Welcome friend!
Consider this your online Steve-and-Adam's room! Traber 611 Online! So kick back, grab your favorite SAGA-esque snack, turn down the lights, and get ready to relive the good old days!
Friday, June 03, 2005
Another Question [trying to stir up a fight...I mean discussion]
Is the Church a product of Scripture, or is Scripture a product of the Church? Which one founds/legitimizes/is logically prior to the other? Why is the answer to this question important?
"The bride of Christ" is a central metaphor for the church. "a love-letter from God" is one for the Scriptures. I venture to suppose you can't have a love-letter without an eligible Lady. Thus the church is logically prior.
So, is the Church defined as "that group which believes and follows the teachings of the Scriptures", or are the Scriptures defined as "those writings which the Church holds to be authoritative"? [Ryan's response pushes us towards affirming the second definition over the first.]
If the church comes before the scriptures, what was the Church before Christ? Clearly, scripture existed at that time. While on the otherhand, much of New Testament scripture's original recipients were individual churches. How could Old Testament scripture be a product of the church? I think the church is to some degree a product of scripture, given that much of New Testament scripture was written intending to give instruction and direction to the church.
Is there a question of canon in here? Christ validated the Old Testament canon. As for the New, the Church clearly determined canon, but these books were written for the Church, before anyone felt the need to determine their validity.
Yes, but it was the Church that determined/designated the validity (or canonicity) of the Scriptures. You could argue that the OT existed before the first century and hence before the Church, but third and fourth century councils also affirmed the canonicity of the Hebrew Scriptures for the Christian Church, which was a decision that could have gone another way. And we must remember that those Hebrew Scriptures were previously canonized by other men using other methods.
It is a question of canon, but not exactly what I think you meant by that phrase: it is a question of what canonicity means. If you ask the question, "Why are these writings important? Why do we regard them as more imporatant than other writings?", then the answer is "Because we have received them from the hands of others who have shared our faith and who regarded them as Scripture." Scripture is received as canonical because it is our tradition to regard it as such: this means that Scripture is not a separate category opposed to tradition-- it is a special category OF tradition. Those Christians who came before us said, "These writings are vitally important and should shape your life and faith" and we, as members of their faith tradition, accept them with a special reverence and respect and we give them priority over other writings. They have an important role in shaping the identity and the life of the Church and the Christian, but Christianity is not contained within Scripture-- it is passed on through the living community of faith, through the Church. Here is the test: would Scripture have authority if the Church did not teach that it does? This does not say that Scripture should not be respected and obeyed, but it might change the ways in which we receive it.
I'm sorry for my long absence from these discussions--computer troubles and James Joyce have kept me out of the game for awhile, but I'm back, reformatted hard drive and all. And I have a lot of catching up to do, but I want to start with a few questions, directed at Coye, but open for responses from others.
I am curious about the strong humanist bent of these postings, Coye, which leads me to wonder what, in your view, is God's role in all of this? Are the scriptures inspired--"God breathed" as Paul describes--or merely human texts? If they are “inspired,” however one might want to define that term, would that require a different understanding of textuality than the ones we (as in, you and I) are used to using? In a similar vein, did the Holy Spirit have anything to do with the formation of the canon and the work of the early councils, or was this a purely human endeavor? Were the criteria the early church used to distinguish canonical books from apocryphal—Apostolic Origin (attributed to or based on the teaching of first-generation apostles), Universal Acceptance (acknowledged by Christian communities at the time), Liturgical Use (used during church gatherings), and Consistent Message (a theology consonant with other canonical works)—pragmatic means to an end, a way to get it as close to right as possible within the constraints of human fallibility, or is there a supernatural aspect to this project? It is definitely easier to theorize all of this in a purely humanist paradigm, applying the tools of discourse analysis and historiography, but are we missing something if we do so?
To ask something of the same from a differnt angle, is there any difference between how you (Coye) understand, study, or think about the relationship between the Muslim and the Koran and the way you think about, study, or understand the relationship between the Christian and the Scriptures.
It's not as if a group of people stumbled upon a collection of writings and proceeded to declare some authoritative and others non-authoritative. (in this case, the church would indeed be logically prior to the scriptures)
You've set this "war" up along a polarity that should not have to exist; there are many scenarios in which neither the church or the scriptures are logically prior in the sense of priority that you use.
This is not to say that I do not stay up at night weeping my heart out because I do not understand how to trust God as he wants me to trust him becuase of all the fracturnedness of everything behind me/us ( if I am to see Christ clearly before me, I must, I must see him clearly behind me); but I do not see the options of preceeding in the kind of either/or catagories you have defined in your discussion grammar.
I'm going to start this comment by addressing Andy and hope that it speaks to others (especially Dave) along the way.
There is a strong "humanist bent" to my language here, but 1) I use it for a good reason 2) that does not mean that I don't see God's hand at work. Over the last few months, I have wrestled with many unfavorable aspects of evangelicalism and have repeatedly found myself brought back to a tangle of issues knotted around our view of the Scriptures. There is a simplistic way of affirming the importance of Scripture that says "this is very Word of God" (plenary ispired, etc)-- it accomplishes the task of elevating the Scriptures, but 1) I question the correctness of the claim 2) I am aware that it is potentially very destructive. My opening question has to do with treating the Bible as the founding document of the Church, an act which places the Bible outside the Christian tradition by claiming that tradition is human but Scripture is divine. I want to question both of those claims. I use strongly humanist language because the line between human and divine is not clearly visible in the life and teachings of the Church. Naming the Bible "very word of God" is an attempt to simply distinguish the Vine from its branches, but that simplicity may be unfounded and dangerous.
I believe that Christ's continued work and committment to the Church is more complex than the simple distinction between "divine" and "human" texts. The work of the Holy Spirit is present throughout the teachings and traditions handed down by former gernerations of Christians and not merely in the 66 canonical books. They are elevated above our other traditional sources of theology-- and rightly so-- but they are part of the same tradition. They are not a "letter from God." Christ and ONLY CHRIST is the WORD of God. This is what makes Christianity different from other religions-- the Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us. Christianity is not the "true faith" because our Bible is very word of God; it is the true faith because the Word dwells in our midst.
We are faced with either an infinite regress or a "terrible responsibility" (have we, in fact, never left our discussion about the law?). We can affirm simply that the Bible is God's own Word, that every word of Scripture comes directly from the mouth of God (even if He used human agents in their composition) and acts as the guarantor of our faith. But we would have to believe this statement on the testimony of those who handed the Scriptures on to us, so we would still be relying on human testimony. We can hold doctrines about the plenary inspiration and infallibility of the Bible, but those doctrines were written by human theologians. Do we need a doctrine saying that those doctrines are the divinely-inspired perfect word of God? And those doctrines? (Here is the infinite regress.)
What is the alternative? We treat the Bible as we treat the rest of our Christian tradition. We say that the Holy Spirit-- the deposit and guarantor of our faith-- is present within the Church and speaks the Word Christ to us from within the Church (and not merely from the canonical books of the Bible). We say that it is the continuous work of the Spirit-- the continued dwelling of the Word with us as opposed to the one-time speaking of God's word into a book-- that makes us the Church. But this places us in a difficult position (this is where the terrible responsibility comes in): we know that the Church is not perfect. We know that it has and will continue to make mistakes, to act outside the bounds of love and truth and justice. If we do not have a written word that is outside the Church and insulated from its human failings, then how do we know that we are following Christ, how do we know the will of God? The Word has made His dwelling among us-- the Word still speaks Himself in our midst-- and it is our responsibility (and one that must be accepted with terror) to pray for a discerning Spirit and try to find Him as He lives in our midst. The Scriptures are an indispensable part of that task, recognized by those who shared our faith before us as teachings which must shape our corporate and individual lives. They are our most important theological writings, and as such they hold more authority than any other source of theology, but they do not provide an escape from our responsibility or the infinite terror of seeking to follow Christ down a path we have not walked before. We must believe that He will lead us TODAY as we work out our salvation with fear and trembling.
Thank you for stating your intentions in all this. It helps.
I'm struggling with this stuff too; and frankly, I'm just thoroughly scared. But as of yet, I still have some important conversations to have with people who have approached this fire before (for there is fire you walk through, and there is fire you walk into).
