Moving towards Easter in the Desert

For the last weeks of Lent until Easter, we will provide daily reflections on the a desert journey. The citations come from John Moses, The Desert. An Anthology for Lent (Harrisburg, PA.: Morehouse, 1997).

Setting out on the Journey
Monday, 23 March, 2009

“What really matters is that I have taken the fundamental decision to begin the journey.”

“The desert is the threshold to the meeting ground of God and man. It is the scene of the exodus. You do not settle there, you pass through. One then ventures on to these tracks because one is driven by the Spirit towards the Promised Land. But it is only promised to those who are able to chew sand for forty years without doubting their invitation to the feast in the end.”

Alessandro Pronzato

Recovering the Bible

by R.R. Reno

The Bible contains a verse that scholars like to quote. It is from the book of Ecclesiastes: “Of making many books there is no end, and much study is weariness of the flesh” (12:12). In context it serves as a warning against the vain illusion that we can study our way to the Kingdom of God. The spiritual life is not a Kaplan course, nor is it like getting tenure after piling up a good record of scholarly publication.

Of late, I’ve come to see this verse as a wry moment when the Bible makes a prophecy about itself, foreseeing the vast number of commentaries on the sacred pages of scripture. Over the last few years I have been wearying myself as the general editor of an impossibly ambitious project, the Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible. Working with authors on the first dozen or so commentaries, and also toiling on my own effort to write about Genesis, the thought has come to me many times: “Of the making of commentaries on the Bible there is no end, and to be honest, Lord, I’m getting pretty weary.”

Wearying, yes, but often profoundly rewarding, and certainly necessary. From the very outset, faith in Jesus took the form of scriptural commentary. The gospels are punctuated with the refrain: “that the Scriptures might be fulfilled.” The Sermon on the Mount is a commentary on the revelation to Moses on Mount Sinai. St. Stephen’s speech in the Acts of the Apostles provides a summary interpretation of the Old Testament as a whole. St. Paul’s letters are chock full of biblical citations, allusions, and expositions.

Not surprisingly, biblical commentary played a central role in the life of the Church. The Fathers wrote commentaries, far more in fact than treatises on doctrinal topics. The great medieval theologians wrote commentaries. Martin Luther and John Calvin wrote commentaries, as did Cajetan and Robert Bellarmine. For more than a thousand years it was simply assumed than an exegete and a theologian were pretty much synonyms. After all, you need to know what the Bible says in order to develop an accurate account of God and salvation—and you need to study classical doctrine in order to give a clear and cogent account of what the scripture says.

These days this unity can no long be presumed. Over the last two hundred years, the work of biblical interpretation has rotated away from the churchly business of teaching doctrine. Bible scholars have built their own independent intellectual project, one that excludes Church doctrine from the process of interpretation as a matter of principle. The job of the modern historical exegete is to scientifically determine what a particular portion of the Bible meant when it was composed, not how it should be read by the Church today.

We can point to many remarkable intellectual achievements in modern biblical scholarship, some of service to the Church. But on the whole the results have been disastrous. The “meaning in the original context” approach has made the Old Testament into the Hebrew Bible. To read forward to fulfillment in Christ is the unforgivable sin of modern biblical scholarship. The New Testament is rich with the vocabulary of Christian piety. St. Paul’s letters are themselves already theological. But even in New Testament scholarship, the requirement of original context invariably drives a wedge between Scripture and the great Trinitarian and Christological doctrines of the early Church. Ask a biblical scholar, “Does the New Testament teach the doctrine of the Trinity?” Odds are overwhelming that the answer will be “no.”

As a theology professor, it is easy for me to point out the specks in the eyes of the biblical scholars. (The “low Christology” and “high Christology” taxonomy is a particularly amusing and pointless exercise.) But there are plenty of beams in the eyes of theologians.

A popular nineteenth-century Catholic theological textbook for seminarians illustrates. Doctrine is described as “materially complete,” “formally perfect,” and capable of universal application. In contrast, the historical nature of the biblical material means that its truths are “expressed in the metaphorical language of the East.” This makes Scripture “unfit for the general use of people.” Better, then, to base theology on succinct and authoritative Church doctrine.

