religiocity

Posted on: May 22nd, 2023 Either/Or: Levinson vs. Machen

For better and for worse, my theological mind is the product (to some extent) of Westminster Theological Seminary, founded in reaction to the “liberalization” of Princeton Seminary, by J. Gresham Machen (and others) in the 1920’s.

Machen most famous book, perhaps, bears the title Christianity and Liberalism. In it he lays down a stark “either/or”: you can be a Christian, or a liberal, but not both. In this stark, antithetical opposition, you must choose sides: are you a Christian, or are you a liberal?

In the introduction to his 1985 Sinai & Zion: an Entry into the Jewish Bible, Jon Levenson displays a completely different attitude. Describing a situation in which premodern Jewish exegetes of the Hebrew Bible were faced with problems (even contradictions) in the text, Levinson writes:

In the great work of post biblical Judaism, the Talmud, for example, one rabbi doubts that Moses wrote the last eight verses of the Torah on the grounds that he could not have written about his own death and burial. The retort is immediately offered that it was not Moses but God who composed these verses. Moses wrote them down in tears. The revealing point is that the … position [that] assumes that a commitment to tradition does not require the Jew to ignore empirical evidence in the name of an increasingly blind faith. One wonders where the Talmudic sage who voiced the doubt would have stood in the modern dispute, when so much more evidence against mosaic authorship has been developed. In any event doubts or ambivalence about Mosaic authorship of the Torah and a host of other traditional beliefs appear on occasion in medieval commentaries which the tradition accepts. Even the possibility of scribal error in the text of the Torah as it reaches us seems to have occurred to some of the great rabbinic exegetes. It is surely the case that a few of them were willing to entertain the notion that the plain sense of a verse can contradict the normative law (halakhah) which the Talmudic rabbis derived from it. In instances of this sort, what is interesting and possibly enlightening for the modern situation is that awareness of the contradiction does not seem to have dampened the exegetes commitment either to the observance of halakhah or to the exposition of the plain sense of scripture. This would imply that Jewish tradition includes a form of biblical scholarship which is more than mere repetition, rearrangement, or extension of data known through the tradition itself. Tradition, so understood, will include novelty, even contradiction. It will not be fossilized, but vital, growing, and to a certain extent, changing.

John Levinson, Sinai & Zion, 6–7.

Now, this posture of Levinson’s—which resonates quite well with the recent emphasis of David Bentley Hart in his Tradition and Apocalypse—stands in stark contrast to that of J. Gresham Machen. It is, quite simply, vastly superior, not least in its admission that tradition (which here would include the Bible which is always already interpreted) is manifold and diverse, riddled with inconsistencies. (Here we remember that our faith is not in the Bible or in any tradition, but rather in the Lord Jesus Christ.)

To put it simply, you can have Levinson and Hart, or you can have Machen. For me, the choice is clear.

Posted on: August 11th, 2022 Gregory of Nyssa on Human Sexual Difference

For Gregory of Nyssa, writing in his On the Making of Man, sexual difference is not simply a beneficent feature of the good creation God made, but rather is a result of the fall of the human race into sin. (More precisely it is the result of God’s foreknowledge of man’s fall.)

In §16 Greg is saying that, in Gen 1:27, we see something like a two-step process or dynamic or development. First, God created man in his image, with no sexual differentiation. Then, in a later step (or in some kind of derivative manner) God, “perceiving beforehand by his power of foreknowledge what, in a state of independence and freedom, is the tendency of the motion of man’s will,” introduced the distinction between male and female. [206] Yet, Gregory re-emphasizes, this distinction has no reference to the Divine Archetype.” [207] Rather it “is an approximation to the less rational nature.” (Here Greg is thinking of the irrational nature of “brutes.”” [205])

In §17 Gregory is arguing against some “adversaries” of his. Yet, for our purposes here, what he agrees on with his adversaries is far more important than what he disagrees with them on (namely, that, given the absence of procreation and marriage before the fall, had man not sinned, “human souls would not have existed in plurality” [209] and “the human race would have remained in the pair of the first-formed.” [209]

What does he agree with them on? Far more importantly, Gregory holds the common assumption with them that the original intention of God for his human creature(s) in paradise did not include sexual procreation or marriage. (Further, he implies that, along with the absence of these two features, sexual difference itself is absent.)

Now, what does this stance of Gregory’s imply for the sex(uality) and gender wars of our contemporary culture, including church culture, or the situation within the churches?

First, I must register one additional point. One of Gregory’s themes is that the cosmic eschaton (the final destiny of the human race and indeed all creation, named variously as “the beatific vision”; “deification”; “the new heavens and the new earth”) is correlated to the origin. We glimpse this insistence of Gregory’s not only in the title of §23 (“That he who confesses the beginning of the world’s existence must necessarily agree also as to its end”), but also in the inherent logic of his argument in §17, his rebuttal against his “adversaries.” Appealing to Jesus’ response to the Sadducees in Lk 20:35–6, that “in the resurrection, they neither marry nor are given in marriage,” Gregory writes that:

I hasten to add, in a preview of how I plan to develop this theme, that in his recent Tradition and Apocalypse, David Bentley Hart stresses that, what it means to be faithful to (the) Christian tradition is not simply to attend to the past (the Scriptures, the apostles, the church fathers, and the teachings and events therein), but also to the “future,” or rather to the final telos envisioned in those same events and writings. Not just the origin, but the eschaton.

Isn’t it interesting that, in the above text, Gregory of Nyssa is discussing both? In both, human beings are conceived of as sexless in some very real sense. What implications might this have for our contemporary struggles with sex & gender? To that question I hope to turn my attention very soon.

Posted on: August 1st, 2022 Hosea, Gomer, & “Sex Workers”

Sometime over the last few months, I have discovered a kindred spirit in the person of Mark Vernon. I have never met Mark (I’ve only interacted with him very briefly online), but through his youtube videos & his books (one book, rather, for I’ve not yet gotten to the others), I can tell that he is channeling something that resonates with my own views/interests/posture. (Sidenote: it was our shared interest in the work of David Bentley Hart that allowed Mark to emerge on my “radar screen.”)

The book in question, The Secret History of Christianity: Jesus, the Last Inkling, and the Evolution of Consciousness (a bit of an unfortunate title, I admit, as it evokes Dan-Brown type images of conspiracy and underground, possibly new-agey plots), is a gem not simply because of the way it applies the thought of Owen Barfield (dear friend of Lewis & Tolkien, whom they both regarded as the most intelligent of the three), but also because of one particular focus it has by way of a “shift” in (what Vernon thinks of as) spiritual consciousness: that of the eighth-century prophets of Israel, Amos and Hosea in particular.

For it just so happens that in my Episcopal parish we have been reading “the Bible in one year” (thanks, Nicky Gumbel!) and discussing it in our Sunday morning Christian Formation Class, that last couple of weeks focusing on the minor prophets of Jonah, Amos, and Hosea.

