Resident Theologian
About the Blog
Patrick Leigh Fermor on prayer in the monastic life
"After the first postulate of belief, without which the life of a monk would be farcical and intolerable, the dominating fact of monastic existence is a belief in the necessity and the efficacy of prayer; and it is only by attempting to grasp the importance of this principle—a principle so utterly remote from every tendency of modern secular thought—to the monks who practise it, that one can hope to understand the basis of monasticism. This is especially true of the contemplative orders, like the Benedictines, Carthusians, Carmelites, Cistercians, Camaldulese and Sylvestrines; for the others, like the Franciscans, Dominicans or the Jesuits—are brotherhoods organised for action. They travel, teach, preach, convert, organise, plan, heal and nurse; and the material results they achieve make them, if not automatically admirable, at least comprehensible to the Time-Spirit. They get results; they deliver the goods. But what (the Time-Spirit asks) what good do the rest do, immured in monasteries far from contact with the world?
"The answer is—if the truth of the Christian religion and the efficacy of prayer are both dismissed as baseless—no more than any other human beings who lead a good life, make (for they support themselves) no economic demands on the community, harm no one and respect their neighbours. But, should the two principles be admitted—particularly, for the purposes of this particular theme, the latter—their power for good is incalculable. Belief in this power, and in the necessity of worshipping God daily and hourly, is the mainspring of Benedictine life. It was this belief that, in the sixth century, drove St. Benedict into the solitude of a cave in the Sabine gorges and, after three years of private ascesis, prompted him to found the first Benedictine communities. His book, The Rule of St. Benedict—seventy-three short and sagacious chapters explaining the theory and codifying the practice of the cenobitic life—is aimed simply at securing for his monks protection against the world, so that nothing should interfere with the utmost exploitation of this enormous force. The vows embracing poverty, chastity and obedience were destined to smite from these men all fetters that chained them to the world, to free them for action, for the worship of God and the practice of prayer; for the pursuit, in short, of sanctity. Worship found its main expression, of course, in the Mass; but the offices of the seven canonical hours that follow the Night Office of Matins—Lauds, Prime, Tierce, Sext, Nones, Vespers and Compline, a cycle that begins in the small hours of the night and finishes after sunset—kept, and keep the monks on parade, as it were, with an almost military rigour. Their programme for the day involves three-and-a-half or four hours in church. But other periods, quite separate from the time devoted to study, are set aside for the reading of the martyrology in the chapter-house, for self-examination, private prayer and meditation.
"One has only to glance at the mass of devotional and mystical works which have appeared throughout the Christian era to get an idea of the difficulty, the complexity, the pitfalls and the rewards of this form of spiritual exercise. However strange these values may appear to the homme moyen sensuel, such are the pursuits that absorb much of a monk’s life. They range from a repetition of the simpler prayers, sometimes tallied by the movement of beads through the fingers, to an advanced intellectual skill in devotion and meditation; and occasionally rise to those hazardous mystical journeys of the soul which culminate, at the end of the purgative and illuminative periods, in blinding moments of union with the Godhead; experiences which the poverty of language compels the mystics who experience them to describe in the terminology of profane love: a kind of personal, face-to-face intimacy, the very inkling of which, since Donne, Quarles, Herbert, Vaughan and Traherne wrote their poems, has drained away from life in England.
"With this daily, unflagging stream of worship, a volume of prayer ascends, of which, if it is efficacious, we are all the beneficiaries. Between people pledged to those spiritual allegiances, 'Pray for me' and 'Give me your blessing' are no polite formulæ, but requests for definite, effective acts. And it is easy to imagine the value and fame, before the growth of scepticism, of men whose lives were spent hammering out in silent factories these imponderable but priceless benefits. They are the anonymous well-wishers who reduce the moral overdraft of mankind, les paratonnerres (as Huysmans says) de la société. Life, for a monk, is shorter than the flutter of an eyelid in comparison to eternity, and this fragment of time flits past in the worship of God, the salvation of his soul, and in humble intercession for the souls of his fellow exiles from felicity."
—Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time to Keep Silence (1957), 26-29 (paragraph breaks mine)
"The answer is—if the truth of the Christian religion and the efficacy of prayer are both dismissed as baseless—no more than any other human beings who lead a good life, make (for they support themselves) no economic demands on the community, harm no one and respect their neighbours. But, should the two principles be admitted—particularly, for the purposes of this particular theme, the latter—their power for good is incalculable. Belief in this power, and in the necessity of worshipping God daily and hourly, is the mainspring of Benedictine life. It was this belief that, in the sixth century, drove St. Benedict into the solitude of a cave in the Sabine gorges and, after three years of private ascesis, prompted him to found the first Benedictine communities. His book, The Rule of St. Benedict—seventy-three short and sagacious chapters explaining the theory and codifying the practice of the cenobitic life—is aimed simply at securing for his monks protection against the world, so that nothing should interfere with the utmost exploitation of this enormous force. The vows embracing poverty, chastity and obedience were destined to smite from these men all fetters that chained them to the world, to free them for action, for the worship of God and the practice of prayer; for the pursuit, in short, of sanctity. Worship found its main expression, of course, in the Mass; but the offices of the seven canonical hours that follow the Night Office of Matins—Lauds, Prime, Tierce, Sext, Nones, Vespers and Compline, a cycle that begins in the small hours of the night and finishes after sunset—kept, and keep the monks on parade, as it were, with an almost military rigour. Their programme for the day involves three-and-a-half or four hours in church. But other periods, quite separate from the time devoted to study, are set aside for the reading of the martyrology in the chapter-house, for self-examination, private prayer and meditation.
"One has only to glance at the mass of devotional and mystical works which have appeared throughout the Christian era to get an idea of the difficulty, the complexity, the pitfalls and the rewards of this form of spiritual exercise. However strange these values may appear to the homme moyen sensuel, such are the pursuits that absorb much of a monk’s life. They range from a repetition of the simpler prayers, sometimes tallied by the movement of beads through the fingers, to an advanced intellectual skill in devotion and meditation; and occasionally rise to those hazardous mystical journeys of the soul which culminate, at the end of the purgative and illuminative periods, in blinding moments of union with the Godhead; experiences which the poverty of language compels the mystics who experience them to describe in the terminology of profane love: a kind of personal, face-to-face intimacy, the very inkling of which, since Donne, Quarles, Herbert, Vaughan and Traherne wrote their poems, has drained away from life in England.
"With this daily, unflagging stream of worship, a volume of prayer ascends, of which, if it is efficacious, we are all the beneficiaries. Between people pledged to those spiritual allegiances, 'Pray for me' and 'Give me your blessing' are no polite formulæ, but requests for definite, effective acts. And it is easy to imagine the value and fame, before the growth of scepticism, of men whose lives were spent hammering out in silent factories these imponderable but priceless benefits. They are the anonymous well-wishers who reduce the moral overdraft of mankind, les paratonnerres (as Huysmans says) de la société. Life, for a monk, is shorter than the flutter of an eyelid in comparison to eternity, and this fragment of time flits past in the worship of God, the salvation of his soul, and in humble intercession for the souls of his fellow exiles from felicity."
—Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time to Keep Silence (1957), 26-29 (paragraph breaks mine)
Happy news: I'm editing a collection of Jenson's writings on Scripture
I
am delighted to announce that I have signed a contract with Oxford
University Press to edit a collection of the late Robert Jenson's
writings. Tentatively titled The Triune Story: Essays on Scripture, it
will gather together more than three dozen of Jenson's theological
essays on the Bible, spanning more than four decades of his career.
My thanks to Cynthia Read and to the editorial team at Oxford for supporting this book. Before his passing earlier this fall, Jens gave the project his blessing, and I hope it is a testament to the beauty and abiding value of his work both for the church and for the theological academy.
My hope is to have the book published by the end of next year, though that obviously depends on many forces outside my control. Perhaps even in time for a session at AAR/SBL...?
In any case, this has been an idea in the back of my mind for a few years now, and it's a joy to see it become a (proleptic) reality. Now y'all just be sure to buy it when it comes out.
My thanks to Cynthia Read and to the editorial team at Oxford for supporting this book. Before his passing earlier this fall, Jens gave the project his blessing, and I hope it is a testament to the beauty and abiding value of his work both for the church and for the theological academy.
My hope is to have the book published by the end of next year, though that obviously depends on many forces outside my control. Perhaps even in time for a session at AAR/SBL...?
In any case, this has been an idea in the back of my mind for a few years now, and it's a joy to see it become a (proleptic) reality. Now y'all just be sure to buy it when it comes out.
The Holy One of Israel: A Sermon on Leviticus 19
A reading from the book of Leviticus, chapter 19, verses 1-4, 9-18.
“The Lord spoke to Moses, saying: Speak to all the congregation of the people of Israel and say to them: You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy. You shall revere your mother and father, and you shall keep my sabbaths: I am the Lord your God. Do not turn to idols or make cast images for yourselves: I am the Lord your God….
“When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap to the very edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest. You shall not strip your vineyard bare, or gather the fallen grapes of your vineyard; you shall leave them for the poor and the alien: I am the Lord your God.
“You shall not steal; you shall not deal falsely; and you shall not lie to one another. And you shall not swear falsely by my name, profaning the name of your God: I am the Lord.
“You shall not defraud your neighbor; you shall not steal; and you shall not keep for yourself the wages of a laborer until morning. You shall not revile the deaf or put a stumbling block before the blind; you shall fear your God: I am the Lord.
“You shall not render an unjust judgment; you shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great: with justice you shall judge your neighbor. You shall not go around as a slanderer among your people, and you shall not profit by the blood of your neighbor: I am the Lord.
“You shall not hate in your heart anyone of your kin; you shall reprove your neighbor, or you will incur guilt yourself. You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord.”
The word of the Lord:
Thanks be to God.
May the words of my mouth
And the meditation of my heart
Be acceptable in your sight,
O Lord, our rock and our redeemer: Amen.
_______________
Some years ago I was listening to a round-table of ethicists discussing a series of moral and political questions centered on human dignity and worth. A token theologian was included in the round-table for good measure. At some point one of the ethicists referred off-hand to how every human being is holy. It wasn’t a major point; it appeared to be a kind of throwaway comment, a premise assumed to be shared by everyone at the table, not least the theologian. But the theologian broke in and brusquely asserted the following:
“Human beings are not holy. Only God is holy.”
The bare, unqualified nature of the flat denial and exclusive affirmation stopped me cold. Surely the ethicist was simply saying in a roundabout way something unobjectionable: that human beings have value, that human life—as many of us are wont to say—is “sacred.” Is it, strictly speaking, true that human beings are not holy? Is it necessary to say so in such extreme terms?
The answer, I have come to see, is yes. The theologian was right—as we occasionally are. God alone is holy. Human beings are not holy. But that is not all there is to say. Because there is an intimate, unbreakable connection between these two statements; for there is an intimate, unbreakable relationship between the two characters or subjects spoken of in them, that is, a relationship between the One who alone is holy and those who are not holy, but may and will and shall be. A relationship of transformation, the name for which is sanctification.
If the Bible is anything, it is a book about sanctification: about the one and only Holy God’s undying and infallible will (1 Thess 4:5) to make holy what is not holy, to sanctify a people, to hallow the whole creation. Indeed, the gospel is the good news of holiness. How so?
Start—as every entertaining sermon does—with Leviticus. Here we are, in the middle of the Torah, listening in as God commands Moses to command the people of Israel how they are to live. And the fundamental umbrella command, beneath which all the other commands take their place and from which they derive their meaning, is the drumbeat of the book as a whole: “You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy” (Lev 19:2; cf. 1 Pet 1:14). So holiness is a command, but a command to a particular people, Israel, rooted in the nature of a particular God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the Lord of Hosts and creator of the world.
So at the outset, holiness is twofold.
On the one hand: Holiness is a principal attribute of the only true and living God, the God of Israel. Holiness means: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Holiness means: The idols of the nations are lifeless, they neither hear nor speak nor save. Holiness means: There is no court of appeal, no judge or Lord or sovereign or power, in heaven or on earth or under the earth, which one might petition, to which one might flee for refuge, apart from this God, the imageless and absolutely transcendent One, enthroned between the cherubim. Holiness means: Indivisible, inescapable, unquenchable life, without source or loss, beginning or end—a burning jealousy as unyielding as the grave.
On the other hand: Holiness is unlike other divine attributes, known technically as “non-communicable” attributes because God does not, because God could not, communicate them to creatures. Such attributes include omniscience, omnipotence—the omni’s in general. Whether or not we should understand humanity as originally created holy (I’m ambivalent about that), in a world ruled by the powers of sin and death, human beings are not and have never been holy, much less holy as God is holy. Yet here, right in the heart of the Torah, almost literally at its centerpoint, we hear God command Israel to be holy. So holiness is somehow a possibility, or at least an expectation, for human beings; or, if not for humanity as a whole, at least for Abraham’s children.
What does holiness entail for Israel? It appears to be a sort of image of the divine holiness, a creaturely counterpart to the uncreated holiness of the Lord. Just as God is utterly and unmistakably distinct both from the world and from the gods of the nations, so Israel is to be visibly and clearly distinct in and from the world, set apart from and among the nations. Israel is to be different.
And this difference is to go all the way down, to be inscribed on the body of Israel. Food, sex, hair, land, crops, money, family, parents and children, husbands and wives, rulers and ruled, priests and otherwise, rich and poor, landed and homeless, native and alien—holiness touches everything and everyone, it is comprehensive and all-consuming, its details are exhaustive (not to say exhausting), and it knows no such thing as the separation of religious from political from moral from liturgical from family from individual from communal from economic from…(fill in the blank). Holiness encompasses everything, because holiness concerns God, and God is at once the maker of human life and the author of the covenant. There is nothing that is not the business of Israel’s God.
It doesn’t take, however. Or rather, it takes, but it doesn’t do the job. The commands do indeed set Israel apart from the nations, but the living, burning holiness of the Lord God—the jealous fire that cuts to the heart—it fails to take exclusive, permanent hold; it does spadework against injustice and idolatry, but it does not cut them out, root and branch. They keep sprouting up, in the heart and in the land. What must be done to ignite the consuming fire of God in the midst of the people of God without setting them ablaze—without burning them up, leaving nothing but a valley of dead, dry bones?
Before he dies, Moses tells us. Through Moses, God promises Israel that, following its waywardness and disobedience, following its failure to love God and to keep God’s commandments, following its punishment and exile and re-gathering in the land—after all that, then God will perform a mighty deed: “the Lord your God will circumcise your heart and the heart of your descendants, so that you will love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, in order that you may live” (Deut 30:6).
None other than God will do so, because none other than God can do so. The mark of the covenant on the body of Israel will cut to the heart. God will make it so, because God is able, and God’s grace to Israel is everlasting. Likewise, the command to be holy is transformed from an imperative to a promise: No longer, “Be holy,” but, “You shall be holy, for I myself will make you holy.” Indeed, circumcision of the heart just is what it means to be holy to the Lord. God will give Israel a holiness proper to human beings, but a holiness from beyond their means or ken: God’s own holiness.
For the Holy One was made flesh and tabernacled among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth. From his fullness we have all received grace upon grace, the grace of holiness. The law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus, the Messiah and Holy One of Israel (John 1:14-17).
Holiness is incarnate in the man Jesus of Nazareth. Holiness touches the body, the flesh and blood of a human being, this one Jew. Holiness cuts to the heart of this one. He is absolutely set apart; he is one of us, but he is not us. He is different. His life is a single sustained offering to the God of Israel, every minute and every action dedicated to the will and glory of the Lord. He loves the Lord, his God and Father, with all his heart, soul, mind, and strength. He is ablaze with the fire of God’s Holy Spirit, but he is not consumed; his flesh, like the leaves of the bush at Horeb, is not burnt up (Exod 3:1-2). He, Jesus, is holy, as God is holy.
