Moving Beyond Statler and Waldorf

Couldn't resist a mental break after accidentally deleting two pages worth of notes from research in the James R. Crumley Archives at LTSS library. Up in the periodical section, the teaser from the cover of an old Christianity Today caught my eye: "Boycotting Outrage." Intrigued, I turned to this much-needed article by Christopher Hays of Fuller Seminary (son of Duke Divinity Dean Richard Hays), "Answering Fools," in which he exhorts Christians to abandon their "posture of perpetual outrage" against secular culture's many and various transgressions of the faith's sacred truths. Such backlash not only serves to promulgate the sales of the works of offending authors - it also, claims Hays, betrays a lack of faith that "the truth of their message does not really need defending, because all will become apparent in time."

Hays offers a illustrative thought experiment:

Imagine if every Christian leader who has invited to comment on the next Dan Brown book simply said, "why are you calling me about this? You know his books are fictional, they're boring to anyone informed, and they're kind of poorly written." No facts, no offense taken - no story.

Would that more of us could simply take up Hays' call to the patience "stillness of faith," for "it is a failure of faith of the first order to lash out on her behalf, as if she needed defending; it only reflects the narrowness of our own experience." I'm not sure I'm ready to completely let go of David Bentley Hart's brilliant pillorying of the new atheism in Atheist Delusions, but I do think Hays is onto something prophetic here, a message that could stand to be heard by those of us whose seminary training in academic warfare formed us to be more like Statler and Waldorf, assailing from a safe distance with darts of irony and hipster cynicism our enlightened critiques of anything still readable by anyone with less than a doctorate rather than engaging with openness hard truths that might force us to change - or letting be those trivialities whose sole purpose is to serve as the tempter's stumbling block on our journey towards charity and peaceableness.

Though of course, if we were all to do that, we'd lose out on such delicious lines as Hays' closing shot. Referring to Philip Pullman's dismay that more people are mad about Harry Potter than his endless reiterations of his kids-kill-God drama, Hays notes

Oh, and Pullman's book? It's slowly falling down the Amazon rankings. May it languish on shelves like Betamax copies of Waterworld.

As long as he doesn't diss the Postman too, than I'm all in. As peaceably as can be.

Sigh. Back to the archives...

04: Son

Meet Dante Urs von Joachim de Fyodor Martin Luther Augustine Mary Margaret Stanley Hilary Dragon-riding Fire-bending Lion-hearted Eagle-Soaring Totally Awesome Balthasar Rowan Nickoloff (its a working title...)

Collecting Manna: The Formula of Concord

Food for thought for Lutherans and other antinomians:

For as Dr. Luther writes in the preface to St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans, "faith is a divine work in us which changes us and makes us to be born anew of God. It kills the old "Adam" and makes us altogether different people, in heart and spirit and mind and all powers; and it brings with it the Holy Spirit. O, it is a living, busy, active, mighty thing, this faith. It does not ask whether good works are to be done, but before the question is asked, it has already done them, and is constantly doing them.

Whoever does not do such good works, however, is an unbeliever, who gropes and looks around for faith and good works, but knows neither what faith is nor what good works are. Yet such a person talks and talks, with many words, about faith and good works.

Faith is a living, daring, confidence in God's grace, so sure and certain that the believer would stake life itself on it a thousand times. This knowledge of and confidence in God's grace makes people glad and bold and happy in dealing with God and with all creatures. And this is the work which the Holy Spirit performs in faith. Because of it, without compulsion, a person is ready and glad to do good to everyone, to serve everyone, to suffer everything, out of love and praise to God, who has shown this grace. Thus it is impossible to separate works from faith, quite as impossible as to separate heat and light from the fire. (Formula of Concord, Solid Declaration V.10-12:576 (Book of Concord, trans. Kolb and Wengert. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000).

Thesis 6: Division Demands Diversity

Thesis 6: The Church exists in a divided state, not just denominationally, but also in terms of race, gender, sexuality, economics, etc, rendering all readings implicitly incomplete.

Christ has given the Spirit as the bridge between the past and present to assist the missionary Church in being made “one, holy, catholic and apostolic.” However, the Church exists, and has always existed, in a state of division. While division finds its primary manifestation in the proliferation of denominations, dramatically impairing the Church’s ability to hear the Word of God in Scripture and deafening her pneumatologically, she is also racked by divisions in terms of race, gender, sexuality, politics, economics, and geography. Tensions within Scripture are augmented by the ways the sinful church perverts or neglects the Church’s diversity in the present.