Allow me to quote the upshot of Vernon’s point about these prophetic shifts in posture:

Now, in our Formation Class yesterday morning, we had an interesting discussion about Gomer, the prostitute whom God commanded Hosea to marry. One good friend (extremely thoughtful) in the discussion suggested that I should refer to Gomer as a “sex worker,” I suggestion which I received with open appreciation. However, reading the Vernon book is causing me to reconsider, for he rightly points out that “Gomer … was a sacred prostitute in the cult of Baal.” Unlike a “sex worker” that we might find the twenty-first century West, this woman is not working for a wage. Rather, she is enmeshed in a system of religious power. While a sex worker has (or ought to have, according to some, myself probably included) the same kind of autonomy, the same rights, as any other worker in a secular, capitalist society, Gomer is, quite plainly, a religious slave.

This slave also turns out to be a symbol that the Hebrew Bible uses to make a point about the new thing that God is doing in his history with his people: the deepening of a relationship starkly different from those having to do with the traditional deities of that age. This relationship is one of the heart, one of love. It is a relationship with God uncountenanced within the context of what Barfield calls “original participation.”

Posted on: June 21st, 2022 O’Donovan’s Genealogy of Christendom

Despite the fact that I disagree (quite strongly) with its conclusion pertaining to the liberal tradition of political philosophy, Oliver O’Donovan’s The Desire of the Nations is an invaluable book.

Among its most conspicuous strengths, in my view, is its clear articulation of (what I call) the historia salutis of God’s people, and how, prior to any kind of grasp of a given political regime—say, the rule of the judges in the Old Testament, the monarchy of Jerusalem, the exile, or the restoration period—one must first attend to the distinctive character of each respective epoch. In other words, the character of each regime—together with one’s evaluation of it—is conditioned by the historical situation in which it took place. One is tempted, even, to venture that for O’Donovan, history is something like “first philosophy.” With all of this I am deeply impressed, and in profound agreement.

A second strength of the book—and this forms the bulk of this essay—is what I will call his “genealogy of Christendom.” How could one possibly know how to think about and to assess the role of the Church in modern western society/culture without closely attending to the various iterations, the various ways in which the relation between what I will often call “the priest” (that is, the Papacy, the Episcopacy, the Church) and “the king” (the emperor of the Roman Empire, the German tribal kings in the fifth and sixth centuries, the civil magistrate during the time of the Reformation, the modern nation state)? Each of these shifts traces the development which leads to our set of assumptions today, for example assumptions about the separation between church and state.

Before I rehearse the details of the genealogy, I want to emphasize two helpful points O’Donovan makes:

First, of the three roles/vocations/ministries/modes that we can discern in the way that the God of Israel implements his rule in the Old Covenant—“salvation,” “judgement,” and “inheritance”—only one falls under the appropriate ministry of “the king” after Christ: that of judgement. Salvation and inheritance (a rather complicated notion which for O’Donovan includes both the promised land of Israel, including how that is reconfigured in the New Covenant, for example in Romans 8, as well as the Torah of Israel, also reconfigured in the New Covenant) remain under the purview of the Church founded by Christ and the apostles.

Second, the specific destiny to which “the king”—the rulers, the civil magistrate—is called in the epoch of the of Church is (in O’Donovan’s language) is to disappear. That is, now that King Jesus has ascended to the right hand of the Father and has been seated on his throne at the right hand of the Father—an event complex he calls “the exaltation”—all other earthly kings are called to cede authority to him, to King Jesus.

I’d like to register a quick paradox here on this last point of O’Donovan’s (about the exaltation of Christ and the disappearance of the rulers): on the one hand, O’Donovan’s radical claim about the Christ’s exaltation & enthronement—that he really is the one true King of the world—commands respect and admiration. On the other hand, though, this radical claim itself forms the intriguing basis for his embrace of liberal democracy (or to use a term closer to his own idiom, liberal constitutionalism): uniquely in the liberal arrangement, he thinks, what one sees is that the rulers truly have, to a striking degree, disappeared. Insofar as constitutional regimes in the West have rooted authority in the peoples’ discernment of the will of God (note: not “in the people themselves, or in the will of the people”) they have succeeded in working out the inevitable vocation and destiny of politics in the west: to make the rulers—kings, autocrats, feudal lords—vanish, thus ceding authority to King Jesus.

It is, as I say, an intriguing claim. So much so that I wish it were true. And, had I read the book when it was published in the 1990’s, perhaps I’d have embraced it. Yet with the post-liberal cultural chaos we’ve witnessed over the last couple of decades—chaos which could be summed up by the word “nationalism”—I’m left unconvinced. (Alas, O’Donovan fails, in the main, to anticipate the rise of such neofascist waves.) That, plus the apparent comfort O’Donovan has with capitalism, give me extreme pause.

And yet, the rigor (including meticulous historical rigor) of the book do not fail to impress. Hence the following genealogy (with my own tweaks), crucial to any understanding of Christendom and political liberalism:

Eusebius of Caesaria: the “rout of the demons.” Standing on the Milvian Bridge, as it were, witnessing the emergence of a Christian, Constantinian political order, Eusebius’ attitude could be summarized as “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!” (O’Donovan, 197). Eusebius identified the fulfilment of “the prophesies which pointed to a universal reign of God” as “the creation of a single empire” (198). For Eusebius, that is, “faith has become sight.” The victory of King Jesus (Col 2:15) has now begun to spill over, to be implemented, in the hic et nunc.

Ambrose & Augustine:  redefining the boundary.

Ambrose, who forced Emperor Theodosius II to do penance before him in the snow, clearly sees “the king” as subordinate to “the priest.” (Somewhat against the grain of O’Donovan, I see a deep continuity here between Eusebius and Ambrose.)  While Ambrose does hold that it is the special prerogative of “the king” to exercise judgement, he also believes that the church maintains the right “to judge the judge” (O’Donovan, 200–201).

Note: one key issue in the configuration of the relationship between “the priest” and “the king” is the issue of temporality versus spatialization. O’Donovan wisely sees the exilic period (as opposed to the Davidic/Jerusalem monarchy) as the paradigmatic configuration for the time after Christ, for it makes clear that the reign of God is an age to come. That is, its relationship to earthy rule/rulership is one of temporality, as opposed to the situation during the monarchy, in which the two reigns were superimposed onto one another such that the two rules are seen to occur within the same shared sphere. (One advantage of O’Donovan’s approach here is that it implies a full respect for the anti-kingship polemical strains we see, for example, in the book of Judges.)

O’Donovan also points out (on the other hand) the sense in which Ambrose does begin ever so slightly to see a kind of “shared sphere” of authority between priest and king: “a king bears the image of God, a bishop the image of Christ” (O’Donovan, 101). Although this quotation is not from Ambrose but rather from one (fourth century) Ambrosiaster, it nevertheless articulates the view from this perspective: yes, priest oversees king, but, to put it simply and directly, the king is beginning to “share the same space/sphere” as the priest.

Augustine, in turn, takes this dual spatial configuration and intensifies it. The two cities are seen as comingled, and the net effect, for our purposes, is to undermine the “victory of Christ’s exaltation” that we see Eusebius pointing to.

Gelasius: two rules. While Augustine said that “two loves made two cities,” Gelasius now says that “Two there are by whom this world is ruled as princes.” Hence he intensifies the shared sphere aspect of the configuration even further.

