Author: Douglas Knight

Jon D. Levenson is an exceptionally interesting biblical scholar – I hope you know his Sinai to Zion, Creation and the Persistence of Evil, The death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son and The Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, and Historical Criticism: Jews and Christians in Biblical Studies

Now Levenson has produced another:

Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel: The Ultimate Victory of the God of Life

This provocative volume explores the origins of the Jewish doctrine of the resurrection of the dead. Jon D. Levenson argues that, contrary to a very widespread misconception, the ancient rabbis were keenly committed to the belief that at the end of time, God would restore the deserving dead to life. In fact, Levenson points out, the rabbis saw the Hebrew Bible itself as committed to that idea.

The author meticulously traces the belief in resurrection backward from its undoubted attestations in rabbinic literature and in the Book of Daniel, showing where the belief stands in continuity with earlier Israelite culture and where it departs from that culture. Focusing on the biblical roots of resurrection, Levenson challenges the notion that it was a foreign import into Judaism, and in the process he develops a neglected continuity between Judaism and Christianity. His book will shake the thinking of scholars and lay readers alike, revising the way we understand the history of Jewish ideas about life, death, and the destiny of the Jewish people.

I don’t expect that you will buy all these books for yourself, but you could get your college library to order them, ask your professor about them, get them put on course reading lists. You have have the email of whoever orders theology books for the library, don’t you? I would glad to hear about other things you think I ought to read – via my LibraryThing catalogue.

Of course The Eschatological Economy discusses Levenson’s work.

Rusty Reno on why he left the Episcopalian Church for the Roman Catholic Church

Newman is excruciatingly detailed in his account of his own thinking, but for my purposes, I can simply report his conclusion: he came to think that the basic rationale for Anglicanism lacked validity. Even more strongly, he came to think that Anglicanism was a midwife for a liberalism that led to atheism. I still do not think Newman correct in the way he sets up Anglicanism, liberalism, and atheism as falling dominos, but I have come to think that the Episcopal Church is disastrously disordered and disarrayed. Here my own reasons and analysis are of no more moment than Newmanâ??s. What matters is the way one responds to the judgment that Anglicanism is in ruins.

As he looks back in his Apologia, Newman reports that the realization that his prior confidence in Anglicanism was mistaken did not produce an immediate conviction that he must leave. He developed a figural interpretation of his circumstances that justified staying put. â??I am content,â?? he wrote to a friend at the time, â??to be with Moses in the desert, or with Elijah excommunicated from the Temple.â?? When I wrote In the Ruins of the Church, I also adopted a figural strategy to make sense of my situation. I clearly saw that the apostolic inheritance bequeathed to the Episcopal Churchâ??a liturgy more medieval than reformed, a veneration of the ancient creeds, a love of the Church Fathers, a scriptural piety that did not confuse being learned with being criticalâ??was being dismantled by a revisionist ideology that knew no limits. But I did not see myself as a prophet who hectored at a distance. I appealed to the scriptural figure of Nehemiahâ??s return to the ruins of Jerusalem. The gates of the Temple had been thrown down, but rather than leave in despair, we should follow Nehemiahâ??s pattern and live in the ruins of the Church with redoubled loyalty.

Under the influence of Ephraim Radner, I placed Nehemiahâ??s return to a destroyed Jerusalem in a larger, more comprehensive figural interpretation of our situation as late-modern Christians. In his ambitious study of the history of Western Christian theology since the Reformation, The End of the Church, Radner places the destiny of the Church within the passion of Christ. Like his body crucified and broken, the divided churches in the West are undergoing a paschal suffering. Thus, I thought of staying put as a form of spiritual discipline. If I followed the path of Nehemiah and drew near to the ruins of the Church, then I would be closer still to my Lord.

Figural interpretations are not intellectual propositions that can simply be judged true or false. They are attempts to make sense out of disparate data according to patterns within Scripture, and they either compel us as deep, structuring insights, or they do not. I imagined that Radnerâ??s larger figural interpretation of our vocations as modern Christians (and my Nehemiahan figure) had the power to justify and structure an orthodox loyalty to a ruined church. I would not have written In the Ruins of the Church had I not believed that the paschal figure of Christ really is present in the increasingly debilitated and diminished forms of apostolic Christianity that one finds in the Episcopal Church, just as Newman would not have remained an Anglican if he had not believed his own figural interpretation of his situation. The problem was not that I had failed to notice that Anglicanism was a mess. Rereading Newman, I discovered that the problem was with myself and with the way in which I had come to hold my figural interpretation.
. . . .

