The first sequence of feasts in Leviticus 23 — Passover/Unleavened Bread (vv. 4–8), Firstfruits Offering (vv. 9–14), and Weeks (vv. 15–21) — maps to the sequence of Christological events from Passion through Resurrection to Pentecost. The Gospels, and St. Paul (1 Cor. 5), of course spell out the Passover/Passion connection. But what I hadn’t noticed before is the Firstfruits Offering. This offering, less familiar perhaps than Passover and Unleavened Bread, is a wave offering of a single sheaf of the firstfruits (probably of the barley harvest) “that you may be accepted” (v. 11), and accompanied by an ascension offering of a male lamb a year old with (unleavened, of course) bread and wine (vv. 12–13). No bread may be consumed before this offering is brought (v. 14). And this offering takes place on “the day after the Sabbath” (v. 11) during Unleavened Bread: that is, on the first day of the week. On Resurrection Day — well, Christ rises as the firstfruits of those that had fallen asleep. Meanwhile, Weeks marks the ingathering of the firstfruits of the (probably wheat) harvest, seven weeks later; at Pentecost, the Spirit descends to gather in the firstfruits of the Church, harvested from all nations.
Is St. John the Evangelist subtly hinting that he was present at the very beginning of Christ’s ministry in John 1? John the Baptizer is “standing with two of his disciples” (v. 35) when the Lamb of God walks by, and the two follow Jesus. One is Andrew, the brother of Peter (v. 40), but the other goes unnamed. Is this the Evangelist? If so, it helps make sense of some of the curious features of John 1. The dramatic action of the gospel begins with the Baptizer’s confrontation with the Pharisees' emissaries, which one of his disciples would have been well-positioned to observe. But perhaps more significantly, the Prologue — otherwise a carefully crafted poem about the Logos who was in the beginning with God, who was and is Light and Life, who came into the world and became flesh to dwell among us — contains two prima facie odd interjections about John the Baptizer: that he was sent from God as a witness about the light, but was not the Light himself (vv. 6–8), and a part of that testimony about the Light’s preeminence (v. 15). If the Evangelist initially had a life-altering encounter with the Baptizer such that he became one of his disciples, then subsequently encountered Jesus of Nazareth and was sent to follow him at the Baptizer’s behest — this all makes sense of why, in his old age, as he was giving final shape to his own testimony that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, he and his followers still could not do without the Baptizer’s testimony. (There is also a point about the historical particularity of the Word becoming flesh: remove the specifics of John the Baptizer that intrude upon the Prologue, and it could resemble a passage of Platonic speculative theology.)
The question is still haunting me: Why is there no New Covenantal analogue to the Feast of Booths? Is it because the temporary dwellings and tabernacles and temples of the Old Covenant, made by human hands, have received their fulfillment in the Word who became flesh and tabernacled among us, the new Temple not made by human hands?
[The] aim of that divine power, which bestowed upon us the sacred Scriptures, is that we should not accept what is presented by the letter alone — such things sometimes being not true with regard to the letter but actually irrational and impossible — and that certain things are interwoven with the narratives of things that happened and with the legislation that is useful according to the letter. But, that no one may suppose that we assert that, with respect to it all, none of the narratives actually happened, because a certain part did not; [or] that none of the legislation is to be observed according to the letter, because a certain part is irrational or impossible according to the letter; or that what is written about the Savior is not true on the perceptible level, or that no legislation of this or commandment is to be kept: it must be said that regarding certain things it is perfectly clear that the detail of the narrative is true… [and] the passages that are true on the level of the narrative are much more numerous than those which are woven with a purely spiritual meaning. (4.3.4)
Nevertheless, the precise reader will be torn regarding certain points, being unable to show without lengthy investigation whether the supposed narrative happened according to the letter or not, and whether the letter of the legislation is to be observed or not. Therefore one who reads in an exact manner must, observing the Savior’s injunction which says “Search the Scriptures,” carefully ascertain where the meaning according to the letter is true and where it is impossible, and as far as possible trace out, by means of similar expressions, the sense, scattered throughout Scripture, of that which is impossible according to the letter. When, then, as will be clear to those who read, the connection taken according to the letter is impossible, yet the principal is not impossible but even true, one must endeavor to grasp the whole sense, which spiritually connects the account of things impossible according to the letter to things not only not impossible but even true according to the narrative, with as many things as did not happen according to the letter being taken allegorically. For our position is that with respect to the whole of the divine Scripture all of it has a spiritual meaning, but not all of it has a bodily meaning, for there are many places where the bodily is proved to be impossible. And therefore great attention must be given by the careful reader to the divine books, as being divine writings… (4.3.5)
For “the kingdom of heaven is like a treasure hidden in a field, which someone found and hid, and then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field”. Let us consider whether the apparent and superficial and surface aspect of Scripture is not the field as a whole, full of all kinds of plants, while the things lying in it and not seen by all, but as if buried under the visible plants, are “the hidden treasures of wisdom and knowledge” — which the Spirit through Isaiah calls “dark and invisible and hidden” — needing, for them to be found, God, who alone is able “to break in pieces the doors of bronze” that hide them and “to break the iron bars” that are upon the gates… (4.3.11)
But let it be sufficient for us in all these matters to conform our mind to the rule of piety and to think of the words of the Holy Spirit in this way: that the text shines, not because composed according to the eloquence of human fragility, but because, as it is written, “all the glory of the King is within,” and the treasure of divine meanings is contained enclosed within the frail vessel of the common letter. … (4.3.14)
Let everyone, then, who cares for truth be little concerned about names and words, since in every nation different usages of words prevail; but let him attend, rather, to that which is signified rather than the nature of the words by which it is signified, especially in matters of such importance and dignity… [for] there are certain things the significance of which cannot be adequately explained at all by any words of human language, but which are made clear more through simple apprehension than by any properties of words. Under this rule must be brought also the understanding of the divine writings, so that what is said may not be assessed by the lowliness of the language, but by the divinity of the Holy Spirit, who inspired them to be written. (4.3.15)
— Origen of Alexandria, On First Principles, tr. John Behr (Oxford University Press, 2019). I have introduced minor repunctuation in certain places for clarity.