So here's something approaching a more practical application of how you answer this question. I once heard a (most likely reformed) person speaking about monumental theologians in the Christian tradition, and they drew a loose line back from Calvin to Augustan to the Apostle Paul (a sort of triple jump backwards through Church history). I might compose a slightly different list (something like Barth, Luther, Aquinas, Boethius, Augustan, Paul, Peter, James, etc), but the question presently at hand is not "who do we include in our 'theology's greatest hits' collection?" but "what is the difference between Barth, Augustan and Tertullian (on one hand) and Paul, Peter and James (on the other). We take Augustan seriously (and for good reason), but if I want to critique his body/mind/soul analogy of the Trinity then I am allowed to do so as long as I make a good argument. I am not typically allowed (in evangelical circles) to take a similar approach to Paul (for instance). I may try a new interpretation that spins Paul's teaching towards a different end, but I am not allowed to say "perhaps Paul doesn't have this quite right, and these are the reasons I think so." This is because Paul's words (or at least the extant writings attributed to Paul) have been canonized and deemed to be not merely the words of Paul the theologian but also the very word of God. This becomes problematic when Paul says things that don't exactly square with James or Peter or John (and what about Peter and all that baptism for the dead?); it becomes a problem in way that Tertullian contradicting Origen or Augustan or Polycarp is not-- we do our best to reconcile or understand the individual contributions of those Church fathers, but we allow them to be human, to err or even simply to disagree. Why not Paul? Why not the author of Hebrews? Now, I do not think that we can simply or lightly or quickly or even totally disregard what the New Testament teachers have written-- they are our greatest and most respected theologians-- but shouldn't we allow them to be theologians instead of THEOS. This puts us in a position where we are terribly responsible for those things in Scrupture that we allow to be questioned, but aren't we always and already responsible for those teachings we affirm (particularly if we say they are the words of God)? So, is Paul the very mouthpiece of Adonai, or is he our greatest theologian? (How do you think he saw himself?)
Coye, you claim to have been struggling with various unfavorable aspects of evangelicalism but in fact you have landed yourself back into a classic evangelical pitfall, that of attempting to discern God's will for your life without reference to Scripture and beyond that without reference to the church. (What does the church have to say about the bible? univocally, "it is divine"--and yet you disagree. You disavow tradition as much as scripture)
Ultimately your train of thought grants authority only to your own fervent "prayer" or soul-searching or inward consultation with the Spirit. And in that sense it is indeed fearful and terrible and beyond that I would imagine lonely and dark.
You question the view that says tradition is human but Scripture is divine. You say the line between human and divine is not clear in the life and teachings of the church. And actually I agree with you here.
But why does that automatically lead to your humanistic take on scripture and tradition and everything? What you are really driving at is that you don't think either one can be divine! You are saying that if there if human agency is functioning at all then clearly divine agency is not. When it comes to the canon you are saying that because you can't see God's unmistakable hand at work then it must not be there at all. Basically, I guess you don't believe God can work through people. Or at least we shouldn't rely on God's work in OTHER people when we go about forming our own way of life.
But you say you affirm that others were imbued with the Spirit, and this lead to Scriptures, the apocrypha, theological traditions, etc. The problem is that that was then and this is now, and you don't believe the Spirit's leading those people should be translated to the Spirit leading us today. I think this is a a disastrous consquence of your philosophy which devalues "words" and robs us of communion with the past. There is no need for fathers to teach sons in your philosophy because they do not speak the same language.
I think solid evidence of this is that you do not interact with Scripture or tradition at all in your comments. You just put on your humanistic glasses and go.
Well, I hope you don't take my comments the wrong way. Correct me where I'm wrong.
Ryan, you misunderstand me. Read what I have written before-- you have not given me a charitable or even a good surface reading. You assign me positions that are the opposite of what I explicitly say. Read it again.
And don't throw me outside the bounds of tradition so quickly. My position is not far from that of Roman Catholicism (the largest and oldest Christian church) regarding the relationship of Scripture to Tradition, and my statements about Scripture itself are well within the bounds of the Anglican tradition (the largest Protestant church). But please, read it again.
Ok, reading again, but what are you talking about terror for? It sounds to me like you are setting up our situation as a mystery which we do not have conclusive guidance for from scripture or tradition and which will require some colossal leap of faith or understanding or action. What are we facing however that has not already been dealt with in the past?
Ryan, I'm having the hardest time thinking how to answer you: I've started this comment four or five times and given up. I'm just not sure exactly what to answer. Yes, Christianity requires a leap of faith where the evidence is not conclusive. Yes, much of our faith is mystery (especially when we talk about this unimaginable partnership between God and humanity-- how can we possibly share in His work!?!). Yes, the whole thing is full of terror-- or it should be. Isn't this the fear of God; isn't this what your friend Lewis calls "the weight of glory"? We are responsible, Ryan, for every action and every word that touches the precious eternal human persons who surround us. We are the recepients of a tradition to which we must remain faithful, but at the same time we recognize that this tradition has been the site of misogyny, anti-semitism, slavery, holy wars, ethnic cleansings, and economic and political corruption-- it has produced these things because the Church remains a human institution even as it is the body of Christ. And we are responsible if we continue a practice which is hurtful to people and hateful to God-- we can only pray to Him for mercy because our hands are stained with the blood of those we have hurt in His name. So, at the same time we must be faithful to the tradition we have received AND be faithful to God and to those who surround us. This is nothing more than what past Christians have faced, but that does not make it less of a terror. This is why we pray. This is why we cling desperately to the hope that Christ will be our head and hold the whole body together, that He will act with us as He did with Jacob's children and bring good out of what we meant for evil. This is why we beg forgiveness in that same prayer which teaches us to forgive others. We must, like Peter, step from the safety of our boat and walk to Christ out on the water: we cannot possibly stay there-- we will sink, we will die!-- but if He reaches out His hand, then we will be saved and He will take us back to the boat and dwell there with us.
Ok, I think I'm caught up now. I'd like to get back to the Bible and what you think it's role should be for us today. Do you think the Bible is part and parcel of the Christian tradition which as you point out has been the site of mysogyny, anti-semitism, slavery, and the like? Have various authors of Scripture from Moses to Paul contributed to these evils with their historically and culturally limited points of view?
If the authors of Scripture are part of the same Christian tradition as the rest of our great theologians, and their writings belong to the same institution which presided over the great evils of our history, where do you see the danger spots in applying the teaching of these 66 books to our lives today? ---
Do you think the line between human and divine was clear to Adam, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Joshua, Samuel, David, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel, and other theologians in our Christian tradition?
How do you handle the phrase, "Thus says the Lord" --- The terror you are speaking about the is a the terror of the unknown. The terrible responsibility of going a path where noone has walked. This is not the fear of the Lord. The fear of the Lord is a given, a known. The fear of the Lord, if "terror" at all, is a fear that comes from knowing God in his holiness and knowing that in our sin we _can not_ endure his presence. --- I'm surprised you place yourself within the Anglican tradition and somewhere close to Roman Catholocism. That's where I put myself, too. --- I do not agree that the merely the fact that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us is what makes Christianity different from other religions. What makes Christianity different is that it is the true story of how God rescued his people from death and the serpent. This includes the incarnation as well as the events leading up to it and following it as recorded in the Scriptures.
I really would like to continue this conversation, but I'm getting a little tired of the two party dialogue format and would very much appreciate some other input to keep me and Ryan from spiraling into some tedious argument that misses a lot of great things that Dave or Andy or Strauss or Stephen or Adam or someone else would have picked up on. My other concern is that the general theoretical discussion has been going on for a long time without any reference to what this might mean for practical issues of living out our faith, so I would love it if we could insert some of that into the conversation. If no one else thinks this is important enough to make a contribution, then I will get back to my and Ryan's private conversation sometime soon, but I'm really hoping that a couple more hats might be thrown into the ring...
I'm currently working on a long response to your above comments concerning the cannon and our relationship with it. I think this issue is very important to our life and faith; so I'm trying to be thoughful. I hope to finish it tonight. I've been tied up with work, moving in, not having internet (or a phone for that matter!), and preparing for the new member of the family.
Two questions of parental perogative: 1) are you going to have your son circumcised? 2) are you going to have him baptised as an infant?
Also, you might respond to this by making a new post in which everyone can ask Davey their baby questions. [and I don't really expect any Dave postings for at least a month after the new arrival-- for some reason babies take up a lot of time]
Finally, my term pap---I mean, comments and such: )
I. A review of your initial line of thinking
In your first comment on this string, you put forward the following line of thinking concerning the Church’s relationship to Scripture:
“‘Why are these writings important [to the Church]? Why do we regard them as more important than other writings?’ . . .the answer is ‘Because we have received them from the hands of others who have shared our faith and who regard them as Scripture.’”
You sum this up with:
“‘Scripture is received as canonical because it is our tradition to regard it as such.’”
Which leads to:
“‘Scripture is not a separate category opposed to tradition—it is a special category OF tradition.’”
This moves your reader to ask, “In what sense is the category of Scripture—as it sits within the boundaries of tradition—‘special?’”
Your text seems not altogether clear; we find out why Scripture is marked out as special among other pieces of writing—namely because, “Those Christians who came before us said, ‘These writings are vitally important and should not shape your life and faith”—but nothing is said explicitly about the specialness of the Scripture-category within tradition. Presumably, we are asked to conclude that Scripture is a special category of tradition in the sense that it is a special kind of action which those who have gone before us have performed—namely, canonizing and the preserving/honoring of the canon.
So in the world your text proposes, Scripture is not the writings themselves; it is the ongoing act of declaring a set of writings “important”—a declaration which we are actively involved in making. To put it succinctly, Scripture—as a category of tradition—is an ongoing action which continues as we declare a distinct set of writings “important.”
I don’t know how else to construe your concept of Scripture. If I have gotten it wrong, please correct my reading!
II. A few interactions with your intended directions
Your rhetorical direction points us not toward a furthering of the Scripture-act per se, but toward something strangely different (strange in regard to the Scripture-act tradition as it has been expressed thus far). The “terrible responsibility” that you point us toward is not essentially the responsibility of acting so as to preserve the importance of certain writings as it has been preserved within our tradition; instead, a different theme emerges: one of strange liberation.