And when God makes the life of Jesus, the Lord’s servant, an offering for sin (Isa 53:10), God does not abandon him to the grave, will not let his Holy One see decay (Ps 16:10; Acts 2:27). God raises him from the dead with power through the Spirit of holiness (Rom 1:4): The Holy One is alive; the fire is not quenched. And by the will of God, we have been made holy through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all (Heb 10:10). The righteous one has made many righteous; the Holy One has made many holy (Isa 53:11). For the holiness of Christ is a hallowing holiness, a sanctifying sanctity. As the Father hallows his name (Matt 6:9), so the Son sanctifies himself for our sakes, that we might be sanctified in the truth of God’s love (John 17:18-19); and God’s love, the flaming tongues of God’s holy word (Acts 2:3), has been shed abroad in our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given us (Rom 5:5).
And through the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead (Rom 8:11), we are a temple of God’s Holy Spirit (1 Cor 3:16), holy bodies bearing the Holy One in our midst, saints circumcised in the heart through baptism into his death. We ourselves are the one body of Christ, set apart from and for the world, ministers of and witnesses to his holiness. He commands us to be holy; he has made us holy; he shall make us holy at the last. For the one who began the work of sanctification among us will bring it to completion on the day of Jesus Christ (Phil 1:6).
We bear the holiness of God to one another, this unmerited and unpossessable gift of the thrice-holy triune God of Israel. The holy Father, the holy Son, the Holy Spirit: This God, the one God, our God, is with us. We stand in the presence of the living God, at the foot of the sacred mountain (Heb 12:18-24), as God’s holy people—and we are not burnt up.
“The Lord spoke to Moses, saying: Speak to all the congregation of the people of Israel and say to them: You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy. You shall revere your mother and father, and you shall keep my sabbaths: I am the Lord your God. Do not turn to idols or make cast images for yourselves: I am the Lord your God….
“When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap to the very edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest. You shall not strip your vineyard bare, or gather the fallen grapes of your vineyard; you shall leave them for the poor and the alien: I am the Lord your God.
“You shall not steal; you shall not deal falsely; and you shall not lie to one another. And you shall not swear falsely by my name, profaning the name of your God: I am the Lord.
“You shall not defraud your neighbor; you shall not steal; and you shall not keep for yourself the wages of a laborer until morning. You shall not revile the deaf or put a stumbling block before the blind; you shall fear your God: I am the Lord.
“You shall not render an unjust judgment; you shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great: with justice you shall judge your neighbor. You shall not go around as a slanderer among your people, and you shall not profit by the blood of your neighbor: I am the Lord.
“You shall not hate in your heart anyone of your kin; you shall reprove your neighbor, or you will incur guilt yourself. You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord.”
The word of the Lord:
Thanks be to God.
May the words of my mouth
And the meditation of my heart
Be acceptable in your sight,
O Lord, our rock and our redeemer: Amen.
_______________
Some years ago I was listening to a round-table of ethicists discussing a series of moral and political questions centered on human dignity and worth. A token theologian was included in the round-table for good measure. At some point one of the ethicists referred off-hand to how every human being is holy. It wasn’t a major point; it appeared to be a kind of throwaway comment, a premise assumed to be shared by everyone at the table, not least the theologian. But the theologian broke in and brusquely asserted the following:
“Human beings are not holy. Only God is holy.”
The bare, unqualified nature of the flat denial and exclusive affirmation stopped me cold. Surely the ethicist was simply saying in a roundabout way something unobjectionable: that human beings have value, that human life—as many of us are wont to say—is “sacred.” Is it, strictly speaking, true that human beings are not holy? Is it necessary to say so in such extreme terms?
The answer, I have come to see, is yes. The theologian was right—as we occasionally are. God alone is holy. Human beings are not holy. But that is not all there is to say. Because there is an intimate, unbreakable connection between these two statements; for there is an intimate, unbreakable relationship between the two characters or subjects spoken of in them, that is, a relationship between the One who alone is holy and those who are not holy, but may and will and shall be. A relationship of transformation, the name for which is sanctification.
If the Bible is anything, it is a book about sanctification: about the one and only Holy God’s undying and infallible will (1 Thess 4:5) to make holy what is not holy, to sanctify a people, to hallow the whole creation. Indeed, the gospel is the good news of holiness. How so?
Start—as every entertaining sermon does—with Leviticus. Here we are, in the middle of the Torah, listening in as God commands Moses to command the people of Israel how they are to live. And the fundamental umbrella command, beneath which all the other commands take their place and from which they derive their meaning, is the drumbeat of the book as a whole: “You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy” (Lev 19:2; cf. 1 Pet 1:14). So holiness is a command, but a command to a particular people, Israel, rooted in the nature of a particular God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the Lord of Hosts and creator of the world.
So at the outset, holiness is twofold.
On the one hand: Holiness is a principal attribute of the only true and living God, the God of Israel. Holiness means: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Holiness means: The idols of the nations are lifeless, they neither hear nor speak nor save. Holiness means: There is no court of appeal, no judge or Lord or sovereign or power, in heaven or on earth or under the earth, which one might petition, to which one might flee for refuge, apart from this God, the imageless and absolutely transcendent One, enthroned between the cherubim. Holiness means: Indivisible, inescapable, unquenchable life, without source or loss, beginning or end—a burning jealousy as unyielding as the grave.
On the other hand: Holiness is unlike other divine attributes, known technically as “non-communicable” attributes because God does not, because God could not, communicate them to creatures. Such attributes include omniscience, omnipotence—the omni’s in general. Whether or not we should understand humanity as originally created holy (I’m ambivalent about that), in a world ruled by the powers of sin and death, human beings are not and have never been holy, much less holy as God is holy. Yet here, right in the heart of the Torah, almost literally at its centerpoint, we hear God command Israel to be holy. So holiness is somehow a possibility, or at least an expectation, for human beings; or, if not for humanity as a whole, at least for Abraham’s children.
What does holiness entail for Israel? It appears to be a sort of image of the divine holiness, a creaturely counterpart to the uncreated holiness of the Lord. Just as God is utterly and unmistakably distinct both from the world and from the gods of the nations, so Israel is to be visibly and clearly distinct in and from the world, set apart from and among the nations. Israel is to be different.
And this difference is to go all the way down, to be inscribed on the body of Israel. Food, sex, hair, land, crops, money, family, parents and children, husbands and wives, rulers and ruled, priests and otherwise, rich and poor, landed and homeless, native and alien—holiness touches everything and everyone, it is comprehensive and all-consuming, its details are exhaustive (not to say exhausting), and it knows no such thing as the separation of religious from political from moral from liturgical from family from individual from communal from economic from…(fill in the blank). Holiness encompasses everything, because holiness concerns God, and God is at once the maker of human life and the author of the covenant. There is nothing that is not the business of Israel’s God.
It doesn’t take, however. Or rather, it takes, but it doesn’t do the job. The commands do indeed set Israel apart from the nations, but the living, burning holiness of the Lord God—the jealous fire that cuts to the heart—it fails to take exclusive, permanent hold; it does spadework against injustice and idolatry, but it does not cut them out, root and branch. They keep sprouting up, in the heart and in the land. What must be done to ignite the consuming fire of God in the midst of the people of God without setting them ablaze—without burning them up, leaving nothing but a valley of dead, dry bones?
Before he dies, Moses tells us. Through Moses, God promises Israel that, following its waywardness and disobedience, following its failure to love God and to keep God’s commandments, following its punishment and exile and re-gathering in the land—after all that, then God will perform a mighty deed: “the Lord your God will circumcise your heart and the heart of your descendants, so that you will love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, in order that you may live” (Deut 30:6).
None other than God will do so, because none other than God can do so. The mark of the covenant on the body of Israel will cut to the heart. God will make it so, because God is able, and God’s grace to Israel is everlasting. Likewise, the command to be holy is transformed from an imperative to a promise: No longer, “Be holy,” but, “You shall be holy, for I myself will make you holy.” Indeed, circumcision of the heart just is what it means to be holy to the Lord. God will give Israel a holiness proper to human beings, but a holiness from beyond their means or ken: God’s own holiness.
For the Holy One was made flesh and tabernacled among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth. From his fullness we have all received grace upon grace, the grace of holiness. The law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus, the Messiah and Holy One of Israel (John 1:14-17).
Holiness is incarnate in the man Jesus of Nazareth. Holiness touches the body, the flesh and blood of a human being, this one Jew. Holiness cuts to the heart of this one. He is absolutely set apart; he is one of us, but he is not us. He is different. His life is a single sustained offering to the God of Israel, every minute and every action dedicated to the will and glory of the Lord. He loves the Lord, his God and Father, with all his heart, soul, mind, and strength. He is ablaze with the fire of God’s Holy Spirit, but he is not consumed; his flesh, like the leaves of the bush at Horeb, is not burnt up (Exod 3:1-2). He, Jesus, is holy, as God is holy.
And when God makes the life of Jesus, the Lord’s servant, an offering for sin (Isa 53:10), God does not abandon him to the grave, will not let his Holy One see decay (Ps 16:10; Acts 2:27). God raises him from the dead with power through the Spirit of holiness (Rom 1:4): The Holy One is alive; the fire is not quenched. And by the will of God, we have been made holy through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all (Heb 10:10). The righteous one has made many righteous; the Holy One has made many holy (Isa 53:11). For the holiness of Christ is a hallowing holiness, a sanctifying sanctity. As the Father hallows his name (Matt 6:9), so the Son sanctifies himself for our sakes, that we might be sanctified in the truth of God’s love (John 17:18-19); and God’s love, the flaming tongues of God’s holy word (Acts 2:3), has been shed abroad in our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given us (Rom 5:5).
And through the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead (Rom 8:11), we are a temple of God’s Holy Spirit (1 Cor 3:16), holy bodies bearing the Holy One in our midst, saints circumcised in the heart through baptism into his death. We ourselves are the one body of Christ, set apart from and for the world, ministers of and witnesses to his holiness. He commands us to be holy; he has made us holy; he shall make us holy at the last. For the one who began the work of sanctification among us will bring it to completion on the day of Jesus Christ (Phil 1:6).
We bear the holiness of God to one another, this unmerited and unpossessable gift of the thrice-holy triune God of Israel. The holy Father, the holy Son, the Holy Spirit: This God, the one God, our God, is with us. We stand in the presence of the living God, at the foot of the sacred mountain (Heb 12:18-24), as God’s holy people—and we are not burnt up.
On the church's eternality and "church as mission"
"The Church is Catholic, that is, universal. First, it is universal in place, because it is worldwide. This is contrary to the error of the Donatists. For the Church is a congregation of the faithful; and since the faithful are in every part of the world, so also is the Church: 'Your faith is spoken of in the whole world' [Rm 1:8]. And also: 'Go into the whole world and preach the gospel to every creature' [Mk 16:15]. Long ago, indeed, God was known only in Judea; now, however, He is known throughout the entire world. The Church has three parts: one is on earth, one is in heaven, and one is in purgatory.
"Second, the Church is universal in regard to all the conditions of mankind; for no exceptions are made, neither master nor servant, neither man nor woman: 'Neither bond nor free; there is neither male nor female' [Gal 3:28].
"Third, it is universal in time. Some have said that the Church will exist only up to a certain time. But this is false, for the Church began to exist in the time of Abel and will endure up to the end of the world: 'Behold, I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world' [Mt 28:20]. Moreover, even after the end of the world, it will continue to exist in heaven [Sed post consummationem saeculi remanebit in caelo]."
This is Thomas Aquinas's all too brief discussion of the church's catholicity in his exposition of the Apostles' Creed. Yesterday on Twitter I quoted the last section, on the eternality or temporal catholicity of the church, with some comments following it. Specifically, I wrote, "This text is ground zero for returning to the Bible to counter the argument that the church—God's people— is constituted by mission."
I got a lot of helpful replies, mostly pushing back or challenging my challenge to the claim that the church is constituted by mission. As I said later, the tweets weren't intended primarily to be polemical; I was preparing to teach Thomas's text in class, and so I jotted some thoughts down on Twitter before heading off. And though John Flett's The Witness of God is on my shelf, I've yet to read it, so I can't speak substantively to where our disagreements might lie, if anywhere.
But let me float a few questions to the church-as-mission folks, for greater clarity of understanding, at least on my side of things.
First, what motivates the claim that mission constitutes the church? Or, put differently, what are the stakes? One reply requested a less polarizing approach to this question. My response was and is this: I'm trying to lower the volume in our ecclesiological rhetoric. My sense is that, in recent decades and perhaps the last century, talk about mission has become over-inflated relative to its material importance to the doctrine of the church as such. What I'd like to say, simply, is: Mission is a crucial feature of the church, though it neither defines nor constitutes it. Or perhaps: Mission constitutes the church militant, but not the church triumphant. My question is: What would be lost if we say "the mission is consummated with the kingdom's coming in full, yet the church endures in the new creation as God's elect and holy people," etc., etc.?
Second, is there biblical support for the church's "sending" being something other than or beyond what is spelled out in Matthew 28:19-20 and Acts 1:8? That is, is God's people "sent" prior to Christ's sending of the apostles (and the apostolic church) or following his second advent? Where in the Bible suggests that?
Third, all the counter-proposals I saw (on Twitter: again, Flett excepted) very quickly became metaphorical in the extreme and/or reductive to the point of emptying the concept. That is, "sending" is interpreted in terms of Gregory of Nyssa's epektasis, the never-ending journey into the infinite life of the triune God's eternal, inexhaustible fellowship. (My friend Myles Werntz posed this idea.) Well, okay ... but what work is "sending" doing there that epektasis isn't already doing? Why hold on to "sending" when we have another term or concept that is perfectly adequate to the job? Others suggested something like the church's never-ending task in the eschaton of worshiping God or testifying to one another about God's grace and love. Sure, those are traditionally (and biblically) the description of what it is we'll be doing in the kingdom; but what conceptual connection exists between those activities and "being sent"? All kinds of descriptions of life in resurrected glory exist in the church's tradition, and few to none include or require language of "sending." (Cf. Dante's Paradiso.) So what, again, does "sending" add materially to the description? "Sending" cannot and should be reduced to "asked/called to do stuff"/"tasked with actions from and for God." Why not advert, say, to cultic language, in which we will all be priests, ministering in the one temple of the one new world of God? You don't need "sending" language for that.
So on and so forth. But my fourth and last query gets to the heart of the matter, I think, which is this: My push-back on church-as-mission is meant, theologically, to de-center ecclesiology that (a) makes Israel secondary or subordinate to the missionary church and/or (b) conceives of election and peoplehood as essentially instrumental, coordinated as a means to some greater end. My counter—and this will be the article, God willing, I write sometime in the next few years—is that divine election to peoplehood is in part an end in itself. Israel is called to be holy, set apart from the nations, to witness to the divine glory and grace, and to be a divine blessing to the nations: yes and amen. But Israel is also called by God simply out of God's inexplicable, unpredictable love for Israel, and therefore out of God's bottomless desire to bless the children of Abraham, the friend of God. Pentecost and ekklesia open up the people of God to the gentiles through faith in Israel's Messiah, and indeed, that was always God's intention for the world; hence the mission to the nations, Christ's sending of the apostles to every corner of the earth as his witnesses. But when the mission is completed—when the gospel has been proclaimed to every nation and people under the sun, when "the full number of the gentiles has come in" (Rom 11:25)—then all Israel will be saved, and will live as God's people under God's reign in God's new creation, no longer sent, but gathered in the city of God where God dwells with them, they as his people, he as their God. But "peoplehood" will not be defunct as a concept in the same way as "mission," for the saints in glory will not be a mere aggregate of individuals, but the corporate bride of Christ, the holy Israel of YHWH, from everlasting to everlasting.
Those are the stakes as I see them. But what say y'all?
"Second, the Church is universal in regard to all the conditions of mankind; for no exceptions are made, neither master nor servant, neither man nor woman: 'Neither bond nor free; there is neither male nor female' [Gal 3:28].
"Third, it is universal in time. Some have said that the Church will exist only up to a certain time. But this is false, for the Church began to exist in the time of Abel and will endure up to the end of the world: 'Behold, I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world' [Mt 28:20]. Moreover, even after the end of the world, it will continue to exist in heaven [Sed post consummationem saeculi remanebit in caelo]."