This morning in our Daily Office readings my wife and I reached Luke 8, which contains St. Luke’s account of the Parable of the Sower (parallels in Mt. 13 & Mk. 4):
(1) Soon afterward [Jesus] went on through cities and villages, proclaiming and bringing the good news of the kingdom of God. And the twelve were with him, (2) and also some women who had been healed of evil spirits and infirmities: Mary, called Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out, (3) and Joanna, the wife of Chuza, Herod’s household manager, and Susanna, and many others, who provided for them out of their means. (4) And when a great crowd was gathering and people from town after town came to him, he said in a parable, (5) “A sower went out to sow his seed. And as he sowed, some fell along the path and was trampled underfoot, and the birds of the air devoured it. (6) And some fell on the rock, and as it grew up, it withered away, because it had no moisture. (7) And some fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up with it and choked it. (8) And some fell into good soil and grew and yielded a hundredfold.” As he said these things, he called out, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”
(9) And when his disciples asked him what this parable meant, (10) he said, “To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of God, but for others they are in parables, so that ‘seeing they may not see, and hearing they may not understand.’ (11) Now the parable is this: The seed is the word of God. (12) The ones along the path are those who have heard; then the devil comes and takes away the word from their hearts, so that they may not believe and be saved. (13) And the ones on the rock are those who, when they hear the word, receive it with joy. But these have no root; they believe for a while, and in time of testing fall away. (14) And as for what fell among the thorns, they are those who hear, but as they go on their way they are choked by the cares and riches and pleasures of life, and their fruit does not mature. (15) As for that in the good soil, they are those who, hearing the word, hold it fast in an honest and good heart, and bear fruit with patience.
(16) “No one after lighting a lamp covers it with a jar or puts it under a bed, but puts it on a stand, so that those who enter may see the light. (17) For nothing is hidden that will not be made manifest, nor is anything secret that will not be known and come to light. (18) Take care then how you hear, for to the one who has, more will be given, and from the one who has not, even what he thinks that he has will be taken away.” (19) Then his mother and his brothers came to him, but they could not reach him because of the crowd. (20) And he was told, “Your mother and your brothers are standing outside, desiring to see you.” (21) But he answered them, “My mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of God and do it.”
St. Luke’s telling differs in various minor ways from St. Matthew’s or St. Mark’s, most notably the immediate context for the parable: he introduces it with the Lord “on the road,” as it were (Mt. and Mk. set it explicitly beside the lake), with his followers and supporters around him, and concludes it with the episode about the Lord’s “mother and brothers” (which in Mt. and Mk. immediately precedes the parable). This mild defamiliarization highlighted some non-obvious features of the parable, which in turn led me to what I think is a slightly unconventional interpretation. Essentially: this parable is not intended first to explain the individual’s response, but to illumine the community and context in which the individual responds.
Let me explain. The sower who sows the seed — which “is the word of God” (v. 11) — is, of course, Christ, who is going out “through cities and villages, proclaiming and bringing the good news of the kingdom of God” (v. 1). As he does so, Christ finds himself surrounded by “a great crowd” coming “from town after town” (v. 4). The parable is, then, a commentary on his (literarily) present actions. He is sowing the Word as he goes, in many different places, on many different soils. Now: the sown Word grows up into a plant (or, as in the first case, does not), which puts down roots in the soil — and the depth of the soil, and the other plants growing in that soil, determines whether the plants wither in the heat, fail to bear fruit, or grow healthfully and fruitfully. When Christ explains the parable, to what do the “plants” — the growths of the seed — correspond? They correspond to the persons who hear the Word. The most explicit indications of this are Christ’s references to their “roots” (v. 13) and “fruits” (vv. 14, 15). The plants are, as it were, “new growth” of the Word: new embodiments of the Word, which should themselves in the proper harvest time bear the seed of the Word, ready to be scattered anew by the sower. The growing Word-plant is a new life where previously there was none, a new-created person, which is to say a new kind of person. (Echoes of the psalm: “Blessed is the man… whose delight is in the Law of the Lord, and on His Word he meditates day and night; that man is like a tree, planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither.") What, then, are the “soils”?