Woven into the very substance of your argument is the assumption that we have somehow attained a vantage point of seeing what the fourth century councils could not see: we see that they weren’t recognizing the God given authority of certain writings over the emerging texts which dangerous individuals were putting forward as authoritative/important. They thought they were doing this, but now—with liberated eyes—we see that they were, in ACTuality (presumably the only reality we have access to) writing a script for an enduring drama called Scripture. And now that we see this is what they were doing, we can free ourselves from the confines of their (manmade) script and begin to actively amend it (with the incredible weight of “responsibility” upon us—yes—but it is clear that you would have us change the Scripture-act script).
It seems clear you have this liberation in mind as you step into the practical world of reading and responding to the canonized Gospels and Epistles vs. the writings of the canonized church fathers. Again, you want us to step outside of the drama of Scripture-act and into the freedom of emerging Justice as manifested by the Spirit among us. We can now interact with Paul and Peter and John in the same way we interact with Augustan and Barth and Aquinas: with reverence, yes, but also with a wary spiritual eye that looks for what they might have gotten wrong. This is our new task, if we can bear the immeasurable weight of its “terrible responsibility.”
I presume that you see this new responsibility taking place through some sort organized human/spirit system—I don’t imagine you would have each of us bearing this weight by ourselves (a kind of hyper-Protestantism)—but you leave no clues as to the shape of this system.
So there’s my reading/responses of your rhetorical directions. Let me know if I’ve been unfair.
III. A response to your line of thinking as I have read it
First, let me clarify that this is a response only my best reading of your initial lines of thinking. So again, if I have put forward a bad reading, please send me back to your thoughts with some help.
OK. Let me put just three responses out there:
Your line of reasoning is extremely dangerous I think you have misconstrued the reasons particular scriptures were canonized I think you have disregarded the claims the Biblical authors (especially the NT authors) have made concerning their position in the body/temple of Christ.
First, I think your line of reasoning is extremely dangerous because it can destroy every object of our faith by assuming it into the realm of merely acted tradition. For example, there seems to be nothing preventing me from using this form of argument to dislocate the resurrection of Christ from a powerful object of faith (i.e. it really happened) into merely an ongoing aspect of acted tradition. That is:
Why do I regard Christ’s resurrection as true? Why do we regard it as an actual event?. . .the answer is “Because we have received this belief from the hands of others who have shared our faith and who regard it as actually happening.”
This can be summed up with
Christ’s resurrection is received as actually happening because it is our tradition to regard it as such.
Which leads to:
The “event” of Christ’s resurrection is not a separate category opposed to tradition—it is a special category OF tradition.
And now, seeing as how I have recognized that Christ’s resurrection is simply a function within the network of tradition’s functions, I can now examine how it—as part of what I have received—is acting on me (since, presumably, this is all that is in fact happening); I can make my own decisions about where to place it among my other beliefs by examining its effect on me in light of my Justice-sensibilities.
No; Christ’s resurrection did occur; on this event I ground my hope. I can do no other!
I cannot accept a line of argument which reduces all the objects of my faith into mere functions within human-acted tradition.
Second, I think you have misconstrued the reasons particular scriptures were canonized. Well, more to the point, you really haven’t construed any reasons at all. You only give the council the following words, “These writings are vitally important and should not shape your life and faith.” It seems that you have pictured a group of council members sitting around the table with all kinds of manuscripts strewn about, and they have to decide from this selection which ones to declare “vitally important”—of which ones to say, “these should shape your life and faith.”
But, from what I understand, the councils hardly happened in a vacuum, and the collection of writings that they “canonized” were pretty widely accepted as scripture by the Church before they gathered together. Their council was more about protecting the church from apostates—who were selling the latest “cannons” like so much snake oil—than it was about making hard decisions about which writings were, in fact, scripture, and which were not.
Many of the New Testament scriptures were considered scripture almost immediately after they were received. Peter, in his second letter, even comments about how Paul’s letters are hard to understand, “as are the rest of the Scriptures.” Paul quotes Luke along with Deuteronomy, calling both Scripture. The New Testament manuscripts were cherished from the beginning, painstakingly copied and proliferated around the ancient world—there are no collection of writings that have been so often copied and distributed than the New Testament collection. Yes, there was a process of GENERAL recognition that, say, Peter’s letters were in fact written by the apostle Peter, but it was more a process of getting-to-the-bottom of the matter than it was deciding ad-hoc within a council that we should believe thus and such.
And this brings us to my third response: I think you have disregarded the claims the Biblical authors (especially the NT authors) have made concerning their position in the body/temple of Christ. This really has a lot to do with the last point: why did it matter that Peter actually authored the two Epistles attributed to him? (and why does it still matter?) And why was it important to preserve Paul’s writings? And why were the Gospels worth copying and distributing? Why is Paul to be treated differently than Augustan or Barth? Well, to begin with, Paul tells you to regard him as different, and Augustan is careful to tell you NOT to regard him as you regard Paul!
Paul was an Apostle, one who had seen the Lord Jesus and who had been commissioned by the Lord to preach and display the Gospel—to lay the foundation for the faith of the believers after him. In his letter to the Roman Christians he writes that he had received, “grace and apostleship [from Christ] to bring about the obedience of faith for the sake of His [Christ’s] name among ALL THE NATIONS.” In Ephesians he writs that, “Grace was given to each one of us.” Earlier, he describes what was given to him, “to me, though I am the very least of all the saints, this grace was given, to preach to the gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ and to bring to light TO EVERYONE what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God who created all things.”
I do not disagree with you that the WORD has all authority—Jesus Christ is Lord of all. So does he not have the authority to distribute the measures of his grace according to his will? Does he not have the authority to give to Paul the grace to make known to me the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God who created all things? Does he not have the power to bring about my obedience of faith through the words he gave Paul?
If you look, most of the NT authors explicitly mark out their Christ-given authority, and often they will even tell you their role in the body of Christ. John, for example, tells you in his Gospel that “he who saw it has born witness—his testimony is true, and he knows that he is telling the truth—that you may also believe.” In his first letter he writes, “I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God that you may know that you have eternal life.” In the beginning of this letter he says, “that which we have seen and heard we proclaim also to you, so that you too may have fellowship with us; and indeed our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ.”
The Apostles and the prophets—these men were marked out by the Spirit of God to proclaim the testimony of God’s new covenant with men using narrative, teaching and prophecy. They were not super human, they were not kings ruling over their subjects, they were simply responding to the measure of grace that had been given to them.
This is the proper context from which we must approach our questions about scripture: Christ is Lord, Christ expresses that Lordship by distributing his grace to his body, he gave grace to the early apostles and prophets to speak and write the foundations of the faith (Paul writes, “built on the foundations of the Apostles and Prophets).
Ok, enough for now…I look forward to hearing your responses to all this (and not only Coye’s I’d like others to let me know what they think of this as well!)
Thank you, Dave, for this significant contribution. It will, of course, take some time to think about and respond to, and I will be away from my desk for a few days as I go out of town to pick up a car. Trust that I will return and respond to what you have said. For now, I offer only a short response intended as a deposit in good faith.
I must agree-- in fact, pointing this out is one of my main intentions in asking these quesitons-- that what I am suggesting is dangerous. It is not safe. It is not guaranteed by any human construction. It is DANGEROUS. You call it a strange freedom; let me add, "let us not use our freedom as a cloak for maliciousness." What is dangerous is not necessarily bad, and what is true is not necessarily safe.
I think that your reading of my developing thoughts (and let me stress here that what I have written are QUESTIONS with no certain answers given) is accurate but incomplete. I cannot argue much, on first reading, with most sections of your exposition, but I feel you ignore my beliefs about the continued work of the Spirit and the unending commitment of Christ to dwell with His Church. This must not be ignored. The intent of this exercise is to put more faith in Him and less in our own understanding (I believe there may be a proverb about that). Well, as I am stretching the limits of briefness, I will end now for now.
: ) I knew you would pick up on my use of dangerous and start from there. You have to take the word in context with the other points and see if that danger is the danger the wild sea to a young child or the danger of an untested cliff face to a determined traveler.
Also, even though you emphasize that your thoughts are to be taken as "questions," you must admit there is still quite a bit of rhetorical momentum and direction in your quiries. I get the feeling that you're running toward a position as your asking questions about it--but I could be wrong here.
I did tip my hat to your understanding of the spirit among us when I speak of the human/spirit system you must have in mind; my sparce treatment of it is due to the fact that I have no idea what you practically mean by it. For example, are you arguing for a continuation of Apostleship? Do you have a form of heiearchy in mind? Who gets the privilidged position of judging between two seemingly valid positions? Who submits to whom at which time? Is it all ad hoc and "spirit-led" (Like my AOG friends would say)? Is it highly structured through defined church positions (Anglican; RC; etc.)?
I have not commented on your statemetns on the Spirit because I do not know what you intend it to look like.
But please don't spend your time spelling that out yet. I'd like to hear some more of your responses to my posting.
