The reduction of scripture

One of the points made was that many religious houses, whilst centred deeply on prayer and the eucharist, have allowed the study of scripture to fall into neglect. When it does take place, it is predominantly the individual religious who ‘studies scripture’, meditating alone with his or her Bible. Aside from recitation of the psalms and the lections in worship, there is little if any communal engagement with scripture – and its use in worship is in any case a thing distinct from study.

It is not only the ‘catholic’ tradition that faces worries about the quality of scripture study in the life of the Church today. Many of those gathering in the Deep Church group in London come from charismatic and/or evangelical backgrounds, and feel that their traditions while professing to be ‘biblically based’ often engage with scripture in a relatively superficial way. This can be because a strong doctrinal paradigm acts to preempt a sustained attentiveness to the possibilities and nuances of a text – the reader already ‘knows’ what she is going to find; she thus hears what she expects to hear. It can also be because scriptural texts are deployed in relative dissociation from each other (in bite-sized chunks, used for very specific pastoral or teaching purposes, and thereby prematurely instrumentalized), or else through very controlled forms of association with specific other passages or verses (again, it is often doctrinal concerns that dictate which associations are considered legitimate).

‘Bible Studies’ in the contemporary church often manifest precisely an evasion of scripture, rather than a willingness to take it seriously. This is true at every level of the Church’s life: I saw exactly the same symptoms at work in the Bible Study groups of senior bishops at the Lambeth Conference in 1998 as in many student or parish groups.

Broadly, two tendencies tend to emerge – neither of them wholly satisfactory. The first is the reduction of scripture to propositional statements, which are then deployed as authoritative descriptions (of the world, human beings, the facts of sin and redemption, or
whatever), or else as irresistible ethical instructions or injunctions. As a mode of reasoning which works from the establishment of clear first principles and then works out from them, this approach to scripture might be described as rather like ‘deductive’ reasoning.

The other dominant tendency – even more prevalent in my experience – is one which uses the reading of scripture as an occasion to tell stories about oneself and one’s own religious experience. Scripture is thus made a vehicle or opportunity for self-expression, rather than being read as something with its own internal ‘logic’ and power to resist and reconfigure the reader’s expectations and understanding. As a mode of reasoning which seeks to derive judgements from experience, this might be likened to an ‘inductive’
approach to scripture.

Ben Quash Deep calls to Deep

Ben is moving from Peterhouse Cambridge, where he was Dean, to become Professor of Theology and the Arts at King’s College London

Humility is the beginning of sanity

The â??common goodâ?? is more than a political slogan. Itâ??s more than what most people think they want right now. Itâ??s not a matter of popular consensus or majority opinion. It canâ??t be reduced to economic justice or social equality or better laws or civil rights, although all these things are vitally important to a healthy society.

The common good is what best serves human happiness in the light of what is real and true. Thatâ??s the heart of the matter: What is real and true? If God exists, then the more man flees from God, the less true and real man becomes. If God exists, then a society that refuses to acknowledge or publicly talk about God is suffering from a peculiar kind of insanity.

What can the â??common goodâ?? mean in the context of Nietzscheâ??s superman or Marx or Freud or Darwin? These men became the architects of our age. But they were also just the latest expressions of a much deeper and more familiar temptation to human pride. We want to be gods, but weâ??re not. When we try to be, we diminish ourselves.

Thatâ??s our dilemma. Thatâ??s the punishment we create for ourselves. Thereâ??s a terrible humor in a man who claims that God is dead, then starts believing heâ??s Dionysius or Jesus Christ, and then ends up on a candy bar made by out-of-work philosophers for middle-class consumers who just want some â??chocolaty goodness.â??

Humility is the beginning of sanity. We canâ??t love anyone else until we can see past ourselves. And man canâ??t even be man without God. The humility to recognize who we are as creatures, who God is as our Father, what God asks from each of us, and the reality of Godâ??s love for other human persons as well as ourselvesâ??this is the necessary foundation that religion brings to every discussion of free will, justice, and truth, and to every conversation about â??the common good.â?? Sirach and the Psalms and the Gospel of Luke and the Letter of Jamesâ??these Scriptures move the human heart not because theyâ??re beautiful writings. Theyâ??re beautiful writings because they spring from what we know in our hearts to be true.