This is Thomas Aquinas's all too brief discussion of the church's catholicity in his exposition of the Apostles' Creed. Yesterday on Twitter I quoted the last section, on the eternality or temporal catholicity of the church, with some comments following it. Specifically, I wrote, "This text is ground zero for returning to the Bible to counter the argument that the church—God's people— is constituted by mission."
I got a lot of helpful replies, mostly pushing back or challenging my challenge to the claim that the church is constituted by mission. As I said later, the tweets weren't intended primarily to be polemical; I was preparing to teach Thomas's text in class, and so I jotted some thoughts down on Twitter before heading off. And though John Flett's The Witness of God is on my shelf, I've yet to read it, so I can't speak substantively to where our disagreements might lie, if anywhere.
But let me float a few questions to the church-as-mission folks, for greater clarity of understanding, at least on my side of things.
First, what motivates the claim that mission constitutes the church? Or, put differently, what are the stakes? One reply requested a less polarizing approach to this question. My response was and is this: I'm trying to lower the volume in our ecclesiological rhetoric. My sense is that, in recent decades and perhaps the last century, talk about mission has become over-inflated relative to its material importance to the doctrine of the church as such. What I'd like to say, simply, is: Mission is a crucial feature of the church, though it neither defines nor constitutes it. Or perhaps: Mission constitutes the church militant, but not the church triumphant. My question is: What would be lost if we say "the mission is consummated with the kingdom's coming in full, yet the church endures in the new creation as God's elect and holy people," etc., etc.?
Second, is there biblical support for the church's "sending" being something other than or beyond what is spelled out in Matthew 28:19-20 and Acts 1:8? That is, is God's people "sent" prior to Christ's sending of the apostles (and the apostolic church) or following his second advent? Where in the Bible suggests that?
Third, all the counter-proposals I saw (on Twitter: again, Flett excepted) very quickly became metaphorical in the extreme and/or reductive to the point of emptying the concept. That is, "sending" is interpreted in terms of Gregory of Nyssa's epektasis, the never-ending journey into the infinite life of the triune God's eternal, inexhaustible fellowship. (My friend Myles Werntz posed this idea.) Well, okay ... but what work is "sending" doing there that epektasis isn't already doing? Why hold on to "sending" when we have another term or concept that is perfectly adequate to the job? Others suggested something like the church's never-ending task in the eschaton of worshiping God or testifying to one another about God's grace and love. Sure, those are traditionally (and biblically) the description of what it is we'll be doing in the kingdom; but what conceptual connection exists between those activities and "being sent"? All kinds of descriptions of life in resurrected glory exist in the church's tradition, and few to none include or require language of "sending." (Cf. Dante's Paradiso.) So what, again, does "sending" add materially to the description? "Sending" cannot and should be reduced to "asked/called to do stuff"/"tasked with actions from and for God." Why not advert, say, to cultic language, in which we will all be priests, ministering in the one temple of the one new world of God? You don't need "sending" language for that.
So on and so forth. But my fourth and last query gets to the heart of the matter, I think, which is this: My push-back on church-as-mission is meant, theologically, to de-center ecclesiology that (a) makes Israel secondary or subordinate to the missionary church and/or (b) conceives of election and peoplehood as essentially instrumental, coordinated as a means to some greater end. My counter—and this will be the article, God willing, I write sometime in the next few years—is that divine election to peoplehood is in part an end in itself. Israel is called to be holy, set apart from the nations, to witness to the divine glory and grace, and to be a divine blessing to the nations: yes and amen. But Israel is also called by God simply out of God's inexplicable, unpredictable love for Israel, and therefore out of God's bottomless desire to bless the children of Abraham, the friend of God. Pentecost and ekklesia open up the people of God to the gentiles through faith in Israel's Messiah, and indeed, that was always God's intention for the world; hence the mission to the nations, Christ's sending of the apostles to every corner of the earth as his witnesses. But when the mission is completed—when the gospel has been proclaimed to every nation and people under the sun, when "the full number of the gentiles has come in" (Rom 11:25)—then all Israel will be saved, and will live as God's people under God's reign in God's new creation, no longer sent, but gathered in the city of God where God dwells with them, they as his people, he as their God. But "peoplehood" will not be defunct as a concept in the same way as "mission," for the saints in glory will not be a mere aggregate of individuals, but the corporate bride of Christ, the holy Israel of YHWH, from everlasting to everlasting.
Those are the stakes as I see them. But what say y'all?
On Markan priority
This semester I'm teaching two sections of a course for freshmen of all majors on the Gospels. It's the professor's discretion to pick one of the Gospels to focus on for the majority of the semester, and while I flirted with the Gospel of John (before I learned that it had to be a Synoptic), I eventually chose Mark. I've now been teaching it, ever so slowly, for the last five weeks—and we're only through the beginning of chapter 9, having discussed the transfiguration today. (We've skipped ahead to a couple teachings, such as on marriage, but otherwise we're going chapter by chapter.) Next week we follow Jesus into Jerusalem for his triumphal entry and prophetic demonstration in the temple.
Reading and re-reading and teaching Mark has raised anew for me the question of Markan priority. I teach, following the overwhelming majority of New Testament scholars, that Mark was most likely the first Gospel written, and that both Matthew and Luke used Mark as a primary source. If I had to bet, that's still by far the choice I would go with.
Having said that...
Spend some time with Mark, and you'll notice just how expertly crafted it is; just how richly artistic and intentional its literary, structural, thematic, and theological features are. My sense is that at least part of the case made for Matthew and Luke's dependence on Mark is their "cleaning up" of Mark's roughness. Except that there is no reason in principle to take Mark's roughness as an accidental aspect of the Gospel, that is, to take it as a function of a hurried or rushed composition, unrelated to the purpose and stylistic substance of the work.
Because Mark's no-frills style is part and parcel of the subtle, sophisticated portrait of Jesus the Gospel offers to its readers. (One student compared the opening two dozen verses of the Gospel to a movie trailer: action, CUT, action, CUT, action, CUT—new scenes piling on top of one another with neither commentary nor context.) And the literary intentionality is undeniable: doubled episodes, intercalation, the messianic mystery, the triple repetition of Jesus's prediction of suffering in Jerusalem, the drum-beat refrain of the disciples' (most of all Peter's) absolute failure to understand Jesus, the allusions (centrally in the opening handful of verses) to Isaiah 40–55, the circumspect but exhaustive affirmation of Jesus's divine power and authority, the elusive and unsettling account of the resurrection, the irony of who it is that recognizes Jesus and who does not, the would-be angel's exhortation to the women (and so to the disciples, and so to the reader) to "return to Galilee" and to discover the living Jesus there—i.e., in the pages of the very same Gospel—etc., etc.
So what would have to be the case for Mark not to have been the first Gospel written? Matthew would probably have to be first instead, using his own materials (and perhaps something like "Q"), composed just before or after the destruction of the temple in 70 A.D.; and Mark, receiving Matthew's Gospel—let's say in Rome, only months or 1-2 years after Matthew's composition—gives us not just the cliff notes, but a much less explicit, a much less didactic, a much less prolix and embroidered Gospel, one emphasizing mystery, secrecy, failure, shame, suffering, and irony—perhaps under the influence of Paul or one of his coworkers, perhaps under the heightened pressures of persecution in the imperial capital, perhaps aiming for something both more concretely close to the ground of Palestine yet accessible to gentile Christians in south-central Europe unfamiliar with Jewish groups, conventions, and language in and around Galilee and Jerusalem, perhaps even a hear-it-in-a-single-sitting biography-Gospel for Pauline-like churches that lacked something so rich in narrative detail but for whom Matthew's Gospel would be too invested in intra-Jewish polemic and interpretive dispute over Torah to be existentially and spiritually significant.
Perhaps. It's a long shot. It's unlikely. I know I'm not the first one to suggest it. But it's a thought.
Reading and re-reading and teaching Mark has raised anew for me the question of Markan priority. I teach, following the overwhelming majority of New Testament scholars, that Mark was most likely the first Gospel written, and that both Matthew and Luke used Mark as a primary source. If I had to bet, that's still by far the choice I would go with.
Having said that...
Spend some time with Mark, and you'll notice just how expertly crafted it is; just how richly artistic and intentional its literary, structural, thematic, and theological features are. My sense is that at least part of the case made for Matthew and Luke's dependence on Mark is their "cleaning up" of Mark's roughness. Except that there is no reason in principle to take Mark's roughness as an accidental aspect of the Gospel, that is, to take it as a function of a hurried or rushed composition, unrelated to the purpose and stylistic substance of the work.
Because Mark's no-frills style is part and parcel of the subtle, sophisticated portrait of Jesus the Gospel offers to its readers. (One student compared the opening two dozen verses of the Gospel to a movie trailer: action, CUT, action, CUT, action, CUT—new scenes piling on top of one another with neither commentary nor context.) And the literary intentionality is undeniable: doubled episodes, intercalation, the messianic mystery, the triple repetition of Jesus's prediction of suffering in Jerusalem, the drum-beat refrain of the disciples' (most of all Peter's) absolute failure to understand Jesus, the allusions (centrally in the opening handful of verses) to Isaiah 40–55, the circumspect but exhaustive affirmation of Jesus's divine power and authority, the elusive and unsettling account of the resurrection, the irony of who it is that recognizes Jesus and who does not, the would-be angel's exhortation to the women (and so to the disciples, and so to the reader) to "return to Galilee" and to discover the living Jesus there—i.e., in the pages of the very same Gospel—etc., etc.
So what would have to be the case for Mark not to have been the first Gospel written? Matthew would probably have to be first instead, using his own materials (and perhaps something like "Q"), composed just before or after the destruction of the temple in 70 A.D.; and Mark, receiving Matthew's Gospel—let's say in Rome, only months or 1-2 years after Matthew's composition—gives us not just the cliff notes, but a much less explicit, a much less didactic, a much less prolix and embroidered Gospel, one emphasizing mystery, secrecy, failure, shame, suffering, and irony—perhaps under the influence of Paul or one of his coworkers, perhaps under the heightened pressures of persecution in the imperial capital, perhaps aiming for something both more concretely close to the ground of Palestine yet accessible to gentile Christians in south-central Europe unfamiliar with Jewish groups, conventions, and language in and around Galilee and Jerusalem, perhaps even a hear-it-in-a-single-sitting biography-Gospel for Pauline-like churches that lacked something so rich in narrative detail but for whom Matthew's Gospel would be too invested in intra-Jewish polemic and interpretive dispute over Torah to be existentially and spiritually significant.
Perhaps. It's a long shot. It's unlikely. I know I'm not the first one to suggest it. But it's a thought.
From "Sent Mail": on contemporary praise and worship music
I am exactly one step away from entering full-on Amos prophetic
mode with contemporary praise and worship songs. It's not that it's bad.
Church music has, parish to parish, congregation to congregation, been bad since time immemorial. It's something else entirely.
The content is so spectacularly, even impressively, vacuous that it it nigh un-Christian. The words are so consistently monosyllabic that one would think the phrases are meant to be understood by kindergartners. The only characters in the songs are the otherwise unnamed pronouns "You" and "I." "You" is, so far as I can tell, generally benign, and makes "I" feel good, but I've yet to figure anything else about him/her/it, or even about "I," except that "I" thinks about "I" a whole lot, especially "I's" emotional well-being.
I am persuaded that the songwriters have together signed a blood-pact never, on principle, to use language that is from, or could be taken by a seeker to be from, the Bible—which is the only possible explanation for the lack of any scriptural terminology, stories, echoes, allusions, personal names, or titles for God. Protestants used to think the pope had a special meeting place in the Vatican for consultations with Satan; I'm convinced some similar bargain has been reached by the lords of CCM. Nothing else except a diabolical conspiracy can make sense of it.
The content is so spectacularly, even impressively, vacuous that it it nigh un-Christian. The words are so consistently monosyllabic that one would think the phrases are meant to be understood by kindergartners. The only characters in the songs are the otherwise unnamed pronouns "You" and "I." "You" is, so far as I can tell, generally benign, and makes "I" feel good, but I've yet to figure anything else about him/her/it, or even about "I," except that "I" thinks about "I" a whole lot, especially "I's" emotional well-being.
I am persuaded that the songwriters have together signed a blood-pact never, on principle, to use language that is from, or could be taken by a seeker to be from, the Bible—which is the only possible explanation for the lack of any scriptural terminology, stories, echoes, allusions, personal names, or titles for God. Protestants used to think the pope had a special meeting place in the Vatican for consultations with Satan; I'm convinced some similar bargain has been reached by the lords of CCM. Nothing else except a diabolical conspiracy can make sense of it.
"Speak a language, speak a people": Willie Jennings on Pentecost
"God has come to them, on them, with them. This moment echoes Mary's intimate moment. The Holy Spirit again overshadows. However this similar holy action creates something different, something startling. The Spirit creates joining. The followers of Jesus are now being connected in a way that joins them to people in the most intimate space—of voice, memory, sound, body, land, and place. It is language that runs through all these matters. It is the sinew of existence of a people. My people, our language: to speak a language is to speak a people. Speaking announces familiarity, connection, and relationality. But these people are already connected, aren't they? They are 'devout Jews from every nation under heaven' (andres eulabeis apo pantos ethnous, v. 5). They share the same story and the same faith in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. They share the same hopes of Israel's restoration, even its expansion into the world freed from oppression and domination. They are diaspora, and diaspora life is already a shared obligation and hope.
"God has, however, now revealed a mighty hand and an outstretched arm reaching deeply into the lives of the Son's co-travelers and pressed them along a new road into the places God seeks to be fully known. This is first a miracle of hearing. . . .
"The miracles are not merely in ears. They are also in mouths and in bodies. God, like a lead dancer, is taking hold of her partners, drawing them close and saying, 'Step this way and now this direction.' The gesture of speaking another language is born not of the desire of the disciples but of God, and it signifies all that is essential to learning a language. It bears repeating: this is not what the disciples imagined or hoped would manifest the power of the Holy Spirit. To learn a language requires submission to a people. Even if in the person of a single teacher, the learner must submit to that single voice, learning what the words mean as they are bound to events, songs, sayings, jokes, everyday practices, habits of mind and body, all within a land and the journey of a people. Anyone who has learned a language other than their native tongues knows how humbling learning can actually be. An adult in the slow and often arduous efforts of pronunciation may be reduced to a child, and a child at home in that language may become the teacher of an adult. There comes a crucial moment in the learning of any language, if one wishes to reach fluency, that enunciation requirements and repetition must give way to sheer wanting. Some people learn a language out of gut-wrenching determination born of necessity. Most, however, who enter a lifetime of fluency, do so because at some point in time they learn to love it.
"They fall in love with the sounds. The language sounds beautiful to them. And if that love is complete, they fall in love with its original signifiers. They come to love the people—the food, the faces, the plans, the practices, the songs, the poetry, the happiness, the sadness, the ambiguity, the truth—and they love the place, that is, the circled earth those people call their land, their landscapes, their home. Speak a language, speak a people. God speaks people, fluently. And God, with all the urgency that is with the Holy Spirit, wants the disciples of his only begotten Son to speak fluently too. This is the beginning of a revolution that the Spirit performs. Like an artist drawing on all her talent to express a new way to live, God gestures the deepest joining possible, one flesh with God, and desire made one with the Holy One.
"Yet here we can begin to see even more clearly the ancient challenge and the modern problem. The ancient challenge is a God who is way ahead of us and is calling us to catch up. The modern problem is born of the colonial enterprise where language play and use entered its most demonic displays. Imagine peoples in many places, in many conquered sites, in many tongues all being told that their languages are secondary, tertiary, and inferior to the supreme languages of the enlightened peoples. Make way for Latin, French, German, Dutch, Spanish, and English. These are the languages God speaks. These are the scholarly languages of the transcending intellect and the holy mind. Imagine centuries of submission and internalized hatred of mother tongues and in the quiet spaces of many villages, many homes, women, men, and children practicing these new enlightened languages not by choice but by force. Imagine peoples largely from this new Western world learning native languages not out of love, but as utility for domination. Imagine mastering native languages in order to master people, making oneself their master and making them slaves. Now imagine Christianity deeply implicated in all this, in many cases riding high on the winds of this linguistic imperialism, a different sounding wind. Christianity was ripe for this tragic collaboration with colonialism because it had learned before the colonial moment began to separate a language from a people. It had learned to value, cherish, and even love the language of Jewish people found in Scripture—but hate Jewish people.