There is nothing uniquely Catholic about the theological shift from exegesis to doctrinal analysis. In his influential systematic theology, Friedrich Schleiermacher sets aside the Old Testament. It’s spiritual character, he argues, is essentially Jewish rather than Christian. It is, shall we say, the Hebrew Bible, not the Christian one. But even the New Testament itself does not provide a firm basis, and therefore he lays down a basic principle: “The confessional documents of the evangelical church, collectively, are, as it were, given prior place to the New Testament Scriptures themselves.”

We should not be terribly surprised by the tendency to push Scripture into the background. Theologians are in the business of making arguments, and the rough and ready variety of Scripture can seem unpleasantly unstable. We want sharply drawn truth-claims to feed into our syllogisms. We find conceptual clarity in doctrine, and the upshot is a temptation to neglect Scripture. Furthermore, in the abstract realm of concepts we can formulate pallid, pseudo-orthodox notions such as “Incarnational worldview,” or “sacramental imagination,” or “Trinitarian ethos,” and thus convince ourselves that our capitulations to the latest intellectual fashions are really grand theological achievements.

Bible without theology, and theology without Bible: It’s understandable, perhaps, but untenable, and over the long term disastrous.

The Church can only claim to be the Church if it teaches what the Bible proclaims. This is not a uniquely Protestant principle. Vatican I affirms: “The meaning of Holy Scripture must be held to be the true one, which the Holy Mother Church held and holds.” In other words, just like Protestantism, Catholicism is founded on the belief that the content of the Bible and the teachings of the Church are fundamentally in accord.

It is a simple fact that the current academic configuration of biblical study and theological education rarely encourages us to coordinate exegesis with doctrine. To my mind, we have reached a crisis with respect to the Old Testament. To appeal to St. Paul for guidance while writing a commentary on Genesis is taboo among biblical scholars.

When I hatched the plan for the Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible, I decided to recruit theology professors, not biblical scholars as writers. My idea was simple. Those of us trained to analyze and defend Church doctrine will get many things wrong, but at least we will do what was once the norm: bring the theological traditions of the Church to bear on the biblical text.

Obviously, this requires us to assume that Church dogma clarifies rather than obscures the true meaning of Scripture. As I wrote in the general preface for the series, “the Nicene tradition, in all its diversity and controversy, provides the proper basis for the interpretation of the Bible as Christian Scripture.”

Angus Paddison wryly noted in a review of one of the early volumes that a presumption in favor of the exegetical value of dogma “is unlikely to generate universal sympathy amongst biblical scholars.” I would have said “very unlikely.” In fact, I said as much to many friends over the last few years. The biblical guild, I predicted, would hate the idea of unauthorized individuals presuming upon their turf.

I was largely right. Eight volumes have appeared, and in the main biblical scholars have shown themselves opposed to—and often angry about—the series. In a review, Pauline Viviano denounced the “spurious typologies” in Peter Leithart’s commentary on 1 and 2 Kings, ending with the stern admonition that “commentaries on the Bible should be left to biblical scholars.” No trespassing!

Philip Cary’s commentary on Jonah apparently disturbed another biblical scholar, Barbara Green. “The book,” she wrote, “features Jesus on virtually every page.” Shocking, simply shocking. This clearly needs to be brought to the attention of the proper authorities.

Luke Timothy Johnson took Stanley Hauerwas to task for making the Gospel of Matthew sound like Hauerwas. Funny, I’ve found the Martin Luther’s commentaries to sound a lot like Luther. But that was before we had the advantage of modern biblical scholars such as Luke Timothy Johnson. He can give us scientific interpretations and help us see that the Church’s teaching on, say, sexual morality, is unscriptural. No Luke Timothy Johnson speaking there. “Just the text, M’am, nothin’ but the text.”

I would have been surprised if the biblical scholars were not antagonistic. After all, the Brazos Commentary on the Bible, as well as other efforts such as the Two Horizons series and the Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture, emerged because of a widespread sense that modern historical–critical study of the Bible has run its course. As an academic project it has a modest future in department of ancient Near Eastern history or ancient Mediterranean studies. It is a plain fact, however, that today the Church does not need to know more (or want to know more) about ancient Israelite religion or the Q hypothesis. We need (and want) to know how Leviticus and Proverbs and Job and the Gospel of John and Letter to the Hebrews can shape our Christian faith.

So I continue to toil and weary myself in the making of more books about the Good Book. The academic Berlin Wall between the study of the Bible and doctrines of the Church must be breached. And who knows, maybe Christ will be on nearly every page. I hope so.