OK, in all of this I'm trying to be careful in how I speak; knowing that where I see a rising tidal wave, you see a towering cliff.
OK, here's what I'm going to do: I'm NOT going to go through everyone's term pap... I mean comments point by point and tell you what I agree with and what I don't and why. I don't want you to think that I don't appreciate and respect all the time you took thinking and writing-- I just think that it will be more profitable for me to pursue another course of action. Now, what I AM going to do is try shifting the perspective of this conversation in a way that will illuminate my earlier comments as responses to your recent comments(especially Dave and Ryan).
I want to talk primarily about two things: tradition and the work of the Spirit. My questions and tentative propositions should not be read as coming from the typical evangelical position of apathy or even open hostility towards tradition. One of my main concerns with elevating Scripture to "very word of God" is that it denigrates tradition and reduces it to "merely human". I am NOT arguing that tradition is purely human and Scripture is only part of that human tradition. If you read my statements in that way, then you have assigned me the very position I am arguing against! If you start with a very high view of tradition, on the other hand, then including Scripture within the bounds of tradition does not reduce it to the merely human but highlights the on-going work of the Spirit who is committed to the Church.
This is the second and most important point I want to make: the role of the Holy Spirit in the revelation of God through the tradition of the Church (including the Scriptures) is not a distinct point within this view of Scripture-- it IS this view of Scripture in its entirety! Unless we view the Church as the place where God speaks-- where the WORD speaks Himself, where THEOlogy happens-- then the questions and ideas I laid out above are meaningless. The Church is never SIMPLY human, but neither is it SIMPLY divine: in this way it resembles the incarnate Christ, whose mystical body it constitutes. Neither the Church nor its Scriptures are Deistic creations set in motion by Christ and left to run their course until His return; NO! they, like the whole universe, are creations held together by the living and active presence of the Holy Spirit (the Lord, the Giver of life) and would cease to exist the moment He withdrew His hand from them. I do not point out a particular place where I believe the Spirit was at work in our Tradition-- I do not say, "In the first century the Spirit inspired this handful of men for a short time to write these books"-- but this is NOT because I think the Christian tradition is merely a human creation. On the contrary, it is because Christ has and continues to be present with His Church throughout our entire (and sometimes tragic) history.
This gets back to my original question about primacy: we do not accept the Church because it has the Scruptures; rather, we accept the Scriptures because they come to us through the Church.
One last comment about WHY I think this is important: if the Church acts as the earthly guarantor of the Scriptures (and not the other way around), then the Church-- that is, you and I-- are responsible for what we affirm within (and through) the Scriptures. When standing before our Judge who knows everything we did to the least of His bretheren, we will not have the excuse of saying, "But it was written here in the book!" No, we must answer for everything we have done and encouraged others to do in His name. This is not, in my view, the ocean of relativism where I drown in my own myopic world-making; it is the cliff of responsibility where I am responsible for every stranger as if they were my neighbor or (my God!) my God.
Dave or Ryan or anybody, if you would like to hear my specific response to a particular part of your comments, let me know and I'll do my best to respond. I did feel like I needed to make the above points first, though, and see if they provided any clarification of my tentative position on the issue. I may provide a few more unprompted responses in the near future.
Here is a thought experiment for us in the meantime: there is another archeological find of scrolls similar in significance to the Dead Sea Scrolls, but this time it is New Testament texts that are found in a cave in northern Egypt. Among the numerous copies of Romans and Ephesians and the Gospels, etc., there are multiple copies of a previously undiscovered Pauline epistle. The language and style is consistent with Paul's other writings, the carbon dating on the scrolls is consistent with late 1st to early 2nd century, and they appear to be copies of a letter to the Corinthians mentioned in the Biblical texts but thought to be lost two-thousand years ago (there are, in fact, at least two such missing epistles to the Corinthians). What would be the proper way to regard this extra-Biblical Pauline writing? Would it be accepted as authoritative Scripture? Would it be regarded as God's Word? How would this differ from finding "new" texts by Polycarp or Augustan?
I know who the Apostles were, but I don't know what the "office of apostle" is. I can't answer because I don't understand to what you refer. The Apostles were those who were with Christ (and Paul as one unnaturally born), so as far as that goes, there aren't any Apostles running around these days (if so, they would be a couple of thousand years old, and that would be impressive in itself).
I decided today to respond to some more of Dave's term paper. Dave said: "The 'terrible responsibility' that you point us toward is not essentially the responsibility of acting so as to preserve the importance of certain writings as it has been preserved within our tradition; instead, a different theme emerges: one of strange liberation."
There are essentially two interconnected responsibilities that I was refering to in my comments (both of which fall under what Kierkegaard would call the responsibility to live as an individual before God): we are responsible to and for our neighbors and we are responsible for our treatment of Scripture.
The first responsibility-- to our neighbor-- is that which Christ lays out in the parables of the good Samaritan and of the sheep and goats. The greatest commandment is "Love God", the second is "Love your neighbor", and there may not be much difference between how you live out those two commands ("whatever you have done to the least of these, you have done to me"). This is also what I am talking about when I make references to responsibility for the Other or the coming of the Other. This responsibility is terrible because the requirement far exceeds our own ability to act (thanks be to God for Jesus Christ).
The second responsibility-- for our treatment of Scripture-- has a couple of different facets. First, there is our responsibility to the text; primarily, this means doing everything we can to make the best reading of the text and not abusing it with poor or uncharitable readings. Since Scripture is part of tradition, we also have a responsibility for reading it as part of the larger tradition of Christian theology, which means we must respond to Augustan and Luther and Aquinas and eveyone else who has contributed to the development of Christianity (and we have to give them careful, charitable readings as well). This responsiblity is terrible because it places the weight of the entire Christian tradition on our shoulders (Thanks be to God for the Holy Spirit who is our interpreter and the life-- pneuma, breath, spirit-- of the Church).
If we are careful and serious with both of these responsibilities, then they should not conflict. A good, informed and charitable reading of the Scriptures should not lead us into harming our neighbor. I worry though, that calling the Scriptures "the very Word of God" is not charitable to the text of Scripture (idolatry is a sin against God and against the idol) and can (indeed, has) led the Church into acting without charity towards our neighbors. That is how we are responsible for our Tradition: we are responsible to preserve the Tradition and not re-write it according to our whims, and we are responsible for how we treat the Other in the name of that Tradition.
I feel that I must respond to what Dave said about the Resurrection. The logic I have used placing Scripture within the Tradition of the Christian Church cannot be used to "dislocate" the resurrection of Christ from its importance as an historical event. The Resurrection is the founding event of the Church: without it, there is no Christianity. This is strengthened (not destroyed) by my argument that the Scriptures are not the foundation of our faith. Scripture is a testimony to the event, not the event itself, and calling it the foundation of the Church would be idolatry. This is not the case when we refer to Christ and His Ressurrection. The Scriptures were gradually written, accepted and canonized by those in the Christian tradition (by the Church), but there would be no Tradition without the Resurrection. Now, I can say that Scripture is part of Tradition without speaking any blasphemy. The Resurrection is also believed traditionally, but if I say that it is a category of tradition, then I have broken that tradition apart by denying the very object of our faith, that the Word has made His dwelling among us.
Dave, what is it you find so important about Apostleship (and what do you mean by that term). My feeling towards Apostles is that there were the original 12, minus Judas, plus Matthias, plus Paul, plus James (that should just about do it, although an argument might be made for the evangelists Luke and Mark). I think they are set apart from other believers in a similar way that the "Church Fathers" are set apart. You might even say that the Apostolic period preceeded the Patristic period in the development of the early Church (I haven't really thought this out thoroughly, though, so don't be too hard on me here). The Apostles were the first people entrusted with the keeping and spreading the faith; they are, in a sense, the fathers of the Church (which is why the creed calls the Church Apostolic and why certain churches find it very imporant to claim apostolic succession of bishops). This is my understanding of the word "Apostle", and it should be easy to see from this why I don't say things about modern day apostles. But I sense that you have something different in mind, ant this something is closely related to the question of Scripture and of God's Word. Please tell me about it when you have the time (in between diapers and feedings or whenever).
One other thing: you asked me, "Who gets the privilidged position of judging between two seemingly valid positions?" My answer is "no one; there is no privileged position." This is why I am protestant rather than Roman Catholic. There is no pontif or Cardinal or anyone else who has a privileged position in reading the Scriptures and interpolating them into a lived life. Instead, we come together and submit our reading of Scripture to the whole Church (or, more practically, to those members of the Church who are present to us) and see if our reading is accepted and acceptable. (I include the theological texts of former believers in that group who are present to us and whose council we must take under advisement.) Now, I don't expect consensus or a vote or anything like that, but one believer saying to his brother, "You should consider what Paul says in Philemon," or "What about Augustan's passage about this in Confessions," or "Does this really demonstrate love for your neighbor?" There is no final court of appeal (not visible on earth, anyways), but as we work out our salvation together with fear and trembling, we trust that Christ will be among us as He promised to be with any gathering of two or three in His name.
I would love to hear Andy or Adam or Steve or Ryan or Dusty or anyone else tell me what they think. I am, after all, taking these ideas before my brothers to hear their approval or rebuke (and praying that the Spirit will lead us towards Christ through the process).