With the substitution of one word (“Two there are by whom the church is ruled”) Gelasius then crosses a line, subtly but really. From this point on the “notional distinction between the two societies is gone.” “One can no longer say that the Christian emperor ruled qua civil society but not qua heavenly city.” Now, the emperor rules the church directly. This separation now turns into an agonistic battle in which “priest” & “king” vie for superiority, as they argue: which should take priority, the temporal or the spiritual?

The “Gregorian Reforms”: the Supremacy of Spiritual Authority. O’Donovan ably narrates the attempt (a successful attempt, no less) of this reform (not unlike two others: the Mendicant movement of the thirteenth century and the anit-Erastianism of the sixteenth-century Calvinist and Tridentine [Suarezian] reforms, Cf. 196) to re-establish priestly/ecclesial supremacy over that of the king.

Here, the church is bolstered to make it competitive with the civil magistrate. The church now needs an elaborate structure of government supporting it” (O’Donovan, 205). There is a hardening of the principle that the spiritual must have rule over the secular. Rivalry with the civil rulers “on their own turf.” Both “natural law” and “salvation history” (“civilizational progress”) are appealed to for justification (O’Donovan, 206). Yet, the jurisdiction of these papalists was “not that of empire.” Wow: all property rights are now exercised in the authority of the pope, who now owns all property (O’Donovan, 206).

Marsilius of Padua & Luther: the Authority of the Word Alone.

With the rediscovery of Aristotle in the 13^th [actually the 12^th] cent., the contrast between “nature” & “grace” becomes a big deal, and of course “grace wins” (duh: who has the power, at first?). But, in a dynamic wh mirrors philosophy in general, the long-term effect here is the eventual triumph of nature over grace…. That’s how compelling Aristotle was (and also the nature of subversion, how “the underdog always wins”).

Franciscan row over “absolute poverty” (O’Donovan, 207). “From the ideal of absolute poverty it seemed to follow [like pulling a thread in a garment] that the church could play no role in society” (O’Donovan, 207). The long-term result: an attempt to formulate a concept of authority based on the authority of the word (the Word of God) alone” (O’Donocan, 207). The most important upshot: the idea that “Gospel truth has its own distinct authority,” unrelated to coercion/force.”

“With this distinction b/t different kinds of authority we suddenly confront some … modern dilemmas.” For an insightful list of examples, see 208.

“Both Lutheran and Anglican Reformers founded their view of church-state relations on this distinction of authority into disparate kinds” (O’Donovan, 209).Yet Luther’s apparent revival of Augustine’s “two kingdoms” duality “turns out to be an ideal one, requiring zwei Regimente to reinforce at a practical/functional level the zwei Reiche.” (O’Donovan, 209). Luther also converts the spiritual/secular distinction into inner/outer. Luther was influenced by “the king’s two bodies,” a medieval lawyers’ distinction.

Calvin & Suarez: Restoring the Balance.

“The Marsilian pattern, having triumphed at the Reformation, steadily lost ground thereafter. To recover equilibrium, rather than to stress the difference, was the chief object of the later sixteenth century and shaped the final phase of Christendom” (O’Donovan, 209–10). (Note: I think that what O is here implying is that, in the previous phase of “the authority of the word alone” what actually occurred is a lopsided power that was arrogated to the “the king,” to the civil magistrate.)

Suarez (and Vitoria, both members of the Salamanca school) advocated a position with the following planks:

The Calvinists. In response to the Erastian reforms (wh took power & influence from the church & handed it to the magistrate), the Calvinists were looking “to claim back the church’s social space.” Yet in so striving, they do not seem to want the church to be able to wield power over the state. Rather, with the “power” of church discipline, the consistory had a strong influence over society, especially if the ruler was a member of the church, and especially given the local jurisdiction of the consistory in each particular city-state (canton?).

Much to digest in this brief genealogy. In my next post I plan to offer some conclusions.

Posted on: May 26th, 2022 A Psalmic “Koan”

In my morning prayer time today (in Psalm 119), I came across the following two lines:

• “I have sworn to keep your … judgements.” (Ps 119:106)
• “O LORD … teach me your … judgements.” (Ps 119:108)

Now, what is going on here? How can the Psalmist—or you or I—presume to be able to keep God’s judgements (v 106) when we need to be taught what they are (and hence clearly do not even know what they are)?

Now, there’s obviously a whole lot going on here … and I am by no means trying to cast aspersions upon the Psalm or to suggest any incoherence.

If anything is undermined here, it is any facile presumption that keeping God’s judgements, being faithful to him, is a straightforward or obviously clear endeavor.

What are the judgements of the LORD? The koan-like character of these lines reminds us that knowing them is the task of a lifetime. Yes, we must commit ourselves to faithfulness, but even as we do that, and with God’s grace, more is unfolded to us. More is revealed.

In the Christian life, there is no easy compliance.

Posted on: August 3rd, 2021 Who may dwell in your tabernacle?

The purpose of this short post is simple: to articulate how and why the Psalms speak of Jesus Christ.

While all of the Psalms are christocentric—in fact according to the Book of Hebrews Jesus is the one who sings the Psalms—Psalm 15 is a particularly apt example, for it requires a kind of perfection in order for one to experience God’s presence.

“LORD, who may dwell upon your holy hill?” Who can rest in your peace and enjoy your presence?” Only she who is blameless. Only the one who speaks the truth in a completely authentic manner. Only one who never gives into the temptation of wrongful financial gain.

Who has done these things? Absolutely no one.

Who has done these things, has kept the law blameless, from the heart? No one. No one, that is except for the man Jesus Christ.

So who may enjoy God’s presence? Who is the one for whom God’s temple is open and available? Only Jesus Christ … and those who are found in him, who are united to him by faith, who are members of his body, having been buried with him in death, and raised with him in newness of life.

Why may enjoy the life-giving presence of God? Those who are mystically in Christ.

Posted on: November 13th, 2020 The Psalmist goes “meta”

Have you ever heard a theologian say something like the following:

It’s not that God is beautiful; God is beauty itself.

It’s not that God is good; God is goodness itself.

It’s not that God is true; God is truth itself.

When the theologian speaks this way, the theologian has gone “meta.”

I once heard a sermon in which Tim Keller does not say that Jesus revolutionizes the economy, or that Jesus revolutionizes politics or that Jesus revolutionizes marriage. No. Instead what Keller says is that Jesus revolutionizes revolution. When Keller said this, he went “meta.”

In a similar way, in Psalm 68 the Psalmist goes “meta.” In verse 18 of that Psalm (BCP), he says,

You have gone up on high and led captivity captive.

He does not say, “You have led the terrorist captive,” or “You have led the enemy captive,” or “You have led the Pharaoh captive.” No. Instead, the Psalmist goes “meta,” saying, “You have led captivity captive.”

Best of all, St. Paul quotes this “meta statement” in Eph 4:8, applying it to the victory of Christ in the Ascension:

When he ascended on high, he made captivity itself a captive; he gave gifts to his people.”

Posted on: July 10th, 2020 Notes on sin, death, sacrifice (a brief sketch)

If there is a contradiction between modern evolution and orthodox Christian theology, it goes something like this:

Christianity (the biblical story) says that humans die (and suffer disease) only because of sin (e.g., Rom 8:10). But evolution says that animal and biological death was a necessary condition for the evolutionary emergence of the human being.