Modern Christianity is modern precisely in its great desire to compensate for what it imagines to be the superannuation, impotence, and failures of apostolic Christianity with a new and improved idea, theory, or theology. The disaster is not the improving impulse. I certainly wish that all Christians would expect more from their teachers and leaders. The problem is the source of the desired improvement. For Newman, â??theoryâ?? is a swear word because it connotes the ephemera of mental life, ephemera easily manipulated according to fantasy and convenience. Yet in my increasing disgruntlement, there I was, more loyal to my theory of staying put than to the actual place that demanded my loyalty. It was an artifact of my mind that compelled me to stay put. Unable to love the ruins of the Episcopal Church, I was forced to love my idea of loving the ruins. With this idea I tried to improve myself, after the fashion of a modern theologian.

. . .

In the end, as an Episcopalian I needed a theory to stay put, and I came to realize that a theory is a thin thread easily broken. The Catholic Church needs no theories. She is the mother of theologies; she does not need to be propped up by theologies. As Newman put it in one of his Anglican essays, â??the Church of Rome preoccupies the ground.â?? She is a given, a primary substance within the economy of denominationalism. One could rightly say that I became a Catholic by default, and that possibility is the simple gift I received from the Catholic Church. Mater ecclesia, she needed neither reasons, nor theories, nor ideas from me.

R.R. Reno Out of the Ruins

Another famous Englishman tackled the atonement recently. On Palm Sunday Sam Wells preached How does Jesus save us?

First indulge a little wistfulness.

Wells went off to the States a couple of years ago. Had he stayed he would be in the Anglican front row – which presently consists of Rowan Williams, Oliver O’Donovan, Tom Wright and John Webster (subs. Michael Banner). Of course the chapel of Duke is an important place to have a good theologian. We English import all our spirituality from the States, in our inverse snobbery assuming that there are no substantial Christian teachers here in the UK. So strangely we are more likely to hear Wells from Duke than from where he was, in dismal Cambridge.

How does Jesus save us? (PDF) is a great sermon, though you can feel the temptations on this wordsmith. I’ll make a couple of points in the hope that you’ll read it all. First Wells reviews a clutch of models of the atonement.

But I want to suggest today that there’s a real danger with all five [atonement] theories. And that is that they’re theories. That’s to say, they are disembodied constructs that pay little or no attention to the context and contours of Jesus’ life.

Why turn theory and story into opposites? What is a theory if not a story compressed? Let’s come back to ‘disembodied constructs’.

The single word that epitomizes the context and contours of Jesus’ life is this: Israel.

Which is to say that God is faithful to his promises to his people, promises given to us in the Scriptures. In slogan form: the gentiles will inherit Israel and Israel will inherit the gentiles, in Christ.

This is, I believe, how Jesus saves us. Not through a decontextualized theory that posits a faraway God doing curious deals in the light of arbitrary codes of debt, justice or honor

Arbitrary codes? Ouch. Nothing like belittling the whole dogmatic tradition of the Church

but through the Jews, God’s everlasting love for them, and his love through them for all the nations and the whole creation.

‘Love’ (and communion) and ‘church’ or people’ are the components of a properly theological account of how Jesus has saved us.

The Church is that body of people who declare they want to be in continuity with this story

Story? We just need to make clear how a ‘story’ may be be true and become our truth. Perhaps sanctification will get a mention in a minute. There should be a doctrine of creation, or ontology, here somewhere. We’ll need just a little eschatological ontology.

The circumstantial detail is the gospel

And a theological ontology would secure, not threaten, particularity.

When you hear all these theories together

They are not theories but doctrines, the teaching of the church. There is no dogma (settled decisions of the Church taken by its councils) of the atonement. It is for the Church in each generation to relate these doctrines of the atonement, and do so by linking them to the doctrines of God, man, creation and eschatology. Then they’ll make very good sense and not be so easy to belittle.

Wells rightly says that we need more than ‘disembodied constructs’.

What we need is embodied givens, embodied gifts. ‘Embodied’ refers to the ecclesiology. The gifts of God to us are embodied as this group of people, the Church, made distinct by God for the world, in particular congregations in particular places, and as the sets of instincts (‘virtues’) that they share with us.

And we need, not ‘constructs’, but doctrines, and with them all the good practices by which we can receive and learn the doctrines of the church, taught us by teachers who, like this one, understand their responsibility. Through this teaching we grow up into the whole truth – and life – of Christ. We receive Christ in those packages Christ gives to the whole Church, packages we call doctrine and sacrament (or gifts of the Spirit). That’s your pneumatology and eschatological ontology.

Anyway, Sam Wells is not too young to be a bishop. Tempt him back, somebody.

Meanwhile another Anglican theologian has recently given us an account of the Christology, pneumatology, anthropology, ontology and eschatology that are required to say how Jesus saves us. Readers of this blog will not need much of a hint.