the service of God in the supreme sense of the term". Well, we know what Barth thinks of proclamation! But we cannot allow this to stand; the argument, such as it was, for limiting proclamation to preaching was simply the grammatical point that prayers are addressed "by man to God" and not the other way round. At no point did this make it better or more central or more crucial.

Indeed, one might have thought that the Church's primary responsibility was not to be a conduit for the Word of God, but rather to respond to it. Yes, preaching is necessary for that, but as a preparation, as a servant, not as a master. Preaching has an apologetic role, it has an educative role, it has a proclamatory role; but all of this is done for the sake of what comes next. It is in prayer, not in preaching, that we approach God; heaven is constituted by unceasing prayer and not by unceasing preaching. Sacrament is, most centrally, prayer, not proclamation; while it does have a proclamatory element, it does so because it is prayer and all prayer is proclamatory.

Here, however, we are concerned with the relation of dogmatics to proclamation. On the one hand, dogmatics has the task of judging proclamation to see whether it is up to snuff. Barth situates this obligation in virtue of the extraordinary importance and value of preaching, but even once we jettison that as unargued and unsound, we can still recognize that dogmatics has a role in judging proclamation, just as it has a role in judging all the Church's activity.

Dogmatics has a second role: hearing the Church's proclamation, dogmatics considers how proclamation should proceed tomorrow. For this reason, preaching is normally "linked to the class of theologians". How wildly different this is from the catholic view that preaching is done normally by the clergy because they are, first and foremost, leaders and sacramental ministers!

The central task of this minister, for Barth, is preaching, and because preaching requires dogmatics, preachers are chosen from the ranks of theologians. Because sacrament is assimilated to proclamation, as simply a kind of enacted proclamation, it doesn't get much play here. And the links to this surprising conclusion (though hardly unexpected) are the most tenuous.

Index of Comments on Karl Barth

Church Dogmatics, Introduction.2

2007-02-09T21:34:00.000-08:00

Karl Barth
Church Dogmatics
Introduction
Section 2: The Task of Prolegomena to Dogmatics

"Prolegomena to dogmatics is our name for the introductory part of dogmatics in which our concern is to understand its particular way of knowledge."

The Necessity of Dogmatic Prolegomena

The desire to immediately start with epistemology is interesting from a philosophical perspective. We associate it with the early moderns, who were passionately interested in epistemological questions, and the need to found all else upon a clear understanding of epistemology.

Philosophers have (mostly) given this up. Not that epistemology has become unimportant (far from it!) but that it is no longer assumed that it somehow comes first. So there is this interesting thing here, right off the bat, that Barth addresses in this section "dogmatic prolegomena" which have two properties: they are introductory, and the concern is epistemological.

The question Barth addresses is confined in this first part to whether such prolegomena are necessary. He addresses the fact that much earlier dogmatics often has extremely brief or even absent prolegomena of this sort. He says that one reason often given for the need for prolegomena is a concern for relevance, or a submission to some philosophical standard, or a conviction that in the past such things were unnecessary but now they are necessary. All of this, according to Barth, is foolish.
(There is no difference to be shown between our times and previous times; dogmatics must have its own standards; apologetics is not dogmatics, and in any case, cannot be "planned".)

The actual reason that the prolegomena are necessary is that they are to address heretics, who are paradoxically recognized simultaneously as having faith, and yet a position which can only be seen as unfaith.

What Barth does not notice is that the epistemological questions are also addressed by many of the previous theologians, but not as necessarily preliminary. In other words, I can agree that a discussion of epistemology is an important part of dogmatics, but I cannot see why it must be first, and Barth seems to simply assume this, as the wording of the summary quote above indicates.

Under the heading of the heretics come two: Modernists and Roman Catholics. (Later in The Doctrine of the Word of God we find the maddening assertion that Anglicans are happily "Evangelicals", and so not heretics. Barth's ignorance about Anglicanism will perhaps come up when I comment on that.)

The Possibility of Dogmatic Prolegomena

This part's contents do not really match the heading. Actually we are concerned here with the beginning of the polemic against Modernism and Roman Catholicism. But the key to the polemic against Modernism is that it subordinates theology to other concerns, particularly secular ones, and in this gives up what theology is.

Importantly, Modernism locates the epistemological questions of theology in its being one of a genus of sciences, or of ways of knowing, or whatever; it subordinates theology to other things particulary in its epistemology. (And in this, it should be noted, is why in the first part above Barth so earnestly rejected the Modernist statements of why prolegomena are necessary.) So the Modernist says that prolegomena are possible, an explication of the basis of theological knowledge can be given, because they are just a special case of general principles that all can agree on, even those with no concern for dogmatics.

This is the central point of attack for the beginning of the polemic against Modernism, and it issues in the title of the part. (It of course also gives a parallelism with the title of the first part; Barth seems to have a great affection for nice parallel structures in writing.)

Prolegemena are there to answer heretics; the Modernists say that prolegomena can be set forth from outside the dogmatic enterprise itself: but in this they are already marking their ground. In fact, says Barth, this is the sort of statement that can only be made outside Evangelical or Roman Catholic dogmatics—but it is precisely the sort of statement we should expect from Modernist dogmatics. To accept it is already to accept Modernism.

The polemic against Roman Catholicism is very different. The criticism of Roman Catholicism here is extremely brief (one page, compared with the three and a half given to Modernism). Essentially, the problem is that Roman Catholicism takes the Incarnation too seriously. "Their presupposition is that the being of the Church, Jesus Christ, is no longer the free Lord of its existence, but that He is incorporated into the existence of the Church..." One wonders why it was all right for the free Lord to become incorporated into pale earthly flesh. The docetism that we find throughout Barth pops in right here.

The catholic faith (and here I include myself, of the anglo- variety) certainly does say that the being of the Church is Jesus Christ, or more exactly, that the Church is the body of Christ, and that Christ is its Lord. At no point does Jesus Christ cease to be the free Lord. All of the things that Barth finds so objectionable would be objectionable if they were something human beings imposed upon God. But thus so is the Incarnation itself. The Pauline theology of the Church sees the Church precisely as the extension in time of the Incarnation, and sees incorporation into the Church as incorporation into Christ. Now you are the body of Christ, and individually members of it.

What Barth sees as human presumption would be, were it not for the fact of revelation. What Barth has done is to give an instruction to God: Thou Shalt Not Humble Thyself. It is true that for the catholic grace "becomes nature", perhaps in the sense of a "second nature", or perhaps we might say a "new creation". If we trust that Paul meant what he spoke, is not this new creation a creation, which is to say, a thing which works according to principles, and not just divine whim? When we proclaim Christ crucified, we proclaim a God who deigns to humble himself for our sakes. In this we do not magnify ourselves, but the grace of God. (More Pauline imagery!)

Perhaps this is clearest when Barth begins painting the Evangelical position, in which the opposition to Roman Catholicism is marked by a rejection "of the presupposition of a constantly available absorption of the being of the Church into a creaturely form, into a 'There is'." What does he think Paul means by speaking of a new creation, if not, well, a new creaturely form?

So, the Evangelical position is marked out thus, after the opening salvos of the polemics have been made. Agreement is made with Roman Catholicism that the prolegomena to dogmatics can only exist within dogmatics itself. The prolegomena are therefore concerned with the Word of God (hence the title of this first volume).

Barth here then expands on the older Protestant tradition, which centered its polemic on claims about the Bible, and he takes the Word of God as a category, into which the theology of the Bible will be a part. Now a problem here is that the older Protestant polemic was based upon three untruths at this point, and the attentive reader will want to see if Barth bothers with these problems.

The first problem is that the catholic position, in which Scripture arose within the Church as a part of the activity of the Church, is denied without any corresponding account of where Scripture comes from and the basis of its authority.

The second problem is that the Protestant polemic includes an accusation that the catholics do not obey Scripture, and this is said such as to imply that the catholics are acting in wildly bad faith. Since the catholic position is not to place tradition "above" Scripture, this was never a just attack. Moreover, sometimes it is painfully absurd: Luther, for example, condemns monasticism as a violation of the commandment to marry; and yet, does not Paul express a wish that all would be single as he is?

The third problem is that the Church existed, fully and completely as the Church, before the New Testament existed. Any account of the Church which makes the existence of Scripture an absolute necessity for the Church is therefore wildly inattentive to historical reality; if it makes it only a necessity now but not then, we are owed an explanation of how and when the change occurred.

Index of Comments on Karl Barth

Index of Comments on Karl Barth

2007-02-04T13:34:00.000-08:00

Church Dogmatics
Introduction
1. The Task of Dogmatics
2. The Task of Prolegomena to Dogmatics

The Doctrine of the Word of God
I. The Word of God as the Criterion of Dogmatics
3. Church Proclamation as the Material of Dogmatics
4. The Word of God in its Threefold Form
5. The Nature of the Word of God
6. The Knowability of the Word of God
7. The Word of God, Dogma and Dogmatics
II.I. The Revelation of God: The Triune God
II.II. The Revelation of God: The Incarnation of the Word
II.III. The Revelation of God: The Outpouring of the Holy Spirit
III. Holy Scripture
IV. The Proclamation of the Church

The Doctrine of God

The Doctrine of Creation

The Doctrine of Reconciliation

Index of Indexes

Church Dogmatics, Introduction.1

2007-02-04T12:55:00.000-08:00

Karl Barth
Church Dogmatics
Introduction
Section 1: The Task of Dogmatics

"As a theological discipline dogmatics is the scientific self-examination of the Christian Church with respect to the content of its distinctive talk about God."

Barth unpacks this under three headings First on on the role of dogmatics in the church as a particular sort of theology, and whether dogmatics is a science, then on dogmatics as that process of self-examination, of enquiry, and finally on dogmatics as an act of faith.

Barth situations, it seems, dogmatics as one kind of theology. The other two kinds are talk about God in "the action of the individual believer" and then the "specific action as a fellowship, in proclamation by preaching and...sacraments, in worship, in...mission."

From an Anglican perspective this is interesting; we are used to talking liturgy as "primary theology" and then the other stuff as "secondary theology". The fellowship and mission, and individual action, we would tend to perhaps identify as a tertiary theology; as meaningful but not done for the purpose of conveying meaning.

But the words in worship (which we would not separate off from preaching and sacraments as Barth seems to) are primary for us. And by primary, we usually mean that the task of secondary theology is to unpack their meaning for us; to reflect upon them. There is a two-way street, of course: when writing the liturgy, the church consults, among other things, dogmatics, and there are elements of the liturgy (such as the creed) which have their origins directly, though only partly, in polemical dogmatics. (The creeds originate in baptismal liturgy, not the other way round.)

This creates a fundamentally different orientation for dogmatics than Barth. Where we see dogmatics as having its central function in commenting on and enriching and explaining, and (maybe) relating to this or that current philosophical concern, Barth sees dogmatics as, at the outset, exercising a critical judgment over the other forms of theology.

It is not that the liturgy is infallible, but the general orientation among us seems to be to learn from the liturgy, rather than to teach to it. Dogmatics then is judged by its conformity with the liturgy, in the normal course of events, and not the other way round. The "normal course of events" is reversed when the it becomes clear that a given liturgical practice cannot be given a defense or an understanding in dogmatics, and then it is to dogmatics that we turn in considering revision of the liturgy. But then, very quickly, the normal course returns, and the (now revised) liturgy once again assumes its pride of place.

This dynamic can be seen in the 16th century Anglican reformation. The task of liturgical revision was thrust into the hands of people who found the preceding Latin liturgy dogmatically indefensible, and the Book of Common Prayer was born. But immediately the BCP became the doctrinal standard of the church. The private opinions of Cranmer are irrelevant; the Books of Homilies quickly fell into disuse, and the XXXIX Articles began to be judged in the terms of the BCP rather than the other way around.

We may still follow the course of Barthian dogmatics, even if we refuse to grant it its pretended status as the judge of what is (for us) primary theology—it can still function well as an explanation of that theology, even if such was not its intent.

I find then that I agree with Barth's explanations of the relationship of theology to conceptions of science, which can be summed up, I think, as saying that theology is a science in that we will not cede that term away, but neither we will allow the importation of a foreign conception of what a science must do or how it must proceed.

Under his second heading Barth explores the presuppositions necessary for dogmatics. It then will not be the task of dogmatics to defend these presuppositions; we simply note them and the cautions they entail. The task of defense is reserved, presumably, to apologetics. The first presupposition is that it is possible to understand the true content of Christian talk about God; the second is that it is necessary. Strictly speaking, only the possibility is a necessary presupposition for dogmatics (that is, if it were impossible to understand the talk about God, then dogmatics would be impossible; but if it were merely optional to understand it, dogmatics could still proceed). So there is more lurking here under the surface.

The possibility is found in the faith that Jesus Christ is the "revealing and reconciling address of God to man". This statements helps to understand what Barth meant by the "true content" of Christian talk about God. There must be something, in philosophical terms, to "fix the reference" of the talk about God, and only in faith in the reconciling and revealing presence of Christ can we understand what our talk means or what it is about. We may thus misunderstand what we are saying, we may think we are talking about God when we are, in fact, talking about an idol of our own creation: this would fail to be "true content".

The necessity of understanding is thus clearer. Because dogmatics (for Barth) has the primary role of standing in judgment upon other talk of God, as being the way in which the Church takes seriously the need to speak responsibly about God, it cannot proceed without the presupposition that the true content Church's talk about God can be known, both because it must be known to be judged, and because it can only be judged insofar as the truth can potentially be seen.