30 comments:
"The bride of Christ" is a central metaphor for the church. "a love-letter from God" is one for the Scriptures. I venture to suppose you can't have a love-letter without an eligible Lady. Thus the church is logically prior.
So, is the Church defined as "that group which believes and follows the teachings of the Scriptures", or are the Scriptures defined as "those writings which the Church holds to be authoritative"? [Ryan's response pushes us towards affirming the second definition over the first.]
If the church comes before the scriptures, what was the Church before Christ? Clearly, scripture existed at that time. While on the otherhand, much of New Testament scripture's original recipients were individual churches. How could Old Testament scripture be a product of the church? I think the church is to some degree a product of scripture, given that much of New Testament scripture was written intending to give instruction and direction to the church.
Is there a question of canon in here? Christ validated the Old Testament canon. As for the New, the Church clearly determined canon, but these books were written for the Church, before anyone felt the need to determine their validity.
Yes, but it was the Church that determined/designated the validity (or canonicity) of the Scriptures. You could argue that the OT existed before the first century and hence before the Church, but third and fourth century councils also affirmed the canonicity of the Hebrew Scriptures for the Christian Church, which was a decision that could have gone another way. And we must remember that those Hebrew Scriptures were previously canonized by other men using other methods.
It is a question of canon, but not exactly what I think you meant by that phrase: it is a question of what canonicity means. If you ask the question, "Why are these writings important? Why do we regard them as more imporatant than other writings?", then the answer is "Because we have received them from the hands of others who have shared our faith and who regarded them as Scripture." Scripture is received as canonical because it is our tradition to regard it as such: this means that Scripture is not a separate category opposed to tradition-- it is a special category OF tradition. Those Christians who came before us said, "These writings are vitally important and should shape your life and faith" and we, as members of their faith tradition, accept them with a special reverence and respect and we give them priority over other writings. They have an important role in shaping the identity and the life of the Church and the Christian, but Christianity is not contained within Scripture-- it is passed on through the living community of faith, through the Church. Here is the test: would Scripture have authority if the Church did not teach that it does? This does not say that Scripture should not be respected and obeyed, but it might change the ways in which we receive it.
I'm sorry for my long absence from these discussions--computer troubles and James Joyce have kept me out of the game for awhile, but I'm back, reformatted hard drive and all. And I have a lot of catching up to do, but I want to start with a few questions, directed at Coye, but open for responses from others.
I am curious about the strong humanist bent of these postings, Coye, which leads me to wonder what, in your view, is God's role in all of this? Are the scriptures inspired--"God breathed" as Paul describes--or merely human texts? If they are “inspired,” however one might want to define that term, would that require a different understanding of textuality than the ones we (as in, you and I) are used to using? In a similar vein, did the Holy Spirit have anything to do with the formation of the canon and the work of the early councils, or was this a purely human endeavor? Were the criteria the early church used to distinguish canonical books from apocryphal—Apostolic Origin (attributed to or based on the teaching of first-generation apostles), Universal Acceptance (acknowledged by Christian communities at the time), Liturgical Use (used during church gatherings), and Consistent Message (a theology consonant with other canonical works)—pragmatic means to an end, a way to get it as close to right as possible within the constraints of human fallibility, or is there a supernatural aspect to this project? It is definitely easier to theorize all of this in a purely humanist paradigm, applying the tools of discourse analysis and historiography, but are we missing something if we do so?
To ask something of the same from a differnt angle, is there any difference between how you (Coye) understand, study, or think about the relationship between the Muslim and the Koran and the way you think about, study, or understand the relationship between the Christian and the Scriptures.
It's not as if a group of people stumbled upon a collection of writings and proceeded to declare some authoritative and others non-authoritative. (in this case, the church would indeed be logically prior to the scriptures)
You've set this "war" up along a polarity that should not have to exist; there are many scenarios in which neither the church or the scriptures are logically prior in the sense of priority that you use.
This is not to say that I do not stay up at night weeping my heart out because I do not understand how to trust God as he wants me to trust him becuase of all the fracturnedness of everything behind me/us ( if I am to see Christ clearly before me, I must, I must see him clearly behind me); but I do not see the options of preceeding in the kind of either/or catagories you have defined in your discussion grammar.
I'm going to start this comment by addressing Andy and hope that it speaks to others (especially Dave) along the way.
There is a strong "humanist bent" to my language here, but 1) I use it for a good reason 2) that does not mean that I don't see God's hand at work. Over the last few months, I have wrestled with many unfavorable aspects of evangelicalism and have repeatedly found myself brought back to a tangle of issues knotted around our view of the Scriptures. There is a simplistic way of affirming the importance of Scripture that says "this is very Word of God" (plenary ispired, etc)-- it accomplishes the task of elevating the Scriptures, but 1) I question the correctness of the claim 2) I am aware that it is potentially very destructive. My opening question has to do with treating the Bible as the founding document of the Church, an act which places the Bible outside the Christian tradition by claiming that tradition is human but Scripture is divine. I want to question both of those claims. I use strongly humanist language because the line between human and divine is not clearly visible in the life and teachings of the Church. Naming the Bible "very word of God" is an attempt to simply distinguish the Vine from its branches, but that simplicity may be unfounded and dangerous.
I believe that Christ's continued work and committment to the Church is more complex than the simple distinction between "divine" and "human" texts. The work of the Holy Spirit is present throughout the teachings and traditions handed down by former gernerations of Christians and not merely in the 66 canonical books. They are elevated above our other traditional sources of theology-- and rightly so-- but they are part of the same tradition. They are not a "letter from God." Christ and ONLY CHRIST is the WORD of God. This is what makes Christianity different from other religions-- the Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us. Christianity is not the "true faith" because our Bible is very word of God; it is the true faith because the Word dwells in our midst.
We are faced with either an infinite regress or a "terrible responsibility" (have we, in fact, never left our discussion about the law?). We can affirm simply that the Bible is God's own Word, that every word of Scripture comes directly from the mouth of God (even if He used human agents in their composition) and acts as the guarantor of our faith. But we would have to believe this statement on the testimony of those who handed the Scriptures on to us, so we would still be relying on human testimony. We can hold doctrines about the plenary inspiration and infallibility of the Bible, but those doctrines were written by human theologians. Do we need a doctrine saying that those doctrines are the divinely-inspired perfect word of God? And those doctrines? (Here is the infinite regress.)
What is the alternative? We treat the Bible as we treat the rest of our Christian tradition. We say that the Holy Spirit-- the deposit and guarantor of our faith-- is present within the Church and speaks the Word Christ to us from within the Church (and not merely from the canonical books of the Bible). We say that it is the continuous work of the Spirit-- the continued dwelling of the Word with us as opposed to the one-time speaking of God's word into a book-- that makes us the Church. But this places us in a difficult position (this is where the terrible responsibility comes in): we know that the Church is not perfect. We know that it has and will continue to make mistakes, to act outside the bounds of love and truth and justice. If we do not have a written word that is outside the Church and insulated from its human failings, then how do we know that we are following Christ, how do we know the will of God? The Word has made His dwelling among us-- the Word still speaks Himself in our midst-- and it is our responsibility (and one that must be accepted with terror) to pray for a discerning Spirit and try to find Him as He lives in our midst. The Scriptures are an indispensable part of that task, recognized by those who shared our faith before us as teachings which must shape our corporate and individual lives. They are our most important theological writings, and as such they hold more authority than any other source of theology, but they do not provide an escape from our responsibility or the infinite terror of seeking to follow Christ down a path we have not walked before. We must believe that He will lead us TODAY as we work out our salvation with fear and trembling.
Thank you for stating your intentions in all this. It helps.
I'm struggling with this stuff too; and frankly, I'm just thoroughly scared. But as of yet, I still have some important conversations to have with people who have approached this fire before (for there is fire you walk through, and there is fire you walk into).
So here's something approaching a more practical application of how you answer this question. I once heard a (most likely reformed) person speaking about monumental theologians in the Christian tradition, and they drew a loose line back from Calvin to Augustan to the Apostle Paul (a sort of triple jump backwards through Church history). I might compose a slightly different list (something like Barth, Luther, Aquinas, Boethius, Augustan, Paul, Peter, James, etc), but the question presently at hand is not "who do we include in our 'theology's greatest hits' collection?" but "what is the difference between Barth, Augustan and Tertullian (on one hand) and Paul, Peter and James (on the other). We take Augustan seriously (and for good reason), but if I want to critique his body/mind/soul analogy of the Trinity then I am allowed to do so as long as I make a good argument. I am not typically allowed (in evangelical circles) to take a similar approach to Paul (for instance). I may try a new interpretation that spins Paul's teaching towards a different end, but I am not allowed to say "perhaps Paul doesn't have this quite right, and these are the reasons I think so." This is because Paul's words (or at least the extant writings attributed to Paul) have been canonized and deemed to be not merely the words of Paul the theologian but also the very word of God. This becomes problematic when Paul says things that don't exactly square with James or Peter or John (and what about Peter and all that baptism for the dead?); it becomes a problem in way that Tertullian contradicting Origen or Augustan or Polycarp is not-- we do our best to reconcile or understand the individual contributions of those Church fathers, but we allow them to be human, to err or even simply to disagree. Why not Paul? Why not the author of Hebrews? Now, I do not think that we can simply or lightly or quickly or even totally disregard what the New Testament teachers have written-- they are our greatest and most respected theologians-- but shouldn't we allow them to be theologians instead of THEOS. This puts us in a position where we are terribly responsible for those things in Scrupture that we allow to be questioned, but aren't we always and already responsible for those teachings we affirm (particularly if we say they are the words of God)? So, is Paul the very mouthpiece of Adonai, or is he our greatest theologian? (How do you think he saw himself?)