My suggestion is that the “soils” are not, primarily, different “types” of individual persons' hearts and souls with their individual responses to the Word; rather, they are different sorts of communities with different kinds of environment for the Word-plantings. Think first about the nature of soil. Soil is not crude, inert matter on which a seed acts to extract water and nutrients. Soil is rather a rich micro-ecosystem, full of other living creatures, with hyper-locally varying tendencies and capacities and deficiencies, itself best understood as a kind of quasi-living substance. There is a dynamic relation — better, an indescribably complex array of dynamic relations — between the seed that is planted and the soil in which it is planted, even as they remain distinct from one another. So it is with the one who comes to believe the Word and the context in which he or she comes to believe it. Some “soils” offer only broad hostility, in which case the seed will struggle or fail to grow at all (“the devil comes and takes away the word,” v. 12). Other soils do not welcome a deep commitment, enforcing only shallow ones (“they receive it with joy… [but] in time of testing fall away,” v. 13). Many soils are full of entanglements and diversions for even a personally-committed believer (“they are choked by the cares and riches and pleasures of life, and their fruit does not mature,” v. 14). But some soil is good, not only permitting but encouraging deep, fruitful commitment (“they… hold it fast in an honest and good heart, and bear fruit with patience,” v. 15). In a rich, nourishing community, the new believer may put down deep roots and bear fruit a hundredfold.
Once we recognize that the primary correspondence is not between soil and believer, but soil and believer’s proximate environment, how much more, and broader, sense does this parable make of the life of faith! It was in a different context that St. Paul quoted the poet Menander to the effect that “Bad company corrupts good morals” (though it is a remarkable not-quite-coincidence that immediately after that quotation he discusses the nature of the resurrection body by analogy to seeds and plants; there are no coincidences in Holy Scripture!). But who has not seen a friend or acquaintance, ostensibly growing in faith, begin to wither when his closest friends begin expressing their disapproval of some teaching inherent to the faith? Or, even more commonly and tragically, whose faith has been slowly choked out when (say) she takes a high-paying job that relocates her away from her community, or when he begins dating someone who is attractive but has little interest in or commitment to faith? Which interpretation of the parable is more realistic (not to say compassionate): to say, “well, this just goes to show they were never good soil to begin with, you see”, or “alas that they were uprooted from good soil and planted elsewhere!” How psychologically realistic — brutally so — is this view of persons' relation to their communities! Look at the findings of interpersonal neurobiology: I really am something like the weighted average of the five people with whom I spend most of my time. Who they are, and what sort of relation they have to the Sower, is naturally of critical importance for who I am. And in subtler but no less significant ways I am influenced by what a previous generation called my “station” in life, i.e., the cultural expectations endemic to my socio-economic layer: the sorts of media that People Like Me consume (and indeed the posture of “consumption”), the kinds of jobs we take, the places it is acceptable for us to live, the churches it is respectable for us to attend. This is the soil in which I live, and in which I am trying to grow. Of course it would affect how deep are my roots and how fulsome my fruits.
Note also that on this interpretation, the growth of the Word-seeds into living Word-plants at all is not only less a deterministic what-kind-of-soil-are-you? matter, but also more evidently due to the inscrutable, uncontrollable power of grace. Anyone who has sown seeds of any sort knows that, even in essentially the same soil, some of the seeds will grow well and others will not (indeed, probably only wealthy modern Westerners, in our highly sterilized environments and de-agriculturalized culture, can imagine crop growth to be basically a matter of controllable inputs and predictable outputs). Yes, there is a dynamic relation between the soil which permits and the seed which sprouts, but the priority is with the sowing of the seed and the actuality of the growth. So it is with the Word of God: whether an individual Word-seed, all else being equal, will indeed begin to grow into a Word-plant is decidedly inscrutable — at least to human understanding; I do not say inscrutable to God, for only God knows why a given human heart does or does not receive the Word in the first place. But — and this is the crucial point — in the process of discipleship, after the Word has been received, after the plant has begun to grow, there really are predictable and repeatable patterns of growth or failure to grow, which one can understand quite readily based on the characteristics of the soil/community in which it is planted. Nitrogen deficiency may not prevent a plant from growing at all, but it will fail to thrive and may not bear its fruit. And, of course, in some communities and contexts the devil seems practically always on the prowl to take away the planted word before it can grow. Certain plants won’t grow at all in acidic soils; “how hard it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God!”
Now, someone will say, “But the analogy of the lamp suggests a more individualistic reading. Christ speaks of ‘the one who has or has not’ in v. 18.” So he does. “Take care then how you hear,” of course. A greater emphasis on the community context in which an individual grows in faith by no means abrogates the individual’s responsibility for that faith; I am tempted to suggest, in an admittedly circular move, that the Holy Spirit sets these words after the parable of the sower in order to guard against a kind of community-is-destiny fatalism. (In this connection it is striking to recall that the post-apostolic Christian generations seem to have essentially invented the concept of free will to explain how Christians could so thoroughly defy, among other things, the temptations of lust endemic to Greco-Roman society.) But I see no reason that these words do not admit two levels of interpretation: one individual, the other communal. The community that receives true faith hospitably — that is good soil — to it will more be given, viz., richer soil and more believers; the community that has not — is a thicket or rock or path — even what it has (as in erosion!) will be taken away. Remember also that St. Matthew uses the same analogy of the lamp to speak of the whole community of disciples (“You [pl] are the light of the world,” Mt. 5:14ff). The apparent interlude about the Lord’s “mother and brothers” in vv. 19–20 also strengthens the community-focused reading. What community could be more naturally proximate (even more naturally in first-century Galilee than in twenty-first-century suburbia) than one’s family? Yet Christ says, in effect, “Those who hear and do the word are my true family; better to surround myself with them than my literal family — unless they hear and do the word also.” The centrality of biological family is fundamentally relativized by the new creation of the Word.