Barth is not here claiming any kind of infallibility for dogmatics, of course, merely that this is the direction the arrows go, as it were. From an Anglican perspective, then, it seems to me that we can of course accept the presuppositional status of the possibility of knowing the true content of the Church's speech, but the necessity is not so clear.

And what undergirds this necessity, for Barth, is also a polemic against a Roman Catholic way of proceeding, in which dogmatics exists only to "combine, repeat, and transcribe a number of truths of revelation which are already to hand, which have been expressed once and for all, and the wording and meaning of which are authentically defined." All must be, for Barth, perpetually up for grabs, so that while the creeds may be "venerable" and can be guidance, they cannot control.

Now the problem is that the role of the creeds can be simultaneously authoritation and the task of dogmatics can be more than repetition, for the simple reason that the creeds do not exaust the topic. We can allow the creeds an irreplaceable status and require a theologian not to transgress outside their bounds, without thereby saying that the task of dogmatics is mere repetition.

I can only say that, at this point, Barth has not fairly represented what a truly catholic dogmatics looks like. He nods that dogmatics also cannot simply repeat what the Scriptures say, but we know what is coming: the creeds are up for grabs, and the Scriptures are not. And we will be brought back to this page when we are told that the creeds are up for grabs (because dogmatics is not just repetition, etc., etc.) and we will not be told why the Scriptures are not also up for grabs for the same reasons.

The third heading of this section addresses dogmatics "as an act of faith." All I can say here is that this is a beautiful exposition of the role of faith in the life of a theologian, that dogmatics is necessarily humble and must trust in God for any success it can have, always needing to approach God trembling and in prayer.

Index of Comments on Karl Barth

Index of Comments on the Philokalia

2007-02-03T18:29:00.000-08:00

St. Isaiah the Solitary, On Guarding the Intellect
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

Index of Indexes

Index of Indexes

2007-02-03T11:28:00.000-08:00

A Master Index listing all the indexes in Reloquus.

Index of Indexes

Index of Comments on Karl Barth
Index of Comments on Ched Myers
Index of Comments on the Philokalia
Index of Comments on Scripture

Index of Posts on the Use and Interpretation of Scripture

Index of Comments on Scripture

2007-02-03T11:21:00.000-08:00

Exodus 24:12–18
Judges 7:1–18
1 Kings 19:1–12
Isaiah 7:10–14
Daniel 7:9–10, 13–14

Matthew 28:9–15
Mark 16:9–15, 20
Luke 3:1–14
Luke 3:15–22
Luke 4:1–13
Luke 4:14–30
Luke 4:31–44
Luke 5:1–11
Luke 5:12–39
Luke 6:1–26
Luke 6:27–49
Luke 7:1–35
Luke 24:13–35
Luke 24:36b–48
John 1:29–42
John 3:1–21
John 12:27–36a
John 20:11–18
John 21:1–14
Acts 3:1–11
Acts 4:1–12
Acts 11:1–18
2 Corinthians 3:1–9, 18
2 Corinthians 4:1–6
2 Corinthians 11:21b–31
1 Peter 1:3–9
1 Peter 1:17–23
1 Peter 2:19–25

Index of Indexes

Welcome to Reloquus

2007-02-03T11:16:00.000-08:00

Reloquus is a place where I respond to what I see and read, with a critical bent, opposing when necessary, agreeing when necessary, but always (I hope!) with a mind to take seriously what I answer.

I also have a normal webpage, and a personal blog.

St. Isaiah the Solitary 10

2006-09-28T15:08:00.000-07:00

St. Isaiah the Solitary, On Guarding the Intellect, Twenty-Seven Texts

10. If your intellect is freed from all its enemies and attains the sabbath rest, it lives in another age, a new age in which it contemplates things new and undecaying. For “wherever the dead body is, there will the eagles be gathered together.”

This third of three statements about the freedom of the intellect is transformative. First, a sing that sin has died in us. Second, that the breach with God has been healed. But those are both negative things. Now we hear of the positive.

The freed intellect lives “in another age”: in eternity. Our intellect is able to exercise its proper function, of the contemplation of eternal things. We are now light-years from what has come before: from the use of the intellect for self-assertion or self-defense. Free from all fear and risk, and no longer even needing to pursue the truth, the intellect is now in possession of the living Truth, God himself. And yet, this talk of possession now seems out-of-place; or rather, backwards: the intellect now knows itself to be possessed by the Truth.

The spiritual life is so often likened to a journey these days, but here St. Isaiah recalls to us the image of a sabbath rest, of the conclusion of our journey. The journey finds its meaning in the conclusion and not in the process of getting there; the process was valuable because of the conclusion. And here we do not find that the conclusion is empty, nor is it unspoken as the Buddhist nibbana. No, the conclusion is with activity, and indeed, the true and proper activity for which the intellect was created.

In the possession of the Truth is the consummation as well of Socratic (and thus, all) philosophy. The pursuit and love of wisdom was always for the sake of wisdom, the dialectic was hunting after the Truth. Plato’s mistake, and that of all the rest of philosophy through the ages, is to settle for half the truth instead of continuing to search. But the contrary mistake is also dangerous: to mistake the journey for the destination, and to be content merely with a pilgrimage that, ultimately, leads nowhere.

St. Isaiah here depicts then, the destination: a sabbath rest, but a rest of contemplation—a state in which the intellect is doing what it ought to have been doing all along.

Index of Comments on the Philokalia

St. Isaiah the Solitary 9

2006-09-27T13:49:00.000-07:00

St. Isaiah the Solitary, On Guarding the Intellect, Twenty-Seven Texts

9. If your intellect is freed, the breach between it and God is eliminated.

The previous text explained that freedom of the intellect from hope in things visible is a sign that sin has died within. Here this is broadened in two ways.

First, the freedom described is not just freedom "from hope in things visible", but simply freedom, full stop. Freedom therefore not from mistaken hope in things not able to deliver, but freedom from whatever oppresses. Indeed, the primary oppression is sin, and so this follows on, rather than restates, the previous text.

It is as if we are told that the care expressed in text seven about the use of the senses was first said to play a role in the freedom of our intellect from sin, and then we are told that this freedom in turn eliminates "the breach between it and God". Our intellect is divided from God in so many ways. Divided in understanding of God and itself, divided in relating to the world, divided in its anxiety and confusion.

But still not clear here is the story about how our intellect is freed, how the death of sin is obtained, how the breach between it and God is eliminated. The ontological fact is that the breach has been eliminated, for the Christian, and for St. Isaiah and the rest of the hesychastic tradition, by the already present and active grace of God, the sacramental life of the church, and the prayer of our hearts. These are the operative means by which this occurs.

It is our subjective apprehension of this already-accomplished objective fact which is lacking, and so it is appopriate to focus so strongly in this way on the intellect. It is the intellect which is principally implicated in the gap between our subjective apprehension and the objective reality as things are. It is here that the practical strategies of St. Isaiah (and the rest) come to the fore: not as mechanisms to achieve the cure for sin, but as mechanisms to apprehend it, to know it to have happened.

We seek signs and signals to see this already-accomplished objective fact. This is the proper function of the intellect, to seek these things, and so here we are told the practical strategies for that seeking and that growing understanding.

Index of Comments on the Philokalia

St. Isaiah the Solitary 8

2006-09-26T11:28:00.000-07:00

St. Isaiah the Solitary, On Guarding the Intellect, Twenty-Seven Texts

8. If your intellect is freed from all hope in things visible, this is a sign that sin has died in you.

From the previous text, which advises a training exercise of closing the “gates of the soul,” we now have a brief discussion of why this is good and important.

This shows us what we heard before, in a broader sense. We were told in the last text to close attention to the senses to prevent the intellect not to be lured astray, until it has learned that it is not dominated by anything, and then a process of integration and wholeness can take root.

Now there is a broader description here, which undergirds and licenses that strategy. The false view would be that the world and sensible things are evil and we must remain pure from them. Here the reason given is quite different. It is that we must not hope in the things of the world. The reason for the sensory restraint advised in the previous text is here explained more fully: we will be given experience in recognizing that the things of this world are not necessary to us.

And once we see that we may stop hoping in them. This is then a sign that sin has died in us. But once more, we are thrust back on the anti-stoic point that this does not depend on us. We might have thought, “oh, I stop hoping in things visible, and that will make sin go away.” No. It is a sign that sin has died, but not the cause. The cause is something quite different: the redemption earned by Christ, and received through grace.

Index of Comments on the Philokalia

St. Isaiah the Solitary 7

2006-09-25T14:09:00.000-07:00

St. Isaiah the Solitary, On Guarding the Intellect, Twenty-Seven Texts

7. The monk should shut all the gates of his soul, that is, the senses, so that he is not lured astray. When the intellect sees that it is not dominated by anything, it prepares itself for immortality, gathering its senses together and forming them into one body.

It is interesting that the language of the senses as gates is one which the Pali canon of Buddhism also shares. In any event, the gates here are shut because through them the soul sees things which may lure it astray. A sort of mental “ooh, shiny thing!” and the soul is out the gate and gone.

But this is merely training, and it is here identified even as strictly monastic training. While certainly St. Isaiah intends a monastic audience for the whole work, here he calls attention to that fact. The monk is one who is consciously in training, and so here that highlights the way in which this is a training rule.

The things the senses show us are lures, attractions, which can pull us away. Away from what we ask? No answer here given. But we do not want to be astray, certainly, and the language of being “led astray” is very close to the language of error or sin, while not being quite the same thing. This is not, however, the condition of holiness, this living with the gates shut. The gates are shut, the senses are closed, not as if the world were a stained or unclean or unpure thing, still less as if the world were unholy. This is not Platonism. The gates are shut because the senses present to us temptations.

This is there for the purpose of training the intellect. The intellect then comes to see that it is not dominated by anything. The experience of living with the senses closed, not being lured away, shows the intellect that it can be quite secure without those external things; that they are not the substance or the essence of its life. So many live as if their intellect is subject to external sensory things, “things passing away” in the language of the collect. The intellect then seems to be dominated by them, unable to be free. And if we think it is dominated by sensible things, we will not be able or willing to submit it to God.

So this training exercise is a way of practicing the independence of the intellect from sensible things. When the intellect knows this independence, it can now prepare for immortality. Why? Because immortality is the condition of life with things eternal and invisible, in place of things transitory and visible. The intellect’s learning that it stands independent of the sensible things of the world enables the intellect to train itself and learn about immortality.

That training, in turn, is a return to the senses. In no way are they rejected, or is the world rejected. Just as fasting does not deny the goodness of food, the “sensory fast” here is also not a denial of the goodness of sensible things. But instead of the senses being disunited and at war, the intellect, once it sees that they do not dominate it, can enable them to become unified, as parts of one single body.

Index of Comments on the Philokalia

St. Isaiah the Solitary 6

2006-09-24T12:45:00.000-07:00

St. Isaiah the Solitary, On Guarding the Intellect, Twenty-Seven Texts.

6. If your heart comes to feel a natural hatred for sin, it has defeated the causes of sin and freed itself from them. Keep hell’s torments in mind; but know that your Helper is at hand. Do nothing that will grieve Him, but say to Him with tears, “Be merciful and deliver me, O Lord, for without Thy help I cannot escape from the hands of my enemies.” Be attentive to your heart, and He will guard you from all evil.

Some points to note: the hatred for sin we should feel is a natural hatred, that is, it is not contrary to our nature. But it may well be unusual or extraordinary or unworldly to have such a hatred. More normally, we would speak that our nature is a sinful nature, which is the more normal Western way to talk. But St. Iasiah and the Eastern Christians tend to use “nature” more specifically to refer to our nature before sin, without sin, what we were created to be. That nature is obscured and hidden perhaps, oppressed and beaten about, but not gone or in itself damaged. This is quite different from the Western way of talking, which produced in Calvin a doctrine that our nature is itself fallen.

Also, we cannot get the first sentence backwards here: the statement is not that we should cultivate a hatred for sin, and then we will defeat the cause of sin and be free of it. Rather, if we have that natural hatred, then we know that we are free, but the cause of feeling that natural hatred is not just a matter of choosing to feel it. Instead, St. Isaiah gives us a recipe for our salvation: he gives us a prayer, and attributes the action of salvation to Christ, not to our own willpower.

A difficulty is this language that the redeemed heart has defeated the causes of sin and freed itself. Isn’t that Christ’s doing? Indeed it is, and the heart which does this is only a heart so infused by the Holy Spirit that it cannot but will what God wills. This is what is filled out by the prayer St. Isaiah gives. We are told to be attentive to our heart, to listen to it, and to look in it for the signs of our salvation. It is Jesus Christ then who guards us from evil.

What we find in St. Isaiah’s text then is intended to be intensely practical. It is the methods and tools we should know in order to engage in this task of attentiveness to our hearts. But if we look at our hearts, what will we see? Will we see a heart with a natural hatred for sin, or will we not rather see a heart still bound by attachments to sin? So if we follow his prescription, we throw ourselves on God’s mercy all the more, and pray all the more this prayer he gives.

We become moved to seek the tools by which we can cultivate this attentiveness and pray more genuinely the prayer for God’s salvation, and it is this which he seeks to teach us.

Index of Comments on the Philokalia

St. Isaiah the Solitary 5

2006-09-23T13:39:00.000-07:00

St. Isaiah the Solitary, On Guarding the Intellect, Twenty-Seven Texts

5. When the intellect hears these words of reassurance, it says boldly to its enemies, “Who would fight with me? Let him stand against me. And who would accuse me? Let him draw near to me. Behold, the Lord is my helper; who will harm me? Behold, all of you are like an old moth-eaten garment.”