Coye, you claim to have been struggling with various unfavorable aspects of evangelicalism but in fact you have landed yourself back into a classic evangelical pitfall, that of attempting to discern God's will for your life without reference to Scripture and beyond that without reference to the church. (What does the church have to say about the bible? univocally, "it is divine"--and yet you disagree. You disavow tradition as much as scripture)
Ultimately your train of thought grants authority only to your own fervent "prayer" or soul-searching or inward consultation with the Spirit. And in that sense it is indeed fearful and terrible and beyond that I would imagine lonely and dark.
You question the view that says tradition is human but Scripture is divine. You say the line between human and divine is not clear in the life and teachings of the church. And actually I agree with you here.
But why does that automatically lead to your humanistic take on scripture and tradition and everything? What you are really driving at is that you don't think either one can be divine! You are saying that if there if human agency is functioning at all then clearly divine agency is not. When it comes to the canon you are saying that because you can't see God's unmistakable hand at work then it must not be there at all. Basically, I guess you don't believe God can work through people. Or at least we shouldn't rely on God's work in OTHER people when we go about forming our own way of life.
But you say you affirm that others were imbued with the Spirit, and this lead to Scriptures, the apocrypha, theological traditions, etc. The problem is that that was then and this is now, and you don't believe the Spirit's leading those people should be translated to the Spirit leading us today. I think this is a a disastrous consquence of your philosophy which devalues "words" and robs us of communion with the past. There is no need for fathers to teach sons in your philosophy because they do not speak the same language.
I think solid evidence of this is that you do not interact with Scripture or tradition at all in your comments. You just put on your humanistic glasses and go.
Well, I hope you don't take my comments the wrong way. Correct me where I'm wrong.
Ryan, you misunderstand me. Read what I have written before-- you have not given me a charitable or even a good surface reading. You assign me positions that are the opposite of what I explicitly say. Read it again.
And don't throw me outside the bounds of tradition so quickly. My position is not far from that of Roman Catholicism (the largest and oldest Christian church) regarding the relationship of Scripture to Tradition, and my statements about Scripture itself are well within the bounds of the Anglican tradition (the largest Protestant church). But please, read it again.
Ok, reading again, but what are you talking about terror for? It sounds to me like you are setting up our situation as a mystery which we do not have conclusive guidance for from scripture or tradition and which will require some colossal leap of faith or understanding or action. What are we facing however that has not already been dealt with in the past?
Ryan,
I'm having the hardest time thinking how to answer you: I've started this comment four or five times and given up. I'm just not sure exactly what to answer. Yes, Christianity requires a leap of faith where the evidence is not conclusive. Yes, much of our faith is mystery (especially when we talk about this unimaginable partnership between God and humanity-- how can we possibly share in His work!?!). Yes, the whole thing is full of terror-- or it should be. Isn't this the fear of God; isn't this what your friend Lewis calls "the weight of glory"? We are responsible, Ryan, for every action and every word that touches the precious eternal human persons who surround us. We are the recepients of a tradition to which we must remain faithful, but at the same time we recognize that this tradition has been the site of misogyny, anti-semitism, slavery, holy wars, ethnic cleansings, and economic and political corruption-- it has produced these things because the Church remains a human institution even as it is the body of Christ. And we are responsible if we continue a practice which is hurtful to people and hateful to God-- we can only pray to Him for mercy because our hands are stained with the blood of those we have hurt in His name. So, at the same time we must be faithful to the tradition we have received AND be faithful to God and to those who surround us. This is nothing more than what past Christians have faced, but that does not make it less of a terror. This is why we pray. This is why we cling desperately to the hope that Christ will be our head and hold the whole body together, that He will act with us as He did with Jacob's children and bring good out of what we meant for evil. This is why we beg forgiveness in that same prayer which teaches us to forgive others. We must, like Peter, step from the safety of our boat and walk to Christ out on the water: we cannot possibly stay there-- we will sink, we will die!-- but if He reaches out His hand, then we will be saved and He will take us back to the boat and dwell there with us.
Ok, I think I'm caught up now. I'd like to get back to the Bible and what you think it's role should be for us today. Do you think the Bible is part and parcel of the Christian tradition which as you point out has been the site of mysogyny, anti-semitism, slavery, and the like? Have various authors of Scripture from Moses to Paul contributed to these evils with their historically and culturally limited points of view?
If the authors of Scripture are part of the same Christian tradition as the rest of our great theologians, and their writings belong to the same institution which presided over the great evils of our history, where do you see the danger spots in applying the teaching of these 66 books to our lives today?
---
Do you think the line between human and divine was clear to Adam, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Joshua, Samuel, David, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel, and other theologians in our Christian tradition?
How do you handle the phrase, "Thus says the Lord"
---
The terror you are speaking about the is a the terror of the unknown. The terrible responsibility of going a path where noone has walked. This is not the fear of the Lord. The fear of the Lord is a given, a known. The fear of the Lord, if "terror" at all, is a fear that comes from knowing God in his holiness and knowing that in our sin we _can not_ endure his presence.
---
I'm surprised you place yourself within the Anglican tradition and somewhere close to Roman Catholocism. That's where I put myself, too.
---
I do not agree that the merely the fact that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us is what makes Christianity different from other religions. What makes Christianity different is that it is the true story of how God rescued his people
from death and the serpent. This includes the incarnation as well as the events leading up to it and following it as recorded in the Scriptures.
Sorry to break off like this but I have to go to bed. I'll try to engage your thoughts and responses more tomorrow.
I really would like to continue this conversation, but I'm getting a little tired of the two party dialogue format and would very much appreciate some other input to keep me and Ryan from spiraling into some tedious argument that misses a lot of great things that Dave or Andy or Strauss or Stephen or Adam or someone else would have picked up on. My other concern is that the general theoretical discussion has been going on for a long time without any reference to what this might mean for practical issues of living out our faith, so I would love it if we could insert some of that into the conversation. If no one else thinks this is important enough to make a contribution, then I will get back to my and Ryan's private conversation sometime soon, but I'm really hoping that a couple more hats might be thrown into the ring...
I'm currently working on a long response to your above comments concerning the cannon and our relationship with it. I think this issue is very important to our life and faith; so I'm trying to be thoughful. I hope to finish it tonight. I've been tied up with work, moving in, not having internet (or a phone for that matter!), and preparing for the new member of the family.
When is new family member expected to arrive?
In less than a week (the twenty-first is her due date, but she's in term now).
I'll let you know when things start going down.
Two questions of parental perogative: 1) are you going to have your son circumcised? 2) are you going to have him baptised as an infant?
Also, you might respond to this by making a new post in which everyone can ask Davey their baby questions. [and I don't really expect any Dave postings for at least a month after the new arrival-- for some reason babies take up a lot of time]
Finally, my term pap---I mean, comments and such: )
I. A review of your initial line of thinking
In your first comment on this string, you put forward the following line of thinking concerning the Church’s relationship to Scripture:
“‘Why are these writings important [to the Church]? Why do we regard them as more important than other writings?’ . . .the answer is ‘Because we have received them from the hands of others who have shared our faith and who regard them as Scripture.’”
You sum this up with:
“‘Scripture is received as canonical because it is our tradition to regard it as such.’”
Which leads to:
“‘Scripture is not a separate category opposed to tradition—it is a special category OF tradition.’”
This moves your reader to ask, “In what sense is the category of Scripture—as it sits within the boundaries of tradition—‘special?’”
Your text seems not altogether clear; we find out why Scripture is marked out as special among other pieces of writing—namely because, “Those Christians who came before us said, ‘These writings are vitally important and should not shape your life and faith”—but nothing is said explicitly about the specialness of the Scripture-category within tradition. Presumably, we are asked to conclude that Scripture is a special category of tradition in the sense that it is a special kind of action which those who have gone before us have performed—namely, canonizing and the preserving/honoring of the canon.
So in the world your text proposes, Scripture is not the writings themselves; it is the ongoing act of declaring a set of writings “important”—a declaration which we are actively involved in making. To put it succinctly, Scripture—as a category of tradition—is an ongoing action which continues as we declare a distinct set of writings “important.”
I don’t know how else to construe your concept of Scripture. If I have gotten it wrong, please correct my reading!
II. A few interactions with your intended directions
Your rhetorical direction points us not toward a furthering of the Scripture-act per se, but toward something strangely different (strange in regard to the Scripture-act tradition as it has been expressed thus far). The “terrible responsibility” that you point us toward is not essentially the responsibility of acting so as to preserve the importance of certain writings as it has been preserved within our tradition; instead, a different theme emerges: one of strange liberation.