"Thankfully this is not the only story of Christianity in the colonial modern. There are also the quiet stories of some translators, and the peculiar few missionaries who from time to time and place to place showed something different. They joined. They, with or without 'natural language skill,' sought love and found it in another voice, another speech, another way of life. They showed something in their utter helplessness in the face of difference: they were there in a new land to be changed, not just change people into believers. they were there not just to make conquered Christians but truly and deeply make themselves Christian in a new space that would mean that their names would be changed. They would become the sound of another people, speaking the wonderful works of God. However these stories remain hidden in large measure from the history of Christianity that we know so well, which means we often know so little of Christianity."
—Willie Jame Jennings, Acts: A Theological Commentary on the Bible (2017), 28-31 (my emphasis). This work is extraordinary for its beauty, creativity, depth, and wonder; it reads as a series of kerygmatic riffs, ruminations, and exhortations on the words of Acts as they encounter the church today. Not every commentary can or should look like this, but it is nonetheless scriptural commentary at its best and most enriching.
"God has, however, now revealed a mighty hand and an outstretched arm reaching deeply into the lives of the Son's co-travelers and pressed them along a new road into the places God seeks to be fully known. This is first a miracle of hearing. . . .
"The miracles are not merely in ears. They are also in mouths and in bodies. God, like a lead dancer, is taking hold of her partners, drawing them close and saying, 'Step this way and now this direction.' The gesture of speaking another language is born not of the desire of the disciples but of God, and it signifies all that is essential to learning a language. It bears repeating: this is not what the disciples imagined or hoped would manifest the power of the Holy Spirit. To learn a language requires submission to a people. Even if in the person of a single teacher, the learner must submit to that single voice, learning what the words mean as they are bound to events, songs, sayings, jokes, everyday practices, habits of mind and body, all within a land and the journey of a people. Anyone who has learned a language other than their native tongues knows how humbling learning can actually be. An adult in the slow and often arduous efforts of pronunciation may be reduced to a child, and a child at home in that language may become the teacher of an adult. There comes a crucial moment in the learning of any language, if one wishes to reach fluency, that enunciation requirements and repetition must give way to sheer wanting. Some people learn a language out of gut-wrenching determination born of necessity. Most, however, who enter a lifetime of fluency, do so because at some point in time they learn to love it.
"They fall in love with the sounds. The language sounds beautiful to them. And if that love is complete, they fall in love with its original signifiers. They come to love the people—the food, the faces, the plans, the practices, the songs, the poetry, the happiness, the sadness, the ambiguity, the truth—and they love the place, that is, the circled earth those people call their land, their landscapes, their home. Speak a language, speak a people. God speaks people, fluently. And God, with all the urgency that is with the Holy Spirit, wants the disciples of his only begotten Son to speak fluently too. This is the beginning of a revolution that the Spirit performs. Like an artist drawing on all her talent to express a new way to live, God gestures the deepest joining possible, one flesh with God, and desire made one with the Holy One.
"Yet here we can begin to see even more clearly the ancient challenge and the modern problem. The ancient challenge is a God who is way ahead of us and is calling us to catch up. The modern problem is born of the colonial enterprise where language play and use entered its most demonic displays. Imagine peoples in many places, in many conquered sites, in many tongues all being told that their languages are secondary, tertiary, and inferior to the supreme languages of the enlightened peoples. Make way for Latin, French, German, Dutch, Spanish, and English. These are the languages God speaks. These are the scholarly languages of the transcending intellect and the holy mind. Imagine centuries of submission and internalized hatred of mother tongues and in the quiet spaces of many villages, many homes, women, men, and children practicing these new enlightened languages not by choice but by force. Imagine peoples largely from this new Western world learning native languages not out of love, but as utility for domination. Imagine mastering native languages in order to master people, making oneself their master and making them slaves. Now imagine Christianity deeply implicated in all this, in many cases riding high on the winds of this linguistic imperialism, a different sounding wind. Christianity was ripe for this tragic collaboration with colonialism because it had learned before the colonial moment began to separate a language from a people. It had learned to value, cherish, and even love the language of Jewish people found in Scripture—but hate Jewish people.
"Thankfully this is not the only story of Christianity in the colonial modern. There are also the quiet stories of some translators, and the peculiar few missionaries who from time to time and place to place showed something different. They joined. They, with or without 'natural language skill,' sought love and found it in another voice, another speech, another way of life. They showed something in their utter helplessness in the face of difference: they were there in a new land to be changed, not just change people into believers. they were there not just to make conquered Christians but truly and deeply make themselves Christian in a new space that would mean that their names would be changed. They would become the sound of another people, speaking the wonderful works of God. However these stories remain hidden in large measure from the history of Christianity that we know so well, which means we often know so little of Christianity."
—Willie Jame Jennings, Acts: A Theological Commentary on the Bible (2017), 28-31 (my emphasis). This work is extraordinary for its beauty, creativity, depth, and wonder; it reads as a series of kerygmatic riffs, ruminations, and exhortations on the words of Acts as they encounter the church today. Not every commentary can or should look like this, but it is nonetheless scriptural commentary at its best and most enriching.
New essay published at the LA Review of Books: "Public Theology in Retreat"
I've got a new essay available over at the Los Angeles Review of Books called "Public Theology in Retreat." It's ostensibly a review essay of three books published by David Bentley Hart in the last year, but I use that occasion to ask about the role of public theology in contemporary U.S. intellectual culture, using Hart as a sort of Trojan horse. Alan Jacobs's essay in Harper's last year serves as a framing device, and I look at Hart as an exception that proves the rule—even while portraying Hart's thought to a largely non-theological audience as a kind of specimen, to intrigue and possibly attract unfamiliar and potentially hostile minds. We live in perilous and fickle times, after all. Why not give theology a try? There have been stranger bedfellows.
My thanks to the editors at LARB for publishing a work of straightforward theological exposition like this; I know it's not their usual cup of tea. I confess that I have steeled myself for more than one failure to read the actual argument of the piece, but so it goes. Mostly I'm excited to see what charitable readers make of it, from whatever perspective. So check it out and let me know what you think.
My thanks to the editors at LARB for publishing a work of straightforward theological exposition like this; I know it's not their usual cup of tea. I confess that I have steeled myself for more than one failure to read the actual argument of the piece, but so it goes. Mostly I'm excited to see what charitable readers make of it, from whatever perspective. So check it out and let me know what you think.
On John le Carré's new novel, A Legacy of Spies
The first thing to say about the latest novel from 85-year old spymaster John le Carré is that it is slight. Trumpeted as a return to the world of characters that made him an international household name—to George Smiley, his allies and his enemies—it is indeed a quite literal trip down memory lane. The book is ostensibly the written account of Peter Guillam, now an elderly man nearly as old as le Carré, reflecting on his role in an affair from the late 1950s and early 1960s. The book uses the threat of a lawsuit against the British secret intelligence service as a plot device for revisiting the events leading up to and including the story told in 1963's The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. It thus doubles as a sort of retrospective prequel, filling in gaps, painting George and his activities in even bolder shades of gray, and adding even more tragedy and pathos to the events of that book, as well as a sort of meta-commentary from David Cornwall, the man behind the pseudonym, on the ethics of spycraft, the humanity (or what's left of it) of his great hero Smiley, and how both Great Britain and Europe as a whole have fared since the Cold War.
The book asks: Can it be simultaneously true that it was right for spies—like Cornwall, like Smiley, like Guillam—to forsake so much of their humanity against so great a foe as the Soviet Union and that their eventual triumph proved empty, a victory for nothing so much as naked global capitalism? In losing the battle for their souls for the sake of winning a war, did they fail to see that a far greater war was at stake, one they lost anyway, thus giving away their souls for nothing? Or if they managed to keep their souls, to what end and at what cost?
These, like so much of le Carré's post-1990 output, are the questions animating A Legacy of Spies. Neither the narrative nor the retrospect is substantial enough to carry the profundity of their weight, but the questions land by sheer force of authorial will, and by the unquenchable loveliness of the prose, and of the lived-in quality of the world. (It's lived in, all right: Smiley's been a character in nine novels across 56 years. His apparent immortality not implausibly matches his creator's.) For example, the way in which the drama of the story comes from the (again, literal) children of those caught in the crossfire of Control, Smiley, and Guillam's work nearly six decades earlier is at once on the nose and fitting: those sacrificed on the altar of war—however cold—are not ciphers or symbols or merely joes but human beings with loves and lives outside of and beyond the fragile networks of information to which they temporarily belong.
One wishes Smiley's role in the book were not so similar to other recent exercises in nostalgia: the lost great man sought by his junior, discovered only at the end (see: Tron 2.0; Blade Runner 2049; Star Wars: The Force Awakens). The book does make me want to see Tomas Alfredson get on with adapting Smiley's People with Gary Oldman, then perhaps—perhaps?—doing some sort of double adaptation of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold paired with A Legacy of Spies, using prosthetics to age the principals in the latter. In fact, we now have three rough-and-ready Smiley trilogies: #1: Call for the Dead, A Murder with of Quality, and The Looking Glass War; #2: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy, and Smiley's People; and #3: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, The Secret Pilgrim, and A Legacy of Spies. The first trilogy is middling, the second is the masterpiece, but the third stretches from 1963 to 1990 to 2017, maps onto the whole drama, denouement, and aftermath of the Cold War, and is book-ended by pained but non-cynical moral reflection on the tragedy of spycraft, using a concrete case study in the sacrifice of others "for the greater good."
What greater good? Le Carré isn't sure anymore, if he ever was. Regardless of the precise quality of his latest novel, it's a question worth pondering.
The book asks: Can it be simultaneously true that it was right for spies—like Cornwall, like Smiley, like Guillam—to forsake so much of their humanity against so great a foe as the Soviet Union and that their eventual triumph proved empty, a victory for nothing so much as naked global capitalism? In losing the battle for their souls for the sake of winning a war, did they fail to see that a far greater war was at stake, one they lost anyway, thus giving away their souls for nothing? Or if they managed to keep their souls, to what end and at what cost?
These, like so much of le Carré's post-1990 output, are the questions animating A Legacy of Spies. Neither the narrative nor the retrospect is substantial enough to carry the profundity of their weight, but the questions land by sheer force of authorial will, and by the unquenchable loveliness of the prose, and of the lived-in quality of the world. (It's lived in, all right: Smiley's been a character in nine novels across 56 years. His apparent immortality not implausibly matches his creator's.) For example, the way in which the drama of the story comes from the (again, literal) children of those caught in the crossfire of Control, Smiley, and Guillam's work nearly six decades earlier is at once on the nose and fitting: those sacrificed on the altar of war—however cold—are not ciphers or symbols or merely joes but human beings with loves and lives outside of and beyond the fragile networks of information to which they temporarily belong.
One wishes Smiley's role in the book were not so similar to other recent exercises in nostalgia: the lost great man sought by his junior, discovered only at the end (see: Tron 2.0; Blade Runner 2049; Star Wars: The Force Awakens). The book does make me want to see Tomas Alfredson get on with adapting Smiley's People with Gary Oldman, then perhaps—perhaps?—doing some sort of double adaptation of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold paired with A Legacy of Spies, using prosthetics to age the principals in the latter. In fact, we now have three rough-and-ready Smiley trilogies: #1: Call for the Dead, A Murder with of Quality, and The Looking Glass War; #2: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy, and Smiley's People; and #3: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, The Secret Pilgrim, and A Legacy of Spies. The first trilogy is middling, the second is the masterpiece, but the third stretches from 1963 to 1990 to 2017, maps onto the whole drama, denouement, and aftermath of the Cold War, and is book-ended by pained but non-cynical moral reflection on the tragedy of spycraft, using a concrete case study in the sacrifice of others "for the greater good."
What greater good? Le Carré isn't sure anymore, if he ever was. Regardless of the precise quality of his latest novel, it's a question worth pondering.
16 tips for how to read a passage from the Gospels
This semester I am teaching two sections of an entry-level course for freshmen of all majors on the Gospels, focused on the Gospel of Mark. This week I gave them 16 tips on how to read a passage from the Gospels, which I thought I'd share here.
1. Characters
Whom do I meet in this passage? Are they named? Are they central or peripheral? Why are they here? What are they doing? Have I met them before? Will I meet them again?
2. Places
Where does this passage take place? Does it take place in one place or multiple places? Does it tell me where, or leave that unknown? Is the location important to the action? Does the action take place between places? What has happened in this place before, historically or biblically?
3. Concepts
What concepts or ideas are mentioned? Do I know what they mean? Do they have a specific meaning here? Does the author define them for me, assume I know what they mean, or want me to wonder what they mean? Is the concept a new one or one that predates this passage? How can I learn what it means?
4. Action
What happens in this passage? Who does the acting, and to whom does something happen? Is the action good, bad, or something in between? Does nothing seem to happen? Why might there be a passage in which nothing at all seems to happen? How does this small action relate to the larger action of the book as a whole? How does the action affect or change the characters involved?
5. Speech
Who talks? About what? Is there a single person who speaks with authority, or is there some kind of exchange between two or more people? Does one of them, or do both, learn something from the exchange? Is the topic spoken about new, challenging, bold, unique in some way? How do those who hear it respond? Is the speech for them alone or for others, including the reader of this text? How do you know?
6. Problem/solution
Is this passage addressing a problem? Is it identified, or left implicit? Is the problem resolved in some way, or left unresolved? Who resolves it? Do all the characters accept the resolution? How does the proposed resolution affect them? Is the problem limited to the characters in the story, or to potential later headers of the story?
7. Echoes of Scripture
Does the passage interact with the Old Testament in any way? Does it quote it? If so, does it name the book cited? Does it cite a single text or combine multiple texts together? How does the text quoted inform or illuminate what happens in this passage? Is the OT text cited by the characters INSIDE the story, or by the narrator OF the story? To what end or purpose? If the OT is not cited, but alluded to in some way, why? And if it is not alluded to explicitly at all, but the action in the passage is similar to the action of a story in the OT, why might that be? Would the characters in the story have realized the similarities, or are the similarities the result of the way that the author of the passage has crafted it? If the latter, why might the author have done that?
8. Genre
What kind of text is this? Is it a story about something that happened in the past? Is it a parable? a letter? a poem or a song? moral teaching? How should my reading of the passage correspond to the kind of text it is?
9. Tone
How does the passage sound? Is it leisurely? Eloquent? Happy? Angry? Urgent? What about the passage makes it feel or sound that way? What happens in the passage that might help explain its tone?
10. Perspective
Whose perspective is represented in the passage? One of the characters’? Multiple characters’? Does the author presume to know what some or all of the characters are thinking? How could he know? What “angle” or “slant” on the action is the narrator taking, regardless of characters? What does he want you to notice, to see, to hear? What does he therefore ignore as a result? What details has he included intentionally—and what details has he perhaps included unintentionally?
11. Audience
To whom or for whom does this text seem to be written? Can you tell from the passage in question, or from other passages? Based on the presumed audience, how can that help you understand what’s going on in the passage? Are you, at least by extension, part of that audience, or are you an outsider? How does that affect your reading?
12. Purpose
What appears to be the intended purpose or purposes of this passage? Why did the author write it? What would or should result if the right people were to read the passage the right way? What does the author want to happen as a result of this passage having been written and communicated to others?
13. Implications
Whatever the author’s goals or intentions, what are the implications of this passage? What follows from it? In particular, what follows for some central biblical realities: God, Jesus, Holy Spirit, gospel, church, discipleship, faith? If the passage you are reading is true, then what must therefore be true about God, or Jesus, or the gospel, or faith?
14. Then/now
Since this text was written at a different time and place and in a different culture than ours, what meanings might it have had then, separate from its potential meanings now? In turn, what meanings might it have now, regardless of what meanings it might have had then? And how might the meanings then and the meanings now be related?