This seems like a contradiction (or something like it), because in order for both the biblical story and evolution to be true, one must must hold that without sin, a death-filled process led up to the emergence of a creature who was never going to die, who was never “intended” to die.

Unless. Unless what my friend Nathan Jennings implies in his book Liturgy and Theology is true. For there he suggests that what God has always wanted (and had always wanted) from humanity is sacrifice, including self-sacrifice. Just as Paul in Rom 12 urges Christians to “present your bodies as living sacrifices,” so also Adam (not intended merely literally) was always supposed to lay down his life in sacrifice to God (and others?). Then and only then, could God raise the human up (or resurrect the human) to an even higher kind of life.

(Nathan develops this idea, among other ways, in terms of the significance of the creation of the human on Day 6, and making some connections about eating.)

If this is right, then it means that we can have both evolution and the biblical story, for death has always been part of God’s plan. For lower creatures, it was part of the process leading up to Adam; for Adam (or humans) it was intended to be in the form of pre-resurrection self-sacrifice.

In conclusion, then, we can say that what the Fall (or the entrance of sin into the world) brings about not death, not even human death. Rather, it brings about involuntary human death.

Posted on: April 16th, 2020 NT Wright on History & Eschatology

NT Wright’s 2018 Gifford Lectures are well worth grappling with, as is the book-form version of the same, History and Eschatology. While I take issues with his historiographical methodology (wh is a bit too positivistic), I think that his presentation of the actual view of first century Jewish thought is absolutely superb.

If we ask the question, “What is history, and what are its contents?” then the Christian can start with St. Paul & the Gospel writers (that is, the apostolic teaching of the NT itself).

But before we can ask, “What do the NT writers think history and its contents are?” we must investigate the historically conditioned character of their minds.

Ah, but before we can ask about the historically conditioned character of their minds, we must first ask about the historically conditioned character of our minds (that is, of the minds of modern interpreters, especially those who practice historical-critical method of biblical interpretation).

There are, then, three levels of history in view in NT Wright’s lecture series (and his book History and Eschatology):

• the history which conditions the modern mind (which NTW rightly describes in terms of Epicureanism);
• the history which conditioned the ancient (first century) mind (predominantly, at least in this lecture series/book, second Temple Judaism with its biblical themes of Temple, Sabbath, & Image);
• the history which those ancient writers took to be real and determinative: the redemptive history—which is always already eschatological—of God’s covenant people.

After each of these investigations has been made, it is theoretically possible finally to ask: Can we ourselves adopt the apostles’ same position on history, namely the embrace of the historia salutis as narrated in Scripture? The striking reality is that, given many strands of postmodern theory (themselves neoplatonic in inspiration) this latter possibility is (in the spirit of Ricœur’s “after the desert of criticism we long to believe again”)  actually quite plausible and attractive.

Posted on: January 2nd, 2020 Enns: God, stories, children

Here is the link to a post I mentioned in a recent Christian formation class on Judges. Enjoy!

Posted on: January 10th, 2019 BCP Psalter Notes (Translations & Traditions)

The aim of this blog post is, after fumbling around with this issue for the better part of two decades, to document something of the history of the Psalms of David, as they appear in the present addition of the American Book of Common Prayer (1979).

Speaking of the Psalms, have you ever wondered why, in some presentations of the psalter, the versification differs from that of other renderings? (For example, in the English Standard Version–beloved of evangelical believers–Psalm 7 has seventeen verses, but in the Roman Catholic Douay-Rheims, eighteen.) Along the way, I will account for that discrepancy (at least in part), as well.

As a traditional Anglican (at least aspirationally), I can say that the Psalms are a foundational part of my life. They feature prominently in virtually every Episcopal worship service. They form the core of the Daily Office. They are the staple of my devotional practice. For any scholar or thinker interested in the historical context of poetry in the history of Western culture (as I, again, aspire to be), the Psalms are an important instance of this literary genre.

Hence, my motivation to produce this brief article.

As Marion Hatchett narrates in his Commentary on the American Prayer Book (see especially pp. 55-–3), the history the BCP Psalter begins before the first ever English Prayer Pook popped into existence in 1549. It was in 1535 that Miles Coverdale translated the Psalms for the newly minted English translation of Holy Writ called quite simply the Great Bible. It is this translation of the Psalms (revised by Coverdale in 1539) which was included in Cranmer’s 1549 Prayer Book.

As Hatchett points out, however, this psalter was (in the venerable words of Fight Club) actually something of a “copy of a copy of a copy.” It translated the Latin Vulgate’s translation of the Greek Septuigint’s translation of the original Hebrew. So it is that the Scottish Prayer Book of 1637 opted in favor of the groundbreaking King James Version of the Psalms instead, as this iteration leapfrogged directly back to the original Hebrew itself.

With Elizabeth’s revision of the BCP in 1662, the conservative voices prevailed, however: while agreeing to adopt to the KJV (or, as it is known on the other side of the pond, the Authorized Version) for the Epistles and Gospel lessons for the Sunday lections, they nevertheless insisted on retaining Coverdale’s rendering of the Psalms.

In astonishing fact, this trend has remained in force until the present day. The 1979 American book itself retains Coverdale’s psalms, albeit in heavily redacted form, so as to conform it much more closely to the original Hebrew.

And finally to the point about versification discrepancy. While Coverdale’s original work was based on the Latin, he nevertheless was more “Hebraic”—more “renaissance humanistic” as opposed to “medieval traditional”—in some ways. For example, he opted against the LXX’s move to render the incipits of the Psalms as the first verse of any given Psalm. Take, for example, Psalm 7, the first verse of which in the ESV is “O LORD my God, in you do I take refuge….” In contrast to this, the LXX has this line (in Greek) as verse two. Most Catholic bibles follow this tradition, whereas most Protestant ones (including Coverdale & the BCP) don’t.

So in some ways Coverdale was quite de rigeur for his time, and in another ways quite antiquated.

(One final issue: how did the versification of the Psalter come about in the first place? To this question I will perhaps address a future blog post.)

Posted on: September 18th, 2018 Human Parts, Wholes & Souls: Some Clarfications

This past Sunday at Christ Church South we had a really fun “Sunday School” (aka, “Christian Formation”) Class during the 10AM hour, right before the service of Holy Eucharist. Fun, and riveting. It was a lively discussion, and I admit that some of what I said, some of the “dopamine bombs” I dropped, may have caused a bit of confusion. Hence some clarification might be in order.

Let me back up a bit.

Last year at Christ Church South, 31 adults were confirmed (or received, or “reaffirmed”) into the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Way of following Christ. What a joy it is to “do life” and to walk with Christ, together with these brothers & sisters in Christ, these new friends who share in our Eucharistic community!

And yet, Christ Church (in Tyler, Texas) exists and functions in the midst of a particular cultural context. One dimension of that context is that East Texas is what you might call the “Bible Belt,” or a particular region in the “Bible Belt.” This means that the dominant cultural assumptions in East Texas are shot through and penetrated by (a watered down) conservative, Protestant life theology.

Now, this is not all bad. Even conservative, Protestant fundamentalists are sisters and brothers in Christ, and, as a fellow follower of Christ, I rejoice in our common fellowship in the Lord. To be sure, the purpose of this blog post is not to denigrate or to insult these fellow believers in any way.