As Joel Green notes, individual persons and individual communities’ proclivity towards self-deception necessitates that the Church’s readings of Scripture be accountable not only to ecumenical differences and dialogues, but must also be undertaken within multigenerational and multicultural settings, paying special heed to the voices of the marginalized, oppressed, and ignored.(15) Such a setting is not only required for accurate reading, but is also mandated by Christ’s own identification with “the least of these” in Matt. 25.31f and throughout the Gospels. Such humble and reconciliatory readings are thus themselves part of the witness of the Church of its faithfulness to the Gospel of new creation, without which, the Church can neither read well, nor fully proclaim Christ. Readings in such conditions are thus never exhaustive, but always constitute risks, which must either be upheld or discontinued in continuing relationship and ongoing hermeneutical negotiation. We cannot know fully until we can know together, and such communal knowing can only follow communal confession and mutual humility.

(Caveat: This is not to say that all voices are necessarily correct in their readings. See previous theses. However, the North American churches can no longer refuse to read the Bible with the rest of the world. Straight and gay Christians cannot afford to remain separate in their textual reasonings. White Christians cannot hope to find salvation without listening to the voices of those they have and continue to oppress. Protestants, Catholics, Pentecostals and Evangelicals must acknowledge their dependence on one another. This points towards ecumenism, both denominationally, and also in terms of the other categories mentioned above. See, for example, the New Delhi Statement of the WCC. It is our faithfulness to the Lord Christ that is at stake in our willingness to listen, to be taught, and to teach one another.)

NOTES
15 Joel Green, “The (Re-)Turn to Narrative” in Narrative Reading, Narrative Preaching (ed. Joel Green. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003), 23.

03: In Exitu Israel

Thesis 5: Church's Mission as Scripture's Trajectory

Thesis 5: The Bible is given for the sake of the Church’s mission, including individual and communal formation, worship, and proclamation.

Lewis Ayers has recently offered his own “thesis” on biblical interpretation, in which he argues that

The scriptures are a providentially ordered resource for the shaping and reformation of the Church’s imagination and desire. The reformation of imagination is a reformation of the human soul – the soul that finds its mission and true end as imago Dei within the Body of Christ. The human person finds this mission and true end through a credally normed meditation on the text of scripture within the church.(12)

As the very form of the codex in which Early Christians collected the New Testament shows, Scripture’s main place in the life of the Church is for public reading, especially in worship.(13) In Christ, God has opened the covenant people of Israel and the blessings of creation to all nations and peoples. Both God’s calling of Israel and the Church, as well as the kind of life to which God calls them, are for the sake of witnessing God’s covenant love to all creation; thus, the main plot of the story of God with God’s people can be said to be that not only of salvation, but also mission. Scripture’s primary use within the Christian community is thus missionary, and this constitutes the central trajectory of its continued use.(14) Christ’s mission is a kenotic, self-emptying one (see Phil. 2.6f), and so too, Christ’s people must have their desires, imaginations and actions formed accordingly. Scripture is used in prayer, in worship, in proclamation, both by individuals and the community, for the sake of forming a communal life which itself is a sacrament and word that proclaims the Good News of God’s action in Jesus Christ. The Christian community, and thus its worship and all of its readings of Scripture, must therefore be a public community, where individual devotions and formations must be tested against the Christological and missional trajectories of the Church’s reading of Scripture. The Church herself can only recognize such readings if she herself is engaged contemplatively in seeking to be formed, reformed and conformed Christologically, for the sake of her mission to reflect and proclaim Christ’s Lordship in all she does. Put differently, Scripture is the Holy Spirit's instrument for the creation of the Church, her faithfulness, her holiness, her catholicity, her unity, and her apostolicity.

NOTE
12 Lewis Ayres, “The Soul and the Reading of Scripture: A Note on Henri de Lubac.” (Scottish Journal of Theology 61 no. 2, 2008, 173-190), 189.
13 Peterson lecture 12.01.10.
14 Here I am imagining mission functioning in a similar manner as the trajectories of “justice” and “justification by faith” in Craig Nessan’s “The Authority of Scripture” (2006, available at www.thelutheran.org/doc/extras/nessan.pdf), 17. As will become apparent in Part II of this paper, within the single trajectory of the mission of the Church in proclaiming the restoration of the blessings of creation, a similar tension will arise as in Nessan, though in this instance, between new creation as transforming the gender roles established in creation, and the more conservative trajectory that seeks to preserve kephale-subordinationism. See Part II below.