15. Context, context, context
ALWAYS ask yourself: What are the relevant contexts of this passage? Within the book of which it is a part, what has happened just BEFORE and just AFTER this passage? What happens at the beginning and ending of the book? How does this passage relate to them? Does something very important happen in this passage, or immediately before/after it? What about the context of the Bible—how does this passage relate to other passages in other biblical books? What about historical context—what was happening at the time in which the passage’s story happened, or at the time in which the passage was written? What about cultural context—what aspects of the culture in the time make an appearance in the passage? What about theological context—what theological questions and conversations does this passage interact with? What about church context—how does this passage relate to the life, mission, worship, and ethics of the Christian community? What about moral context—what does this passage suggest about the good, about how human beings are to live in the world? So on and so forth.
16. The study notes are your friend!
Finally, use the notes in your study Bible! Read the introduction to the biblical book you are reading, and read the footnotes at the bottom. And preferably also consult a commentary on the book, at least when you have big questions about any of the above—especially context.
1. Characters
Whom do I meet in this passage? Are they named? Are they central or peripheral? Why are they here? What are they doing? Have I met them before? Will I meet them again?
2. Places
Where does this passage take place? Does it take place in one place or multiple places? Does it tell me where, or leave that unknown? Is the location important to the action? Does the action take place between places? What has happened in this place before, historically or biblically?
3. Concepts
What concepts or ideas are mentioned? Do I know what they mean? Do they have a specific meaning here? Does the author define them for me, assume I know what they mean, or want me to wonder what they mean? Is the concept a new one or one that predates this passage? How can I learn what it means?
4. Action
What happens in this passage? Who does the acting, and to whom does something happen? Is the action good, bad, or something in between? Does nothing seem to happen? Why might there be a passage in which nothing at all seems to happen? How does this small action relate to the larger action of the book as a whole? How does the action affect or change the characters involved?
5. Speech
Who talks? About what? Is there a single person who speaks with authority, or is there some kind of exchange between two or more people? Does one of them, or do both, learn something from the exchange? Is the topic spoken about new, challenging, bold, unique in some way? How do those who hear it respond? Is the speech for them alone or for others, including the reader of this text? How do you know?
6. Problem/solution
Is this passage addressing a problem? Is it identified, or left implicit? Is the problem resolved in some way, or left unresolved? Who resolves it? Do all the characters accept the resolution? How does the proposed resolution affect them? Is the problem limited to the characters in the story, or to potential later headers of the story?
7. Echoes of Scripture
Does the passage interact with the Old Testament in any way? Does it quote it? If so, does it name the book cited? Does it cite a single text or combine multiple texts together? How does the text quoted inform or illuminate what happens in this passage? Is the OT text cited by the characters INSIDE the story, or by the narrator OF the story? To what end or purpose? If the OT is not cited, but alluded to in some way, why? And if it is not alluded to explicitly at all, but the action in the passage is similar to the action of a story in the OT, why might that be? Would the characters in the story have realized the similarities, or are the similarities the result of the way that the author of the passage has crafted it? If the latter, why might the author have done that?
8. Genre
What kind of text is this? Is it a story about something that happened in the past? Is it a parable? a letter? a poem or a song? moral teaching? How should my reading of the passage correspond to the kind of text it is?
9. Tone
How does the passage sound? Is it leisurely? Eloquent? Happy? Angry? Urgent? What about the passage makes it feel or sound that way? What happens in the passage that might help explain its tone?
10. Perspective
Whose perspective is represented in the passage? One of the characters’? Multiple characters’? Does the author presume to know what some or all of the characters are thinking? How could he know? What “angle” or “slant” on the action is the narrator taking, regardless of characters? What does he want you to notice, to see, to hear? What does he therefore ignore as a result? What details has he included intentionally—and what details has he perhaps included unintentionally?
11. Audience
To whom or for whom does this text seem to be written? Can you tell from the passage in question, or from other passages? Based on the presumed audience, how can that help you understand what’s going on in the passage? Are you, at least by extension, part of that audience, or are you an outsider? How does that affect your reading?
12. Purpose
What appears to be the intended purpose or purposes of this passage? Why did the author write it? What would or should result if the right people were to read the passage the right way? What does the author want to happen as a result of this passage having been written and communicated to others?
13. Implications
Whatever the author’s goals or intentions, what are the implications of this passage? What follows from it? In particular, what follows for some central biblical realities: God, Jesus, Holy Spirit, gospel, church, discipleship, faith? If the passage you are reading is true, then what must therefore be true about God, or Jesus, or the gospel, or faith?
14. Then/now
Since this text was written at a different time and place and in a different culture than ours, what meanings might it have had then, separate from its potential meanings now? In turn, what meanings might it have now, regardless of what meanings it might have had then? And how might the meanings then and the meanings now be related?
15. Context, context, context
ALWAYS ask yourself: What are the relevant contexts of this passage? Within the book of which it is a part, what has happened just BEFORE and just AFTER this passage? What happens at the beginning and ending of the book? How does this passage relate to them? Does something very important happen in this passage, or immediately before/after it? What about the context of the Bible—how does this passage relate to other passages in other biblical books? What about historical context—what was happening at the time in which the passage’s story happened, or at the time in which the passage was written? What about cultural context—what aspects of the culture in the time make an appearance in the passage? What about theological context—what theological questions and conversations does this passage interact with? What about church context—how does this passage relate to the life, mission, worship, and ethics of the Christian community? What about moral context—what does this passage suggest about the good, about how human beings are to live in the world? So on and so forth.
16. The study notes are your friend!
Finally, use the notes in your study Bible! Read the introduction to the biblical book you are reading, and read the footnotes at the bottom. And preferably also consult a commentary on the book, at least when you have big questions about any of the above—especially context.
Jenson's passing: tributes, links, and resources
Last week the great American theologian Robert W. Jenson died, at 87 years old. In addition to a remembrance I wrote myself (linked below), a number of other obituaries and tributes have appeared online, so I thought I would gather them together, along with further Jenson-related primary and secondary resources.
(If you have a link for me to add, mention it in the comments, on Twitter @eastbrad, or by email: bxe03a AT acu DOT edu.)
Remembering Jenson:
Victor Lee Austin: "Can These Bones Live? A Sermon Preached at Jenson's Funeral"
Carl E. Braaten: "Encomium for an Evangelical Catholic: Robert Jenson (1930–2017)"
Christian Century: "Robert Jenson, theologian revered by many of his peers, dies at age 87"
Christianity Today: "Died: Robert Jenson, 'America's Theologian'"
Brad East: "Rest in peace: Robert W. Jenson (1930–2017)"
Kim Fabricius: "Clerihew for Robert W. Jenson (1930–2017)"
Paul R. Hinlicky: "Robert Jenson and the God of the Gospel"
Scott Jones: "Can These Bones Live?"
Alvin F. Kimel, Jr.: "Reminiscences and Memories"
Peter Leithart: "Remembering Jenson"
Mars Hill Audio: "In Memoriam: Robert W. Jenson (1930–2017)"
Elizabeth Palmer: "Robert Jenson and the Search for the Divine Feminine"
R. R. Reno: "Robert W. Jenson, R.I.P."
Fred Sanders: "3 Favorite Robert Jenson Moments"
Secondary Resources:
Brad East: "What is the Doctrine of the Trinity For? Practicality and Projection in Robert Jenson's Theology"
Colin E. Gunton, ed.: Trinity, Time, and Church: A Response to the Theology of Robert W. Jenson
David Bentley Hart: "The Lively God of Robert Jenson"
Ben Myers: "Robert W. Jenson and Solveig Lucia Gold: Conversations with Poppi about God"
Wolfhart Pannenberg: "Systematic Theology: Volumes I & II"
Fred Sanders: "Unintended Consequences of Shoving (Robert W. Jenson)"
Brian K. Sholl: "On Robert Jenson's Trinitarian Thought"
Scott R. Swain: The God of the Gospel: Robert Jenson's Trinitarian Theology
Stephen John Wright: Dogmatic Aesthetics: A Theology of Beauty in Dialogue With Robert W. Jenson
Stephen John Wright and Chris E. W. Green, ed.: The Promise of Robert W. Jenson's Theology: Constructive Engagements
Primary Resources:
"Don't Thank Me, Thank the Holy Spirit" (Crackers and Grape Juice Podcast, 2017)
A Theology in Outline: Can These Bones Live? (ed. Adam Eitel; OUP, 2016)
"Ecumenism's Strange Future" (Living Church, 2014)
"On 'the Philosophy that Attends to Scripture'" (Syndicate, 2014)
"It's the Culture" (First Things, 2014)
"Reversals: How My Mind Has Changed" (The Christian Century, 2010)
"The Burns Lectures on 'The Regula Fidei and Scripture'" (University of Otago, New Zealand, 2009)
"A Theological Autobiography, to Date" (dialog, 2007)
"God's Time, Our Time: An Interview with Robert W. Jenson" (The Christian Century, 2006)
"Reading the Body" (The New Atlantis, 2005)
Song of Songs (Interpretation; WJKP, 2005)
"Can We Have a Story?" (First Things, 2000)
Systematic Theology: Volume I: The Triune God (OUP, 1997)
"How the World Lost Its Story" (First Things, 1993)
Christian Dogmatics (with Carl E. Braaten; Fortress, 1984)
Story and Promise: A Brief Theology of the Gospel About Jesus (Fortress, 1973)
(If you have a link for me to add, mention it in the comments, on Twitter @eastbrad, or by email: bxe03a AT acu DOT edu.)
Remembering Jenson:
Victor Lee Austin: "Can These Bones Live? A Sermon Preached at Jenson's Funeral"
Carl E. Braaten: "Encomium for an Evangelical Catholic: Robert Jenson (1930–2017)"
Christian Century: "Robert Jenson, theologian revered by many of his peers, dies at age 87"
Christianity Today: "Died: Robert Jenson, 'America's Theologian'"
Brad East: "Rest in peace: Robert W. Jenson (1930–2017)"
Kim Fabricius: "Clerihew for Robert W. Jenson (1930–2017)"
Paul R. Hinlicky: "Robert Jenson and the God of the Gospel"
Scott Jones: "Can These Bones Live?"
Alvin F. Kimel, Jr.: "Reminiscences and Memories"
Peter Leithart: "Remembering Jenson"
Mars Hill Audio: "In Memoriam: Robert W. Jenson (1930–2017)"
Elizabeth Palmer: "Robert Jenson and the Search for the Divine Feminine"
R. R. Reno: "Robert W. Jenson, R.I.P."
Fred Sanders: "3 Favorite Robert Jenson Moments"
Secondary Resources:
Brad East: "What is the Doctrine of the Trinity For? Practicality and Projection in Robert Jenson's Theology"
Colin E. Gunton, ed.: Trinity, Time, and Church: A Response to the Theology of Robert W. Jenson
David Bentley Hart: "The Lively God of Robert Jenson"
Ben Myers: "Robert W. Jenson and Solveig Lucia Gold: Conversations with Poppi about God"
Wolfhart Pannenberg: "Systematic Theology: Volumes I & II"
Fred Sanders: "Unintended Consequences of Shoving (Robert W. Jenson)"
Brian K. Sholl: "On Robert Jenson's Trinitarian Thought"
Scott R. Swain: The God of the Gospel: Robert Jenson's Trinitarian Theology
Stephen John Wright: Dogmatic Aesthetics: A Theology of Beauty in Dialogue With Robert W. Jenson
Stephen John Wright and Chris E. W. Green, ed.: The Promise of Robert W. Jenson's Theology: Constructive Engagements
Primary Resources:
"Don't Thank Me, Thank the Holy Spirit" (Crackers and Grape Juice Podcast, 2017)
A Theology in Outline: Can These Bones Live? (ed. Adam Eitel; OUP, 2016)
"Ecumenism's Strange Future" (Living Church, 2014)
"On 'the Philosophy that Attends to Scripture'" (Syndicate, 2014)
"It's the Culture" (First Things, 2014)
"Reversals: How My Mind Has Changed" (The Christian Century, 2010)
"The Burns Lectures on 'The Regula Fidei and Scripture'" (University of Otago, New Zealand, 2009)
"A Theological Autobiography, to Date" (dialog, 2007)
"God's Time, Our Time: An Interview with Robert W. Jenson" (The Christian Century, 2006)
"Reading the Body" (The New Atlantis, 2005)
Song of Songs (Interpretation; WJKP, 2005)
"Can We Have a Story?" (First Things, 2000)
Systematic Theology: Volume I: The Triune God (OUP, 1997)
"How the World Lost Its Story" (First Things, 1993)
Christian Dogmatics (with Carl E. Braaten; Fortress, 1984)
Story and Promise: A Brief Theology of the Gospel About Jesus (Fortress, 1973)
Rest in peace: Robert W. Jenson (1930–2017)
I first read Robert Jenson in the summer of 2009, following the first year of my Master of Divinity studies at Emory University, on a sort of whim. I had been introduced to him through an essay by Stanley Hauerwas, originally published in a festschrift for Jenson but republished in the 2004 collection of Hauerwas's essays called A Better Hope. Oddly, I had the impression that Hauerwas didn't like Jenson, but at a second glance, I realized his great admiration for him, so I not only read through Jenson's whole two-volume systematics that summer, but I blogged through it, too—in extensive detail. In fact, it was the first systematic theology I ever read.
Eight years later, and I am a systematic theologian. Fancy that.
Jenson passed away yesterday, having been born 87 years earlier, one year after the great stock market crash of 1929. He lived through the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War, the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, Roe v. Wade, the rise and fall of the Religious Right, the fall of the Soviet Union, September 11, 2001, the election of the first African-American U.S. President, and much more. He also lived through, and in many ways embodied, a startling number of international, ecclesial, and academic theological trends: ecumenism; doctrinal criticism; analytic philosophy of language; Heidegerrian anti-metaphysics; French Deconstructionism; the initially negative then positive reception of Barth in the English-speaking world; the shift away from systematics to theological methodology (and back again!); post–Vatican II ecclesiology; "death of God" theology; process theology; liberation theologies (black, feminist, and Latin American); virtue ethics; theological interpretation of Scripture; and much more.
Jenson studied under Peter Brunner in Heidelberg and eventually spent time in Basel with Barth, on whose theology he wrote his dissertation, which generated two books in his early career. He was impossibly prolific, publishing hundreds of essays and articles as well as more than 25 books over more than 55 years.
Initially an activist, Jenson and his wife Blanche—to whom he was married for more than 60 years, and whom he credited as co-author of all his books, indeed, "genetrici theologiae meae omniae"—marched and protested and spoke in the 1960s against the Vietnam War and for civil rights for African-Americans. His politics was forever altered, however, in 1973 with Roe v. Wade. As he wrote later, he assumed that those who had marched alongside him and his fellow Christians would draw a logical connection from protection of the vulnerable in Vietnam and the oppressed in America to the defenseless in the womb; but that was not to be. Ever after, his politics was divided, and without representation in American governance: as he said in a recent interview, he found he could vote for neither Republicans nor Democrats, for one worshiped an idol called "the free market" and the other worshiped an idol called "autonomous choice," and both idols were inimical to a Christian vision of the common good.
In 1997 and 1999, ostensibly as the crown and conclusion to 70 years' work in the theological academy, Jenson published his two-volume Systematic Theology, arguably the most read, renowned, and perhaps even controversial systematic proposal in the last three decades. There his lifelong interests came together in concise, readable, propulsive form: the triune God, the incarnate Jesus, the theological tradition, the nihilism of modernity, the hope of the gospel, and the work of the Spirit in the unitary church of the creeds. Even if you find yourself disagreeing with every word of it, it is worth your time. As my brother once told me, he wasn't sure what he thought about the book when he finished the last page, but more important, he felt compelled to get on his knees and worship the Trinity. Surely that is the final goal of every theological system; surely nothing could make Jenson more pleased.
Happily, those of us who loved and benefited from Jenson's work were blessed with nearly two more decades of output from his mind and pen following the systematics. Some of this work was his most playful and provocative; it also included two biblical commentaries, on the Song of Songs and Ezekiel. There are treasures not to be overlooked in those lovely works.