This brings me to the other key objection to my interpretation, which is how to make sense of those whose new-planted faith actually flourishes in hostile contexts — I think naturally of the little apostolic communities scattered around the Mediterranean over the course of the Acts of the Apostles; or, in the present day, of Muslim-background believers who encounter Christ in a dream and are led to one another by the voice of the Spirit. I might reasonably respond that again, Christ’s parable is a commentary on his present actions, and therefore situational; it is not, and does not need to be, in principle infinitely applicable to absolutely any situation. (Scripture in its totality is profitable for all situations, not simply any individually extracted passage, and most of the profitability comes in learning — from Scripture itself — the quotidian wisdom to discern which passage is most fit to which situation.) But the ultimate response, I think, is again to emphasize the inescapably communal aspect of faith. As often in Christ’s parables, there is an instructive asymmetry between the good examples and the bad examples; in Christ’s four paradigms — the path, the rock, the thicket, and the “good soil” — this last is the only one that is not a specific sort of place. Soil is hyperlocal; a patch of “good soil” may be found, or formed, anywhere in the field. (Legume plants, for instance, famously improve the soil quality for other plants by “fixing” nitrogen so that it is usable.) Every such example of faith flourishing in a hostile context which comes to my mind presupposes that at least “two or three are gathered,” such that the soil quality is enriched so as to nourish new plantings. St. Paul never traveled alone in his apostolic work, and never left a solitary believer as a “congregation of one,” but baptized whole households. Christ sent the seventy-two out in pairs. The Desert Fathers, who might similarly be considered a counterexample, in fact are constantly warning novices in the faith about the spiritual dangers inherent to the desert, and how unwise it is to charge, solo, into battle with the devil before you are ready.
The lesson of the parable of the sower, then, might not in fact be “test yourself to see whether you are good soil or not”; it might instead be “get yourself to the good soil, and put down roots.”
If [you have quoted this passage] because you imagined that you could throw doubt on the [preceding] passage, in order that I might say the Scriptures contradicted each other, you have erred. But I shall not venture to suppose or to say such a thing; and if a Scripture which appears to be of such a kind be brought forward, and if there be a pretext that it is contrary, since I am entirely convinced that no Scripture contradicts another, I shall admit rather that I do not understand what is recorded, and shall strive to persuade those who imagine that the Scriptures are contradictory, to be rather of the same opinion as myself.
— St. Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho 65 (in The Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 1).
My reading project on the concept of tradition commences in earnest with Origen’s De Principiis (I use John Behr’s translation, with minor punctuation and formatting alterations):
All who believe and are assured that “Grace and truth came through Jesus Christ,” and who know Christ to be the truth, according to his saying, “I am the truth,” derive the knowledge which leads human beings to live a good and blessed life from no other source than from the very words and teaching of Christ. And by “the words of Christ” we mean not only those which he spoke when he became human and dwelt in the flesh; for even before this, Christ, the Word of God, was in Moses and the prophets… And that he also spoke, after his ascension into heaven, in his apostles, is shown by Paul in this way, “Or do you seek a proof of Christ who speaks in me?” [Pr.1.]
Since, however, many of those who profess to believe in Christ differ not only in small and trivial matters, but even on great and important matters — such as concerning God or the Lord Jesus Christ or the Holy Spirit, and not only regarding these but also regarding matters concerning created beings, that is, the dominions and the holy powers — it seems necessary first of all to lay down a definite line and clear rule [Gk Vorlage: kanon?] regarding each one of these matters, and then thereafter to investigate other matters. … [Although] there are many who think that they know what are the teachings of Christ, and not a few of them think differently from those before them, one must guard the ecclesiastical preaching, handed down from the apostles through the order of succession and remaining in the churches to the present: that alone is to be believed to be the truth which differs in no way from the ecclesiastical and apostolic tradition. [Pr.2.]
[The] holy apostles, in preaching the faith of Christ, delivered with utmost clarity to all believers, even to those who seemed somewhat dull in the investigation of divine knowledge, certain points that they believed to be necessary, leaving, however, the grounds of their statements to be inquired into by those who should merit the excellent gifts of the Spirit and especially by those who should receive from the Holy Spirit himself the grace of language, wisdom, and knowledge; while on other points they stated that things were so, keeping silence about how or whence they are, certainly so that the more diligent of their successors, being lovers of wisdom… might have an exercise on which they might display the fruit of their ability. [Pr.3.]
Subject for further reflection: Christ’s encounter with His two disciples on the road to Emmaus gives the paradigm for our worship. First, as they walk, Christ expounds Moses and the Prophets, “opening their minds” to understand how the Scriptures show it necessary “that the Christ should first suffer and then enter into glory.” Then, as they sit down to supper (“Stay with us!"), the Lord “opens their eyes” in blessing and breaking the bread, and they learn Who it was that unfolded the Scriptures to them: “Did not our hearts burn within us…?” The order is always thus: Hearing ushers us on to seeing; the Word guides us to the Table; the Scripture prepares us for Eucharist.
Questions the “historical method” might ask about the “laws of leprosy” in Leviticus 13–14: What was this disease, actually? The same as what we know as “leprosy” today or different? Multiple diseases? Surely the same pathogen does not affect humans and garments and structures — are these different sorts of molds? What is the cultural logic of hygiene that generates these regulations?