The reassurance referred to is presumably that in the previous text, that God’s presence will be always with us, which is promised when we have submitted our intellect entirely to God. The fear I spoke of commenting on Text 4 was about the fear that the intellect’s own purposes and nature would be subverted by being subjected. The fear then was that an untrammeled intellect seems to be necessary for it to achieve its purpose of seeking truth, and that binding it to God might block the goal of the intellect. But, once we realize that God is truth, we hear the promise, the reassurance, that God will always be with the intellect, and will not abandon it, and the intellect is strengthened, not weakened, by its submission to God.

The strengthening now is broader in Text 5. Not only is it guarded against an apparent loss of its own function, but it is able to stand firm more solidly than before, with God as helper. Challenges to our ideas, to our thoughts, to our knowledge and our wisdom, are the sort of thing we would normally meet with a challenge back. The intellect asserts itself to defend our ideas in a sort of combat with opposing ideas, or worse, the people who express them. St. Isaiah, again quoting his namesake the prophet Isaiah, accepts the martial metaphor, but turns it on its head.

The intellect is strengethened here not to better argue against its enemies, or oppose them intellectually. But rather, by resting in the confidence of God’s presence, it has nothing to fear. There is no mention here of defeating the intellectual opponent, but only of withstanding because that opponent can do nothing. Indeed, the opponent need not be fought because he is only an “old moth-eaten garment.”

The intellect, secure in its knowledge that God is present and will always be present, confident in its submission to God, has nothing to fear either from a subversion of its purpose of seeking truth, or from a need to defend itself against enemies. God has promised help, and there is no need for combat or defense any longer.

This is thus quite different from Socratic dialectic, which must always be tested in discussion. (See the Crito!) Instead, the truth is not known because it is hard-won through struggle with competing visions of other people; the truth is known in a relationship of submission and loving adoration of God. The dialectic is thus perhaps exposed to be what Socrates’ opponents always thought it was: self-assertion.

Index of Comments on the Philokalia

St. Isaiah the Solitary 4

2006-09-22T09:54:00.000-07:00

St. Isaiah the Solitary, On Guarding the Intellect, Twenty-Seven Texts

4. If God sees that the intellect has entirely submitted to Him and puts his hope in Him alone, He strengthens it, saying, “Have no fear Jacob my son, my little Israel,” and, “Have no fear, for I have delivered you, I have called you by My name; you are Mine. If you pass through water, I shall be with you, and the rivers will not drown you. If you go through fire, you will not be burnt, and the flames will not consume you. For I am the Lord your God, the Holy One of Israel, who saves you.”

The three preparatory texts have counseled us about things secondary to the intellect: about anger, good or bad, about spiritual pride, and about the moral prerequisites of holy fear, virtuous life, and a well-nurtured conscience. Now on to the topic of the piece, the intellect.

The submission of the intellect is perhaps one of the hardest things to deal with as a modern. We are supposed to use our minds; the Episcopal Church loves the tagline that in our churches you are not expected to “check your mind at the door.” The intellect is, for us, a great defense. It is how we understand and appropriate the world, how we manipulate the world to achieve our goals and avoid harm. But I don’t think this is distinctively modern. It sounds modern, but human nature has not changed all that much.

St. Isaiah is addressing then a fear that we may have if we proceed on the course of submission of the intellect to God. The fear is that we will no longer be safe. The things that the intellect is good for will be subverted if we do not remain solidly in control of it. But this isn’t so, is it? If we believe that Jesus Christ is the Truth, then what exactly do we have to fear by submitting the intellect to truth? Nothing! And isn’t a person supposed to submit their minds to the truth, in preference to all attachments, all ego, all desire?

The fear then that by submitting our intellect to God we will lose our greatest tool for approaching the world gets entirely wrong the relation between the world, the intellect, and God. God cannot lead us astray; if we submit our intellect to God, we improve our safety, not the opposite. We find our true security, and our true needs met. St. Isaiah knows and presumes all this. Only one thing remains: to overcome our fear and anxiety about losing control. We ought to use our intellect to seek the truth, but in fact we so often use it to preserve control, or the illusion of control.

This is the real spiritual problem, so it’s right here that St. Isaiah goes, by quoting his namesake the prophet Isaiah and declaring that a strong intellect, and strong defense come from God. It is our fear that must be quelled in this process, and so the reassuring and ancient words of God are called for, who loves and cares for us, who has gone to such long straits to redeem us.

One further note: see the tense of the prophet’s words as St. Isaiah quotes them. Our future is secure, because our redemption has already been accomplished, and our salvation is occurring now, as we speak.

Index of Comments on the Philokalia

St. Isaiah the Solitary 3

2006-09-21T10:21:00.000-07:00

St. Isaiah the Solitary, On Guarding the Intellect, Twenty-Seven Texts

3. Let us stand firm in the fear of God, rigorously practicing the virtues and not giving our conscience cause to stumble. In the fear of God let us keep our attention fixed within ourselves, until our conscience achieves its freedom. Then there will be a union between it and us, and thereafter it will be our guardian, showing us each thing that we must uproot. But if we do not obey our conscience, it will abandon us and we shall gall into the hands of our enemies, who will never let us go. This is what our Lord taught us when He said: “Come to an agreement with your adversary quickly while you are with him in the road, lest he hand you over to the judge, and the judge deliver you to the officer and you are cast into prison.” The conscience is called an “adversary” because it opposes us when we wish to carry out the desires of our flesh; and if we do not listen to our conscience, it delivers us into the hands of our enemies

Here is a two-stage process, though most of the emphasis is on the second stage. Stage one is to develop a conscience, and then stage two is to respect it. Stage one is so crucial and so easily overlooked. The first stage is to achieve freedom for our conscience, and we do this by “standing firm in the fear of God” and “rigorously practicing the virtues.” In other words, a certain inner attitude of humility and holy fear, combined with the outward practice of a virtuous life, result together in a freed conscience.

If our conscience is not freed yet, then what is it bound to? It must be bound to our sins, which keep it in chains. It can be distorted and undeveloped and impotent. But the crucial thing I want to point out here is that it is only once the conscience has been freed that St. Isaiah proceeds to talk about our obligation to obey it. Before it has been freed, our task is to stand firm in the fear of God, and to rigorously practice the virtues. That is, we look to external standards first, and the assiduous following of these external standards frees our conscience: our internal standard.

St. Isaiah promises that once our conscience has been freed, there will be union between it and us. We can then trust and rely on it, and it will teach us. The fear of God and the practice of the virtues is thus only the first step, with much still left to be done: much still left to be “uprooted.” We internalize our standards and our compass, and our own conscience becomes our guide for all that remains to be done. We then become equipped to measure the external standards around us, testing and sifting them to see whether they are correct for us or not.

But what a disaster if we reverse the order! If our conscience is still chained, then it is not in a position to measure the external standards presented to us, and if we try to let it do so, nothing good can come of it. We are likely to simply allow our distorted desires to take free hold, and judge all external standards not against our conscience (bound and confined as it still is) but rather against our desires and impulses and passions.

This is the great virtue of holy fear and external standards of virtue. They assure us, by their very objectivity, that they are not subject to our own unconverted whims and passions. But once our conscience is freed, we owe it our obedience. Here it is striking that St. Isaiah allegorizes the saying of Jesus to take our conscience—the voice of the Holy Spirit in our heart!—as an adversary. But so it seems if our conscience, once freed and active within us, is disregarded. It chases us, hounding us, not letting us go. Unless, finally, it abandons us, and that is what St. Isaiah is here warning us about.

This is troubling and takes care to understand well. It is not that the Holy Spirit abandons us in a literal sense. This is not right, because God is always with us. It is that by delivering us up to our enemies, the Holy Spirit is taking advantage of our own passions and desires to bring us back. How could that process work? If we disregard our conscience, and then are delivered “into the hands of our enemies” (that is, the demons which afflict us, our disorded desires and sinful hearts), how is this supposed to be good for us?

Ah! External standards again! This is the picture. The conscience teaches us “what must be uprooted,” that is, what remains in us still for spiritual work, restraint of sin, holiness of life, and so forth, even after we have achieved a true holy fear and the practice of the virtues. Suppose, while keeping our holy fear and our practice of the virtues, we neglect what our conscience teaches us about what further there is to do. (Are we not then resting in the “works of the law” for our salvation?) Then, according to St. Isaiah, our concscience delivers us over to our enemies, and we should expect that we become beset once more by contempt of God and vicious living—that is, the state before we had holy fear and practice of the virtues. And this may—let us hope!—wake us up to what has happened and call us back.

God is not satisfied with half-measures.

Index of Comments on the Philokalia

St. Isaiah the Solitary 2

2006-09-20T14:40:00.000-07:00

St. Isaiah the Solitary, On Guarding the Intellect, Twenty-Seven Texts.

2. If you find yourself hating your fellow men and resist this hatred, and you see that it grows weak and withdraws, do not rejoice in your heart; for this withdrawal is a trick of the evil spirits. They are preparing a second attack worse than the first; they have left their troops behind the city and ordered them to remain there. If you go out to attack them, they will flee before you in weakness. But if your heart is then elated because you have driven them away, and you leave the city, some of them will attack you from the rear while the rest will stand their ground in front of you; and your wretched soul will be caught between them with no means of escape. The city is prayer. Resistance is rebuttal through Christ Jesus. The foundation is incensive power.

The first text was about a good anger as opposed to bad anger; now what happens if we have defeated our bad anger? If we have achieved peace and stillness towards our fellows, what next? That is, our attitude towards our anger and wrath towards others: we should be angry at our anger and wrath towards others. So surely there must be a good pride, just as there is a good anger; that is, if it was right to have a certain kind of anger towards our own internal enemy, then surely it must also be right to have pride if we have defeated it.

But no. We have here a spiritual interpretation of the story of the assault on Ai. The enemies do not ever really withdraw; they are always there. If we rejoice that we have defeated our own sinfulness, then we open ourselves up to even greater sin. The thought that we have defeated our own sinfulness is a mistaken thought, an illusion, indeed, we are told here it is a deceit our enemy plants. And if we rejoice in this illusion, we end up bitten back.

St. Isaiah adds a second bit to the allegory. The city is prayer. So our rejoicing if we think we have defeated our own demons is a running out from prayer, and if we leave our prayer behind in that pride, we open ourselves to further and more dangerous attack. Indeed, the attack may be the defeat of the city entirely: the overthrow of our prayer and our loss of ourselves.

We must resist in the name of Jesus Christ, not that is trusting in our own power or our own prayer as if our prayer were the agent protecting us. The city is where we are in our prayer, but the resistance is from Christ, and only from him. It is the attribution of our spiritual successes to ourselves, and leaving our true fortress behind, which opens us up to this greater danger.

So now, what should we do in response to spiritual success? If we should not be proud and joyful, then what? Continue to pray, to recognize that the defeat of our demons is not over or trivially accomplished. Most of us discover as adults that the same issues come up over and over, the same trials and difficulties, the same areas where we are unhappy with ourselves and try to improve. Here we are given the rich advice that when we encounter moderate success, we will not stay successful if we do not remain just as vigilant as before. Our trial (our combat!) is against an enemy rather more tenacious than that.

We should instead act with thanksgiving for the respite, continue in prayer even more fervently than before, and watchful for the first glance of our old demons peeking around the bend, seeking to renew the assault.

Index of Comments on the Philokalia

St. Isaiah the Solitary 1

2006-09-19T20:16:00.000-07:00

St. Isaiah the Solitary, On Guarding the Intellect, Twenty-Seven Texts

1. There is among the passions an anger of the intellect, and this anger is in accordance with nature. Without anger a man cannot attain purity; he has to feel angry with all that is sown in him by the enemy. When Job felt this anger he reviled his enemies, calling them “dishonorable men of no repute, lacking everything good, whom I would not consider fit to love with the dogs that guard my flocks.” He who wishes to acquire the anger that is in accordance with nature must uproot all self-will, until he establishes within himself the state natural to the intellect.

Amidst the usual emphasis on stilling the passions, it’s rather striking that the very first words of the Philokalia are on a good passion. The general view expressed, that the passions are unnatural and residues of sin, is mollified right away, by a good passion.

One might think that this “anger of the intellect” is against untruth or unrighteousness or such things. And, in a sense, so it is. But this is a paradoxical reversal. Normally anger is about self-assertion, whether it is defensive or offensive anger, it is about protecting or advancing the self over and against others. But notice that St. Isaiah’s conclusion is that the acquisition of this anger requires the uprooting of self-will. So it is a strange anger, an anger which is not about advancing the self but about defeating the self, or a particular part of it.

Indeed, if ordinary anger is about the assertion of the self, this is an anger which is turned against ordinary anger. It is the anger of frustration and dislike for all that within us is “sown by the enemy.” All the spiritual decay and sordidness of our hearts, is here to be angered at. St. Isaiah is telling us that the one thing we must not attempt to make peace with is our own lack of peace! We must not be complacent with our own deficiencies and sinfulness, but instead we must, at least, be angry at them. Even if we are impotent to change them or our efforts are frustrated, we must at least not rest.

This anger at our own shortcomings is also a sort of hunger for God, I think. The same frustration with our own brokenness and the things in us we want to change, but cannot, is a hunger for the God who can change them and us. In other words, the one disquietude we should have is a yearning for God; the one rest and contentment we should not have is to rest and be content with the absence of God.