Bernanos once said that â??the world will be saved only by free men. We must make a world for free men.â?? He also said that prudenceâ??or rather, the kind of caution and fear that too often pose as prudenceâ??is the one piece of advice he never followed. â??When trouble is looking for you,â?? he said, â??itâ??s primarily a question of facing it, since it would be still more dangerous to turn your back on it. In that case, prudence is only the alibi of the cowardly.â??

We most truly serve the common good by having the courage to be disciples of Jesus Christ. God gave us a free will, but we need to use it. Discipleship has a cost. Jesus never said that we didnâ??t need a spine. The world doesnâ??t need affirmation. It needs conversion. It doesnâ??t need the approval of Christians. It needs their witness. And that work needs to begin with us. Bernanos said that the â??scandal of Creation [isnâ??t] suffering but freedom.â?? He said that â??moralists like to regard sanctity as a luxury; actually it is a necessity.â?? He also said that â??one may believe that this isnâ??t the era of the saints; that the era of the saints has passed. [But] it is always the era of the saints.â??

Charles J. Chaput Archbishop of Denver Religion and the Common Good at First Things – with some discussion of George Bernanos

Levenson

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.

The Church doesn't need a theory

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

Wells – the one that got away

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.

Christian dogmatics in London

Neil MacDonald is good at titles. What do you think of his latest?

Metaphysics and the God of Israel: Systematic Theology of the Old and New Testaments

or of his earlier

Karl Barth and the Strange New World within the Bible: Barth, Wittgenstein, and the Metadilemmas of the Enlightenment

So what are the reviews like?

â??Neil MacDonaldâ??s reflection moves back, forth and sideways between critical biblical study, high-modern philosophy in the analytical tradition, and classical Christian doctrine. Most who have attempted such explorations have reported mostly blockades and traps. MacDonald discovers instead sudden opportunities of faithful insight and of â?? very often unexpected â?? theological construction. A remarkable and, I think, important book, to be read with attention.â??
Robert W. Jenson, Formerly Senior Scholar for Research at the Center of Theological Inquiry, Princeton, Professor Emeritus of Religion, St. Olaf College, Minnesota

â??MacDonaldâ??s is a voice crying in the wilderness. This is a brilliant effort to combine the very best in historical-critical and theological exegesis with dogmatic and philosophical reflection of a very high level. The writing style is lucid and at times almost poetic,which a theme as exalted as Godâ??s work in time requires. Sophisticated and full of
insight. May his tribe increase.â??
Christopher R. Seitz, Professor of Old Testament and Theological Studies, University of St Andrews

â??Neil MacDonaldâ??s latest book is the first major effort in many decades to attempt to reintegrate systematic theology with biblical studies. The authorâ??s grasp of the whole
spectrum of modern biblical scholarship, both in Old and New Testaments, is highly impressive. Because of his unique mastery of philosophical theory as well, he is superbly equipped for this exciting task. His book will certainly serve to open up a fresh dialogue, which is long overdue.â??
Brevard S. Childs, Emeritus Professor of Old Testament, Yale Divinity School

Hmm. Always interesting to see who a man’s friends are.

But there is another remarkable fact about this Neil MacDonald. He teaches Christian dogmatics in London.

Renewal of an ecumenical and therefore truly catholic Church

In order to recover its Christian roots, Europe needs the re-emergence of Christian unity. In their present state of separation, the causes of which lie in the distant past, the Christian churches cannot call effectively upon the nations of Europe to remember and reappropriate the spiritual and cultural resources of their Christian past. The ruptures of Christian unity that have led to the separate existence of confessional churches and to their endless controversies have contributed so decisively to the calamities of European history and to the sufferings of the nations of Europe, that these separate churches continuously remind educated Europeans of the historical reasons why modern culture and political order have had to be cut loose from any religious foundation. But human life needs a religious foundation lest it becomes empty of meaning and self-destructive. The cultural history of humankind provides ample evidence that this function of religion is irreplaceable. This is also true of social life and public culture. The only question, in the long run, is what kind of religion comes to be of basic importance in the life of a culture. In this respect, if Europe is to preserve what has been distinctively European in its cultural tradition, it cannot easily dispose of Christianity, provided that Christianity does not present itself as sectarian, nor sells out to secularism, but continues to incorporate within itself the best heritage of classical antiquity and therefore openness to reason as well as the true achievements of modern culture. Might a reuniting Christianity also offer evidence of having learnt the lessons of history concerning toleration and the provisional nature of human knowledge even about the truth of revelation? Such a renewal of an ecumenical and therefore truly catholic Christian church could perhaps heal aching memories in European nations of past sufferings and bitter conflicts. It might inspire a new confidence both in the cultural unity of Europe and in the prospect and vigour of its renewal.