R.R. Reno is an associate professor of theology at Creighton University and features editor at First Things.

Lent and self-esteem

Fasting of some kind will soon become popular again, for Lent is upon us. For a culture soaked in self-esteem one wonders how fasting is understood, what is expected from this brief season of self denial. Can this fast cultivate authentic compassion for others in a society dedicated to “my passion”? Belden C. Lane writes:

“[the] idea of compassion as the fruit of indifference is difficult to grasp in our contemporary culture. Popular conceptions of love are so often limited to sentimental feelings and delusions of self-denying grandeur. As a result, we often fail to recognize the extent to which all this disguises a highly manipulative bid for our own self-aggrandizement. We are entirely too needy, too anxious about the fragility of our own self-worth, to be free to love. We have missed the desert truth that, ironically, only those who no longer care can be truly loving. Love at its best, as Dostoyevsky knew, is wholly disinterested—‘a harsh and dreadful thing.’”

“Having metaphorically died to the world and all its seductions, [these] . . . desert athletes . . . were far less subject to outside pressures of status, power, money, and knowledge.”

“No threat is as dangerous as a people wholly set free from the value structures of this world.”

Belden C. Lane, “Desert Catechesis: The Landscape and Theology of Early Christian Monasticism,” Anglican Theological Review 75.3 (1993): 308-09, 310.

Four Lanes on the Emerging Church Highway

Contemporary church life is beset by calls for change and transformation. But the variety is enormous and can be confusing. So-called “emerging churches” represent one such trend. Below some helpful distinctions by from Mark Driscoll (“Navigating the Emerging Church,” Christian Research Journal 31.4 [2008]: 12-21), himself part of that movement.

Emerging Evangelicals, represented by pastors and authors such Chris Seay, Dan Kimball, Rick McKinley, John Burke, and Donald Miller: “are interested in updating worship styles, preaching styles, and church leadership structures so as to be relevant to postmodern-minded people. They do not place as much emphasis as do other ‘lanes’ on actively engaging in their local culture and loving and serving people as the church. They are divided over such things as the role of women in ministry, the proper mode of baptism, and charismatic gifts. . . . The common critique of Emerging Evangelicals is that they are doing little more than cool church for hip young Christians.”

House Church Evangelicals, represented by house church leaders such as Neil Cole and Shane Claiborne among others, “are dissatisfied with current forms of church (e.g., traditional, seeker-sensitive, purpose-driven, contemporary). They bolster criticism of traditional church by noting that America is becoming less Christian, and Christians are not living lives that are markedly different from non-Christians, thereby proving that current forms church forms have failed to create life transformation. . . . The common critique of House Church Evangelicals is that they are collecting disgruntled Christians who are overreacting to the megachurch trend and advocating a house church trend that works well in some cultures but has not proven effective in Western nations.”

Emerging Reformers, see themselves as linked to the traditions established by traditional teachers such as Augustine, Calvin, the Puritans, Jonathan Edwards and Charles Spurgeon, contemporary theologians such as James Packer and John Stott. They look to contemporaries such as John Piper, David Carson and Tim Keller. Driscoll locates himself in this “lane.” The common critique of this lane “is that they are merely repackaging tired Reformed fundamentalism, . . . that they are outdated in their understanding of gender roles, too narrow in their theological convictions, and do not fir into the category of the emerging church at all.”

Emergent Liberals, represented by such as Tony Jones, Doug Pagitt and “most visibly” by Brian McClaren and Rob Bell, “range form the theological fringe of orthodoxy to heresy that crosses the line by critiquing key evangelical doctrines, such as the Bible as authoritative divine revelation, God as Trinity, the sinfulness of human nature, the deity of Jesus Christ, Jesus’ death in our place to pay the penalty for our sins on the cross, the exclusivity of Jesus for salvation the sinfulness of homosexuality and other sex outside of heterosexual marriage, and the conscious, eternal torments of hell. . . The common critique of Emergent Liberals is that they are recycling the liberal doctrinal debates of a previous generation and are not seeing significant conversion growth, but rather merely gathering disgruntled Christians and people intrigued by false doctrine.”