Questions a literary-theological approach might ask: Why is the leper who is “covered head to toe” in his disease pronounced clean? Why must the unclean leper dwell outside the camp? Why are the defilements of skin, fabric, and structure all referred to as “leprosy”? Why is the cleansing of leprosy accomplished through a sin offering and a burnt offering? What exactly is being “cleansed”? Why does it require a full-body shaving? What are the analogies between humans and houses? The significance of clean garments? How can one make atonement for a house?
I’m sure everyone else has already noticed this, but in Exodus 29:38ff the twice-daily (morning & evening) lamb offering in the Tabernacle is offered with bread and wine:
A few stray observations, with no particular ordering:
The “bread” is composed of flour and oil. One might object that as described it is not bread yet but merely a sort of flour-oil paste. However, this is of course a burnt offering: the bread is baked, as it were, in the fire, as it is being offered.
There is, of course, no leaven in this bread. The Passover (which of course involves the sacrifice of a lamb) is followed by the seven-day Feast of Unleavened Bread, on the first day of which all leaven is cleaned out of every Israelite house. There is no permanent regulation of which I am aware that prescribes leaven the rest of the year. But the collocation of lamb & unleavened bread recalls this festal season. Dare we infer: the Tabernacle exists in a sort of permanent Passover state, or is indeed a kind of permanent Passover?
The bread and wine are offered with the lamb. They are not substitutable with the lamb, but are its essential accompaniment in sacrifice.
Similarly, the description of the daily offering as a “sweet savor” comes not in reference to the lamb, but to the lamb with the bread and wine.
The covenant language of the LORD’s presence with Israel, “meeting” her and “speaking to” her, sanctifying the Tent of Meeting by His presence, dwelling among her and being their God, is not novel to this passage — but its reiteration in connection with the daily sacrifice is, shall we say, suggestive.
The “grain and wine and oil” of, say, Joel 2, are all present here: the signs, by the fruit of the earth, that the nation is blessed and enjoying abundance.
To get (potentially) fanciful: Flour symbolically combines various Scriptural images of judgment, death, and resurrection. A kernel of wheat falls to the ground and “dies” so that the plant may “bear much fruit” (John 12). The wheat must be threshed to separate the chaff (which is to be burned unto destruction) from the kernels. The kernels are then ground up to make flour; one thinks of St. Ignatius’ image of himself, preparing for martyrdom, as the “pure wheat of Christ.” Oil, then, is associated with the Spirit; while wine stands everywhere for blood and thus also for judgment.
More on leaven: In 1 Corinthians 5, when St. Paul is instructing his wayward congregation to expel the man who has his father’s wife (a kind of symbolic, if not necessarily literal, incest), he appeals by analogy to… the sequence of Passover and Feast of Unleavened Bread. “Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed; therefore let us celebrate the festival, not with the old leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.” In expelling notorious evildoers, the churches honor the once-for-all Passover of Christ by keeping a permanent Festival of Unleavened Bread.
“‘Take away therefore the talent from him and give it to him who has the ten talents. For to everyone who has much, more shall be given, and he shall have abundance; but from him who does not have, even that which he has shall be taken away.’” (Mt 25)
“I am the true vine, and my Father is the husbandman. Every branch in me that does not bear fruit, he takes it away. And every branch that bears fruit, he cleanses it, that it may bear more fruit.” (Jn 15)
Athanasius’s debate with the Arians was a lectionary-based discussion, if not explicitly, a least in a very practical way: it had to do with how the full range of the Scriptures in their apprehended juxtaposition disclosed the truth of God. I believe that Athanasius’s discussion is, on that basis, more credible than the Arians', because it is more comprehensive of the texts of the Scripture as they are made to perdure side by side. In our own day, it is such contiguity in temporal extent that has drastically shrunk. To that degree, the triumph of Arianism lies in the thinning out of the figural word, and thereby the dropping out of texts as divinely referring in their meaning and power. Heresy is the deliberated withering, far more even than the purported contradicting, of the Scriptures.
— Ephraim Radner, Time and the Word: Figural Reading of the Christian Scriptures, 233
Addendum:
The notion that Christian theology is to be seen as concerned with the mystery of God, the trinitarian God who loved us in Christ and calls us to participate in the mystery which he is, suggests to me that the main concern of theology is not so much to elucidate anything, as to prevent us, the Church, from dissolving the mystery that lies at the heart of the faith—dissolving it, or missing it altogether, by failing truly to engage with it. And this is what the heresies have been seen to do, and why they have been condemned: the trinitarian heresies dissolve the divine life, either by reducing it to a monadic consciousness, or by degrading it to the life of the gods; the Christological heresies blur the fact that it is in Christ that this divine life is offered to us—that it is through him and in the Spirit that we know ourselves to be loved by God himself—and do this either by qualifying the fact that God is who Jesus is, or by qualifying the fact that what Jesus is is truly a man; heresies concerning man’s divinization are no less insidious, as they blur the fact that we are truly loved by God in Jesus and are called to respond to that love, and that in thus loving and being loved we are drawn into a real communion with God.