And yet, in order for me to clarify a couple of points which came up in last Sunday’s class, I must differentiate my position from some convictions which are held in some quarters of the conservative, Protestant, evangelical world. There are two areas, in particular, which I have in mind: the relationship between the human soul and body, and the issue of dichotomy versus trichotomy vis-à-vis the human soul.

First, the human soul and its relationship to the human body. Now, I don’t have time to write an entire tome on this issue (nor do I desire to do so). The specific claim I made yesterday, in the context of robust discussion surrounding the question of what “happens” to the soul after the death of the individual human person, is that the Hebrew language—the language in which (what Christians call) the Old Testament was originally written—has no term for soul. (Ironically, during the liturgy, the congregation read Psalm 116:1-8 together, and in one of these versed the word “soul” is used!)

I do not deny that English translations of the OT employ the word “soul” to translate a certain Hebrew term. Nor am I arguing that such a move is an erroneous translation.

The Hebrew term which is often translated as “soul” is the Hebrew nephesh. As is often the case, here it is wise to go back to the beginning of our story, and to attend to the very first (or at least one of the first) instance(s) of this term in the Hebrew Bible. I have in mind Gen. 2:7: “Then the LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.” The phrase “living creature” here is the Hebrew nephesh haya. (The term nephesh is the same term which pops up in Ps 116:8.)

Gen 2:7, by the way, is “riffed on” by Paul in 1 Cor 15:45: “Thus it is written, ‘The first man Adam became a living being’; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit.” Here Paul is saying that Christ is kind of like the “new and improved Adam.” Now, the word for “being” here is the Greek term psyche (as in “psychology,” the logos of the soul). Paul translates—or rather he quotes the Greek Septuagint (LXX) translation of—nephesh in Gen 2:7 as psyche.

Paul uses a Greek concept, that of the individual human soul, the psyche, to communicate the truth of the Hebrew Scriptures. This kind of thing happens all the time in the apostolic teaching of the apostles, contained in the NT. It is worth remembering that it is the Greek LXX which the apostles—including the Gospel writers—authoritatively quote.

But the point is that psyche is a Greek concept. It is different from the Hebrew nephesh, which really means something closer to “life” or “creature” or “living thing.”

This is what I mean when I claim that the Hebrew language—unlike Greek—contains no term for our concept of soul. There is an important point to grasp here, and it bears upon questions such as “what happens to the soul after one dies?” To “cut to the chase” in this brief blog post,  that the Hebrew Bible has no concept of the soul is a cautionary warning, in my opinion, that we ought to beware of certain overemphases on the idea of the soul “going to heaven” when one dies. This is especially true when it comes to the sustained stress of St. Paul, a brilliant first century Jewish thinker who understood the Greek mind and also sat at the feet of Gamaliel, precisely on the resurrection of the body, not least in 1 Cor 15, the very context in which he quotes Gen 2:7.

The second point of clarification has to do with trichotomy versus dichotomy.

It was Charles Schofield, associated with the history of Dallas Theological Seminary, in the notes of his Schofield Study Bible, who did much to popularize the idea that the human person consists of three fundamental “parts:” body, soul, and spirit. I am confident that Pentecostal and charismatic emphasis on the indwelling of the Holy Spirit also plays into this, along a separate but related trajectory of thought and Christian culture. The result: most folks in East Texas just assume this position—that the human person is trichotomous—to be true.

And yet, none of the church fathers held this view. Neither did Thomas Aquinas. Neither did CS Lewis. Now, maybe Schofield and the Pentecostals are correct, and the weight of premodern Christian tradition is wrong … but I seriously doubt it.

The truth, in my opinion, is that there are many “parts” to the soul: spirit, heart, mind, will, memory, imagination, etc. But this does not undermine the fact that, in its most fundamental constituent parts, the human person is dichotomous, having only two parts: body and soul. Just as the body has many “subparts” (head, neck, torso, kneecap, eardrum), so does the soul (will, memory, etc.).

Posted on: July 14th, 2018 Verstand & Dianoia (in Bavaria)

I am having the most amazing time today in my room here at the Priesterseminar in Regensburg (though it is not completely free of various kinds of turmoil).

For years, I have noticed how the work or the process of dianoia is inherently taxing. It’s a ton of work. Not just that, but also it is stressful to the soul in a subtle way. For example, reading a dense text, or doing some kind of logical (or mathematical) proof, or learning a new language. It is the same kind of disturbing tedium involved in reading an owner’s manual when trying to assemble or repair some kind of appliance, such as a chainsaw, or searching Google to try to figure out how to do something on your computer such as editing a PDF or inserting the symbol for the currency Euro into a Word document.

Now, in my PhD coursework I became convinced that the opposite of this dianoia is in a certain sense what I call “intellect” or “nous” or “Verstand.” (CS Lewis has a relevant section in The Discarded Image; Also Plato’s divided line in Book VII [?] of the Republic.) For me perhaps the best way to characterize it is a “the moment of recognition.” It is when you have an “aha” experience and, either for the first time or in an act of remembering, you “see” something.

During my time in Munich, studying at the Goethe Institute, I was constantly oscillating between dianoia and Verstand. There were times in which I felt like I was existentially “in the weeds of William James’ ‘blooming buzzing confusion.’” During these times, for example, as I was trying to figure out the proper case ending for a dative masculine definite article, or trying to translate a paragraph containing many unknown words which I would then have to look up in the dictionary, I was unable—so it felt—to recognize anything. It was hell. But then, at other times I would have flashes of insight, recognition, in which I would suddenly “see” something, grasp something: a sentence from my instructor’s mouth, the dialogue of a video, etc. It was Heaven.

This whole dynamic—emerging from the blooming buzzing confusion into the state of recognition—has always reminded me of some scenes from the Matrix, just after Thomas Anderson’s celebral plug is pulled, and he slides down the tubular portals of existential chaos. By the end of the movie, though, not only can he dodge bullets; he can also kick the ass of the bad guy “on the back of his hand,” almost as if he is resting. This process is also, surely, closely akin to what certain thinkers mean by “waking up” or even becoming conscious.

When recently reading Nathan Jennings’s book, Liturgy and Reality (and discussing some things with him), and also while reading Returning to Reality and Bonaventure’s Hexaëmeron, I realized that, one of the riveting things about Verstand is that is occurs both before and after dianoia. (Actually, now that I think about it, I had realized this far earlier, since I have tried to teach this dynamic in various philosophy classes at UTT.)

The struggle for achieving the post-dianoetic Verstand—what Whitehead called “the simplicity on the far side of complexity”—is really the heart of my dissertation writing process. The goal of the difficult process of research is to achieve a vision of Ratzinger’s Bonaventure, for everything to “fall into place,” for the dissertation to “write itself.” I do think that this will happen—it has already begun to happen and it has happened in smaller-scale ways.

This pattern of nous–dianoia–nous characterizes:

• the exit and return structure of neoplatonism & Bonaventure;
• Gadamer’s hermeneutic circle;
• “Meno’s Paradox” regarding anamnesis & searching;
• Augustine’s divine illumination theory (exemplified in Bonaventure’s account of the creation of intellectual light on Day 1 in the Hexaëmeron).