Driscoll then goes on at length to describe the Emergent Liberals through their most prominent leaders Brian McLaren and Rob Bell. Driscoll concludes this discussion as follows: “It seems inevitable, though I am no prophet, that the Emergent Liberal lane of the emerging church will continue to drift away from a discussion about how to contextualize timeless Christian truth in timely cultural ways to an interfaith dialogue with less and less distinction between the religions of the world and the deity of Christ.”

THE MORE THINGS CHANGE . . .

“The last I heard, both of them were going down for at least twenty-five years. But who cares? As players in the building and the deconstruction of empires, they’re mere ciphers. Jefferson in his letters to John Adams foretold their advent long ago. Perhaps the greater problem is their constituency. A confidence man chooses only one kind of person as his victim—some one who, of his own volition, invites deception into his life. Eventually we catch on to charlatans and manipulators and ostracize or lock them away. But unlike the fifth act of an Elizabethan tragedy, order is seldom reimposed on the world. The faces of the actors may change, but the story is ongoing, and neither religion nor government has ever rid the world of sin or snake oil.”

Dave Robicheaux, in James Lee Burke’s Swan Peak, 401-402.

Christianity and Islam

“The question to be asked, then, is whether, face to face with Islam, Christians will be able to sustain, rebuild, and create strong and resilient communities that provide institutional anchorage for the faith to endure and flourish. Will they have the imagination to form the spiritual architecture of the societies of which they are a part? This is a task for which Christianity is particularly well suited. It has a much longer lineage than Islam, it has taken many different cultural forms in the course of its history, and it has passed through the fires of modernity. It has a deeper and more coherent relation to its own tradition, including the cultural patrimony of classical antiquity. And it commands the intellectual resources to understand and engage other religious traditions as well as to provide moral inspiration for secular societies.

“Unlike Islam, Christianity began as a community distinct from the body politic, and for three hundred years it existed independently of political authority. This early history has never been forgotten. Even in the time of Christian hegemony in the West, during the age of Charlemagne, Abbot Wala of Corbie insisted that the Church constituted a parallel sovereignty. The king, he said, should have public properties for the maintenance of his army, and the Church should have ‘church properties, almost like a second public domain.’

“Augustine’s metaphor for the new life in Christ was not that of an individual’s being born again but that of becoming part of a city with its own form of governance. ‘Happy the people whose God us the Lord,’ wrote the psalmist. Though some may eschew the term, in the decades to come the great challenge for Christians will be to fashion, within the cultural and political conditions of the twenty-first century, a new kind of Christendom.”

-Robert Louis Wilken, “Christianity Face to Face with Islam,” First Things (Jan 2009), 26.

New Year, Old Year
We like to believe that January 1 brings new opportunities. So we make resolutions, or treat them as a game at New Year’s Eve gatherings. Most of us know, however, that there is nothing new under the sun, that the struggle to discard old burdens and create space for newness in 2008 will continue in 2009, and that we will likely fail, again. That too is old news for the Christian; dying to sin and rising to newness of life is our daily bread as Christ’s disciples.

As the years roll by, however, socio-political events and cultural undertows create patterns of thought and action that warrant change. Will any of the following resolutions find themselves on your list?

1. Ask for kneeling benches to be attached to the pews, if your church is redesigning its worship area.

2. Practice honest prayer through John Baillie’s A Litany of Daily Prayer in March and September.

3. Support or recommend one person for a position because she or he is qualified. Resist politically correct reasoning.

4. When leading the congregation in prayer, begin, “Let us pray,” not, “Please join ME in prayer.”

5. Read one book or article about Islam. Suggestions: Sinclair Lewis, What Went Wrong? The Clash between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East (Perennial, 2002), or Robert Louis Wilken, “Christianity Face to Face with Islam,” First Things (Jan 2009), 19-26.

6. Practice Lent during Advent.

7. Answer the question: Can a post-modern, missional theology prepare the church to engage Islam?

8. Befriend a marginalized person in your church or community.

Please add your own suggestions in the comments.
ACL

Pentecost, the Incarnation, and Diversity

Although far apart on the liturgical calendar, Pentecost and Christmas belong together. On Pentecost the Word Incarnate, seated at the right hand of the Almighty, poured out the Holy Spirit on a handful of disciples. After that event, God’s people were never the same. For the first time in the history of God with his people, Gentiles–red, and yellow, black and white non-Jews–became the object of God’s special attention. Not that they were ever out of consideration. Remember Seth, Noah, Rahab, Ruth and Naaman? And then there was Abram, who was a Semite, but not “Jewish,” when God called him to abandon kith and kin.