— Andrew Louth, Discerning the Mystery: An Essay in the Nature of Theology
“And Jacob served seven years for Rachel, and they were in his eyes but a few days because of his love for her. And Jacob said to Laban, ‘Give me my wife, for my days are fulfilled, that I may go in unto her.’ And Laban gathered together all the men of the place and made a feast.” — Genesis 29:20f
“But forget not this one thing, beloved, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. The Lord is not slow concerning his promise, as some count slowness, but is long-suffering toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.” — 2 Peter 3:8f
“’Hallelujah! For the Lord our God, the Almighty, reigns. Let us rejoice and be exceeding glad, and let us give the glory to him, for the marriage of the Lamb has come, and his wife has made herself ready. And it was given to her that she should array herself in fine linen, bright, pure.’ For the fine linen is the righteous acts of the saints. And he says to me, ‘Write: Blessed are those who have been invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb.’“ — Revelation 19:6–9
Though it now seems like a fairly obvious point, probably already made somewhere by St. Augustine or the like, it has never before today struck me what is the nature of the basic contrast between the false seed of Adam, represented by Cain and his son Enoch, and the true seed, represented by Seth and his son Enosh.
Cain, cast away from the gate of Paradise and alienated from the ground, goes off and establishes a city — which he names for his son, linking the future of his line metaphorically and literally to human civilization (which begets agriculture, technology, and culture). Enoch, it is worth noting, means something like “dedicated” or “disciplined.” As a result of Cainite man’s alienation from the world through sin, he dedicates himself — not unfruitfully, in a way — to the civilizing practices of building, making, growing, and so forth, that will “discipline” the world towards his ends. Nevertheless, since these attempts at civilization began in Cain seeking to escape the consequences of his brother’s murder, they will inevitably tend towards and end in Lamech’s celebration of a young man’s murder.
But Seth stays, it seems, with his father and mother at the gates of Paradise, and continues to worship the true Creator rather than dedicating himself to overcoming creatureliness. And this is just what Enosh means: man, as frail and weak, mortal, yet relationally bound. Sethite man “remembers that he is dust” and “calls on the name of the Lord” — the only name that can deliver from death.
In John 12:41, the narrator of the Fourth Gospel remarks, “Isaiah said these things because he saw his glory and spoke of him.” There is no question that the referent of the pronouns “his” and “him” is Jesus. Similarly there is no ambiguity about the episode in which Isaiah “saw his glory”: it is the vision of Isaiah 6 in which the prophet sees the Lord “high and lifted up.” (The quotation from Isaiah 6 which immediately precedes this verse all but proves this.) John is making a simple exegetical point, with weighty theological ramifications: when Isaiah saw the Lord, the Lord he saw was Jesus, the Logos, the eternal Son, in his eternal heavenly glory.
(John also clearly believes that the “suffering servant” of Isaiah 53 is likewise Jesus; but that is a point upon which to expand another time.)
This helps to clarify what, from the trinitarian perspective of the New Testament (yes, I said it!), is the exact nature of the testamental discontinuity — and continuity. It is not that the Old Testament exclusively reveals the Father as God, while the Son is previously “unknown” as also being God. (A fortiori regarding the Spirit!) Neither, therefore, is it that God was known as One in the Old Covenant, and is now known as Three in the New, and these must somehow be reconciled by a complicated theological grammar. Rather, John’s remark implies that when the One God has been seen and heard and worshipped in the Old Covenant, it is as the eternal Son that He has been seen and heard and worshipped. The Logos is always characteristically the one who makes the invisible God visible — audible, perceptible, thinkable, knowable. (Consider John 1:18: “No one has ever seen God.") There is for John thus, at the divine level, an absolute continuity of both revelation and worship between the covenants. The discontinuity — and therefore the scandal — of the New Covenant is merely (!) that God the eternal Son is revealed and worshipped as a man: “the Logos became flesh and dwelt among us.” This is the scandal which is too great for the Pharisees in the passage to accept — “to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?”
The key question for critics of “theological interpretation of Scripture”: Does “non-theological interpretation” of Scripture exist? It is normally claimed that the historical-critical mode of interpretation, in opposition to various religiously motivated modes, provides a set of “scientific” tools to establish the original meaning of the text in question (or the meaning now hidden underneath numerous redactional layers), so as to lay a surer foundation for future reflection upon the text. (Set aside, for a moment, the recognition that rather than producing a unified, scientific account of the Bible’s meaning and origins, the historical-critical mode has provided only a far more fragmented and scrambled picture, or rather set of pictures, than existed in the supposedly pre-critical age.) Essential to this mode is the assertion (which, at a certain level, I accept without controversy) that the history of a text’s, or idea’s, development and effects is absolutely critical to understanding its meaning. Now turn this question to the historical-critical mode itself. It has a history, and a distinctly theological history at that. Its developers and proponents had beliefs, complex beliefs indeed, about God, the Church, the Bible, and the like — living when and where they did, how could they not? Those beliefs affected their work, as their work affected their beliefs, in a constant hermeneutical spiral, affecting the directions given to their intellectual passions and the sorts of resolutions they found satisfying — how could they not? Can the historical-critical mode — or any mode of interpretation of a text which confronts one with questions about God (and is there any text which does not?) — really then be called “non-theological”?
This essay was originally written for Professor Kavin Rowe’s Spring 2023 seminar on New Testament Theology. I am posting it without edits or revisions other than reformatting; while I do not see the substance as needing any significant revision, there are no doubt minor word choices I would make differently if writing today. No doubt, also, I would expand on some topics more — particularly the Christian understanding of history — if I were writing to a less restrictive page count than Professor Rowe imposed upon us! But such a restriction was an immensely useful exercise, and I am a sharper thinker and writer for it. — TBC
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New Testament Theology is the synthetic, canonical interpretation of the New Testament according to the principle of faith, from the perspective of faith, for the purpose of faith. Without the perspective and purpose of faith there is no canonical collection to be called “the New Testament” in the first place — to say nothing of the writings in that collection — and without the principle of faith there is no defending the concept of “theology” (or “canon”). A definition of the discipline without faith is implausible — perhaps even impossible.