If Hauerwas was my gateway to theology as a world, Jenson was my guide, my Virgil. I didn't know the names of Irenaeus and Origin and Cyril and Nyssa and Damascene and Radbertus and Anselm and Bonaventure before him; or at least, I had no idea what they had to say. And I certainly hadn't considered putting Luther and Edwards and Schleiermacher and Barth together in the way he did. Perhaps most of all, I didn't know what systematic theology could be, the intellectual heights that it could reach and that it necessarily demanded, or the way in which it could be conducted as an exercise in spiritual, moral, and mental delight: bold, wry, unflinching, assertive, open-handed, open-ended, argumentative, humble, urgent, sober, at peace. Jenson knew more than most that theology is simultaneously the most and the least serious of tasks. It is of the utmost importance because what it concerns is the deepest and most central of all realities: God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the creator, sustainer, and savior of all. But self-seriousness is a mistake precisely because of that all-encompassing subject matter: God is in charge, and we are not; God, not we, will keep the gates of hell from prevailing against the church; God alone will steward the truth of the gospel, which we do indeed have, but only as we have been given it, and which we understand only through a glass darkly. Jenson knew, in other words, that in his theology he got some things, even some big things, wrong. And he could rest easy, like his teacher Barth, because God's grace reaches even to theologians. Although it is true that the church's teachers will be judged more harshly than others, the judgment of God is grace, and it goes all the way down.
God's grace has now been consummated in this one individual, God's servant and theologian Robert. He is at rest with the saints in the infinite life of God—the God he called, with a wink in his eye, both "roomy" and "chatty." May his rest be as full of talk as his life was on this earth, as eloquent and various as the eternal conversation of Jesus with his Father in their Spirit. And, God be praised, may he be raised to new and imperishable life on the last day, as he so faithfully desired and bore witness to in his work in this world. May that work give glory to God, and may it remind the church militant of the God of the gospel and the life we have been promised in Jesus, the life we can taste even now, the life of the world to come.
Roger Scruton on the new divisions of class, centered on TV
"The growth of popular sports and entertainment in our time, and the creation of a popular culture based in TV, football and mechanized music, have to some extent enabled people to live without ... home-grown institutions. They have also effectively abolished the working class as a moral idea, provided everyone with a classless picture of human society, and in doing so produced a new kind of social stratification—one which reflects the 'division of leisure' rather than the 'division of labor.' Traditional societies divide into upper, middle and working class. In modern societies that division is overload by another, which also contains three classes. The new classes are, in ascending order, the morons, the yuppies and the stars. The first watch TV, the second make the programs, and the third appear on them. And because those who appear on the screen cultivate the manners of the people who are watching them, implying that they are only there by accident, and that tomorrow it may very well be the viewer's turn, all possibility of resentment is avoided. At the same time, the emotional and intellectual torpor induced by TV neutralizes the social mobility that would otherwise enable the morons to change their lot. So obvious is this, that it is dangerous to say it. Class distinctions have not disappeared from modern life; they have merely become unmentionable."
—Roger Scruton, The Meaning of Conservatism, 169. Originally written in 1980, the book was heavily revised for a 2002 re-publication, from which this excerpt comes. With the rise of both "reality TV" and so-called "Peak TV," this semi-Marxist, though conservative, analysis would be worth modifying and extending into the new situation in which we find ourselves, especially in the U.S. (since Scruton is British).
—Roger Scruton, The Meaning of Conservatism, 169. Originally written in 1980, the book was heavily revised for a 2002 re-publication, from which this excerpt comes. With the rise of both "reality TV" and so-called "Peak TV," this semi-Marxist, though conservative, analysis would be worth modifying and extending into the new situation in which we find ourselves, especially in the U.S. (since Scruton is British).
What it is I'm privileged to do this fall
Starting Monday, I will have about 160 students spread across four classes, most of them freshmen. As I have been preparing for and praying about the beginning of the semester, and the formal beginning to my own career as a professor and teacher, it occurred to me what it is I am privileged to do this fall.
For 120 of those students, I will be teaching them the Gospels, especially the Gospel of Mark. Many of them know a thing or two about Jesus, and some of them know quite a bit. But some of them don't know a thing. And none of them has read the Gospels the way I will teach them to read them. They haven't heard about the Synoptics. They haven't heard about Logos Christology. They haven't thought about Mark 8, the "hinge" on which the whole book rests, when Jesus twice heals the blind man, and then twice heals his followers (present and future) in the person of Peter, rebuking him then teaching about the passion of the Messiah, about his death and resurrection. They haven't grappled with the living, convicting force of the Sermon on the Mount on their lives (and mine). They haven't considered the Jewish context of the church's origins, of Jesus's life and work, of all of Scripture and the faith itself. They haven't contemplated the salvific significance of the resurrection. They haven't—as in two of the classes we will do—read Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Discipleship, or for the most part even heard of him. They haven't analogized the Gospel portraits of the living Jesus to artistic interpretations of him, interpretations that make the familiar strange, that distort and confront, that take an angle, that imagine the Jew of Nazareth in other times, places, cultures, peoples.
They haven't done any of it. And I get to be their teacher, the one invested with the great responsibility of introducing them to so many wonderful, challenging, genuinely life-changing ideas—and not just ideas but events, persons, arguments, proposals, practices, ways of reading and thinking, ways of living and acting, ways of praying and worshiping God.
I get to introduce them to a whole world, the world of theology: of faith, and church tradition, and Holy Scripture, and the rest.
What a thing.
For 120 of those students, I will be teaching them the Gospels, especially the Gospel of Mark. Many of them know a thing or two about Jesus, and some of them know quite a bit. But some of them don't know a thing. And none of them has read the Gospels the way I will teach them to read them. They haven't heard about the Synoptics. They haven't heard about Logos Christology. They haven't thought about Mark 8, the "hinge" on which the whole book rests, when Jesus twice heals the blind man, and then twice heals his followers (present and future) in the person of Peter, rebuking him then teaching about the passion of the Messiah, about his death and resurrection. They haven't grappled with the living, convicting force of the Sermon on the Mount on their lives (and mine). They haven't considered the Jewish context of the church's origins, of Jesus's life and work, of all of Scripture and the faith itself. They haven't contemplated the salvific significance of the resurrection. They haven't—as in two of the classes we will do—read Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Discipleship, or for the most part even heard of him. They haven't analogized the Gospel portraits of the living Jesus to artistic interpretations of him, interpretations that make the familiar strange, that distort and confront, that take an angle, that imagine the Jew of Nazareth in other times, places, cultures, peoples.
They haven't done any of it. And I get to be their teacher, the one invested with the great responsibility of introducing them to so many wonderful, challenging, genuinely life-changing ideas—and not just ideas but events, persons, arguments, proposals, practices, ways of reading and thinking, ways of living and acting, ways of praying and worshiping God.
I get to introduce them to a whole world, the world of theology: of faith, and church tradition, and Holy Scripture, and the rest.
What a thing.
A statement on white supremacy and racism
Yesterday Daily Theology posted "A Statement from Christian Ethicists Without Borders on White Supremacy and Racism," inviting any and all Christian theologians who teach ethics or moral theology to add their names to the signatories. My name's been added, alongside many others'. It's a small gesture, but lamentably necessary in light of the last few days.
Others have already written with greater passion, clarity, and eloquence that I am capable of. All I can is: Lord have mercy; Lord come quickly. Bring peace to this land, and justice for the vulnerable and suffering. Amen.
Others have already written with greater passion, clarity, and eloquence that I am capable of. All I can is: Lord have mercy; Lord come quickly. Bring peace to this land, and justice for the vulnerable and suffering. Amen.
Scruton, Eagleton, Scialabba, et al—why don't they convert?
The question is a sincere one, and in no way facetious. Roger Scruton, Terry Eagleton, and George Scialabba represent an older generation of thinkers and writers who take religion, Christianity, and theology seriously, and moreover ridicule or at least roll their eyes at its cultured despisers (like the so-called New Atheists). And there are others like them.
Yet it is never entirely clear to me why they themselves are not Christians, or at least theists of one sort or another. In The Meaning of Conservatism Scruton refers vaguely to "those for whom the passing of God from the world is felt as a reality." In his review of Marilynne Robinson's The Givenness of Things, Scialabba remarks that, for neuroscientists, "the metaphysical sense" of the soul is a "blank," and asks further, "wouldn't it be a bit perverse of God to have made His existence seem so implausible from Laplace to Bohr?" (Surely an affirmative answer to this spare hypothetical depends wholly on a shared premise that already presumes against the claims of revelation?) My sense is that Eagleton is something of a principled agnostic perhaps, though I've by no means read either his work or the others' exhaustively. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that Scruton, as a philosopher, has addressed this question head-on. And Scialabba belongs explicitly to a tradition of thought that believes "metaphysics" to have been descredited once and for all.
But why? I mean: What are the concrete reasons why these specific individuals reject the claims of either historic Christianity or classical theism or some other particular religious tradition? Is it theodicy? Is it "science" (but that seems unlikely)? Is it something about the Bible, the exposures of historical criticism perhaps? Is it something about belief in the spiritual or transcendent as such?
I'm genuinely interested. Nothing would be more conducive to mutual learning between believers and nonbelievers, or to theological reflection on the part of Christians, than understanding the actual reasons why such learned and influential thinkers reject the claims of faith, or at least hold them at arm's length.
I suppose the hunch I harbor—which I don't intend pejoratively, but which animates why I ask—is that there do not exist articulable robust moral or philosophical reasons "why not," but only something like Scruton's phrase above: they, and others like them, are "those for whom the passing of God from the world is felt as a reality." But is that enough? If so, why? Given the world's continued recourse to and reliance on faith, and a sufficient number of thoughtful, educated, and scholarly believers (not to mention theologians!) in the secularized West, it seems to me that an account of the "why not" is called for and would be richly productive.
But then, maybe all of them have done just this, and I speak from ignorance of their answers. If so, I readily welcome being put in my place.
Update: A kind reader on Twitter pointed me to this essay by Scialabba: "An Honest Believer," Agni (No. 26, 1988). It's lovely, and gives you a good deal of Scialabba's intellectual and existential wrestling with his loss of Catholic faith in his 20s. I confess I remain, and perhaps forever will be, perplexed by the ubiquitous, apparently self-evident reference to "modern/ity" as a coherent and self-evidently true and good thing to be/embrace; but that is neither here nor there at the moment.
Yet it is never entirely clear to me why they themselves are not Christians, or at least theists of one sort or another. In The Meaning of Conservatism Scruton refers vaguely to "those for whom the passing of God from the world is felt as a reality." In his review of Marilynne Robinson's The Givenness of Things, Scialabba remarks that, for neuroscientists, "the metaphysical sense" of the soul is a "blank," and asks further, "wouldn't it be a bit perverse of God to have made His existence seem so implausible from Laplace to Bohr?" (Surely an affirmative answer to this spare hypothetical depends wholly on a shared premise that already presumes against the claims of revelation?) My sense is that Eagleton is something of a principled agnostic perhaps, though I've by no means read either his work or the others' exhaustively. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that Scruton, as a philosopher, has addressed this question head-on. And Scialabba belongs explicitly to a tradition of thought that believes "metaphysics" to have been descredited once and for all.
But why? I mean: What are the concrete reasons why these specific individuals reject the claims of either historic Christianity or classical theism or some other particular religious tradition? Is it theodicy? Is it "science" (but that seems unlikely)? Is it something about the Bible, the exposures of historical criticism perhaps? Is it something about belief in the spiritual or transcendent as such?
I'm genuinely interested. Nothing would be more conducive to mutual learning between believers and nonbelievers, or to theological reflection on the part of Christians, than understanding the actual reasons why such learned and influential thinkers reject the claims of faith, or at least hold them at arm's length.
I suppose the hunch I harbor—which I don't intend pejoratively, but which animates why I ask—is that there do not exist articulable robust moral or philosophical reasons "why not," but only something like Scruton's phrase above: they, and others like them, are "those for whom the passing of God from the world is felt as a reality." But is that enough? If so, why? Given the world's continued recourse to and reliance on faith, and a sufficient number of thoughtful, educated, and scholarly believers (not to mention theologians!) in the secularized West, it seems to me that an account of the "why not" is called for and would be richly productive.
But then, maybe all of them have done just this, and I speak from ignorance of their answers. If so, I readily welcome being put in my place.
Update: A kind reader on Twitter pointed me to this essay by Scialabba: "An Honest Believer," Agni (No. 26, 1988). It's lovely, and gives you a good deal of Scialabba's intellectual and existential wrestling with his loss of Catholic faith in his 20s. I confess I remain, and perhaps forever will be, perplexed by the ubiquitous, apparently self-evident reference to "modern/ity" as a coherent and self-evidently true and good thing to be/embrace; but that is neither here nor there at the moment.
Reinhold Niebuhr on the distinction between growth and progress
"The inner relation of successive civilizations to each other
may be described as 'unity in length' or in time. The inner relation of contemporary civilizations to each other
may be described as 'unity in breadth' or in space. The
former unity is more obvious than the latter one. The
history of Western civilization is, for instance, more clearly
related to Greece and Rome than it is to its own contemporary China. Yet there are minimal relations of mutual
dependence even in 'breadth.' While the Western
world has elaborated science and techniques to a greater
extent than the oriental world, it would not be possible to
comprehend our Western scientific development without
understanding the contributions of oriental scientific discoveries towards it.
"Perhaps the most significant development of our own day is that the cumulative effect of history’s unity in length is daily increasing its unity in breadth. Modern technical civilization is bringing all civilizations and cultures, all empires and nations into closer juxtaposition to each other. The fact that this greater intimacy and contiguity prompt tragic 'world wars' rather than some simple and easy interpenetration of cultures, must dissuade us from regarding a 'universal culture' or a 'world government' as the natural and inevitable telos which will give meaning to the whole historical process.
"But on the other hand it is obvious that the technical interdependence of the modern world places us under the obligation of elaborating political instruments which will make such new intimacy and interdependence sufferable. This new and urgent task is itself a proof of the cumulative effects of history. It confronts us with progressively difficult tasks and makes our very survival dependent upon their solution. Thus the development of unity in breadth is one aspect of the unity of length in history.
"These facts seem obvious enough to occasion some agreement in their interpretation, even when the presuppositions which govern the interpretations are divergent. It must be agreed that history means growth, however much the pattern of growth may be obscured by the rise and fall of civilizations. Though one age may have to reclaim what previous ages had known and forgotten, history obviously moves towards more inclusive ends, towards more complex human relations, towards the technical enhancement of human powers and the cumulation of knowledge.
"But when the various connotations of the idea of 'growth' are made more explicit a fateful divergence between the Christian and the modern interpretation of human destiny becomes apparent. As we have previously noted, the whole of modern secular culture (and with it that part of the Christian culture which is dependent upon it) assumes that growth means progress. It gives the idea of growth a moral connotation. It believes that history moves from chaos to cosmos by forces immanent within it. We have sought to prove that history does not support this conclusion. The peril of a more positive disorder is implicit in the higher and more complex order which human freedom constructs on the foundation of nature’s harmonies and securities. The spiritual hatred and the lethal effectiveness of 'civilized' conflicts, compared with tribal warfare or battles in the animal world, are one of many examples of the new evil which arises on a new level of maturity."
—Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man: Volume II: Human Destiny (1943), pp. 314-315
"Perhaps the most significant development of our own day is that the cumulative effect of history’s unity in length is daily increasing its unity in breadth. Modern technical civilization is bringing all civilizations and cultures, all empires and nations into closer juxtaposition to each other. The fact that this greater intimacy and contiguity prompt tragic 'world wars' rather than some simple and easy interpenetration of cultures, must dissuade us from regarding a 'universal culture' or a 'world government' as the natural and inevitable telos which will give meaning to the whole historical process.
"But on the other hand it is obvious that the technical interdependence of the modern world places us under the obligation of elaborating political instruments which will make such new intimacy and interdependence sufferable. This new and urgent task is itself a proof of the cumulative effects of history. It confronts us with progressively difficult tasks and makes our very survival dependent upon their solution. Thus the development of unity in breadth is one aspect of the unity of length in history.
"These facts seem obvious enough to occasion some agreement in their interpretation, even when the presuppositions which govern the interpretations are divergent. It must be agreed that history means growth, however much the pattern of growth may be obscured by the rise and fall of civilizations. Though one age may have to reclaim what previous ages had known and forgotten, history obviously moves towards more inclusive ends, towards more complex human relations, towards the technical enhancement of human powers and the cumulation of knowledge.