Collecting Manna: Rusty Reno

Reno is a master of mixing up the medicine we loathe to taste, yet cannot be healthy without swallowing. Here, in his In the Ruins of the Church (a book I wish I'd read ten years ago), Reno completes an appreciation of post-liberalism in its Radical Orthodoxy form, countering what I like to call "the Law of Substitutionary Conversion" with a warning against attempts to reform Christianity from the safe and distant heights of hipster irony and academic objectivity. Against the ambition to be sexy and relevant, even against the desire and deep-drive to out-create the creativity of culture all around us, Reno offers a decidedly unsexy, yet unavoidable word of warning. At the very least, I find it cuts uncomfortably close to the bone of my own Evangelical Catholic proclivities, and should do the same for anyone of a blue devil persuasion. His recent collection of essays, Fighting the Noonday Devil, is not to be missed.

Many offer courageous and articulate warnings against the modern "culture of death," and Christian witness does provide an alternative that has weight and substance. Nonetheless, no triumphant vision of peace emerges out of what twenty-first-century Christians actually say and do...Against the weakness of the gospel - in churches that do not seem to hear and in a culture increasingly blind - we are tempted by theory. We imagine that by sheer theological genius and intellectual virtuosity, we can reconstruct an all-embracing Christian culture, we can uncover and make present the glue that holds everything together. But guided by what might be rather than what is, we come to correct and perfect that which we have received in Word and Sacrament. As the editor's blue pencil excises and adds, violence and will to power reemerge. We re-create the distance we wish to overcome...our theorizing, our "new theologies," will hold together what Christ and his church seem unable to encompass and embrace.

Against this temptation we must keep our nose close to the ill-smelling disaster of modern Christianity, articulate about its failures but training ourselves to dwell in enduring forms of apostolic language and practice. Diminished vision may be the price we must pay. We may no longer be able to see our culture, stem to stern, through Christian eyes. We may no longer be able to see the complex shape of our contemporary churches as a creature of the gospel. We can only see what has been given us to see. But paying this price is necessary if we are to train our eyes to see the identity of Christ in the witness of Scripture and the practice of the Church. For no matter how high we might soar on eagle's wings if theological ideality, and despite our hopes that from such heights we might recover a vision of the full scope of the truth of Christ, we will be disappointed. Christ is in the concete faith and practice of the church, and only he can give the power and potency to a post-modern theology that is genuinely orthodox. The Son holds all things together in the Father.

Thus to escape the patterns of theological modernism, the first task is not to imagine and invent, for this opens up a distance between us and the concrete and enacted forms of our apostolic inheritance. Instead, we must train ourselves in that which modernity rejects most thoroughly and fatally: the disciplines of receiving what has been given. We must eat the scrolls that the Lord has given us and dwell amidst his people. Only then will the scope of an Augustinian ambition recover the intense, concrete, and particular Christ-centered focus that gives it the power of good news. Only there, amidst walls ruined by faithlessness, apathy, and sin, can we taste God's peace. (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2002, 78-9)

Thesis 4: The Bible as Rosetta Stone

Thesis 4: The Biblical canon does not exhaust salvation history, but is a Rosetta Stone by which all subsequent history is to be understood.

Salvation history does not end with the closing of the Bible. As Katherine Doob-Sakenfeld has shown us, the Bible is not merely a “repository or databank of verbally correct information about God,” but rather, can be viewed as “establishing a trajectory for Christian living, a trajectory that the continuing community checks an rechecks by reference to the Bible.”(10) We can view the narrative of Scripture in similar fashion, not as exhausting God’s life with God’s people, but rather, as providing a snapshot of a relationship in motion. As in calculus, the narrative we have is a kind of derivative, establishing the rate of change at a particular point, and thus establishing a trajectory. Or, we could view the Bible as God’s Rosetta Stone, which, when laid alongside our own part of the story, enables us, with much difficulty and care, to begin to translate the strange language of God’s speaking, acting and relating in the present by reference to how God has been heard speaking, acting and relating in the past. While the canon itself has been closed, the story of God with God’s people continues to be written in the witness of the Church (and also of Israel).