Woven into the very substance of your argument is the assumption that we have somehow attained a vantage point of seeing what the fourth century councils could not see: we see that they weren’t recognizing the God given authority of certain writings over the emerging texts which dangerous individuals were putting forward as authoritative/important. They thought they were doing this, but now—with liberated eyes—we see that they were, in ACTuality (presumably the only reality we have access to) writing a script for an enduring drama called Scripture. And now that we see this is what they were doing, we can free ourselves from the confines of their (manmade) script and begin to actively amend it (with the incredible weight of “responsibility” upon us—yes—but it is clear that you would have us change the Scripture-act script).
It seems clear you have this liberation in mind as you step into the practical world of reading and responding to the canonized Gospels and Epistles vs. the writings of the canonized church fathers. Again, you want us to step outside of the drama of Scripture-act and into the freedom of emerging Justice as manifested by the Spirit among us. We can now interact with Paul and Peter and John in the same way we interact with Augustan and Barth and Aquinas: with reverence, yes, but also with a wary spiritual eye that looks for what they might have gotten wrong. This is our new task, if we can bear the immeasurable weight of its “terrible responsibility.”
I presume that you see this new responsibility taking place through some sort organized human/spirit system—I don’t imagine you would have each of us bearing this weight by ourselves (a kind of hyper-Protestantism)—but you leave no clues as to the shape of this system.
So there’s my reading/responses of your rhetorical directions. Let me know if I’ve been unfair.
III. A response to your line of thinking as I have read it
First, let me clarify that this is a response only my best reading of your initial lines of thinking. So again, if I have put forward a bad reading, please send me back to your thoughts with some help.
OK. Let me put just three responses out there:
Your line of reasoning is extremely dangerous
I think you have misconstrued the reasons particular scriptures were canonized
I think you have disregarded the claims the Biblical authors (especially the NT authors) have made concerning their position in the body/temple of Christ.
First, I think your line of reasoning is extremely dangerous because it can destroy every object of our faith by assuming it into the realm of merely acted tradition. For example, there seems to be nothing preventing me from using this form of argument to dislocate the resurrection of Christ from a powerful object of faith (i.e. it really happened) into merely an ongoing aspect of acted tradition. That is:
Why do I regard Christ’s resurrection as true? Why do we regard it as an actual event?. . .the answer is “Because we have received this belief from the hands of others who have shared our faith and who regard it as actually happening.”
This can be summed up with
Christ’s resurrection is received as actually happening because it is our tradition to regard it as such.
Which leads to:
The “event” of Christ’s resurrection is not a separate category opposed to tradition—it is a special category OF tradition.
And now, seeing as how I have recognized that Christ’s resurrection is simply a function within the network of tradition’s functions, I can now examine how it—as part of what I have received—is acting on me (since, presumably, this is all that is in fact happening); I can make my own decisions about where to place it among my other beliefs by examining its effect on me in light of my Justice-sensibilities.
No; Christ’s resurrection did occur; on this event I ground my hope. I can do no other!
I cannot accept a line of argument which reduces all the objects of my faith into mere functions within human-acted tradition.
Second, I think you have misconstrued the reasons particular scriptures were canonized. Well, more to the point, you really haven’t construed any reasons at all. You only give the council the following words, “These writings are vitally important and should not shape your life and faith.” It seems that you have pictured a group of council members sitting around the table with all kinds of manuscripts strewn about, and they have to decide from this selection which ones to declare “vitally important”—of which ones to say, “these should shape your life and faith.”
But, from what I understand, the councils hardly happened in a vacuum, and the collection of writings that they “canonized” were pretty widely accepted as scripture by the Church before they gathered together. Their council was more about protecting the church from apostates—who were selling the latest “cannons” like so much snake oil—than it was about making hard decisions about which writings were, in fact, scripture, and which were not.
Many of the New Testament scriptures were considered scripture almost immediately after they were received. Peter, in his second letter, even comments about how Paul’s letters are hard to understand, “as are the rest of the Scriptures.” Paul quotes Luke along with Deuteronomy, calling both Scripture. The New Testament manuscripts were cherished from the beginning, painstakingly copied and proliferated around the ancient world—there are no collection of writings that have been so often copied and distributed than the New Testament collection. Yes, there was a process of GENERAL recognition that, say, Peter’s letters were in fact written by the apostle Peter, but it was more a process of getting-to-the-bottom of the matter than it was deciding ad-hoc within a council that we should believe thus and such.
And this brings us to my third response: I think you have disregarded the claims the Biblical authors (especially the NT authors) have made concerning their position in the body/temple of Christ. This really has a lot to do with the last point: why did it matter that Peter actually authored the two Epistles attributed to him? (and why does it still matter?) And why was it important to preserve Paul’s writings? And why were the Gospels worth copying and distributing? Why is Paul to be treated differently than Augustan or Barth? Well, to begin with, Paul tells you to regard him as different, and Augustan is careful to tell you NOT to regard him as you regard Paul!
Paul was an Apostle, one who had seen the Lord Jesus and who had been commissioned by the Lord to preach and display the Gospel—to lay the foundation for the faith of the believers after him. In his letter to the Roman Christians he writes that he had received, “grace and apostleship [from Christ] to bring about the obedience of faith for the sake of His [Christ’s] name among ALL THE NATIONS.” In Ephesians he writs that, “Grace was given to each one of us.” Earlier, he describes what was given to him, “to me, though I am the very least of all the saints, this grace was given, to preach to the gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ and to bring to light TO EVERYONE what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God who created all things.”
I do not disagree with you that the WORD has all authority—Jesus Christ is Lord of all. So does he not have the authority to distribute the measures of his grace according to his will? Does he not have the authority to give to Paul the grace to make known to me the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God who created all things? Does he not have the power to bring about my obedience of faith through the words he gave Paul?
If you look, most of the NT authors explicitly mark out their Christ-given authority, and often they will even tell you their role in the body of Christ. John, for example, tells you in his Gospel that “he who saw it has born witness—his testimony is true, and he knows that he is telling the truth—that you may also believe.” In his first letter he writes, “I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God that you may know that you have eternal life.” In the beginning of this letter he says, “that which we have seen and heard we proclaim also to you, so that you too may have fellowship with us; and indeed our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ.”
The Apostles and the prophets—these men were marked out by the Spirit of God to proclaim the testimony of God’s new covenant with men using narrative, teaching and prophecy. They were not super human, they were not kings ruling over their subjects, they were simply responding to the measure of grace that had been given to them.
This is the proper context from which we must approach our questions about scripture: Christ is Lord, Christ expresses that Lordship by distributing his grace to his body, he gave grace to the early apostles and prophets to speak and write the foundations of the faith (Paul writes, “built on the foundations of the Apostles and Prophets).
Ok, enough for now…I look forward to hearing your responses to all this (and not only Coye’s I’d like others to let me know what they think of this as well!)
Thank you, Dave, for this significant contribution. It will, of course, take some time to think about and respond to, and I will be away from my desk for a few days as I go out of town to pick up a car. Trust that I will return and respond to what you have said. For now, I offer only a short response intended as a deposit in good faith.
I must agree-- in fact, pointing this out is one of my main intentions in asking these quesitons-- that what I am suggesting is dangerous. It is not safe. It is not guaranteed by any human construction. It is DANGEROUS. You call it a strange freedom; let me add, "let us not use our freedom as a cloak for maliciousness." What is dangerous is not necessarily bad, and what is true is not necessarily safe.
I think that your reading of my developing thoughts (and let me stress here that what I have written are QUESTIONS with no certain answers given) is accurate but incomplete. I cannot argue much, on first reading, with most sections of your exposition, but I feel you ignore my beliefs about the continued work of the Spirit and the unending commitment of Christ to dwell with His Church. This must not be ignored. The intent of this exercise is to put more faith in Him and less in our own understanding (I believe there may be a proverb about that). Well, as I am stretching the limits of briefness, I will end now for now.
: ) I knew you would pick up on my use of dangerous and start from there. You have to take the word in context with the other points and see if that danger is the danger the wild sea to a young child or the danger of an untested cliff face to a determined traveler.
Also, even though you emphasize that your thoughts are to be taken as "questions," you must admit there is still quite a bit of rhetorical momentum and direction in your quiries. I get the feeling that you're running toward a position as your asking questions about it--but I could be wrong here.
I did tip my hat to your understanding of the spirit among us when I speak of the human/spirit system you must have in mind; my sparce treatment of it is due to the fact that I have no idea what you practically mean by it. For example, are you arguing for a continuation of Apostleship? Do you have a form of heiearchy in mind? Who gets the privilidged position of judging between two seemingly valid positions? Who submits to whom at which time? Is it all ad hoc and "spirit-led" (Like my AOG friends would say)? Is it highly structured through defined church positions (Anglican; RC; etc.)?
I have not commented on your statemetns on the Spirit because I do not know what you intend it to look like.
But please don't spend your time spelling that out yet. I'd like to hear some more of your responses to my posting.
OK, in all of this I'm trying to be careful in how I speak; knowing that where I see a rising tidal wave, you see a towering cliff.