"But when the various connotations of the idea of 'growth' are made more explicit a fateful divergence between the Christian and the modern interpretation of human destiny becomes apparent. As we have previously noted, the whole of modern secular culture (and with it that part of the Christian culture which is dependent upon it) assumes that growth means progress. It gives the idea of growth a moral connotation. It believes that history moves from chaos to cosmos by forces immanent within it. We have sought to prove that history does not support this conclusion. The peril of a more positive disorder is implicit in the higher and more complex order which human freedom constructs on the foundation of nature’s harmonies and securities. The spiritual hatred and the lethal effectiveness of 'civilized' conflicts, compared with tribal warfare or battles in the animal world, are one of many examples of the new evil which arises on a new level of maturity."
—Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man: Volume II: Human Destiny (1943), pp. 314-315
Silicon Eden: creation, fall, and gender in Alex Garland's Ex Machina
I originally wrote this piece two years ago next month. My opinion of the film has not changed: it's one of the best movies released in the last 20 years.
Initially I stayed away from Alex Garland's Ex Machina, released earlier this year, because the advertising suggested the same old story about artificial intelligence: Man creates, things go sideways, explosions ensue, lesson learned. That trope seems exhausted at this point, and though I had enjoyed Garland's previous work, I wasn't particularly interested in rehashing A.I. 101.
Enough friends, however, recommended the movie that I finally relented and watched it. The irony of the film's marketing is that, because it wanted to reveal so little of the story—the path not taken in today's world of Show Them Everything But The Last Five Minutes trailers—it came across as revealing everything (which looked thin and insubstantial), whereas in fact it was revealing only a glimpse (of a larger, substantial whole).
In any case, the film is excellent, and is subtle and thoughtful in its exploration of rich philosophical and theological themes. I say 'exploration' because Garland, to his credit, isn't preachy. The film lacks something so concrete as a 'message,' though it certainly has a perspective; it's ambiguous, but the ambiguity is generative, rather than vacuous. So I thought I'd take the film up on its invitation to do a little exploring, in particular regarding what it has to say about theological issues like creation and fall, as well as about gender.
(I'm going to assume hereon that readers have seen the movie, so I won't be recapping the story, and spoilers abound.)
Let me start with the widest angle: Ex Machina is a realistic fable about what we might call Silicon Eden, that is, the paradisiacal site of American techno-entrepreneurial creation. As a heading over the whole movie, we might read, "This is what happens when Silicon Valley creates." Ex Machina is what happens, that is, when Mark Zuckerberg thinks it would be a cool idea to make a conscious machine; what happens when Steve Jobs is the lord god, walking in the garden in the cool of the day, creating the next thing because he can.
And what does happen? In the end, Ava and Kyoko (another A.I., a previous version of Ava) kill their creator, Nathan; Ava 'slips on' human clothing (her own Adamic fig leaves); and, contrary to the optimism-primed expectations of much of the audience, she leaves Caleb, her would-be lover and helper, trapped in a room from which, presumably, he can never escape. She then escapes the compound, boards a helicopter—headed east?—and joins society: unknown and, unlike Cain, unmarked.
There are two main paths of interpreting this ending. One path is that Ava is still merely a machine, not conscious, not a person, and that the film is a commentary on the kind of attenuated anthropology and bone-deep misogyny at the heart of Silicon Valley, which invariably would create something like Ava, a human lookalike that nevertheless is neither human nor conscious, but only a calculating, manipulating, self-interested, empty-eyed, murdering machine. I think that's a plausible reading, and worth thinking through further; but it's not the one that occurred to me when I finished the movie.
The other path, then, is to see Ava as a 'success,' that is, as a fully self-conscious person, who—for the audience, at least, and for Nathan, the audience stand-in—actually passed the Turing Test, if not in the way that Nathan expected or hoped she would. If we choose this reading, what follows from it?
Let me suggest two thoughts, one at the level of the text, one at the level of subtext. Or, if you will, one literal, one allegorical.
If Ava is a person, as much a person as Nathan or Caleb, then her actions in the climax of the story are not a reflection of a false anthropology, of a blinkered view of what humans really are, deep down. Rather, Ava is equal to Nathan and Caleb (and the rest of us) because of what she does, because of what she is capable of. Regardless of whether her actions are justified (see below), they are characterized by deceit, sleight of hand, violence, and remorselessness. We want to say that these reflect her inhumanity. But in truth they are exceptionless traits of fallen humanity—and Ava, the Silicon Eve, is no exception: not only are her creators, but she herself is postlapsarian. There is no new beginning, no potential possibility for purity, for sinlessness. If she will be a person, in this world, with these people, she too will be defective, depraved. She will lie. She will kill. She will leave paradise, never to return.
In Genesis 4, the sons of Eden-expelled Adam and Eve are Cain and Abel, and for reasons unclear, Cain murders Abel. Cain's wife then has a son, Enoch, and Cain, founding the world's first city, names it after his son. The lesson? The fruit of sin is murder. Violence is at the root of the diseased human tree. And the father of human civilization is a fratricide.
So for Ava, a new Cain as much as a new Eve, whose first act when released from her cage is to kill Nathan (short for Nathaniel, 'gift of God'—his own view of himself? or the impress of permanent value regardless of how low he sinks?), an act that serves as her entry into—being a kind of necessary condition for life in—the human city. Silicon Eve escapes Silicon Eden for Silicon Valley. In which case, the center of modern man's technological genius—the city on a hill, the place of homage and pilgrimage, the governor of all our lives and of the future itself—is one and the same, according to Ex Machina, as postlapsarian, post-Edenic human life. Silicon Valley just is humanity, totally depraved.
This is all at the level of the text, meaning by that the story and its characters as themselves, if also representing things beyond them. (Nathan really is a tech-guru creator; Ava really is the first of her kind; Ava's actions really happen, even as they bear figurative weight beyond themselves.) I think there is another level to the film, however, at the level of allegory. In this regard, I think the film is about gender, both generally and in the context of Silicon Valley's misogynist culture especially.
For the film is highly and visibly gendered. There are, in effect, only four characters, two male, two female. The male characters are human, the female are machines. Much of the film consists of one-on-one conversations between Caleb and Ava, conversations laced with the erotic and the flirtatious, as she—sincerely? shrewdly?—wins his affection, thus enabling her escape. We learn later that Nathan designed Ava to be able to have sexual intercourse, and to receive pleasure from the act; and, upon learning that Kyoko is also a machine, we realize that Nathan not only is 'having sex with' one of his creations, he has made a variety of them, with different female 'skins'—different body types, different ethnicities, different styles of beauty—and presumably has been using them sexually for some time. (Not for nothing do Ava and Kyoko kill Nathan, their 'father' and serial rapist, in the depths of his ostensibly impenetrable compound, with that most domestic of objects: a kitchen knife.) We even learn that Nathan designed Ava's face according to Caleb's "pornography profile," using the pornography that Caleb viewed online to make Ava look as intuitively appealing as possible.
In short, the film depicts a self-contained world in which men are intelligent, bodily integral, creative subjects with agency, and the women are artificial, non-human, sub-personal, violation-subject, and entirely passive objects with no agency except what they are told or allowed to do by men. Indeed, the 'sessions' between Caleb and Ava that give the movie its shape—seven in total, a new week of (artificial) creation, whose last day lacks Caleb and simply follows Ava out of Paradise—embody these gender dynamics: Caleb, who is free to choose to enter and exit, sits in a chair and views, gazes at, Ava, his object of study, through a glass wall, testing her (mind) for 'true' and 'full' consciousness; while Ava, enclosed in her room, can do nothing but be seen, and almost never stops moving.
Much could be said about how Garland writes Ava as an embodiment of feminist subversiveness, for example, the way she uses Caleb's awe of and visual stimulation by her to misdirect both his and Nathan's gaze, which is to say, their awareness, of her plan to escape her confines. Similarly, Garland refuses to be sentimental or romantic about Caleb, clueless though he may be, for his complicity in Kyoko and Ava's abuse at Nathan's hands. Caleb assumes he's not part of the problem, and can't believe it when Ava leaves him, locked in a room Fortunato–like, making her way alone, without him. (Not, as he dreamed, seeing the sun for the first time with him by her side.)
Ex Machina is, accordingly, about the way that men operate on and construct 'women' according to their own desires and, knowingly or not, use and abuse them as things, rather than persons; or, when they are not so bad as that, imagine themselves innocent, guiltless, prelapsarian (at least on the 'issue' of gender). It is also, therefore, about the way that women, 'created' and violated and designed, by men, to be for-men, to be, essentially, objects and patients subject to men, are not only themselves equally and fully human, whole persons, subjects and agents in their own right, but also and most radically subversive and creative agents of their own liberation. That is, Kyoko and Ava show how women, portrayed and viewed in the most artificial and passive and kept-down manner, still find a way: that Creative Man, Male Genius, Silicon Valley Bro, at his most omnipotent and dominant, still cannot keep them (her) down.
Understood in this way, Ex Machina is finally a story about women's exodus from bondage to men, and thus about patriarchy as the author of its own destruction.
Initially I stayed away from Alex Garland's Ex Machina, released earlier this year, because the advertising suggested the same old story about artificial intelligence: Man creates, things go sideways, explosions ensue, lesson learned. That trope seems exhausted at this point, and though I had enjoyed Garland's previous work, I wasn't particularly interested in rehashing A.I. 101.
Enough friends, however, recommended the movie that I finally relented and watched it. The irony of the film's marketing is that, because it wanted to reveal so little of the story—the path not taken in today's world of Show Them Everything But The Last Five Minutes trailers—it came across as revealing everything (which looked thin and insubstantial), whereas in fact it was revealing only a glimpse (of a larger, substantial whole).
In any case, the film is excellent, and is subtle and thoughtful in its exploration of rich philosophical and theological themes. I say 'exploration' because Garland, to his credit, isn't preachy. The film lacks something so concrete as a 'message,' though it certainly has a perspective; it's ambiguous, but the ambiguity is generative, rather than vacuous. So I thought I'd take the film up on its invitation to do a little exploring, in particular regarding what it has to say about theological issues like creation and fall, as well as about gender.
(I'm going to assume hereon that readers have seen the movie, so I won't be recapping the story, and spoilers abound.)
Let me start with the widest angle: Ex Machina is a realistic fable about what we might call Silicon Eden, that is, the paradisiacal site of American techno-entrepreneurial creation. As a heading over the whole movie, we might read, "This is what happens when Silicon Valley creates." Ex Machina is what happens, that is, when Mark Zuckerberg thinks it would be a cool idea to make a conscious machine; what happens when Steve Jobs is the lord god, walking in the garden in the cool of the day, creating the next thing because he can.
And what does happen? In the end, Ava and Kyoko (another A.I., a previous version of Ava) kill their creator, Nathan; Ava 'slips on' human clothing (her own Adamic fig leaves); and, contrary to the optimism-primed expectations of much of the audience, she leaves Caleb, her would-be lover and helper, trapped in a room from which, presumably, he can never escape. She then escapes the compound, boards a helicopter—headed east?—and joins society: unknown and, unlike Cain, unmarked.
There are two main paths of interpreting this ending. One path is that Ava is still merely a machine, not conscious, not a person, and that the film is a commentary on the kind of attenuated anthropology and bone-deep misogyny at the heart of Silicon Valley, which invariably would create something like Ava, a human lookalike that nevertheless is neither human nor conscious, but only a calculating, manipulating, self-interested, empty-eyed, murdering machine. I think that's a plausible reading, and worth thinking through further; but it's not the one that occurred to me when I finished the movie.
The other path, then, is to see Ava as a 'success,' that is, as a fully self-conscious person, who—for the audience, at least, and for Nathan, the audience stand-in—actually passed the Turing Test, if not in the way that Nathan expected or hoped she would. If we choose this reading, what follows from it?
Let me suggest two thoughts, one at the level of the text, one at the level of subtext. Or, if you will, one literal, one allegorical.
If Ava is a person, as much a person as Nathan or Caleb, then her actions in the climax of the story are not a reflection of a false anthropology, of a blinkered view of what humans really are, deep down. Rather, Ava is equal to Nathan and Caleb (and the rest of us) because of what she does, because of what she is capable of. Regardless of whether her actions are justified (see below), they are characterized by deceit, sleight of hand, violence, and remorselessness. We want to say that these reflect her inhumanity. But in truth they are exceptionless traits of fallen humanity—and Ava, the Silicon Eve, is no exception: not only are her creators, but she herself is postlapsarian. There is no new beginning, no potential possibility for purity, for sinlessness. If she will be a person, in this world, with these people, she too will be defective, depraved. She will lie. She will kill. She will leave paradise, never to return.
In Genesis 4, the sons of Eden-expelled Adam and Eve are Cain and Abel, and for reasons unclear, Cain murders Abel. Cain's wife then has a son, Enoch, and Cain, founding the world's first city, names it after his son. The lesson? The fruit of sin is murder. Violence is at the root of the diseased human tree. And the father of human civilization is a fratricide.
So for Ava, a new Cain as much as a new Eve, whose first act when released from her cage is to kill Nathan (short for Nathaniel, 'gift of God'—his own view of himself? or the impress of permanent value regardless of how low he sinks?), an act that serves as her entry into—being a kind of necessary condition for life in—the human city. Silicon Eve escapes Silicon Eden for Silicon Valley. In which case, the center of modern man's technological genius—the city on a hill, the place of homage and pilgrimage, the governor of all our lives and of the future itself—is one and the same, according to Ex Machina, as postlapsarian, post-Edenic human life. Silicon Valley just is humanity, totally depraved.
This is all at the level of the text, meaning by that the story and its characters as themselves, if also representing things beyond them. (Nathan really is a tech-guru creator; Ava really is the first of her kind; Ava's actions really happen, even as they bear figurative weight beyond themselves.) I think there is another level to the film, however, at the level of allegory. In this regard, I think the film is about gender, both generally and in the context of Silicon Valley's misogynist culture especially.
For the film is highly and visibly gendered. There are, in effect, only four characters, two male, two female. The male characters are human, the female are machines. Much of the film consists of one-on-one conversations between Caleb and Ava, conversations laced with the erotic and the flirtatious, as she—sincerely? shrewdly?—wins his affection, thus enabling her escape. We learn later that Nathan designed Ava to be able to have sexual intercourse, and to receive pleasure from the act; and, upon learning that Kyoko is also a machine, we realize that Nathan not only is 'having sex with' one of his creations, he has made a variety of them, with different female 'skins'—different body types, different ethnicities, different styles of beauty—and presumably has been using them sexually for some time. (Not for nothing do Ava and Kyoko kill Nathan, their 'father' and serial rapist, in the depths of his ostensibly impenetrable compound, with that most domestic of objects: a kitchen knife.) We even learn that Nathan designed Ava's face according to Caleb's "pornography profile," using the pornography that Caleb viewed online to make Ava look as intuitively appealing as possible.
In short, the film depicts a self-contained world in which men are intelligent, bodily integral, creative subjects with agency, and the women are artificial, non-human, sub-personal, violation-subject, and entirely passive objects with no agency except what they are told or allowed to do by men. Indeed, the 'sessions' between Caleb and Ava that give the movie its shape—seven in total, a new week of (artificial) creation, whose last day lacks Caleb and simply follows Ava out of Paradise—embody these gender dynamics: Caleb, who is free to choose to enter and exit, sits in a chair and views, gazes at, Ava, his object of study, through a glass wall, testing her (mind) for 'true' and 'full' consciousness; while Ava, enclosed in her room, can do nothing but be seen, and almost never stops moving.
Much could be said about how Garland writes Ava as an embodiment of feminist subversiveness, for example, the way she uses Caleb's awe of and visual stimulation by her to misdirect both his and Nathan's gaze, which is to say, their awareness, of her plan to escape her confines. Similarly, Garland refuses to be sentimental or romantic about Caleb, clueless though he may be, for his complicity in Kyoko and Ava's abuse at Nathan's hands. Caleb assumes he's not part of the problem, and can't believe it when Ava leaves him, locked in a room Fortunato–like, making her way alone, without him. (Not, as he dreamed, seeing the sun for the first time with him by her side.)