Wolfhart Pannenberg The Churches and the Emergence of European Unity

Oswald Bayer

Just seen the bibliography of Oswald Bayer at Wiki.de and remembered what a colossus Bayer is.

He is Professor Emeritus at Tübingen, a Lutheran, but more than that, he is a Luther – really shocking evangelical power, wielded with very great intellectual sophistication and gentleness. His line is that the Reformation is much more modern than ‘modernity’ will ever be. He has lots in common with Jüngel, but more spiritual authority (ludicrous, to say so, but…). I’ll translate some of his titles:

• Promise: Luther’s Reformation Turn

• Creation as Address: Towards a Hermeneutic of creation

• Living Word: Reformation and Modernity in Conflict

• Freedom as Response: Theological Ethics

• Contemporaries in Confrontation: Johann Georg Hamann as Radical Enlightener

• God as Author: Theological Poetics

• Reason is Speech (or discourse/conversation): Hamann’s demolition of Kant ‘critique’)

Hamann is one of Germany’s least explored Christian theologians. He was a contemporary, friend yet crushing opponent of Kant, with much in common with Kierkegaard and Coleridge.

Oswald Bayer would be the perfect subject for a PhD on Christian theological hermeneutics.

WHICH AMBITIOUS PUBLISHER IS GOING TO BE THE FIRST TO TRANSLATE BAYER’S WORK?

Robert Spaemann

Another great European about to be launched into the insular English-speaking world is Robert Spaemann, a Catholic moral philosopher who until recently taught at Munich.

Robert Spaemann Persons: The Difference between `Someone’ and `Something’, translated by Oliver O’Donovan, appears in the Oxford Studies in Theological Ethics series.

Spaemann has also authored Happiness And Benevolence

Wikipedia has a little about him in English and German which has a link to his Der Gottesbeweis auf Welt and two other short pieces at Project Syndicate, itself worth bookmarking.

You read it here first

Fletcher-Louis on the temple and the cosmos

The key…lies in the fact that the Temple was understood to be not only the centre of the world but also a microcosm of the whole creation. To speak of heaven and earth passing away quite naturally evoked the image of its destruction. Conversely, to destroy the Temple was to destroy the universe.

That a temple could represent the entire cosmos was taken for granted in the ancient Near East, as any modern visitor to the temple at Karnak in Egypt knows. Solomon’s Temple was similarly constructed, albeit with its own distinctive Israelite features (notably, the bronze basin of 1 Kings 7.23-26, which was actually called ‘the Sea’). Like the Tabernacle, it was dedicated in the New Year festival which celebrated God’s creation of the universe.

According to Psalm 78.69, the sanctuary was built ‘like the high heavens, like the earth, which he has founded forever’. A careful examination of the account of creation in Genesis 1 alongside the description of the Tabernacle in Exodus 25-40 finds many points of correspondence between the structure and symbolism of the latter and the order of the former. These connections were not esoteric secrets hidden in scripture. They were very well known to Jews in Jesus’ day and were described in detail by such writers as Josephus and Philo in the first century AD.

This cosmic symbolism had a very specific purpose: it meant that everything that went on in the Temple gave a structure, order and stability to the whole world. Through its sacrifices, prayers and liturgy, the Temple was believed to integrate within itself the life not only of humankind but of all creation. For Jesus the Jew, Israel’s coming catastrophe meant the destruction of the old order. This had truly cosmological implications, as the Temple’s function of holding things together was about to come to an end.

Rather than longing for a cosmic meltdown, we must hear the groans of creation as the birth-pangs of the new age and pray, in the words of Romans 8.21, that it ‘will be set free from its bondage to decay [so that it may] obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God’.

Crispin Fletcher-Louis at Third Way on Mark 13.24ff & 30f

Try Greg Beale The Temple and the Church’s Mission: A Biblical Theology of the Temple for a summary of Israel’s theological cosmology