And this is a natural anger, which is not only the statement that it is not part of our fallen nature, but that it is functional. It is a sort of natural tendency in us to restore our equilibrium, an equilibrium which our fallen nature has lost. There is within us a sort of “restoring force” which pushes us back to our center, back to God. And that restoring force is here seen to be a species of anger, that is, of passionate and powerful disquietude with our lack of proper equilibrium.

St. Isaiah also offers here a bit of spiritual exegesis, a suggestion for how we might read imprecatory passages of Scripture. The great and holy Job was angry at his friends, says Isaiah, and this was the natural good sort of anger. But this must mean that Job was angry at “what was sown within him by the enemy.” The point is that what his friends said to him was a sowing in him of doubt and discord, and with which he was angry, and rightly so. Job was right to maintain his integrity, and those who tried to impugn him were wrong in doing so, and Job was rightly bothered by what had been sown in him, and rightly angry at it.

Indeed, the reference from Job 30 here is about Job’s being made an object of ridicule, and with the self-focus of St. Isaiah’s context, it is ultimately that Job is losing confidence in himself (or a part of him is) and he is angry with that part, sown in him by the words of his friends.

The broader sense here is the very common one that imprecatory scriptures can be read as imprecatory towards our own misdeeds, of course, a theme that is very common among spiritual writers.

Index of Comments on the Philokalia

Acts 11:1–18

2006-06-29T15:03:00.000-07:00

This wonderful passage is appointed for Morning Prayer today, the feast of the Apostles Peter and Paul. It gives a very nice description of how the church successfully comes to recognize an innovation in practice. We have not here just “oh, an innovation happened,” but a nice step-by-step description of the process.

First, the backstory is that Peter has not been keeping the kosher laws. In chapter 10 we hear of this, that Peter has been called by Cornelius, a Roman military officer and a devout godfearing man—but not a Jew. Cornelius has been told by an angel to send for Peter. Meanwhile, Peter has the vision which he relates again in Acts 11:4–10, and he accepts Cornelius’ invitation, he preaches to his household, the Holy Spirit falls on them all, and Peter baptizes them. He then stays with them “for several days.”

The innovation starts with the initiative of God, speaking through an angel to the pagan Cornelius and the apostle Peter. But God’s initiative is expressed mystically, individually. There is no corporate revelation of anything; there is nothing visible in either vision to anyone but Cornelius and Peter. There is merely their private revelation, a vision, which told each of them to do something quite unprecedented. Peter does not test this revelation against the scriptures, he does not consult with the other apostles.

We must not conclude from this that anyone who receives a bolt from the blue is always right. That is not the message. But we should conclude that there is no necessity in the order of things to consult any of scripture, tradition, or reason—for all of these would have counseled against Peter’s innovation—and certainly there is no necessity to consult with the rest of the church. Both Peter and Paul, the subject of today’s feast, insisted that they pursued the Gospel as they believed they had been commanded, without consulting anyone, and without needing the agreement of other leaders in the church, who, in each case, constituted the majority party and were insisting on a clearly articulated position, based unquestionably on the most solid foundations of both scripture and tradition.

Thus far chapter ten. But today’s reading is chapter eleven. Today’s reading is not about whether one should innovate or on what terms, but about what the proper course is to investigate an innovation; this is about how the rest of the church should go about evaluating what has happened.

First off, verses one through three. Notice that there was a recrimination from the traditionalists. They criticized Peter, and ask him point blank, why have you done what the whole church agrees must not be done? Why have you violated both scripture and tradition? Do you not know that your actions will bring disrepute upon the church? However, the recrimination is expressed as a question. It is a good question and a fair question. But it is not a declaration that the other apostles are now out of communion with Peter. There is no deputation to Peter’s friends to tell them not to listen to him anymore. But there is a question.

Next, verses four through ten. Peter explains the special revelation he has received. He does not expect this alone to carry the weight, but it is extremely important. He stresses that what has happened was not his own initiative, but was from God. They presumably do not believe him. They will, later, but they do not insist that Peter must first have proved his case to them before taking this unprecedented step.

Then comes verses eleven through fifteen. Peter accepts the invitation from Cornelius. He does something entirely unprecedented. He finds that God has already been at work with Cornelius. But again, this is a private revelation. He does not insist upon or need proof; there is no statement here that Cornelius somehow convinced Peter that his own vision was genuine. It is just that Cornelius says, “God has told me to ask for you.”

Now we have the crucial moment, verses sixteen through seventeen. Peter offers a theological conclusion. The conclusion is not based upon the visions that either he or Cornelius had, but instead upon the effect of his preaching upon Cornelius and his household. Cornelius believes, and God pours out the Holy Spirit upon them. We are not told what this was, but it is clearly public. It is not just a private revelation, as were the two visions that started the ball rolling. Acts 10:45 reports that “the circumcised believers who had come with Peter were astounded.” They went along for the ride, relucant, nervous, not sure. Unlike Peter, they had had no vision. Peter was not astounded that the Holy Spirit was poured out, but these others were.

Now the new innovation is accepted in the church. Verse eighteen reports first that the questioners were silenced. And they praised God, they were genuinely happy that the old rule had been overthrown, that people were being included in the church who had previously been excluded.

Finally, after this, the remainder of the chapter, verses nineteen through thirty, describes the foundation of the church in Antioch. There had already been some christian activity in Antioch, but exclusively among Jews. The new innovation is put in place, however, missionaries are sent to the gentiles in Antioch, and the church in Antioch is founded. This is, it should be noted, the first gentile church.

From this, we can distill the following procedure for innovations and their possible eventual reception in the church:

Individuals, both within and without the church, based on their own private experiences of God, are led to violate existing norms. They may be doing so without any consultation or approval from established authorities.

The gift of the Holy Spirit is poured out upon the new effort. The sign of the Holy Spirit is not some sort of conformity to existing practice, but is instead some sort of publicly visible grace. We might think of communities of joy and growth, of feeding the poor, of fruitful prayer.

The rest of the church, nervous and upset by the innovation, asks for an explanation. They do not insist that approval had to be granted in advance. If the innovation is right, then it does not matter that they were not consulted; if the innovation is wrong, it would not matter if they had been.

The private experiences of God which led to the innovation are explained.

The experiences of violating existing practice are related, signs are described of God’s activity preceding the innovation, activity which occured outside the church.

The gifts poured out by the Holy Spirit are described.

Now, for the very first time a public theological rationale for the innovation is given. Crucial reliance is placed not on scripture, tradition, or reason. No explanation is given about how to interpret the scriptures which prohibited the innovation. Reliance is instead placed upon the visible gift of the Spirit.

The church responds in joy and thankgsiving, genuinely pleased that the innovation has overthrown what had been previously understood to be the bounds of God’s grace.

The church’s missionary apparatus swings into action, not to block the innovation or argue against it, but to spread it as soon as possible, as widely as possible.

Comparison of these steps with the process outlined in the Windsor Report as normative is left as an exercise to the reader.

Index of Comments on Scripture

Luke 7:1–35

2005-04-23T17:29:00.000-07:00

More healings first, which are valuable witness to many things. These get richer and richer as the story progresses. The healing of the centurion’s slave shows the centurion’s great faith and Jesus’ accessibility to the hated Roman oppressors. There’s more, but that’s meat enough. And then this young man in Nain, whose death has left his mother destitute, and Jesus raises him to great acclaim. It comes to the attention of John, who sends messengers to find out what’s going on.

So it’s clear that despite the initial encounter between Jesus and John, the baptism, and all that; the disciples, and so forth, John still isn’t sure. Jesus refers to a text from Isaiah, a messianic prophecy, and shows how these healings he is performing have marked him as “the one who is to come.”

Now Jesus bears his witness to John, just as John had borne his to Jesus. He says that “among those born of women no one is greater than John”: high praise indeed. And that even the least in the kingdom of God is greater still. So this is big stuff. Ok, point made. Then comes two little verses, the two cited at the top above. The Episcopal lectionary has curiously marked these optional for the reading. Hrm, when this happens, one always wonders why?

Perhaps, most likely, they are worried about the anti-semitic cast one might place on them. Though, given all the anti-Pharisee stuff already, and yet to come, excising two verses can’t change that. Moreover, this is about “the Pharisees and the lawyers” as opposed to the “tax collectors” and “all the people who heard this.” The latter two groups are Jews, just as much as the former. So if this is why the lectionary authors diddled the text, it’s a silly reason.

But isn’t it telling what these verses say? Remember back to John’s baptism. Why did the Pharisees and the lawyers reject it? Because they didn’t need it or so they thought. For them to admit they needed a new beginning would be to admit that their old beginning isn’t enough. I am much fond of the Benedictine saying, “Always we begin again.” Those who think they do not need to begin again, reject God’s purpose for themselves. God is never content with what we have accomplished so far. The Pharisees, in their proud confidence that they did not need a new beginning, on the theory they had not sullied the old one, end up excluding themselves.

And, once more, who is included? Even “the tax collectors” (the hated collaborators with the Roman state), “tax collectors and sinners.” Who’s out? Those who are proud and confident in their in-ness. Who’s in? Those who are excluded and rejected by society, who have no place, who have no one to trust but God.

Index of Comments on Scripture

Luke 6:27–49

2005-04-21T15:05:00.000-07:00

Here we have the guts of the “Sermon on the Plain”, Luke’s analogue to Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount. It starts with the beatitudes, and continues with much of the same material (though much less of it) that Matthew puts in the Sermon on the Mount.

He is speaking to “a great crowd of his disciples and a great multitude of people from all Judea, Jerusalem, and the coast of Tyre and Sidon”; the last suggests that there are probably non-Jews in the audience too.

The part I’ve picked out here is Jesus’ new version of the lex talionis, the law of retributive punishment. The lex talionis is the “eye for an eye” law of criminal punishment (or tort liability, depending on how you think of it). It worked a reduction, because no longer could you exact whatever punishment you wanted, you were limited to exacting an equal punishment in kind to the harm that had been done to you.

Jesus lays out a different standard, but one based on the old. He says that you will meet with whatever you give out, “the measure you give will be the measure you get back.” In other words, be aware of the divine lex talionis and so if you want mercy, show it; if you want not to be judged, do not judge; if you want to receive richly, give richly.

The implication is that merely keeping your own hands clean, doing no wrong, is not enough to avoid judgment. For judgment hurts. To judge someone hurts them; it’s painful to be judged. You might have thought that if you did nothing wrong, then you would receive no painful judgment. That’s the pharisaic mentality as Jesus criticizes it. But he says, no! If you judge others, you will be judged, even if you judge them rightly and fairly, even if you keep your own hands perfectly clean. The only way not to be judged, not to be condemned, to be forgiven, is to refrain from judgment and condemnation, and to be forgiving.

Some like to quote Paul’s talk about right judging as if that nullified Jesus’ clear command not to judge. They have misunderstood Paul, but today’s text is Luke, not Paul. So here it is enough to answer to them, “Why do you call me ‘Lord, Lord,’ and do not do what I tell you? ... The one who hears and does not act is like a man who built a house on the ground without a foundation. When the river burst against it, immediately it fell, and great was the ruin of that house.” What is the foundation? Mercy, kindness, gentleness, non-judgment, non-condemnation, forgiveness, love.

Index of Comments on Scripture

Luke 6:1–26

2005-04-19T22:18:00.000-07:00

Now in rapid succession the story gets going. Three elements. First, Jesus and the sabbath; then he picks the twelve; then the beatitudes.

Jesus breaks the sabbath law. Having just shown that God’s grace is open to all, those whom the Pharisees would exclude, having shown that the bounds of God’s grace are...well, no bound at all: that there are no bounds to God’s grace, Jesus proceeds to march through the field eating grain on the sabbath. This breaks the rules. And his appeal is to David, who broke the rules. This makes clear what the preceding miracles had implied, that Jesus is about a new set of rules, a breaking of the old rules. He proceeds to heal on the same sabbath, and this in turn enrages the Pharisees.

Then the Twelve are chosen. The old community is over: a new crowd is allowed in, and a new set of foundational rules are in place, and now a new community is made. These had all already been called. What happens now is that they are chosen for a particular role. He chose twelve of them to be the leaders of the community. This new community is the immediately itself an instrument of healing for others.

And the foundational principles of this community are then laid out. Blessed--happy--fortunate--are those who are poor, hungry, weeping, excluded, reviled, or defamed. Huh? Yep, that’s what he says. These are the lucky ones. This is the new community, the community of the excluded, the shut-out, those without power, those who are oppressed by the old rules. Who is the unhappy, the unfortunate? the rich, the full, the laughing, those who are well-spoken of.

How tragic that this could be missed. The church is the continuation of this community; the proclamation of the one holy catholic and apostolic church of the creed is the proclamation of the lineal descent of today’s church from this community: or rather, that we with them are one community. But we are so not because of our lineage, our inheritance, our continuity. Fine things those may be, but what is most important in this community are these three characteristics:

First, that the community uses rules and policies as tools for its own mission; never constrained by them against its will, but using them as holy tools for the proclamation of the new redeemed and liberated community.

Second, that the leaders are chosen of God, from among the excluded and rejected, of every sort with a stunning diversity, and whose choice results in healing, not distress.

And third, that this community values first and always the poor, the excluded, the oppresed, the sad, the weeping; that it never courts or seeks those who are rich, powerful, or well-regarded. It proclaims that happiness, joy and the blessing of God are with the former; that the latter are in a sad and sorry state.

Index of Comments on Scripture

1 Peter 2:19–25

2005-04-17T19:03:00.000-07:00

In his preaching, Peter was very focused on the paschal mystery, on the cross and resurrection. Here in the middle of Easter, the preaching returns to the passion. But it is the passion as infused with the understanding of the resurrection.