Obviously, all three of these prepositional phrases — according to the principle of faith, from the perspective of faith, for the purpose of faith — must be elucidated, as must be the terms “synthetic” and “canonical” along the way. Accordingly, that task will occupy the bulk of this essay. In the concluding pages I will outline the shape of the constructive proposal implicit in the above definition.
I.
Interpreting the New Testament according to the principle of faith is the most important element and depends on making the movement of faith or trust. Every act of interpretation presupposes an act of trust. Trust can never be reduced to an abstract affirmation of “the facts” but is always, inescapably, trust in a person. The question is therefore never “what do you believe?” so much as “whom do you trust?” — and New Testament Theology consists essentially in interpreting the New Testament according to its own answer to this question.
In a sense the great achievement of twentieth-century science and philosophy is to demonstrate the inescapability of trust in all knowledge. What Ernst Troeltsch identified in historiography as the principle of criticism — the necessity of making probabilistic rather than binarily definitive judgments about past events — was shown within decades of Troeltsch’s death in 1923 to go, like Bertrand Russell’s turtles, all the way down. Starting in 1927, Werner Heisenberg’s famous “uncertainty principle” showed the limit to precision and completeness in observation to be unavoidable — part of the quantum mechanics revolution demonstrating an inescapable randomness and indeterminacy at the deepest layer of physical reality. By 1931 Kurt Gödel had definitively proved his “incompleteness” theorems demonstrating that no mathematical-logical system could be constructed so perfectly as to not require at least one axiom underivable from within that system. And Ludwig Wittgenstein’s observation, articulated in the posthumously published Philosophical Investigations (1953), that the meanings of words depend substantially on their function within certain “language-games” spelled the death of a logical-symbolic understanding of language. Karl Barth spoke more rightly than he could have known in 1921 when he insisted on being more critical than the critics.
Postwar philosophical and sociological developments extended the scope of this fundamental principial uncertainty to all of daily life and thought. The hermeneutic tradition in philosophy extending back to Schleiermacher through Dilthey and Heidegger reached its apex in Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method (1960), which definitively exposed the Enlightenment’s scientistic “prejudice against prejudices” as a methodological fantasy in the humanities. No interpretation is possible without the interpreter bringing him or herself into the “fusion of horizons” which constitutes the act of interpretation. Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) similarly upended the notion of linear “scientific progress” as a modernist myth: “settled” science does not evolve like the Ship of Theseus, seamlessly replaced bit by bit until it is entirely updated and overhauled, but rather occasionally finds itself shipwrecked on new kinds of data and in need of total reconstruction using new materials. Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s influential The Social Construction of Reality (1966) described the extent to which the first-person experience of reality is influenced by “society” even as that same society is acted on by persons — a line of reasoning startlingly confirmed in subsequent decades by experiments in neuroscience demonstrating “intersubjectivity”: I really am something like the sum of the five people with whom I spend the most time.
All these insights, of course, can be and have been horrendously misapplied, particularly in the Nietzschean-Freudian style of certain postmodernists, who took them as license to unleash a sweeping relativism of values and adopt a suspicious posture toward all claims of truth. This application, however, is exactly wrong. What they really represent — particularly germane, and suggestive, for questions of theology — is the indissolubility of trust within knowledge. If no text can be “objectively” interpreted, if no interpreter can avoid being influenced by persons and social constructs, if the experience of reality is itself in a way dependent on how one seeks to observe it — then it becomes supremely important whom one chooses to trust or take to be reliable. I cannot choose by fiat how I construe reality, nor can I verify every point of my construal by direct experience; my life is too fragile and potentially short for that. Accepting that there is no singularly, objectively “right” way to construe reality does not guarantee that I cannot hit on a wrong way to construe reality, with potentially tragic results. I have never been hit by a car, nor seen anyone else hit by a car; my construal of reality is lacking (a radical empiricist, or someone wishing for my death, might say) key data; I must nevertheless trust my parents, my friends, and my fiancée who implore me to heed the danger of vehicular homicide and stay attentive while out on my road bike, rather than performing an experiment (on) myself with potentially deadly results. To wrong ways of construing reality, reality itself responds with cold, hard, frequently painful resistance.
There is therefore finally no alternative between a hermeneutic of suspicion and a hermeneutic of trust — and while the hermeneutic of trust may still get me killed if I trust foolishly, the hermeneutic of suspicion is all but guaranteed to lead to my destruction. So why should I not admit to myself whether or not I trust the New Testament and — if yes — embrace a comprehensive hermeneutic of trust for it? Trust “the New Testament,” I say, but I am really trusting a whole array of persons. Some of them translated and edited the Bibles and Greek New Testaments in which I read the text. The trustworthiness of their product depends in turn on a long history of ecclesiastics and caretakers who recognized these books as texts in and through which God speaks, and who collected them together as the definitive, normative textual corpus of the word of God. Those churchmen (and women) trusted both that the apostles, or their trusted assistants and associates, had written these books, and trusted the authors themselves to have written faithfully — to have been trustworthy witnesses to what they had seen and heard, to what God wanted them to write. Text-critical history can with real confidence establish the most probably original form of the text, for errors do creep in and persist even among persons of good faith; it can tell us all sorts of interesting and potentially useful things about the history of those texts’ transmission; it can even provide good evidence that certain persons are not trustworthy tradents — but it cannot finally determine whether an author is positively trustworthy.