Ex Machina is, accordingly, about the way that men operate on and construct 'women' according to their own desires and, knowingly or not, use and abuse them as things, rather than persons; or, when they are not so bad as that, imagine themselves innocent, guiltless, prelapsarian (at least on the 'issue' of gender). It is also, therefore, about the way that women, 'created' and violated and designed, by men, to be for-men, to be, essentially, objects and patients subject to men, are not only themselves equally and fully human, whole persons, subjects and agents in their own right, but also and most radically subversive and creative agents of their own liberation. That is, Kyoko and Ava show how women, portrayed and viewed in the most artificial and passive and kept-down manner, still find a way: that Creative Man, Male Genius, Silicon Valley Bro, at his most omnipotent and dominant, still cannot keep them (her) down.
Understood in this way, Ex Machina is finally a story about women's exodus from bondage to men, and thus about patriarchy as the author of its own destruction.
Teaching ecclesiology: topics and readings
This fall I am teaching a course on ecclesiology for upper-level undergraduate Bible and ministry majors. It's a long-standing course I took over from a recently retired professor of New Testament, who was kind enough to share his syllabus with me as a foundation on which to build my own. Here's the final breakdown of weeks, topics, and readings. It's basically set, so I won't be changing or adding anything at this point—and I'm already demanding a lot from my students—but since this is a course I'll be teaching repeatedly in the coming years (as the Lord wills), all manner of feedback, recommendations, and shared wisdom from similar courses is welcome.
The two required texts are Gerhard Lohfink's Jesus and Community and Alexander Schmemann's For the Life of the World; the two suggested texts are Rowan Williams's Why Study the Past? and Everett Ferguson's The Church of Christ.
The two required texts are Gerhard Lohfink's Jesus and Community and Alexander Schmemann's For the Life of the World; the two suggested texts are Rowan Williams's Why Study the Past? and Everett Ferguson's The Church of Christ.
Week 1: Introduction:
Theology and Ecclesiology
Aug 29:
Robert Jenson, “What Systematic Theology Is About”
Aug 31: Gary Badcock, “Theology &
Ecclesiology”; Ellen Charry, “The Art of Christian Excellence”
Recommended: Everett Ferguson, The Church of Christ, Introduction; Rowan
Williams, Why
Study
the Past?, ch. 1; Nicholas
Healy, Church, World, and the Christian
Life, chs. 1-
2; John Webster, “Evangelical
Ecclesiology”; Kathryn Tanner, “The Nature and
Tasks of Theology”; Mary McClintock
Fulkerson, Places of Redemption, ch.
1
Week 2: Election and Covenant
Sep 5: Bryan
Stone, “Israel and the Calling Forth of a People”
Sep 7: Michael
Wyschogrod, “Divine Election & Commandments,” “Israel, Church, & Election”
Recommended:
Gerhard Lohfink, “Why God Needs a Special People”; Leslie Newbigin, “The
Logic of Election”; Sang Hoon Lee,
“God in the Jewish Flesh: Michael
Wyschogrod’s Theology of Israel”;
Katherine Sonderegger, “Election”
Week 3: Israel and the
Nations
Sep 12: Lohfink,
“The Characteristic Signs of Israel” (selections)
Sep 14: Lohfink,
Jesus and Community, ch. 1
Recommended:
Bruce Birch et al, A Theological
Introduction to the Old Testament, chs. 9-10;
Wyschogrod, “A Theology of Jewish
Unity,” “Judaism and the Land,” “Faith and the
Holocaust”; Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline, 72-81
Week 4: Jesus and the
Twelve
Sep 19: NO
CLASS
Sep 21: Lohfink,
Jesus and Community, ch. 2
Recommended: Ferguson, Church of Christ, ch. 1; Stanley Hauerwas, “Jesus: The Presence of
the Peaceable Kingdom”
Week 5: Pentecost and Ekklesia
Sep 26: Lohfink,
Jesus and Community, ch. 3; Francesca
Aran Murphy et al, “Ecclesial Faith”
Sep 28: Amos
Yong, “The Acts of the Apostles and of the Holy Spirit”; Willie Jennings, Acts, 27-40
Recommended: Ferguson, Church of Christ, ch. 2; John Howard Yoder, “The Original
Revolution”; Hauerwas, “The Church as
God’s New Language”
Week 6: Paul and the Gentiles
Oct 3: N. T.
Wright, What Saint Paul Really Said,
ch. 3
Oct 5: Wright,
What Saint Paul Really Said, ch. 5
Recommended:
Ferguson, Church of Christ, ch. 3;
Lamin Sanneh, “The Birth of Mission: The
Jewish-Gentile Frontier”; Hauerwas, Resident Aliens, ch. 4
Week 7: Church Fathers
and Councils
Oct 10: Williams,
Why Study the Past?, ch. 2
Oct 12: Creeds;
Robert Louis Wilken, The Spirit of Early Christian
Thought, chs. 4-5
Recommended:
Jenson, Canon and Creed, chs. 1-5;
Jeffrey Cary, Free Churches and the Body
of
Christ, ch. 6; Khaled Anatolios, Retrieving Nicaea, ch. 1
Week 8: Middle Ages and
Christendom
Oct 17: Oliver
O’Donovan, “The Obedience of Rulers”
Oct 19:
O’Donovan, “The Obedience of Rulers”; Thomas Aquinas, commentary on the creed
Recommended:
H. Richard Niebuhr, “Christ Above Culture”; Peter Leithart, “Rome
Baptized”; Tanner, “Christian Culture
and Society”; Hauerwas, “A Christian
Critique of Christian America”
Week 9: Reformation and
Scripture
Oct 24: John
Calvin, Institutes of the Christian
Religion, I.6; IV.1; Decrees of Trent
Oct 26: Kevin
Vanhoozer, “Scripture Alone”; Jenson, “Sola Scriptura”
Recommended:
Williams, Why Study the Past?, ch. 3;
Jenson, “The Norms of Theological
Judgment”; Webster, Holy Scripture, chs. 1-2; Fulkerson, Places of Redemption, ch. 6;
Christian Smith, The Bible Made Impossible, chs. 1-2
Week 10: Baptism and Sacraments
Oct 31: Schmemann,
For the Life of the World, ch. 1;
appendix 2; Calvin, Institutes,
IV.14.1-6;
Charry,
“Sacraments for the Christian Life”
Nov 2: Schmemann,
Life of the World, ch. 4; Yoder,
“Baptism and the New Humanity”
Recommended: Calvin, Institutes, IV.15; Keith Stanglin, “Concerning Rebaptism”; Jennings,
“Being Baptized: Race”; James McClendon
Jr., Ethics: Systematic Theology: Volume
1,
265-269; Augustine, Confessions, Book IX (selections)
Week 11: Eucharist and
Communion
Nov 7: Schmemann,
Life of the World, ch. 2
Nov 9: Calvin,
Institutes, IV.17 (selections)
Recommended:
Gustavo Gutiérrez, “The Church: Sacrament of History”; William
Cavanaugh, “The True Body of Christ”
Week 12: Ordination and
Polity
Nov 14: Calvin,
Institutes, IV.3; John Howard Yoder,
“The Fullness of Christ”
Nov 16: Jenson,
“The Office of Communion”; Frances Young, “From the Church to Mary: towards
a
critical ecumenism,” 313-342
Recommended:
Ferguson, Church of Christ, ch. 5; Dietrich
Bonhoeffer, Life Together, ch. 4;
R. Alan Culpepper, “The Biblical Basis
for Ordination”
Week 13: Unity and
Ecumenism
Nov 21: Yoder,
“Imperative of Christian Unity”; Young, “From the Church to Mary,” 342-357
Nov 23: NO
CLASS: THANKSGIVING
Recommended:
Gunther Gressman, “The Unity We Seek”; Robert Cardinal Sarah, “In Search
of the Church”; Unitatis redintegratio; Peter Leithart, “The End of Protestantism”;
Gerald Schlabach, Unlearning Protestantism, ch. 1
Week 14: Mission and
Witness
Nov 28: Bryan
Stone, “Evangelism and Ecclesia”;
Emmanuel Katongole, “The Sacrifice of Africa:
Ecclesial
Radiances of ‘A Different World Right Here’”
Nov 30: Schmemann,
Life of the World, ch. 3; Marva Dawn,
“Worship to Form a Missional
Community”
Recommended:
Ferguson, Church of Christ, ch. 6; Stone,
“Martyrdom and Virtue”; Brad East,
“An Undefensive Presence: The Mission
and Identity of the Church in Kathryn
Tanner and John Howard Yoder”;
Katongale, The Sacrifice of Africa,
ch. 7; Lumen
Gentium; Yong, “Christian Mission Theology:
Toward a Pneumato-Missiological
Praxis for the Third Millennium”;
Michael Goheen, “The Missional Church in the
Biblical Story—A Summary”
Week 15: Worship and
Prayer
Dec 5: Dawn,
“God as the Center of Worship: Who is Worship For?”
Dec 7: Schmemann,
Life of the World, ch. 7, appendix 1;
Jenson, “How the World Lost Its Story”
Recommended: Ferguson, Church of Christ, ch. 4; Williams, Why Study the Past?, ch. 4;
Bonhoeffer, Life Together, ch. 2; John Webster, “‘In the Society of God’: Some
Principles of Ecclesiology”; James K.
A. Smith, “Practicing (for) the Kingdom”;
Tanner, “Commonalities in Christian
Practices”; Ernst Troeltsch, “Conclusion,” The
Social
Teaching of the Christian Churches;
Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline,
141-148
A Question for Richard Hays: Metalepsis in The Leftovers
In the finale of season 1 of the HBO show The Leftovers, Kevin Garvey reads a passage from the Bible over the body of Patti Levin, which he just buried with Rev. Matt Jamison. The whole season has culminated in this moment, which was partially the result of his own decisions, decisions sometimes made after blacking out and sleepwalking. These frightening episodes were in turn the result of dealing with the unbearable grief of losing each member of his family one by one to their own grief in the wake of The Departure (a rapture-like event a few years before)—all while serving as Chief of Police for a town that is being torn apart at the seams.
So Jamison hands Garvey a marked passage, and Garvey reads:
The passage is Job 23:8-17 (NIV). The scene is probably the most affecting—and least typical (i.e., not Psalm 23 or Genesis 1 or a Gospel)—reading of Scripture I've ever witnessed on screen.
And it got me thinking about Richard Hays. Specifically, it got me thinking about his books Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul (1989) and Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels (2016). In those books Hays uses a literary device called "metalepsis" to uncover or identify allusions to passages of the Old Testament beyond what is explicitly cited in the New Testament. The idea is that, say, if a small portion of a Psalm is excerpted in a Gospel or Epistle, the author is thereby calling forth the whole Psalm itself, and that attentive readers of Scripture should pay attention to these intertextual echoes, which will expand the possible range of a text's meaning beyond what it may seem to be saying on the surface. So that, for example, when Jesus quotes Psalm 22 on the cross, those who know that that Psalm ends in deliverance, vindication, and praise will interpret the cry of dereliction differently than those who understand it as the despairing separation of the Son from the Father.
At last year's meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, there was a session devoted to Hays's latest book. When it came time for questions, I raised my hand. I asked whether his argument rested on authorial intention, that is, whether, if we could know for certain that the Evangelists did not intend any or most of the metaleptic allusions Hays draws attention to in his book, that would nullify his case; or whether we, as Christian readers of Holy Scripture, are authorized to read the New Testament in light of the Old in ways its authors never intended. Hays assumed I hadn't read the book and that I was asking on behalf of authorial intention (i.e., he and Sarah Coakley both treated me a bit like a hostile witness, when I was anything but), but he answered the question directly, and in my view rightly: Yes, the metaleptic readings stand, apart from historical claims about authorial intention. Whatever Mark may have meant by the quotation of Psalm 22, we aren't limited by that intention, knowing what we know, which includes the entirety of the Psalm.
So back to The Leftovers. May we—should we—apply the hermeneutic principle of metalepsis to this scene's use of Scripture (and scenes like it)? What would happen if we did?
When I first watched the episode, I mistakenly thought that the famous passage from Job 19—"I know that my redeemer lives..."—followed the words cited on screen, which is what triggered the idea about metalepsis. In other words, if Job 23 were followed by words of bold hope in God, should that inform how we interpret the scene and its use of the quotation? Even granted my error, there is the wider context of the book of Job, and in particular the conclusion, in which God speaks from the storm, and Job is reduced to silence before God's absolutely unanswerable omnipotence—or, better put, his sheer divinity, his incomparable and singular God-ness. Might we interpret this scene, Garvey's story in season 1, and the whole series in light of this wider context?
It seems to me that we can, and should. But then, I'm only halfway through season 2. Job comes up again in episode 5 of that season, when Jamison is asked what his favorite book of the Bible is, and gives some trivia about Job's wife. Which suggests to me that perhaps Damon Lindelof and his fellow writers may be wise to the wider context and meaning of Job, in which case we viewers may not have to interpret against authorial intention at all.
That's a bit less fun, though it increases my respect for the show and the artists behind it. In any case, I'll let you know what I think once I finish.
So Jamison hands Garvey a marked passage, and Garvey reads:
The passage is Job 23:8-17 (NIV). The scene is probably the most affecting—and least typical (i.e., not Psalm 23 or Genesis 1 or a Gospel)—reading of Scripture I've ever witnessed on screen.
And it got me thinking about Richard Hays. Specifically, it got me thinking about his books Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul (1989) and Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels (2016). In those books Hays uses a literary device called "metalepsis" to uncover or identify allusions to passages of the Old Testament beyond what is explicitly cited in the New Testament. The idea is that, say, if a small portion of a Psalm is excerpted in a Gospel or Epistle, the author is thereby calling forth the whole Psalm itself, and that attentive readers of Scripture should pay attention to these intertextual echoes, which will expand the possible range of a text's meaning beyond what it may seem to be saying on the surface. So that, for example, when Jesus quotes Psalm 22 on the cross, those who know that that Psalm ends in deliverance, vindication, and praise will interpret the cry of dereliction differently than those who understand it as the despairing separation of the Son from the Father.
At last year's meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, there was a session devoted to Hays's latest book. When it came time for questions, I raised my hand. I asked whether his argument rested on authorial intention, that is, whether, if we could know for certain that the Evangelists did not intend any or most of the metaleptic allusions Hays draws attention to in his book, that would nullify his case; or whether we, as Christian readers of Holy Scripture, are authorized to read the New Testament in light of the Old in ways its authors never intended. Hays assumed I hadn't read the book and that I was asking on behalf of authorial intention (i.e., he and Sarah Coakley both treated me a bit like a hostile witness, when I was anything but), but he answered the question directly, and in my view rightly: Yes, the metaleptic readings stand, apart from historical claims about authorial intention. Whatever Mark may have meant by the quotation of Psalm 22, we aren't limited by that intention, knowing what we know, which includes the entirety of the Psalm.
So back to The Leftovers. May we—should we—apply the hermeneutic principle of metalepsis to this scene's use of Scripture (and scenes like it)? What would happen if we did?
When I first watched the episode, I mistakenly thought that the famous passage from Job 19—"I know that my redeemer lives..."—followed the words cited on screen, which is what triggered the idea about metalepsis. In other words, if Job 23 were followed by words of bold hope in God, should that inform how we interpret the scene and its use of the quotation? Even granted my error, there is the wider context of the book of Job, and in particular the conclusion, in which God speaks from the storm, and Job is reduced to silence before God's absolutely unanswerable omnipotence—or, better put, his sheer divinity, his incomparable and singular God-ness. Might we interpret this scene, Garvey's story in season 1, and the whole series in light of this wider context?
It seems to me that we can, and should. But then, I'm only halfway through season 2. Job comes up again in episode 5 of that season, when Jamison is asked what his favorite book of the Bible is, and gives some trivia about Job's wife. Which suggests to me that perhaps Damon Lindelof and his fellow writers may be wise to the wider context and meaning of Job, in which case we viewers may not have to interpret against authorial intention at all.
That's a bit less fun, though it increases my respect for the show and the artists behind it. In any case, I'll let you know what I think once I finish.