The motif here is that we follow in Christ’s example. But why should this work? In other words, why should an abused and suffering failure to obtain our goals somehow get our goals fulfilled? Now the Pauline idea is that we become united with Christ in his death; our baptism joins us to him, and so by joining him in his death, we are assured we will join him in our life. Paul’s first way of doing this joining is baptism, but the patient endurance of suffering is also a theme of his preaching.

My theme in the past few Sundays however has been to look at Petrine preaching in its distinctiveness. Peter has a different thing to say than Paul. What Peter says then here is quite different. We follow in Jesus example, in part, because it’s the right example, but also because in this way it is a credit to us. We build up credit, merit, reward, by following in Christ’s example, because God repays. So if we suffer unjustly, God will reward us and make it right in the end; by our patient endurance then we win a reward.

But this is still Christian preaching; it’s not just “do right and God will reward you.” Peter says that Jesus “himself bore our sins in his body on the cross.” This is much stronger than Paul’s first Adam/second Adam language. Peter’s language is less about ontological union with Jesus and more about a functional relationship. Jesus bore our sins “in his body,” and those sins were nailed to the cross and died. In this way we are free of them, and now we have returned to him, as the “shepherd and guardian of [our] souls.”

Our patient endurance, then, indicates our commitment that Jesus himself did right by patiently enduring wrong, and we have God’s approval when we do so, just as Jesus did. It is that approval of God which we crave and which Peter assures us we have.

Index of Comments on Scripture

Luke 5:12–39

2005-04-16T18:06:00.000-07:00

Two miracles, the calling of Levi, and a confrontation with the Pharisees and their scribes.

The miracles are miracles which grant access to those who have been excluded. The leper cannot be touched by anyone without making them unclean. Indeed, lepers were supposed to announce their presence shouting “leper! unclean!” wherever they went, lest someone accidentally touch them. Jesus, without missing a beat, “stretched out his hand, touched him, and said...” Did Jesus have to touch him to heal him? From the standpoint of the miracle, no. But the point is to show that this person is to be cured, and to be allowed to be part of the community. Jesus is willing to go outside the bounds, to transgress the rules, to make himself unclean, in order to reach this person and bring him in.

The second miracle is of a paralyzed man. Such a person isn’t necessarily excluded from the community in the way the leper is. Instead, he is unable to get in simply because of the facts of his disability. He would have to push through the crowd, but he can’t. So his friends bust through the ceiling and lower him down. Here we have the opposite of the healing of the leper. This time, the excluded ones bust through, breaking the rules (and committing no small act of property destruction) in order to gain access. Jesus forgives the man (for what, exactly? who knows! perhaps vandalism...) and the Pharisees are shocked. Sinfulness is what excludes someone from the community, and Jesus has no right to change that. The role of a leader (as the Pharisees see it) is to maintain the boundaries. Jesus, by contrast, is a physician, whose job is to cross the boundaries, and to legitimize the boundary crossings of others.

Then he includes a tax collector, Levi. And he sits down and eats a banquet which Levi prepares for him. Now the money for this banquet came from the people of Israel, whom Levi had been oppressing. Surely this boundary should not be crossed! But Jesus crosses it. He enjoys the feast and the honor Levi shows him. The Pharisees are once more incensed. Why do you do this? What justification do you have? You aren’t doing the proper religious activities (fasting and prayer), instead you’re hanging around with collaborators, dirty lepers, wicked sinners, whores, fags, drug dealers, and all the rest! Jesus, what’s up with you?!

Jesus does this. He crosses the boundaries, even the ones we think are most dear. He legitimizes the boundary crossings of other people. And why? Because only in this way can the people on the far side of the boundary be cured of whatever ails them. God’s concern (as Jonah teaches and Jonah doesn’t understand) is for everyone. The old regime in which a boundary is maintained to preserve the safety and security of those within it is gone.

This is new. It cannot be absorbed into the old or matched with it. It is so new that if you try to add this to the old system, it will tear the whole thing apart. This new attitude can only work if you are yourself made new. This is not a mere addendum or a tacked-on extra to the old system, very well it was, thank you very much. (Hence dispensationalism as such is wrong.) No, the old system must pass away. If you want to preserve what was good and preserved by the old system (the old wine in the old wineskins) you cannot do it by putting it into the new system (the new wineskins). And if you have drunk the old wine, if you are attached to the old system, you will naturally reject the new. Content with what you like, you will not see the need for change.

But those who are being included, they see the need. The leper, the paralytic, the tax collector, the collaborators, the wicked sinners, the whores, the fags. We get it. We know why the new is better, and we are drinking deep.

Index of Comments on Scripture

Luke 5:1–11

2005-04-14T18:19:00.000-07:00

Finally we get the calling of the disciples, and it is this extraordinary tale of a great fish-catch. John places this tale after the resurrection. Matthew and Mark just have the calling of these four men as they are mending their nets. John has an entirely different depiction of the calling of the first apostles. But for Luke, it’s here, with this tale of a fish catch.

The fish are obviously symbolic of the catch of the church, the great number of people that these men will gather into God’s net, a mighty harvest of the fruits of the sea. But not every apostle necessarily gathered this crowd of fish. Amidst the fact of the divine call, we often sometimes miss its specificity. How easy it is to look to this story, as so many preachers do, and proceed to say how we are supposed to go out and gather such a mighty harvest of Christian folk ourselves. But are we, in fact, all evangelists?

I notice that Jesus gave them direction: do this. And they, did, and they received a great catch. And they followed and caught even more. But to other disciples, Jesus may give a different message. Indeed, James did not earn such a mighty catch after all: he was the first to by martyred. But if the words of Jesus are correct, it may will be that this martyrdom was the way that James was called to be a fisherman of people, not by evangelism, but by his own passion, his own passive witness.

This is the Calvinist truth: we are all called by God. And the Catholic truth: this calling is sometimes to very serious business, to martyrdom or to great renunciation. I will have none of those nattering preachers who say such nonsense as “None of us are called to martyrdom, but we are called to ...” or “We today are not called to give up all our possessions, but we are called to ....” I wonder, how does such a preacher know that nobody in his or her congregation is called to martyrdom or the renunciation of all worldly goods? No preacher can tell us what we are all called to do or not called to do: whether martyrdom, renunciation, evangelism, marriage, or whatever. The Catholic and Calvinist agree that God’s call is particular and individual.

There is a heresy rampant in the Episcopal Church today which, like all heresies, starts with a great truth, and then distorts it to mean something quite different, often the opposite. The Catechism of the Episcopal Church teaches that the ministers of the church come in four orders: lay persons, bishops, priests, and deacons. And unlike most churches, we insist on this, and we are experiencing great and wonderful revival of the sense that every Christian is called to ministry. And we call them “ministers” and the work they do “ministry.”

But the heresy now rampant is to turn this around, and start telling people that whatever they are doing is a ministry. The ministers of the church are found in all four orders, but it does not follow that everyone in each of those four is actually a minister! Some of them are falling down on the job, not doing their part, have not counted the cost, and may find themselves on the wrong side when Jesus Christ separates the sheep from the goats. From a wonderful statement that all are called to be faithful, some have drawn the lesson that all are faithful; from a statement that the ministers of the church come in four kinds, some have drawn the lesson that everyone in those four kinds is a minister. They are not. Some are, some are not. All are called to ministry, but not all have heeded that call.

No preacher can say what everyone is called or not called to with any specificity. But one of the tasks of certain ministers is to, individually, help people to discern where God is calling them, and help them to live out the call to ministry which each of us receives. But this task cannot be performed if it has been replaced with the pernicious notion that everyone is already ministering where God wants them to.

Index of Comments on Scripture

Luke 4:31–44

2005-04-12T21:08:00.000-07:00

I think it’s interesting here, as we hear of the first miracles that Luke relates, to notice that Luke started with the preaching. All the other gospels start with calling of disciples. But Luke starts with the word. And it was received badly in his hometown (yesterday’s selection), and received well in Capernaum.

What is this authority with which Jesus spoke? A special tone of voice, or a ringing in the ears that persisted? Because we know, as John says, that his authority came not from men but from God. It is not because Jesus has some special validation from any human wisdom or power or religious structure that his words carry authority. Unlike John, it is not signaled by miracles. For John, the miracles are signs of Jesus authority intended to provoke a faithful response. But Luke puts the miracles second and the preaching first.

The authority had then, some note, some resonance, some divine response within the hearers. They recognized it as having authority, and the only source which there could have been for that recognition was the Holy Spirit in their hearts. At the end, Luke relates the two on the road to Emmaus, and after they experience Jesus among them, they say, “Did not our hearts burn within us?” That inward fire, burning, is the Holy Spirit, which recognizes the words of Jesus. In virtue of this we know that it is the word of God being spoken.

And then, only then the miracles happen. If it is true that Luke’s gospel is a re-edit of Mark’s, then Luke is saying something quite important by sticking the little preaching bit in first here. The miracles of healing here also involve preaching. Jesus rebukes the demon, rebukes the fever of Simon’s mother, and so forth. He preaches even to the demons, this time a word of command and authority. And why do the demons leave? Because he has some special power of exorcism? Not quite. The demons leave because they too recognize him: “I know who you are, the Holy One of God.” Notice that in Mark’s telling, Jesus rebukes the demon, but not Simon’s mother’s fever.

So this is what authoritative preaching is: it is preaching which resonates in the hearer with the Spirit of God already present in them. It is recognized as the word of God because God already dwells in the hearer. And then Jesus goes to “proclaim the good news of the kingdom of God to the other cities also.” And only then does he start calling his first disciples.

Index of Comments on Scripture

Luke 4:14–30

2005-04-11T23:20:00.000-07:00

We miss this: Jesus pissed people off. So much so that in this case, they took him to a cliff and were ready to throw him off.

And this is his very first “ministry event” after all the preparation. Birth, set-up, John the Baptist, lineage, baptism, testing in the desert, and here he is, ready to begin, and what he says so enrages the folks that they are ready to do him in, right then and there.

What does he say that so angers them? It started well enough. He reads the prophecy, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,” which follows to detail the wonderful things he has been sent to do, to bring good news to the poor, release to captives, sight to the blind, freedom to the oppressed, and so forth. And he says this is now fulfilled. “All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth.”

But then they wonder, isn’t this the kid we knew growing up? And at the first sign of trouble, he says that there are plenty of others. Elijah spurned Israel during a famine and brought salvation to a Sidonian widow. Despite plenty of lepers in Israel, Elisha cured none but the Syrian Naaman. It’s the same thing John said!

Jesus is repeating that all the earth is filled with candidate children for God, and God has done and will continue to do wonderful things to draw them in, with those who are hereditarily entitled possibly thrown out. And that enrages them, because, of course, they are the hereditarily entitled ones. It’s so, so easy to miss the point, and think this is merely about Israelite vs. Gentile. And it is partly about that. But it’s also so very much more.

It’s about never, never, never resting on one’s religious laurels, sure of one’s place, confident that one is on the inside. All those wonderful things in the prophecy, whose announced fulfillment had everyone thinking such good things about Jesus, were potentially for others. Eek! We thought he meant us.

Entitlement, of any sort, has absolutely no place in God’s kingdom. Nothing so enrages those who think they are entitled, the guardians of the social order, of the way things have always been. As soon as tradition becomes a self-confident assuredness that by keeping one’s tradition one is on the in with God, one is set and assured, one has become prone to reject Jesus when he tells you that you just might get passed over in favor of the outsiders, the unacceptible, the great unwashed (unbaptized?).

So whenever you hear anyone start saying that the tradition authorizes their message of exclusion and privilege, you know that they have left the Christian tradition, and headed off for something quite different, and that they are among those prepared to toss Jesus off the cliff for his challenge to their status.

Index of Comments on Scripture

1 Peter 1:17–23

2005-04-10T12:39:00.000-07:00

Continuing the readings from 1 Peter appointed for the Eucharist this year in Easter, we have a clear indication that Peter’s letter is written to converted pagans, not to Jews. Notice that he refers to “the futile ways inherited from your ancestors,” and that “through [Christ] you have come to trust in God.” These are not things to be said to Jewish Christians, whose ancestors did not have “futile ways”, and who already trusted in God before their faith in Jesus. No, this is the way you talk to converted pagans.

Since we live in a pagan culture, a culture which cannot any longer claim to a general Christian or even godly understanding of itself and the world, Peter’s words are pretty good for us. He speaks of conversion and newness of life, being brought through faith in Christ, which his hearers could not have received any other way.

Think of such a converted pagan at that time. First Peter refers to the Father “who judges all people impartially according to their deeds”; this echoes Petrine preaching in Acts also, where Peter says that “God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.” It’s actually distinctively Petrine. Our religion is so heavily Pauline, especially since the epistle to the Romans has been treated by some as if it were the basis of all theology. It’s good to stop and hear what Peter himself says, rather than filtering it through the lens of Paul.

Peter focuses on impartiality: that God does not play favors with Israel. This is a lesson that was hard won for Peter. But his experience of the gentile church taught it to him. Moreover, Peter follows this up, both in Acts and in his epistle, by referring to deeds as the standard for acceptability to God. It is right living which God wants. And since God shows no partiality, it cannot be that the written law is the key. That is, if you needed revelation from God to know what is right and wrong, then only those who get the revelation would have hope of living rightly. This is the dynamic of law and gospel again, but in a very different key from the more commonly heard Pauline version.

What Jesus brings to these pagans is not a new law even. It would be tempting to say that Jesus is the universal revelation, thus because Jesus is available to all, this is how God no longer plays favorites. But let’s not read Paul back into this here either. Peter himself tells us what he means. Jesus was indeed “revealed...for your sake.”