From Babel to Pentecost

At Babel the nations sought to build the city that would use heaven to save them from the corruption that filled the earth. But God scattered the nations–red and yellow, black and white–over the earth and. He forced them to continue an aimless wandering begun by Adam, Eve, and Cain. In their wandering these nations achieved enormous knowledge in mathematics, urban and agrarian development, architecture, medicine, music, Babylon and Ur preserved this knowledge in great libraries. From this sophisticated culture God rescued Abram and Sarah to become the parents of a nation not born by human will (Gen. 5; 11:1-26), but by the power of God.

That special nation would become known as Jews (after Judah, Jacob’s [Israel] son), chosen by God to live apart from the nations (Gentiles). Nevertheless, from the very beginning God told Abram that “all the families of the earth” (Gentiles) would be blessed through “his seed.” Thus, wherever Abraham went, and whatever God did with his descendants, the Gentiles were never out of consideration. They were, so to speak, in Abraham’s back pocket, waiting for God’s time to deal with them.

That time, the apostle Paul said, came in Jesus Christ. He was the seed God spoke about to Abram (Gal. 3:16) who destroyed the wall between Jews and Gentiles (Eph. 2:11-22). He also poured out the Spirit at Pentecost so that the nations heard the Gospel proclaimed by Peter.

Pentecost, then, was not a move from a uni-cultural to multi-cultural people of God, nor from one ethnicity to many, not even from Jewishness to whiteness. Rather, it was a move from a focus on God’s Jewish people to an inclusion of the Gentiles into the root planted by God with Abram (Rom. 11:17-21). At Pentecost massive numbers of Gentiles began to be grafted onto this root. At Pentecost peoples from all nations were amazed to hear Peter’s sermon in their own languages, the very thing that divided them at Babel. It was not one language, but one Word that was understood by all nations–red and yellow, black and white–by the power of the Holy Spirit.

That Pentecost was not a move from one to many ethnicities, but from many into one ethnicity is clear from Paul’s declaration that Christian Gentiles would be engrafted into the root God planted through Abram. Abram’s descendants are not merely another ethnicity (Rom. 9:3-5) among many others. It is the only ethnicity whose Word saves the nations from the corruption that threatens. Abraham’s Gentiles descendants are not Jewish, but through Christ they inherit the promises of God to Abraham (Gal. 3:29). All Abraham’s descendants through Christ have a heavenly citizenship.

Christmas and diversity

Christ’s coming, then, is not a move into diversity, but a unifying by the Word, of all descendants of Adam and Eve the Spirit entices into the body of Christ, no matter their culture, language, or skin color.

For more than 2000 Advents and Christmases, the Gentile Christian Church has sung: “Oh come, oh come, Immanuel, and ransom captive Israel, that mourns in lonely exile here, until the Son of God appear.” Of whom do we sing? Who is the captive Israel? Gentile believers from Iraq and Darfur? Mega-church attenders in Southern California or Guatemala? Because Gentile believers have not yet arrived at home, and will only arrive when the heavenly Jerusalem descends on a new earth (Rev. 21), this truly is our song. James speaks to the believers scattered among the nations (James 1:1).

But what of the descendants of Esther and Mordecai in the Middle East, of the exiles who went to Egypt with Jeremiah, and of the descendants of the exiles who died by the millions in Hitler’s furnaces, and who are awaiting the Messiah as Gentiles no longer do? They still experience an exile no Gentile Christian can grasp.

Pentecost brought Gentiles of all kinds into the Jewish church. Today the Gentile Church is overflowing with ethnicities, cultures, and languages, all united by one Word. But few, very few Jews. Is it not time for the Gentile church to rediscover the biblical diversity that would bring Jews into the Gentile Church? Only so will all Israel be saved.

But how many Christian churches are involved in evangelism to Jews evangelism? How many churches have decided to call off evangelizing Jewish people as too politically insensitive.

We work so hard to escort Gentiles who are not “our own kind” into the Church. But we’ve got the “not our own kind” wrong. No matter the language, color or race, they are our own kind, for we are all Gentiles. Like the little Jewish girl who told the Gentile Naaman about the prophet who heals, maybe we Gentiles–red, and yellow, black, and white–should speak the Word with a Jewish neighbor. Then all will be precious in his sight.

ACL