Faithfulness to the canon, then, is in making it the measure of our times, with all its divergences and disagreements, without allowing it to exhaust or limit the surprising ways God continues to act in relationship with God’s people. As John Henry Newman beautifully notes, “Scripture cannot be mapped, or its contents catalogued; but, after all our diligence, to the end of our lives and to the end of the Church, it must be an unexplored and unsubdued land, with heights and valleys, forests and streams, on the right and left of our path and close about us, full of concealed wonders and choice treasures.”(11) Scripture leads to further adventures into the strange new world within its pages, and so remains a crucial site within which God’s people encounter God speaking today. It also provides, as in Calvin's famous image, a set of lenses through which to view all of reality in the fullness of its spiritual dimensions. History quite simply is salvation history, and through Scripture, Newman's adventure extends to the entirety of Christian existence and engagement in time.

NOTES
10 - Katherine Doob Sakenfeld, “Feminist Theology and Biblical Interpretation” in Biblical Theology: Problems and Perspectives: In Honor of J. Christiaan Beker (ed. Johan Christiaan Beker. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1995), 251.
11 - Cited in Jason Byassee’s Praise Seeking Understanding: Reading the Psalms with Augustine (Grand Rapids: Wm. Eerdman’s Co., 2007), 240.

Thesis 3: The Resurrected Christ as Hermeneutical Key

Thesis 3: The key to the identity of the Bible’s God is the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth from the dead by the God of Israel. All readings must therefore be Christologically oriented.

While various New Testament authors employ vastly different Christologies, for the Christian Church, they converge on the raising of Jesus from the dead by Israel’s God as the decisive moment of salvation history.(7) In Christ, a new creation has begun (2. Cor.5.16f), bestowing on the Church the ministry of reconciliation. According to Colossians, as the “image of the invisible God,” all things “hold together” in him, and “through him, God was pleased to reconcile all things” to Christ (Col.1.15, 19). As such, all attempts to read and understand the diversity of Scripture’s witness must use the ministry, death, and resurrection of Christ as their hermeneutical key. This means that the four canonical Gospels, which were almost universally accepted throughout the canonical-formation process as authoritative, hold a special place of privilege at the center of Christian Scripture as narratives about Jesus.(8) However, various non-narrative genres, such as the Old Testament psalms or dietary regulations, as well as New Testament epistles, can and must be read Christologically, as either prefiguring, unfolding, or wrestling with the decisive act of salvation and new creation by God for God’s people. In the event of irresolvable conflicts or impenetrable opacity, particularly in cases where certain passages seem incommensurable with the Gospels, Augustine’s recommendation of looking to the two-fold love commandment (Matt.22.34-40) is to be followed, for here, Christ Himself claims, is the summation of all Scripture.(9) By seeking to love God and love our neighbor – by no means simple or self-evident tasks – readings of Scripture will seek to participate in the ministry of reconciliation that is constitutive of the new creation revealed in the resurrection of Christ.

(Caveat Lector: The Christological focus should not be taken as an invitation to supercessionism. Nor does it exclude the importance of understanding the Old Testament as Hebrew Scripture. However, as these theses relate to reading scripture within the Church proper, it is equally vital that Christians not shy away from the centrality of Christ, which both influences the very naming of the Old Testament as such, as well as creates significant differences with Judaism. As in Thesis 2, these differences and tensions, canonized in scripture in places like Romans 9-11, are invitations and opportunities for dialogue and encounter with Jewish brothers and sisters for whom Jesus is not Messiah. Such disagreements must be acknowledged - but in love, can be an opportunity for mutual and even collaborative scriptural reasonings. I know of very few Jews who would appreciate sentiments such as "we basically believe the same things at the root-" my Jewish friends have no problem pointing out their strong divergence from my own faith claims, and such truthfulness is yet another lesson the Church must continue to learn through its dependence on the descendants of Israel.)

NOTES
(7) Brian Peterson, lecture 9.29.10. All references to Peterson’s lectures refer to those given as part of his course BI451 New Testament Theology, given in the Fall Semester 2010 at Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary.
(8) While various collections of NT texts such as the Pauline epistles varied in their inclusion in various canonical lists throughout the first centuries of the Church, the four Gospels are the sole constant. In claiming the Gospels as canonically privileged, I look not only to their exalted place in the worshipping life of the Church, but also to the Scripture Project’s claim that “the Gospels, read within the matrix of Scripture from Genesis to Revelation, convey the truth about the identity of Jesus more faithfully than speculative reconstructions provide by modernist historical methods” (Art of Interpreting Scripture 3).
(9) See Augustine’s On Christian Teaching (trans. R.P.H. Green. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).

02: Marginalia from the Book of Harbison