So what is this “for your sake,” what is it that Jesus did, according to Peter here? Two things. First, ransomed us from “the futile ways inherited from your ancestors.” Pagan religion and culture, those futile ways. Nothing here speaks of hell, nothing here speaks of the judgment of God, except to say that God judges everyone fairly according to their deeds. So the ransoming here is expressed as a ransoming from the past, from something bad we have gotten from our ancestors. If you think that Peter is talking about the future or some kind of ransoming yet to come then you’ve missed what he is talking about here. That doesn’t mean there is no such thing as a ransoming in the future; yes indeed there certainly is! But it’s not what Peter is talking about here.

Second thing Jesus did, according to Peter here. Because God “raised him from the dead and gave him glory,” we have come to trust in God. In other words, we see this wonderful thing God did for him, and we come to trust in God ourselves who can and will do such wonderful things for us.

And it ends with Peter’s statement of new birth: “you have been born anew,” with a new inheritance. And we must purify our souls, live in obedience to the truth, but that’s not enough: we must then “love one another deeply from the heart.” This is the point, and this is the “deed” most central by which we are all judged impartially.

Index of Comments on Scripture

Luke 4:1–13

2005-04-09T21:44:00.000-07:00

After Jesus was tempted, the devil left for an opportune time. That time was in the garden, one presumes, when Jesus (according to Luke) sweated drops of blood.

After his meeting with John, Jesus first needs to confront and deal with himself, with his own hopes and dreams, and subordinate all of them to the will of God. This is something I have never been able to do myself until recently, because I wasn’t even in touch with my own hopes and dreams, let alone able to see them as potential distractions.

Jesus of course gets everything he wants, food, power, authority, self-confidence in his own mission, safety. Luke gives the three temptations in a different order from Matthew and from the way we normally remember them. Matthew’s go food, safety, power. But Luke puts the bit about safety, the temptation to dive off the pinnacle of the temple and be saved, as the last one.

This is because, I think, for Luke this is the resurrection. Jesus receives all the things he is tempted with, but only by being willing not to get them, and that’s why he sweated those drops of blood.

I want to take my own will and place it at Jesus’ feet, for him to use as he wishes. I am now at a place in my life where I think I have gotten rather well in touch with what I want, some of which I have received and some not. It’s not about changing what one wants though. It’s about being willing to, as they put it, “deal with unfulfilled desire.” It’s ok to want things, the point is to place getting what one wants in second place and not in first.

Index of Comments on Scripture

Luke 3:15–22

2005-04-08T09:24:00.000-07:00

Huh? This is the good news? Remember those bad tracts which first start off by trying to convince you you’re going to hell, and then tell you how to avoid it, and end up with a little prayer of dedication and the address of a local church? The idea is that before you can hear the good news of salvation, you need to hear the bad news of what you’re being saved from. Well, this is crazy.

It’s a typically Protestant problem: a key doctrine was forged in a religious climate foreign to today, and that key doctrine has been elevated way out of proportion in a bad form long past its expiration date. In this case, the doctrine is that we are saved from hell through faith in Christ and through nothing else. If you think that’s all there is to salvation, then you’re kind of stuck when someone doesn’t believe in hell in the first place: hence those awful tracts. For a medieval, whose fear of hell might have been acute, this saving gospel is indeed good news. (Though I reject Martin Luther’s claim that the medieval church didn’t teach the gospel of salvation; it certainly did.)

Many of the people Jesus was preaching to didn’t even believe in an afterlife at all, and his preaching did not start out with a bunch of bad news from which the good news would save you. (And leave you where? right where you started? why bother?) Consider contemporary universalism. How is it good news to first convince somebody who trusts in a saving and redeeming God, that they might actually be tortured by that God for eternity, and then that the little prayer on the back of the tract will get them out of hell? How is this good news? for such a person? Answer: it’s not.

Ok, now what about John? Is his preaching just that kind of bad news? No. By contrast, his preaching is good news, very good news, because he says that God is going to act soon to “clear the bastards out.” To get the point, you have to get a whole lot more visceral and a whole lot less namby-pamby. The point is that if you’re upset with the way things are going in the world, so is God, and God is going to act very soon to rectify the situation. John proclaims that he is only able to get you ready, not to bring about God’s action. He warns that God’s action will baptize--that is, cleanse--you with the Holy Spirit and with fire, that is, not with the water of the Jordan. So be ready for it. But the point here is not a scary ghost story or a frightfully vindictive hell from which you can be saved, but that God is going to act to clean up all the nastiness and ugliness and hatred and war and violence and everything else in the world.

Then we are told that the one who is the agent of this transformation is Jesus Christ, and the good news is not only that the world is going to get cleaned up (and is being cleaned up), but that God will bring us (suitably cleansed and transformed) into that fresh new world.

Index of Comments on Scripture

Luke 3:1–14

2005-04-07T12:21:00.000-07:00

The preaching of John the Baptist gets short shrift, and so it’s good that we pick up Luke at this point. John is his own person, not just a forerunner to Jesus, he is a true prophet, he is Elijah who was to come.

He tells the crowds that they cannot look to Abraham as their ancestor as a guarantee of salvation. This is radical stuff, because the people relied on God’s promise to Abraham as the guarantee of their own secure place in his kingdom. But John says that the promise was to Abraham, not to them, and that God can keep his promise to Abraham without giving them anything: “I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham.”

So it’s turned around: instead of focusing on their Abrahamic pedigree as the guarantee of their own place, John tells them to focus on their own actions, and not just on their ancestry--literal, or spiritual ancestry, we should add. If they behave like Abraham, they are his children, but if they spurn the right path, it won’t matter a hill of beans who their ancestor is. And, pace the Protestants, and pace St. Paul in Romans 4, John tells the crowd how to be children of Abraham: by right and moral action.

People today should note that John the Baptist does not tell the crowd anything about sex, or anything about religion. He tells the crowd that if you have two coats you must share with anyone who has none; the same for food. Tax collectors--collaborators with the occupying enemy state--have a place, provided they stop asking more than is right. Even the Roman soldier--good grief! is just anyone</i> being allowed in?</i>--can have a place, provided he cease using his power as a way to extort money.

So it’s a moral command, but it’s a moral command that is not about the maintenance of the existing social order. We see a foretaste of Jesus’ own hobnobbing with tax collectors and prostitutes and occupying Romans; Jesus tells us elsewhere that the prostitutes were also down at the river with John.

The so-called Christian Right had better start taking this to heart. They cannot count on their spiritual pedigree, their religious correctness, their (pretended) purity, even (dare I say it?) their faith in Christ. These will not save them. God can make new people better than they out of the stones any time he chooses. But if they turn back, repent, receive grace anew, and start bearing fruits worthy of repentance then they have a chance. And what’s the fruit? They need to start welcoming all as John did, they need to start explaining how everyone--even the most apparenty evil--have a place in God’s kingdom, and they need to start sharing with those who have none.

Index of Comments on Scripture

Isaiah 7:10–14

2005-04-04T15:36:00.000-07:00

This year the Annunciation has been delayed to avoid colliding with Holy Week and Easter Week. Fitting, isn’t it? I read the psalmist’s expression of patient waiting for salvation to Ahaz, who in desperation and fear was approached by Isaiah, who wanted to promise deliverance. But Ahaz wouldn’t have it, feigning a religious attitude, “I will not put the Lord to the test.”

It’s a fake; Isaiah has come to announce deliverance, and he’s going to, whether Ahaz is ready or not. The promise to Ahaz was about his son, presumably Hezekiah, who did in fact secure freedom for Judah and kept Judah at least functional as a semi-independent state, instead of falling under Assyrian direct rule as Israel did. Because Assyria was scary, and Ahaz was sure that there was no hope. For this reason, Ahaz seeks help from Egypt, but it won’t do any good (and didn’t); but the intervention of God did. According to 2 Kings, the Assyrians got all the way to the gates of Jerusalem when they were struck with a plague and fled. Not long after the Assyrian empire fell under the rise of the Neo-babylonian empire.

Hezekiah wasn’t too smart; while he got the kingdom on a stable footing and started a solid religious revival, he also showed emissaries from Babylon all the treasures of the kingdom. And in a few generations, the Babylonians had taken over everything and came and stamped out the independence of Judah too, carting the inhabitants off just as the Assyrians had done to the northern kingdom Israel.

So this deliverance announced by Isaiah to Ahaz was short-lived; it survived his life indeed, but it wasn’t the kind of freedom and security the country really needed.

Of course, this prophecy was quoted by Matthew to explain the birth of Jesus, which is why it’s appointed for the feast of the Annunciation. But once we get clear on the context of this verse, it’s harder to understand it. For it’s pretty clear that the deliverance was temporary, that the Immanual Isaiah speaks of is Hezekiah, Ahaz’s son. I think this is ok, however. Yes, Matthew is pulling a verse out of nowhere for his own purposes; it’s crazy to think this was what was in Isaiah’s head. (By contrast, the more clearly messianic prophecies in deutero-Isaiah would get a very different treatment from me!)

Yet Matthew is canonical text, including the quote. What can we get from it? I’m not sure. I want to understand Isaiah 7 all by itself first, without trying to force it into being a prophecy of Jesus’ birth. But having done that, it does seem as if part of the message is about accepting deliverance. Joseph is who is being addressed in Matthew 1, and Joseph is reluctant to take Mary as his wife, and surely would be even more unwilling to take her son as his own. It just may be that this is Matthew’s comment on Joseph, that Joseph is a bit like Ahaz, but a better one: one who accepts the promised deliverance, one who is willing to be told Good News (even though it’s scary), one who is faithful and obedient and truly religious, rather than the pretended religiosity of Ahaz’s “I will not put the Lord to the test.”

Index of Comments on Scripture

1 Peter 1:3–9

2005-04-03T17:11:00.000-07:00

What’s this inheritance? Peter’s grammar is tightly wrought and hard to parse here. I don’t have good enough Greek to make my own judgment, so I may embarass myself by relying on the NRSV, but here goes.

By his great mercy,
he has given us a new birth
into a living hope
through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead,
and into an inheritance that is
imperishable,
undefiled,
and unfading,
kept in heaven for you,
who are being protected
by the power of God
through faith
for a salvation ready to be revealed
in the last time.

So, the new birth, that’s baptism. And it brings two things: a living hope, and an inheritance.

The living hope is given through the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The inheritance has three properties: imperishable, undefiled, and unfading. And it’s “kept in heaven.”

And the recipients of this gift start out as “us”, but end up as “for you,” and who? We who are being protected by God’s power, and through faith. And protected for what? A salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.

Ok, that’s the grammar of the sentence. So what’s the inheritance? I’m going to guess that it’s not mere repetition, and front the following interpretation. At least, this was in the background of my homily this morning. (But if I’m wildly off base here, at least my homily didn’t rely on this interpretation!)

The living hope, I think, is our present hope. The hope we have now, in all its fullness, for all the things we hope for. A constant theme in my preaching is that this kind of hope is hope for heaven, for universal justice, truth, and love, for reconciliation with everyone, for all that eschatalogical stuff, but also and perhaps even more urgently it is hope for all the ordinary things we hope for: hope for security and peace, hope for tasty food, hope for our children to be happy, and so forth. So that’s the present hope. Hope is a big thing, but my little quest here is to figure out what the inheritance is, not the hope.

Ok, so the inheritance. One is tempted to say “eternal life.” But wait. If so, that’s mere surplusage. Because eternal life is part of the hope. And eternal life isn’t being “kept in heaven.” Something close is; better than eternal life, perhaps the inheritance is our resurrection? Unlike eternal life, the resurrection of our bodies isn’t something we have now. It’s something being “kept for us.” But that doesn’t work either, because it doesn’t address really the strong theme of preservation which is going on here. If this were pointing to the resurrection of our bodies, then it wouldn’t be saying all this stuff about preservation. No, the resurrection is included in the living hope too, it’s part and parcel of our hope. Moreover, surely the resurrection is the “salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.”

Ok, so then what is the inheritance? It’s kept in heaven, for we who are being protected. I’ll tell you what I think it is. It’s the Body of Christ, and specifically the church as the body of Christ. And the church is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading. This is how my homily this morning had it, but I relied on the gospel reading more. The church hasn’t been fading. It’s stronger than ever, and cannot be defiled, cannot perish, and cannot fade. (Why? Because it’s kept in heaven!)

Now this is pretty sketchy, I admit. Perhaps the more natural reading is just to take this as referring to eternal life and the resurrection and the consummation of all things. At least, that’s how I’ll probably think of it within a week. But I trot out this tendentious reading for one purpose: to underscore what Jesus said to Thomas, “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” Jesus does not make here a comparison between Thomas and the other ten. No, no, no. For all eleven only believed after they saw. (And there is nothing in the gospel to suggest that Thomas takes Jesus up on the offer to touch his wounds either.)

The comparison is between Thomas and us, and indeed, the lectionary chose this bit from 1 Peter almost certainly because of the phrase Peter uses, “even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and rejoice.” Ah hah! See, we are better off than the apostles. We are more blessed, more happy, more fortunate. Why? Because we have so much greater a cloud of witnesses. Despite not seeing Jesus, we see him more clearly than the apostles ever could, and our successors in faith will see even more clearly yet.