This reality of Verstand, or Intellect, is also crucially related to faith, how Christian intellectuals historically have thought about faith. Faith is a kind of a recognition. It is the grasping of a gift, a word, a message, a vision … which originates not from one’s own mind or resources. It is not reason. Reason’s role—for example in both dogmatic and fundamental theology—is to take these gift-messages, and to work on them. To examine them, to string them together or synthesize them. To strive to approach “far-side” recognitions of simplicity. But the first move, that of Verstand, is the simple reception of the message, the recognition of it. This is the (the work of the) intellecus fidei.

On a more personal note: what I realized today in my Priesterseminar room is that, I can rest, very deeply, by engaging in Verstand, in particular the “pre-dianoia” Verstand. What I was doing was simply meditating on the Inhalt of a compilation of Nietzsche’s aphorisms. Even though I had to look up some words (such as “Vergänglicheit,” transcience) I felt like I was in heaven! Surely this is very closely related to the heart of true meditation, Christian meditation. Like the cow chewing the cud.

This is what I want to do with the Psalms, in multiple languages. This is what I want to do in the presence of God, with my heart, at the deepest level of my “ontological conscience,” openly, purely, freely, sensitively, listening.

Posted on: May 12th, 2018 Desire above Reason (and Desire)

Any any student of philosophy knows, Plato and Aristotle both had accounts the human soul such that the soul can be seen as consisting of three basic “parts.” What’s more, even though the two renditions differ in important ways, in each case the respective thinker argues that, in some sense, human reason is “above” desire. That is, both Plato and Aristotle think that the flourishing of the human individual involves some kind of “program” in which reason’s  proper role is to somehow manage, control, oversee, or discipline human desire in all its manifold variety.

It has taken me a long time to grasp a certain way in which this picture, nevertheless, gets “tweaked” in an important way, at least by the mainstream neoplatonist tradition, and I’m shocked that I have not explicitly blogged about this before.

According to neoplatonism, and in particular Christian neoplatonism, while it is true in terms of traditional “faculty theory” that it is the  job of rationality to keep human desire in check, what’s equally true is that there is an additional kind of “desire” which is “above” both psychic faculties of reason (logos; ratio) and desire (horexis; epithumia; thumos). (Somewhat related to this is this.)

Now, why does all this matter, and why should you care? Two reasons: mythos and mysticism.

First, mythos. More and more, I’m convinced that for the Christian mythos is privileged over logos. That is, it is the Christian story into which we as Christians are called super deeply to delve. With the Feast of the Ascension ringing in my imagination (and its amazing collect), it is truly mind blowing to affirm that Christ ascended into the clouds, and then continued to rise beyond the ability of the disciples to see. Where did he go? The answer to this question, it seems to me, stumps rationality. And yet, it makes for a really good story, which is a way of saying that mythos is closely connected to desire. It is myth, over and over again throughout Christian intellectual history (according to folks like Bonaventure and CS Lewis) which supremely is able to stimulate (and satisfy?) Christian desire.

Second, mysticism. My nifty nutshell “definition” of a mystic is one who is convinced that God wants us to experience God. Not primarily to think about him, but to experience him. If this is the case, if the mystic is correct, then the central role of desire in the Christian life, occupying a position even superior to that of reason, is a very big deal.

Posted on: February 27th, 2018 Yearning for Justice

This morning (Monday, February 19, 2018) is one of those mornings when my head is still spinning from the previous Sunday, that is, yesterday. You could say “my head is still spinning” or “my brain is fried.” You see, the work of pastoral ministry, the privilege to serve in this way, is as precious a gift as I can imagine. And yet, it is A LOT of work (blood, sweat, and tears)! Five services yesterday, scores of conversations / “life stories” with individual folks, two sermons, untold needs of people texting & messaging (some of whom are truly in dire straits). A wise priest once told me, in all seriousness, that a typical Sunday of active pastoral ministry is the equivalent of a 40-hour work week. What a joy, and what a burden. Throw into the mix the joyful responsibility of daddyhood and husbandom, and truly, it makes one’s head spin.

I suppose one reason for my heightened sense of being stretched today is the intensity of this past week: not just Ash Wednesday, but Diocesan Council (Thursday through Saturday, in beautiful Waco, Texas).

Ah, Diocesan Council.

I can tell you that, for me, every year this gathering is mainly an encouragement. I love seeing friends new and old. I (usually) love hearing the Bishop’s vision. Often Council is something of a mixed bag, though, and I suppose this year was no exception, for I witnessed, yet again, a tendency to reduce to the role of a priest (or, indeed, a Christian) to that of a “Social Justice Warrior” (SJW).

And yet, justice is a huge part of what we are called to as the Body of Christ. After a long day of Council presentations geared toward motivating us clergy and lay leaders to engage in social justice warfare (along the lines of community organizing and “Black Lives Matter”) I found myself sitting around the dinner table with trusted allies in ministry. One colleague wisely reminded us that, in the New Testament, the term for “justice” is the same exact term as that of “righteousness.” In the other words, in the mind of the apostles, there is no distinction between “righteousness” and “justice.” This is a truth which progressive SJW’s would do well to heed.

And yet, the kind of racial reconciliation on display at Council truly stirs up a deep yearning for justice within me. It is what my church planting (and yes, community organizing) work in Austin during my 30’s was all about. It is why, together with key leaders of Christ Church, I cannot give up on working with the Episcopal Health Foundation’s office of Congregational Engagement to bring holistic justice to Smith County, fraught with challenges though this work be.

Finally, it is why I’ve been so deeply encouraged by a recent development within our college ministry, which I would like to share with you, dear reader. Thanks to one deeply engaged leader in our parish, the leadership of our Episcopal College Community recently had a ground-breaking lunch with a leader of Texas College (among others). Then, this past Friday, Ian Hyde (our Christ Church College Missioner) along with Mr. Uriah Johnson (one of our gifted lay leaders, involved as both a youth mentor and a college mentor), met again with this Texas College representative, along with one of her local leaders. So, now, the ball is rolling with Texas College, a historically black college here in Tyler. God willing, this will bear fruit, resulting in many Kingdom centered relationships of love with our neighbors in North Tyler.

If that happens (and I’m full of biblical hope that it will), it will be an answer to a long and passionately held yearning for justice, indeed.

Posted on: November 1st, 2017 Psalm 1 (Gender, Justice, Disenchantment)

Last Sunday the psalm appointed for the day (according to my church’s lectionary) was Psalm 1, which begins like this: “Happy are they who have not walked in the counsel of the wicked….”

I want to call attention to that first pronoun, the grammatical subject of the first sentence, “they,” for this translation is not a literally accurate rendering of the original Hebrew, which says, “How blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked….” Rather, the committee of scholars who decided to render the Hebrew ha ish (“the man”) by way of a gender neutral pronoun in English, “they.”