OK, here's what I'm going to do: I'm NOT going to go through everyone's term pap... I mean comments point by point and tell you what I agree with and what I don't and why. I don't want you to think that I don't appreciate and respect all the time you took thinking and writing-- I just think that it will be more profitable for me to pursue another course of action. Now, what I AM going to do is try shifting the perspective of this conversation in a way that will illuminate my earlier comments as responses to your recent comments(especially Dave and Ryan).
I want to talk primarily about two things: tradition and the work of the Spirit. My questions and tentative propositions should not be read as coming from the typical evangelical position of apathy or even open hostility towards tradition. One of my main concerns with elevating Scripture to "very word of God" is that it denigrates tradition and reduces it to "merely human". I am NOT arguing that tradition is purely human and Scripture is only part of that human tradition. If you read my statements in that way, then you have assigned me the very position I am arguing against! If you start with a very high view of tradition, on the other hand, then including Scripture within the bounds of tradition does not reduce it to the merely human but highlights the on-going work of the Spirit who is committed to the Church.
This is the second and most important point I want to make: the role of the Holy Spirit in the revelation of God through the tradition of the Church (including the Scriptures) is not a distinct point within this view of Scripture-- it IS this view of Scripture in its entirety! Unless we view the Church as the place where God speaks-- where the WORD speaks Himself, where THEOlogy happens-- then the questions and ideas I laid out above are meaningless. The Church is never SIMPLY human, but neither is it SIMPLY divine: in this way it resembles the incarnate Christ, whose mystical body it constitutes. Neither the Church nor its Scriptures are Deistic creations set in motion by Christ and left to run their course until His return; NO! they, like the whole universe, are creations held together by the living and active presence of the Holy Spirit (the Lord, the Giver of life) and would cease to exist the moment He withdrew His hand from them. I do not point out a particular place where I believe the Spirit was at work in our Tradition-- I do not say, "In the first century the Spirit inspired this handful of men for a short time to write these books"-- but this is NOT because I think the Christian tradition is merely a human creation. On the contrary, it is because Christ has and continues to be present with His Church throughout our entire (and sometimes tragic) history.
This gets back to my original question about primacy: we do not accept the Church because it has the Scruptures; rather, we accept the Scriptures because they come to us through the Church.
One last comment about WHY I think this is important: if the Church acts as the earthly guarantor of the Scriptures (and not the other way around), then the Church-- that is, you and I-- are responsible for what we affirm within (and through) the Scriptures. When standing before our Judge who knows everything we did to the least of His bretheren, we will not have the excuse of saying, "But it was written here in the book!" No, we must answer for everything we have done and encouraged others to do in His name. This is not, in my view, the ocean of relativism where I drown in my own myopic world-making; it is the cliff of responsibility where I am responsible for every stranger as if they were my neighbor or (my God!) my God.
Dave or Ryan or anybody,
if you would like to hear my specific response to a particular part of your comments, let me know and I'll do my best to respond. I did feel like I needed to make the above points first, though, and see if they provided any clarification of my tentative position on the issue. I may provide a few more unprompted responses in the near future.
Here is a thought experiment for us in the meantime: there is another archeological find of scrolls similar in significance to the Dead Sea Scrolls, but this time it is New Testament texts that are found in a cave in northern Egypt. Among the numerous copies of Romans and Ephesians and the Gospels, etc., there are multiple copies of a previously undiscovered Pauline epistle. The language and style is consistent with Paul's other writings, the carbon dating on the scrolls is consistent with late 1st to early 2nd century, and they appear to be copies of a letter to the Corinthians mentioned in the Biblical texts but thought to be lost two-thousand years ago (there are, in fact, at least two such missing epistles to the Corinthians). What would be the proper way to regard this extra-Biblical Pauline writing? Would it be accepted as authoritative Scripture? Would it be regarded as God's Word? How would this differ from finding "new" texts by Polycarp or Augustan?
Is the office of Apostle an office that continues to this day? If so, who are the present Apostles?
I know who the Apostles were, but I don't know what the "office of apostle" is. I can't answer because I don't understand to what you refer. The Apostles were those who were with Christ (and Paul as one unnaturally born), so as far as that goes, there aren't any Apostles running around these days (if so, they would be a couple of thousand years old, and that would be impressive in itself).
I decided today to respond to some more of Dave's term paper. Dave said: "The 'terrible responsibility' that you point us toward is not essentially the responsibility of acting so as to preserve the importance of certain writings as it has been preserved within our tradition; instead, a different theme emerges: one of strange liberation."
There are essentially two interconnected responsibilities that I was refering to in my comments (both of which fall under what Kierkegaard would call the responsibility to live as an individual before God): we are responsible to and for our neighbors and we are responsible for our treatment of Scripture.
The first responsibility-- to our neighbor-- is that which Christ lays out in the parables of the good Samaritan and of the sheep and goats. The greatest commandment is "Love God", the second is "Love your neighbor", and there may not be much difference between how you live out those two commands ("whatever you have done to the least of these, you have done to me"). This is also what I am talking about when I make references to responsibility for the Other or the coming of the Other. This responsibility is terrible because the requirement far exceeds our own ability to act (thanks be to God for Jesus Christ).
The second responsibility-- for our treatment of Scripture-- has a couple of different facets. First, there is our responsibility to the text; primarily, this means doing everything we can to make the best reading of the text and not abusing it with poor or uncharitable readings. Since Scripture is part of tradition, we also have a responsibility for reading it as part of the larger tradition of Christian theology, which means we must respond to Augustan and Luther and Aquinas and eveyone else who has contributed to the development of Christianity (and we have to give them careful, charitable readings as well). This responsiblity is terrible because it places the weight of the entire Christian tradition on our shoulders (Thanks be to God for the Holy Spirit who is our interpreter and the life-- pneuma, breath, spirit-- of the Church).
If we are careful and serious with both of these responsibilities, then they should not conflict. A good, informed and charitable reading of the Scriptures should not lead us into harming our neighbor. I worry though, that calling the Scriptures "the very Word of God" is not charitable to the text of Scripture (idolatry is a sin against God and against the idol) and can (indeed, has) led the Church into acting without charity towards our neighbors. That is how we are responsible for our Tradition: we are responsible to preserve the Tradition and not re-write it according to our whims, and we are responsible for how we treat the Other in the name of that Tradition.
I feel that I must respond to what Dave said about the Resurrection. The logic I have used placing Scripture within the Tradition of the Christian Church cannot be used to "dislocate" the resurrection of Christ from its importance as an historical event. The Resurrection is the founding event of the Church: without it, there is no Christianity. This is strengthened (not destroyed) by my argument that the Scriptures are not the foundation of our faith. Scripture is a testimony to the event, not the event itself, and calling it the foundation of the Church would be idolatry. This is not the case when we refer to Christ and His Ressurrection. The Scriptures were gradually written, accepted and canonized by those in the Christian tradition (by the Church), but there would be no Tradition without the Resurrection. Now, I can say that Scripture is part of Tradition without speaking any blasphemy. The Resurrection is also believed traditionally, but if I say that it is a category of tradition, then I have broken that tradition apart by denying the very object of our faith, that the Word has made His dwelling among us.
Dave,
what is it you find so important about Apostleship (and what do you mean by that term). My feeling towards Apostles is that there were the original 12, minus Judas, plus Matthias, plus Paul, plus James (that should just about do it, although an argument might be made for the evangelists Luke and Mark). I think they are set apart from other believers in a similar way that the "Church Fathers" are set apart. You might even say that the Apostolic period preceeded the Patristic period in the development of the early Church (I haven't really thought this out thoroughly, though, so don't be too hard on me here). The Apostles were the first people entrusted with the keeping and spreading the faith; they are, in a sense, the fathers of the Church (which is why the creed calls the Church Apostolic and why certain churches find it very imporant to claim apostolic succession of bishops). This is my understanding of the word "Apostle", and it should be easy to see from this why I don't say things about modern day apostles. But I sense that you have something different in mind, ant this something is closely related to the question of Scripture and of God's Word. Please tell me about it when you have the time (in between diapers and feedings or whenever).
One other thing: you asked me, "Who gets the privilidged position of judging between two seemingly valid positions?" My answer is "no one; there is no privileged position." This is why I am protestant rather than Roman Catholic. There is no pontif or Cardinal or anyone else who has a privileged position in reading the Scriptures and interpolating them into a lived life. Instead, we come together and submit our reading of Scripture to the whole Church (or, more practically, to those members of the Church who are present to us) and see if our reading is accepted and acceptable. (I include the theological texts of former believers in that group who are present to us and whose council we must take under advisement.) Now, I don't expect consensus or a vote or anything like that, but one believer saying to his brother, "You should consider what Paul says in Philemon," or "What about Augustan's passage about this in Confessions," or "Does this really demonstrate love for your neighbor?" There is no final court of appeal (not visible on earth, anyways), but as we work out our salvation together with fear and trembling, we trust that Christ will be among us as He promised to be with any gathering of two or three in His name.
I would love to hear Andy or Adam or Steve or Ryan or Dusty or anyone else tell me what they think. I am, after all, taking these ideas before my brothers to hear their approval or rebuke (and praying that the Spirit will lead us towards Christ through the process).
Post a Comment