The Buddhist picture has it that the Buddha comes, delivers the Dhamma, and over time it is corrupted and weakens and decays. Eventually it has vanished from the earth, and then after many ages another Buddha appears. But the Christian picture is the dead opposite. Jesus Christ came, bringing the Gospel. But the Gospel does not, over time, corrupt, weaken, and decay. No, just the opposite. It grows and strengthens and builds. The later you come, the more blessed you are, because the Gospel has expanded and grown still more, including more and more witness to the reconciling love of God in Christ. The legacy of Jesus is not just the Bible, or a “deposit of the faith once delivered” (though it includes those things); Jesus is with us now, and our primary witness to the Resurrection is in our heart, the testimony of the Holy Spirit, speaking to us through the Church, present and real.

Index of Comments on Scripture

Mark 16:9–15, 20

2005-04-02T19:57:00.000-08:00

Here we have one of those lectionary readings which isn’t actually part of the text. For this little appendix to the Gospel of Mark was, with virtual certainty, simply not part of the Gospel. It was added by other people later.

But this is its own witness to the Resurrection. Some see in this an embarassed reaction to the abrupt ending of the Gospel of Mark, an unfortunate copying of the elements of the other gospels back into the text of Mark. I cannot speculate sensibly on the intentions of whoever added these bits.

And I cannot tell you whether they are canonical. But I can say this: the very fact that whoever added these bits was so sure of the Resurrection of our Lord, that he felt it quite necessary to make that faith explicit. It is not relevant nor the least bit important that the details seem to come from elsewhere. It is not relevant nor the least bit important who did it, or why. But what is patently clear is that these bits were added out of faith, out of a conviction that a gospel which ended without actual faith in the Resurrection was inadequate.

Well, the Gospel of Mark has its own integrity without this addition. But rejoice, shall we, in the confidence that inspired whoever to add these bits. I do not care why they were added, but they were added by someone with faith, who wants to tell us something important, perhaps only that we should not stop short. We should add our own witness, our own stamp, our own modification, if you will, to the message of Jesus. Amen! Alleluia!

Index of Comments on Scripture

John 21:1–14

2005-04-01T12:10:00.000-08:00

This charming story of breakfast on the lakeshore, with Peter’s nudity and implusive dash into the water (when is the last time you heard of someone putting clothes on so that they could dash into the sea and swim to shore?), the charcoal fire, the net laden with a hundred fifty-three fish, is often only used as the prelude to Peter’s re-integration and reconciliation with Jesus after having betrayed him.

I’m interested in something else. Since all week I’ve been speaking about recognition of Jesus as a major theme in these Easter appearances, I want to point to this odd quote above. Normally one does not remark that someone didn’t ask “Who are you?” In other words, either the person is recognized, which is normal, and so it isn’t worth mentioning that they weren’t asked, or not recognized, in which case they are asked.

So this verse tells us that the situation was something in the middle. That one might think Jesus wasn’t recognized, but that in fact he was. Which, to me, means that it took them a moment, that this recognition wasn’t just ordinary recognition but the kind of thing that the previous appearances were all supposed to help with. In other words, it’s still not immediate, still not automatic, that they recognize Jesus, but they are getting better at it.

This is bolstered by the earlier comment, “Jesus stood on the beach; but the disciples did not know that it was Jesus.” This could mean just that the distance from boat to beach was great, and indeed it does mean that, but it is also there to signal the same kind of recognition scene as we are now familiar with.

The beloved disciple is the first to recognize him, “It is the Lord!” And then Peter jumps in. The other disciples collect fish from the sea and have a splendid breakfast, and then, “they knew it was the Lord.” A Eucharistic moment follows, with Jesus giving them bread and fish, and then one of John’s countings: “This was now the third time that Jesus appeared to the disciples after he was raised from the dead.” Remember the third sign he did in the Gospel of John? It was the feeding of the five thousand in John 6, a chapter filled to the brim with Eucharistic overtones.

Peter is reconciled, and then John tells us that “There is much else that Jesus did. If it were all to be recorded in detail, I suppose the world could not hold the books that would be written.” It is this invitation that we have now been instructed how to recognize Jesus, and we must now proceed to start telling these other things that Jesus did, the things he’s done in our own lives and the ways we have recognized him and come to know him.

Index of Comments on Scripture

Luke 24:36b–48

2005-03-31T12:16:00.000-08:00

With this greeting Jesus culminates the resurrection appearances in Luke. The story as Luke has told it is as follows. Early on Sunday the women came to the tomb, see an angel, but not Jesus, and return to “report everything to the eleven and all the others.” The story “appeared to them as nonsense, and they would not believe them.”

Then as we had yesterday, the Emmaus story, which is thus the first actual resurrection appearance in Luke. The two unnamed disciples tell Jesus about the vision of angels and the missing body, and at supper they realize they have been with Jesus all along on the road.

And now, back in Jerusalem, they find that Jesus has appeared to Simon in the meanwhile: “It is true: the Lord has risen; he has appeared to Simon.” And they share their story.

Now amidst the excitement, “there he was, standing among them.” Once again, the suggestion is of a recognition, as if he were there all along and they didn’t know it. They are frightened, and think they have seen a ghost, but he invites them to touch him, and he eats some food to prove that he is real. And then, just as with the Emmaus incident, he shows how “the law of Moses and the prophets and the psalms” foretold what has happened.

Once more, there is a sending out. The women at the tomb were sent to the eleven. The two in Emmaus were sent back to Jerusalem to rejoin the community. And now, the whole community is sent out “to all nations beginning from Jerusalem.” It is this sending and this telling which is so crucial to Luke, at every stage. It isn’t nearly as pronounced in Matthew; in Mark it doesn’t even get obeyed; in John the focus is entirely different.

But for Luke, the whole nature of the resurrection is to be proclaimed, sent out, published abroad. Jesus leaves them once more, for good this time, or so it seems, in his ascension. Luke’s gospel ends with that. But no, wait, it doesn’t. It ends with this: “And they returned to Jerusalem full of joy, and spent all their time in the temple praising God.” Jesus hasn’t left them, but the need for these resurrection appearances has been completed. Each of them was designed to bring the community together and to urge it on its way of proclamation.

Now they have learned to see Jesus in each other, in the breaking of the bread, and in their distribution of this message to the four corners of the world.

Index of Comments on Scripture

Luke 24:13–35

2005-03-30T11:46:00.000-08:00

How does one recognize Jesus? The resurrection appearances, as I have been noting, frequently seem to include this component of non-recognition. Here we have two unnamed disciples, leaving town after the death of Jesus, not knowing what’s up, and he joins them on the road. But they don’t know who he is.

Notice that they begin telling their companion who Jesus was and what had happened to him. They even repeat the resurrection story as they have heard it from others. Jesus chides them for their foolishness. But why are they foolish? Because all the evidence they need is right there even before they recognize him. And so he explains to them, “beginning with Moses and all the prophets,” that none of this should have been a surprise, but rather should have shown them who Jesus was and given them hope and courage.

And while he does this, their hearts were burning within them. Something was being kindled, that had not been kindled yet. But still, they are not aware of who this is.

Then, in a eucharistic moment, “their eyes were opened, and they recognized him; and he vanished from their sight.” This is extremely curious language. We have the blindness theme, so common in the gospels and especially so important in Luke and Acts. They have been blind, and now they see. But they do not only see who this is that has been with them on the road; they see who Jesus was all along. Remember how he called them foolish? Their blindness concerned not only this fellow-traveler on the road; they were also blind to who Jesus was before his passion.

Now that they can see, he vanishes from their sight. He is no longer seen, because they have seen. What is the meaning of this? Once more, as I noted yesterday, the point is to send them back to the community from which they came. Instead of leaving Jerusalem for Emmaus, giving up hope, they are to return. Jesus did not appear to them and manifest himself to them in order to give them a pep-talk; he did so to reverse their blindness and to send them back to Jerusalem. Once their blindness had been reversed, they reversed their steps as well.

And so they rejoin the community in Jerusalem, which is by now abuzz with the news of resurrection, and they add their own story to the rest.

Index of Comments on Scripture

John 20:11–18

2005-03-29T15:12:00.000-08:00

After yesterday’s more ugly reading, full of deceit and conspiracy and fraud, today’s, from John, is more internal, personal, and poignant. Mary had been cured of seven demons, she owed her whole new life to Jesus. It is only through him that she found wholeness, and all that was dashed when he was killed.

And now, as a final indignity, she isn’t even allowed to care for his body. Not understanding, she sees the angels--she does not know they are angels--and is weeping. She is weeping because Jesus is dead, and she is weeping because even his body is denied her. Then, seeing Jesus, still not understanding--she does not know he is Jesus--she is still weeping. And he asks her, just as the angels did, why she is weeping.

The angels and Jesus both know, and in her desperation, she asks Jesus for the body. Note the reversal here: Jesus has given himself to her, and gives his body to us, and this is exactly what she is looking for: the body of Jesus, the body of Christ. And it is what she finds. But Jesus says not to hold on to him, not to hold on to his body.

How did the encounter with Mary end? We are not told. The resurrection appearances of Christ are filled with stories of encounter and recognition, but not so much of parting. We only get stories of parting when Luke and Matthew describe the ascension. So here she is, overjoyed at the recognition, given Jesus’ body yet not given Jesus’ body, and what does she do? She returns to the disciples.

The body of Jesus, the body she was not allowed to hold on to, was his physical body. The old is gone; gone are the days of Jesus walking around and teaching and eating with his disciples. Even though after his resurrection he does do these things, it is not in the same way, it is strange and mysterious, and always ends not with further eating and teaching and walking around, but instead with the people who have seen the risen Christ being sent to go and announce to others what has happened to them.

During his earthly life, Jesus’ body was most importantly that of an ordinary human being. Now, after his resurrection, it is most importantly found in the community of the disciples. Mary is not to stay in the garden and hold on to his physical body; she is to go to the disciples: to the Church, to the Body of Christ, and tell them what Jesus has said and done for her.

Index of Comments on Scripture

Matthew 28:9–15

2005-03-08T13:54:00.000-08:00

The tale here is a particularly ugly one today, but stay with it. It’s the Gospel for Easter Monday.

One figures that the back-story is something like this. First, the Christian proclamation involved an empty tomb. There are two explanations immediately available for why the tomb was found to be empty. As Christians say, Jesus rose from the dead. Or, alternatively, the body was taken away from the tomb. We see the latter thought in John 20:11-15 where Mary Magdalene sees the tomb empty, but assumes that the body has been stolen.

Unlike Luke and John, Mark makes mention that the stone in front of the tomb was quite heavy. And Matthew amplifies this in two ways, to short-circuit the “stolen body” explanation. One supposes that some people around in the days of the early church agreed that the tomb was empty, but claimed that this was no proof of resurrection, but only that the body has been stolen.

So Matthew places this concern back when Jesus is buried, and has the only discussion of this point. He presents the Pharisees coming to Pilate and saying that the tomb must be made secure, and Pilate grants them a guard of soldiers to make the tomb secure. (Matthew 27:62-66). Then, after Sunday, the priests and elders bribe the guards to lie and say that the body has been stolen. And indeed, Matthew’s claim that this story is “still told among the Jews to this day” is borne out, with many ancient Jewish commentators giving the stolen body explanation as the correct explanation for the empty tomb.

Note that Matthew does not say that those who were repeating the story “to this day” were in on the fraud. The villains are those who are perpetrating the fraud, and not those who have been deceived by it. Nothing here licenses anti-semitism or anything of the sort.

But two oddities are present here, and they are also quite unique to Matthew. Note that the leaders who are committing the fraud know the tomb is empty and know that the body has not been stolen. We see a similar situation in Matthew’s account of the ascension (Matthew 28:16-20) where we are told: “When they saw him, they worshipped him; but some doubted.”

It is this possibility which Matthew is highlighting, and what is most distinctive about Matthew’s description of the resurrection appearances. In Luke, the risen Jesus is recognized together with recognizing him as Lord and trusting him in faith. In John, the same is true. In Mark, we don’t even get a resurrection appearance at all. This is not to say that these others are wrong, merely that the other evangelists each have their own distinct and quite important things to say about the risen Jesus.

What Matthew says, quite singularly, is that it is possible to know that Jesus has been raised, to see him, to be present, to have all the right experiences, and still to be an unbeliever, to be without faith. Whether it’s the dishonest leaders who are perpetrating the fraud in today’s gospel, or those on the mountain who doubted at his ascension, Matthew wants us to know that there is something more than just an intellectual assent, or a particular experience, which is crucial.

What is this something more? It is the decision to worship, to trust, to believe.

Index of Comments on Scripture

John 3:1–21

2004-08-09T21:52:00.000-07:00

I think a lot of people have memorized this verse. Not surprising, because it gets treated as if this were the whole point of the Gospel. And yeah, it is indeed pretty important. But I tend to resist (ok, I totally reject) the picking out of one doctrine or verse or tenet and saying, “This is the standard to measure all the rest by.”

Lutherans measure everything by the measure of “salvation by faith alone,” which is not so much false as one-sided. It led Luther to essentially reject an entire book of Scripture as an “epistle of straw.” This is a good sign that something has gone wrong, and if Luther were as serious about his sola scriptura as he claimed to be, he would not have so easily rejected the letter of James simply because it didn’t agree with Luther’s reading of Paul. Luther had at least two other choices: admit that James and Paul are in tension (or even disagreement) but both still canonical, or admit that his interpretation of Paul might be incorrect. But he chose neither; instead we get a tendentious reading of James, grudgingly allowed in the canon, and a dogged insistence that Luther’s interpretation of Paul must be correct, the rest of scripture notwithstanding.