Many biblical scholars of Psalms hold that Psalm one, in the original context of the Hebrew Scriptures, was extremely important, in that it gave its readers (who were also worshippers, since the Psalter is something like the original hymnbook of the covenant community of God’s people) an imaginative portrait of the ideal Israelite, that is, of the Messiah, of whom King David—who, in the ancient Hebrew imagination, was a type or a kind of foreshadowing of the Messiah. Together, with Psalm 2, Psalm 1 stands at the head of the entire Psalter, and (among other things) says to the reader / worshipper: “When the Messiah comes, he will keep his heart pure; he will not participate in unjust schemes; he will be stable and trustworthy … and, just to give you a picture of what that is like, look at King David.” (Of course, the Psalter “knows” full well about David’s sin, and that is part of the point: we are to “look past” David to the true Messiah.)

This is what our king is like. He is the source of our hope and peace and security. He is the one in and from whom my identity ultimately derives. He is the one after whom we are to pattern our lives, in mimetic love.

But notice what happens when the “he” at the beginning of the Psalm is transformed into “they.” This “they” which departs from the original “ha ish” not just in terms of gender (it is no longer masculine), but also in terms of number (it is no longer singular). Suddenly, the Psalm is no longer about a great king, an imaginatively construed messiah-like figure who is supposed to be the object of our contemplation. Suddenly, the Psalm is reduced to a mere moralistic formula for us to follow. It is as if it is now saying, “Do you want to be happy? Then do these things, and don’t do these other things.”

A formula which, of course, is true as far as it goes, but which is still a far cry from the original intent of the Psalm.

Am I saying that gender neutral pronouns are never to be implemented? No.

Am I saying that Psalm 1 is more applicable to males than to females? Obviously not.

What I am saying is that language (and translation) matters. It shapes our thinking. It forms our assumptions. By the providence of God, our thoughts are constrained by “the prison house of language.” We should admit that in making this shift, God’s people have lost something important.

Something which is no longer mysterious, no longer beautiful, no longer transcendent. Now, as thinkers like Henri de Lubac and Charles Taylor would say, things have become immanent and disenchanted.

Is it worth it? Is the justice which has been upheld in this re-translation worth the loss of mystical enchantment? Or perhaps might there be a better way?

Posted on: October 10th, 2017 Elvis or the Beatles? Paul’s Cosmic Anthropology

For years I have said, in various contexts and to various audiences, that for the New Testament writers, there are only two kinds of humans: Jews and Gentiles. This, for them (being good first century Jews), is how humanity is carved up. (Yes, one can “slice & dice” it at a finer level: in addition to Jew & Gentile, you also have other political demographic types such as Barbarian & Scythians, etc.—see Col 3:11.)

If this sounds to you like a scene from Quinton Tarentino’s Pulp Fiction, where Uma Thurman’s character interviews John Travolta’s character with questions like “Are you an Elvis person or a Beatles person?” (although, technically, she never asks him this question), then you are onto something.

Nowhere is this division of the human race into two fundamental types, Jew and Gentile (or sometimes stated as “Jew and Greek”) more apparent than in Gal 2:15-16:

We ourselves are Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners; yet we know that a person is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ, so we also have believed in Christ Jesus, in order to be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law, because by works of the law no one will be justified.

Posted on: June 1st, 2017 Ascension: All things full of Christ

This time of the church year is a rich one. Here we are, nestled between Ascension (my favorite feast) and Pentecost. Why did Christ ascend?

In one sense, it was to bring the entire world back to the Father. In other sense, it was to pour the Holy Spirit out upon the Church and “all flesh” on the Day of Pentecost.

But there is another sense, as well. One of the two collects for the Ascension in the Book of Common Prayer says that Christ “ascended far above all heavens that he might fill all things.” What does it mean to say that Christ, post-Ascension, now fills all things?

Well, I don’t know, but I do know that when you look at your brothers or sister in Church, you are looking at someone filled with Christ.

I don’t know, but I do know that when you encounter a stranger on the street, especially if they are down and out or strung out, you are looking at someone filled with Christ.

I don’t know, but I do know that the “bread” and the “wine” of Holy Eucharist are full of Christ.

I don’t know, but I do know that the Church father said that when Jesus was baptized in the River Jordan, he sanctified all water.

I don’t know, but I do know that St. Gregory of Nyssa said that, when Jesus gestured toward some bread and said, “this is my body,” he could have just as easily gestured toward a tree branch and said the same thing.

I don’t know, but I do know that a life of prayer, meditation, and “sobriety” (1 Peter 4:7) can train, sensitize, and condition one to experience the mystical reality of God, mediated by and through the things of creation, which mediate the presence of Christ.

Posted on: March 13th, 2017 “Theos” as Conceptual Idol? (a 3-fold response)

This little essay, a practice exercise for my upcoming PhD comprehensive exams, is intended for philosophy & theology geeks, and for them alone!

For at least four decades now, one strain or type of “postmodern” theologian (such as Jack Caputo) has been arguing, following Martin Heidegger, that any purported conception of God, but especially any used by the (western) metaphysical tradition, is inherently idolatrous. In this regard, Caputo is also channeling the spirit of his friend Jacques Derrida (d. 2004), insofar as both the Gentile Catholic Caputo and the Jewish Derrida root their critiques in an allegedly biblical “idoloclasm.”

As I see it, there are three valid responses to this criticism, which show that our intellectual conceptions of God are not necessarily idolatrous.

1. First one can argue that the best renditions of philosophico-theological accounts of God proceed on the basis of a kind of Pseudo-Dionysian apophaticism. That is, when thinkers from Augustine to Thomas (and one could possibly throw Aristotle into this list, albeit anachronistically, perhaps) develop their accounts of God in a philosophical or theological register, they are essentially saying what God is not. They are making denials about God. For example, with regard to the Aristotelian (and neoplatonist) point that God is “pure act,” one could argue that this is really another way of saying that God does not at all admit of any kind of potentiality, including and especially the potentiality of materiality.
2. Second one could appeal to biblical revelation, which does two relevant things. First, it claims that God is being or “has” being (Exodus 3:15, inter alia), a claim which then gives license to the interpreter to imagine God, to describe God, to think God (conceptually). Second, though, Scripture itself develops multiple images of God which no one, not even the most hard core iconoclast, has regarded as idolatrous. Examples: God as a pillar of fire in the Old Testament; God as a dove descending on Jesus in the New Testament. I suppose one could even place Christ himself in this context: the incarnation establishes a new economy of images.
3. Third one can appeal Thomas Aquinas’ the logic of divine naming, which he includes in his “Five Ways” in Summa Theologiae (prima pars, Question II). On this view, God’s naming works such that even terms or concepts such as “first mover” or “first cause” do actually refer to God. This position is ably represented by Denis Turner, for example here. (That Thomas thinks this, it seems to me, indicates something inscrutably profound about his thinking about God. Somehow, God is accessible both to natural human reason and to divinely bequeathed faith.)

In conclusion, however, one should also respond to this Derridian / Heideggerian point with salutary gratitude. Idolatry, for anyone purporting to stand within a biblical or theological tradition, is a real thing, and a pernicious problem. One must repent; one must be on guard. And yet, on the basis of the three responses above, I think we can legitimately disagree with Caputo / Derrida / Heidegger.

Posted on: January 10th, 2017 God: Never Unmediated

Posted on: January 10th, 2017 God: Beyond Emotion(s)

PSS Here’s a blog post about the term “emotivism” as well as emotion in general.