Recently a correspondent, happy with the doctrine of the infallibility of scripture, decided that to actually expect worship to be based upon scripture and conform to its guidelines (particularly in the matter of the Lord’s Prayer) was more or less not necessary. In my opinion, she had decided what proper worship looked like, and it didn’t matter much whether that comported with scripture or not; the scripture had to be interpreted however necessary to make it fit. And that has consequences: to maintain this view, she had to claim that the entire sermon on the mount is not meant to be taken literally. (Presumably on the grounds that it is too hard.)

So I am not willing to take John 3:16 as the be-all and end-all of Scripture. It is one verse, it is important and memorable, but it is not a summation of the whole story. And the best clue of that, of course, is that it isn’t even the end of the pericope. The point of this conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus is about darkness and light, and about understanding why some people just don’t “get it.”

Nicodemus has asked Jesus what is the basis of his authority, and he says in reply first, that Jesus has authority because he speaks of what he knows; second, that Jesus has come down from heaven and will be lifted up, for the the sake of eternal life; and third, that the purpose of this enterprise was not to condemn anyone, but that some will still be condemned because they reject him, and yet, their condemnation is not a result of their rejection, but rather, their rejection is a consequence of their desire to continue in the evil they do.

And that third part is, of course, the point here. The second part--the verse everyone remembers--is only the set up. The point here is that Nicodemus had better understand what is at stake, and to knowingly reject the light is motivated by one’s own desire for darkness. There are, it seems, two reasons people reject Christ: they do not know it is Christ, or they do not want to confront or admit their own darkness.

Index of Comments on Scripture

2 Corinthians 11:21b–31

2004-08-08T22:46:00.000-07:00

Why does Paul trot out these punishments? He wants to shame the rich and secure church in Corinth to realize that he has far more claim than others on their attention.

Isn’t this the politics of victimization? Paul is saying Who is weak, and I am not weak? Who is made to stumble, and I am not indignant? His point, indeed, is that he suffers for the sake of all, and in this he is conformed to Christ, and in that, he has a claim upon the Corinthians for their attention, and obedience.

But isn’t this the politics of victimization? Does being beat up really make you better? It is certainly rhetorically effective. But we resist (or do we?) this kind of argument, precisely because we know it’s a matter of trotting out one’s injuries as if they made one’s message true. Such is, indeed, a non sequitur.

So is Paul just using a rhetorical trick? (I don’t believe he’s above that, when it is the right thing to do, by the way.) I don’t think he is. I think he’s saying something rather more interesting, and maybe even important. God’s favor is not measured by whether one is rich, important, well-respected, or powerful. Note how he concludes: Who is weak, and I am not weak? Who is made to stumble, and I am not indignant? It is because Paul is identifying with the pain of all: when anyone is weak, he is weakened, when anyone stumbles, it is Paul who is indignant.

That is, he has identified himself with the sufferings and trials of others, and (assuming we take him at his word in this) he is thereby worthy of the respect and even obedience which he demands of the Corinthians.

But why is that so? Even supposing he does, isn’t he just like Clinton, saying “I feel your pain”? No. Because the problem with Clinton is that he didn’t feel others’ pain: he understood it, empathized with it, wanted to alleviate it, but he didn’t actually feel it. Paul, however, says the he does feel it.

And if that makes no sense, then the cross must be emptied of power. Paul is (see the whole chapter here) saying that if you want to distinguish the true apostles from the false, you can tell by seeing who suffers along with everyone, and who holds themselves apart from that suffering.

And at this point, I submit, we see the problem with the anti-gay folks. Secure in their righteousness, confident in their rightness, they inflict suffering on gay people. They tell themselves that this suffering is necessary; that it will only make gay people better (by encouraging them to become straight, I suppose, is how it’s supposed to go)--and by falling back on the statement that they aren’t causing the suffering, but gay people bring it on themselves, or in the alternative, that it is God’s righteous punishment. But admidst it all, we see no willingness on their part to share in the suffering. And this, I believe, exposes them as the false apostles they are.

Index of Comments on Scripture

Office Readings for the Transfiguration

2004-08-06T18:22:00.000-07:00

1 Kings 19:1–12
2 Corinthians 3:1–9, 18
Exodus 24:12–18
2 Corinthians 4:1–6
Daniel 7:9–10, 13–14
John 12:27–36a

We look today, with this wealth of readings (and these are just the ones appointed for the daily office, to say nothing of the Eucharistic lections!) at light and appearance. For that is what is in common to all these: the manifestation of God, now not in an Epiphany spirit, where the focus is on the fact of the manifestation and what is made manifest, but in a different spirit.

As Paul says, God has shone in our hearts. We bask, as it were, in reflected glory, glory multiply reflected. Moses’ face shone, with reflected glory, after he spoke with God, and God shines still more brightly in the face of Jesus Christ. The tradition says that the Transfiguration of Jesus on Mount Tabor was a vision of the uncreated light--the light which simply is God.

That light, at first, blinded Peter so that he spoke out so foolishly trying to contain it in a tent; rather like Moses and his veil to protect the Israelites from the fearsome sight. And the fearsome, awesome nature of this light, this Christ, is seen in Daniel’s vision also; first the Ancient One, whose throne was fiery flame and its wheels were burning fire and then the one like a human being comes, and everything there is is given to him. And that’s our Jesus!

But lest we get swept up into all this grandeur, we remember that the fourth gospel, the only one which does not actually depict the Transfiguration, gives us its most poignant description: And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself. For the Crucifixion and the Transfiguration are the same event, really; and for the Gospel of John especially is the Crucifixion the moment when Jesus’ true nature is most plainly manifest.

Amid all the court splendour, the burning bushes, the fiery thrones, we remember that the glory in question is not that of a great and powerful Oz, but that of a carpenter’s son, killed most ignominiously, in service and self-giving to others. And to hear that message, that sound of sheer silence we have to be stilled, and quiet, and patient. We must let the great wind, the earthquake, and the fire subside and pass by, and keep our gaze fixed on Jesus, who was lifted up for us.

And that is the knowledge which has shone in our hearts.

Index of Comments on Scripture

Acts 4:1–12

2004-08-05T14:39:00.000-07:00

I’m reading a very nice book by Raymond Smullyan, called Who Knows?: A Study of Religious Consciousness in which he talks about lots of stuff. It’s a cool book and a fun read, filled with amusing little stories and touching bits and all the rest. And one question he treats at length is hell. He doesn’t believe in it: and more to the point, he thinks that hell might just be a reductio ad absurdum. If that’s necessary, then clearly the whole thing is crazy.

Well, I’m not going to talk much about hell today. But I am going to ask: if Peter is right that Jesus is the only name given...by which we must be saved, then, what must we be saved from?

And the fundamentalists have an easy answer: hell! But I think that’s wrong. First off, note that nothing in the text supports that answer. Moreover, as verse 4:1 makes clear, he is defending himself before the Saducees, who do not believe in any resurrection. And the Pharisees, who do so believe, believe that the irredeemably wicked are annihilated, not tortured forever. So Peter can’t possibly be talking about hell.

So what is Peter talking about? Since he is not telling his audience that Jesus is the only way to be saved from hell (since his audience doesn’t believe in that in the first place), what must we be saved from?

The answer is not supplied, but that’s because it’s easy. Whatever you need saving from, the only name given by which it must happen is Jesus. See how easy that is? Jesus is the end to self-reliance (sorry Emerson). Now how does that match with the rest of Peter’s defense to that point? Look and see!

If we are questioned today because of a good deed done to someone who was sick and are asked how this man has been healed... Ah! Remember, we’re talking about that poor disabled person who can now walk. He has been saved, from his infirmity, and a ruckus ensued, and that’s how we got to this little police examination. More evidence that this has nothing to do with hell.

So now what? Let it be known to you, and to all the people of Israel, that this man is standing before you in good health by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth for it was at Peter’s command, in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, stand up and walk--see exactly the same phrasing of the name--it was in virtue of this prayer. But is the point that he prayed to Jesus, and Jesus did this? Not quite. The point is that Peter is calling on the power that raised Christ from the dead. In other words, it is because Christ was raised, that those who have faith in him (and thus in his resurrection, and the power which raised him) can call upon that same power for their own infirmity.

You see, Jesus was saved, and because he was saved, we can be saved by calling on his name. Now those who think this salvation is salvation from hell have nothing to say here; they cannot explain this. But since the salvation is from whatever we need saving it is clear that Jesus too required saving from death, and it is that very salvation which we lay claim to.

What’s my warrant for saying this? Well, see how Peter justifies this: whom you crucified, whom God raised from the dead. Jesus is “the stone that was rejected by you, the builders; it has become the cornerstone.” Splendid then! Jesus was saved from death, by God, and through faith in him and calling on his name, we lay claim to that same power to save ourselves. In this case, to save this poor disabled man from his infirmity.

So the upshot is: this salvation is for anyone who looks and says: I need to be saved from that. I will have none of this preaching of bad news to people so that they having something to apply the Good News to. (“First I’ll convince them that they are in danger of hell, and then convince them they can escape the danger.”) No, everyone one of us already has a pretty good sense of what we need saving from. And Jesus is for that, here and now.

Index of Comments on Scripture

John 1:29–42

2004-08-04T14:38:00.000-07:00

The Gospel of John, not normally noted for its narrative excitement and storytelling, does tell some amazing stories, and this is one of them right here at the beginning. John sees Jesus in the distance and comes out with this incredible Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. John bears witness, and two of his disciples hear him. One of them we do not know, but the other is Andrew, and Andrew goes and tells his brother Simon, and says, We have found the Messiah.

And then this weird bit of translating, in only a few verses, John explains that Rabbi means teacher; that Messiah means anointed, and that Cephas means Peter. This is a persistent concern with the fourth gospel, and a clear indication that the Johannine community did not have ready access to any kind of understanding of Hebrew or Aramaic.

But I think there is more to it than that. This passage is all about translation, about interpretation. Indeed, the Gospel of John is all about the big question What does this mean? So here is John, saying that this is the Lamb of God, and then saying something of what this means. Jesus is the anointed teacher, the one on whom the Holy Spirit descended. But the narrative does not describe this. John says, I saw the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and it remained on him. And unlike the other gospels, I did not know him.

It was seeing this descent of the Holy Spirit--something we, the readers, do not get to see (unlike in the synoptics)--that told John what this person meant. And he tells the two disciples, and Andrew tells Peter. Then Jesus sees Philip, and Philip tells Nathanael. And each time, what is given is the interpretation, the meaning.

So it’s not an accident, I think, that the author of the fourth gospel puts these three words all needing explanation right in a row. It underscores that what is going on here is interpretation, communication, messages handed on from one to another... and not just each person’s direct experience. Peter would not have known the direct love of Jesus if it were not for the mediating work of Andrew, and Andrew not but for John’s confession, and John not but for the one who sent him and his witness of the Holy Spirit’s descent upon Jesus.

Index of Comments on Scripture

Judges 7:1–18 and Acts 3:1–11

2004-08-03T16:58:00.000-07:00

Judges 7 is all about Gideon and the fight against Midian. Israel is being oppressed, and Gideon is God’s appointed servant to liberate the people. God promises Gideon that a tiny number will serve to defeat the enemy: With...three hundred...I will deliver you, and give the Midianites into your heand. Let all the others go to their homes. From an army of thirty-two thousand, Gideon has already allowed the twenty-two thousand who were fearful to return home, and from the ten thousand stalwarts, God says this is too many. Three hundred is enough.

What happens? Tommorow we will read that these three hundred attack a host of Midianites and Amalekites, who lay along the valley as thick as locusts; and their camels were without number, countless as the sand on the seashore. And the trumpets blast, and Gideon’s three hundred scare the bejeezus out of the Midianites and Amalekites, and after the rout begins, the rest of Ephraim joins in the pursuit.

Oreb and Zeeb, the captains of Midian, become symbols of those whom Israel has defeated, and are used as such in the psalm: Do to them as you did to Midian....Make their leaders like Oreb and Zeeb.

All this--indeed, nearly all of the books of Judges and Joshua--can be a little hard to take. It all seems so destructive, and while we all know that ancient life could be very warlike and dangerous (far more so than the twentieth century, in fact), it’s not easy to hear this and then say “The Word of the Lord.” I think the key is to hear it as we hear the text from Acts 3. The people are being saved from a blight of rather horrible oppression. The point of the passage is not about war, or the glories of war, or the fun of being one of the big onrush of Ephraim looting and pillaging and killing once the enemy has turned tail.

The point is that God has intervened, decisively, to save his people from a blight of oppression. The war is just assumed by the writer; the story he is remembering and retelling is about thankfulness to God for the present freedom of Israel, earned by those heroes of yesteryear. It is, I believe, well and good to cringe at the descriptions of bloodshed and slaughter, but I think the author’s point here is not that bloodshed and slaughter are great fun, but that they are horrible, deeply horrible, and that through this military victory, there will be less, not more of such.

It would be a great mistake to read such a story as sanctioning whatever wars we might want today. The point is not that war is a great way to end war. So what is Acts 3 about? God has intervened, decisively, to save this one poor man from his disability and the poverty and oppression it engenders. It took three hundred to defeat the Midianites and the Amalekites, but it took only Peter and John to save this person. And just as with Gideon, the point is not them, but who really is doing the saving. Why do you stare at us, as though by our own power or piety we had made him walk? The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, the God of our ancestors has glorified his servant Jesus.

And that’s the point. To the Midianites and the Amalekites, to Gideon and Peter and John, to the Israelite army fearing oppression, to the disabled man at the Beautiful Gate, to all of them, the message is “It is not all about you. Something much bigger is going on here.”

Index of Comments on Scripture