Posted on: January 4th, 2017 God is not Angry

In a previous post, I wrote:

Thomas, in question 3 of the Summa, adumbrates the simplicity of God: that God’s existence is his essence, and that God has no (non-metaphorical) predicate that is not also his essence. If we can say “God is good,” for example, then it is necessarily true that God is goodness. So also for “one,” “beautiful,” “real,” etc.

Now given the doctrine of divine simplicity, the same move can be made with respect to anger. That is, if God is angry, then it necessarily follows that God is anger itself.

From here it follows that if God is not anger itself, then it is not the case that God is angry.

Now I’ve never known of a theologian willing to claim that God is anger itself. And there are many reasons for this, not least that this would “reify” or “hypostasize” anger, giving it an ultimate, uncreated ontological status completely independent of the Fall (of man & angels).

But do you see what’s going on? Since we know that it is not the case that God is anger itself, it necessarily follows that God is not angry.

Does Scripture (and the liturgy) speak of “the wrath of God?” Yes, it does. However, it is important to keep that strain of thought in its proper (marginal) place. It is true only in a distant and radically derivative sense. (I need to think more about this.)

One last note: notice that all of this presupposes the simplicity of God. In other words, it assumes the classical doctrine about God that, in particular, he is in no way subject to temporality (pace the likes of that “open theist” Greg Boyd and that “process theologian” Alfred North Whitehead and all their respective followers), which is wholly and completely a created thing. Otherwise, this line of thinking, which demonstrates that God is not angry, fails.

Posted on: December 26th, 2016 John 1 (in medias res)

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. (John 1:1-3a)

Having soaked my mind & heart in the philosophical contemplation of John 1 this Christmas (both at the four Christmas Eve services in which I preached or presided), what has hit me afresh, or possibly for the first time, is that part of John is saying is that the story of the world begins in medias res. “Among the middle things,” or (more colloquially) “in the middle of things.”

That is, when the world popped into being (so the story goes), what was already there? In one sense, not nothing.

No. That which was already there is the Logos.

Posted on: August 23rd, 2016 Reformed Theology, Stoicism, & Virtue Ethics

In my transition from Reformed evangelicalism to a more catholic tradition of Christianity, one constant source of consternation which has plagued me for years (almost two decades) has to do with the “senior Ethics” course I had at Westminister Theological Seminary. In this class, which was supposed to prepare soon-to-be-ordained pastors with a basic grasp of ethical theory, all of the emphasis was on Scripture and the Law of God. The word “virtue” did not appear on the syllabus.

Now, I don’t want to go overboard here. I do have respect for the professor of this course as well as for the author of the primary text we studied (alongside the Bible): The Ten Commandments by J. Douma (undoubtedly a brilliant Dutch Reformed theologian who taught at The Theological University in Kampen in the late 20th century).

However, what I am prepared to say, with the thought of Alasdair MacIntyre ringing in my head, is that such an approach to ethics is more Stoic than Christian. In chapter 13 of After Virtue, MacIntyre explains how the Stoic approach to moral philosophy differed starkly with that of Aristotelianism. For the latter, virtue is the rational discernment of the natural human telos (which of course for Aristotle is also thoroughly cultural), and the cultivation of human desires, habits, feelings, dispositions in such a way as to form the human being into the kind of person who acts virtuously. For Stoicism, by contrast, what matters is the individual will, and its embrace of an externally existing law.

MacIntyre  goes on to argue that here as always philosophy is rooted in a prior socio-political context: the displacement of the Greek city-state by the Macedonian regime and then the Roman imperium serves to bolster the Stoic stance, since any communal agreement and embrace of the common good for man now becomes more problematic.

So it is that Stoicism “sets a pattern for all those later European moralities that invoke the notion of law as central in such a way as to displace conceptions of the virtues” (MacIntrye, After Virtue, 2nd ed., 169).

“What about Judaism?” one might ask. Does it not make the law (the Torah of God) central, apparently in agreement with Stoicism? MacIntyre quite insightfully provides a response to this objection: one reason why Stoicism was unable to occupy an even more dominant role in Western culture is that it was “outnarrated” by an “even sterner morality of law, that of Judaism.”

With this insight I completely agree, and would only add the following conjecture. There must be something within Judaism which allows for the inculcation of the virtues (even if this amounts to a marginalization of law). Surely that “something” is its historicism (which MacIntrye’s thought correctly connects with the notion of narrative or story), which in turn allows it to be developed into Christianity (by way of tradition), which in turn had additional resources which allowed it to embrace classical thought, including that of Aristotelian moral philosophy.

So it is that I am prepared to say that my Senior ethics class at Westminster, seventeen years ago, was more Stoic than Christian. (To Westminster’s credit, it itself supplied me with at least one tool to help me realize this: in the Old Testament Department we were constantly reminded that the Torah of Yahweh is fundamentally different from western and especially modern notions of law, not least in that the former is deeply woven together with the story of Israel, and God’s faithfulness to her.)

Posted on: July 4th, 2016 Tears & Laughter, Plato & Christ

At the end of Plato’s _Symposium_,

… the faithful Aristodemus … falls off into a drunken sleep, but awakens to find Agathon, Socrates, and Aristophanes having a discussion, with only Socrates fresh and in full possession of his powers (223B-D). Socrates is forcing the two poets to agree that it would be possible for a man to be both tragedian and comedian, which each resists because Agathon regards tears as highest and Aristophanes regards laughter as highest, and they are opposites. For them there is no mean between the two that is as high as the two extremes. Socrates says that philosophy is such a mean and that a mixture of laughter and tears is the way to define man. Practically, Socrates is telling them that their two arts must be combined in order to depict him. This is the formula for the Platonic dialogues and perhaps for Shakespeare’s plays. The other two nod away, and one is never sure whether Socrates could not persuade them. It is with this doubt that the dialogue ends. (Allan Bloom, “The Ladder of Love,” in Plato, _Symposium_, ed. Seth Bernardete, 170.)

Socrates defines man in terms of “a mixture of laughter and tears.” Chesterton, who said that the wise man has comedy in his head and tragedy in his heart, would surely agree.

When it comes to classical Greek philosophy, my firm conviction is that the best way to view it is as a “propaeduetic of the Gospel,” as Clement of Alexandria held. When one reads the ancients’ texts for themselves, one is struck over and over by the ways in which the themes and teachings foreshadow themes in the New Testament.

Nowhere, perhaps, is this more clear, however, than in the above quotation about tears and laughter, tragedy and comedy. Socrates says not only that they go together, but that they go together in the life of man. This is a suggestive pointer to, an intriguing foreshadowing of, the Paschal Mystery of Jesus Christ.

The Paschal Mystery is Good Friday (with all its pain and blackness) plus the Easter Feast (with all its luminosity and joy). It is the death of Christ, and his surprise resurrection on the third day after. It is tragedy plus comedy.

What’s more, in places like Rom 5:12-21 and I Cor 15:45-47 St. Paul argues that Christ is the “second _anthropos_ and the last _adam_.” He is the New Man, the Renewed Humanity. Socrates, then, is vindicated, for it is in the life of this most true human that we behold the Paschal Mystery. Death and life, sadness and joy, tragedy and comedy.