At bottom — as at the top — is the person of Jesus. Deciding whether I trust the apostles’ portrayal of Jesus presses inexorably the question of whether I trust Jesus himself: for the Jesus of apostolic history demands to be received as the Christ of faith. A Jesus of suspicious, critical historical reconstructions may make less-sweeping claims — or no claims at all. The Jesus who emerges from a hermeneutic of trust does not and cannot make less than the absolute claim of faithful allegiance. “Choose this day whom you will serve…”
Interpreting the New Testament according to the principle of faith means that I first accept the absolute claim of this Jesus on my faith and trust, and then accept the claims of the apostolic writers about the immediate material implications of my faith in Jesus. It means that I interpret their writings on the presumption of coherence and sensibility, rejecting interpretations that assume they did not know what they were talking about or failed to communicate their meaning effectively. It means also that I interpret them synthetically, not seeking to make points of different emphasis or expression between writers (e.g., Galatians 2 and James 2) into principles in ultimate and irreconcilable tension — adherence to one of which must become the real badge of faith — but rather to discover a capacious, inter-canonical coherence between their writings. It similarly means that when seemingly intractable problems of history emerge from the text, I seek the maximally charitable and trusting interpretation. It means that I accept the possibility of divine causality as the simplest explanation for the miraculous, rather than bracketing it because, like Lessing, I (alas) no longer experience such miracles in daily life. Most of all it means that I accept, as a presumption of my exegesis, the whole chain of reasoning that runs from “he is not here; he is risen, just as he said!” through “God has made him both Lord and Christ” to “I am the first and the last, and the living one” — an inescapably theological chain of reasoning; which is to say that in doing New Testament interpretation I should and will always find myself at least embroidering a corner of the glorious garment of New Testament Theology.
II.
Interpreting the New Testament according to the perspective of faith, therefore, means situating myself in the community of interpretation that is formed by faith in Jesus: the church. This is true in two dimensions (if not more). For one thing, if I adopt a hermeneutic of trust toward the Jesus who speaks to me in the pages of the New Testament, I will discover that his proclamation of the kingdom (Matt. 4:17) led immediately to gathering a band of disciples around him (Matt. 4:18ff) to listen to his teaching (Matt. 5:1ff) and live according to it (Matt. 7:24ff). There is no individualistic response to “repent and believe the good news” that satisfies how Jesus expects my faithful allegiance to be expressed. For another thing, if I understand myself to be interpreting “the New Testament,” I am immediately under the rule — the κάνων — of the church. The community of Jesus’ followers has selected — or better, recognized — in advance for me that set of writings which enjoy authoritative status in it, and given it the name “the New Testament.” They did so according to the principle of faith: on the basis of trust in Jesus and the apostles who wrote about him. The enduring existence of this community, formed by faith and operating according to the principle of faith, is the only reason to interpret the New Testament as a “New Testament” rather than as the (no doubt very interesting) “early Christian literature” which William Wrede preferred to interpret. In combination, the Christian community and the New Testament canon in which it functions authoritatively form the perspective of faith.
At this point, some — paradigmatically Wrede — might object that the Christian community is far too much of a mess, historically and contemporarily, for the ecclesiastical judgment of canonicity to have any enduring value. The so-called “process of canonization” was a polemical and exclusivist exercise from the beginning, meant to draw sharp boundaries between “orthodoxy” and “heresy” that are historically unjustifiable. Furthermore, the “canonical” literature itself underwent a process of development and alteration as the post-apostolic communities sought (and created) authoritative guidance on issues that could not have been foreseen by Jesus or his apostles. How can such a self-evidently flawed rule remain not only valuable but indeed authoritative?
These standard objections are in part answered — or at least responded to — by the principle of faith. A posture of suspicion will always be inclined to interpret any evidence of the church’s messiness as warrant for the church’s invalidation, as much when it comes to the first as in the twenty-first century. Many of the scholarly judgments about the development and alteration of the canonized writings rest — at some level in their own genealogies — on maximally suspicious interpretation of odd details in the texts, presuming that the various redactors and editors were simultaneously so brilliant as to hide their work from subsequent generations and so incompetent as to leave self-evidently contradictory and messy texts for nineteenth-century historical critics to discover. (The notion that pre-Enlightenment exegesis was wholly “pre-critical” and naïve is undermined by reading Origen, Jerome, or Augustine and seeing them employ — sometimes advance upon — the critical tools of their days. The difference is in the first place a hermeneutic of suspicion rather than trust.)
But equally important is the institutional analogy to the principle of faith: the perspective of faith. Any community that orients itself around reading has judgments about what texts are central to its life and thought, as well as what kinds of readings are acceptable and appropriate. The question is how implicit or explicit those are. And though the history of the canon is as messy as that of the church, the judgments about central texts and acceptable readings appear to emerge quite early and straightforwardly. The “rule of the truth” identified by Irenaeus at the end of the second century was not a criterion for canonizing the New Testament writings; rather it was a kind of aural lens through which the church focused its habits of listening to divine truth, and through which it listened to “early Christian literature” to discern the voice of God instructing them in a living and active way. Here is the place for the crucial insight of Brevard Childs that the canonical process included the transmission, even editing, of the canonical writings, precisely because those who transmitted them did so in response to hearing the living voice of God speaking in them. The rule of the truth and the canonical writings formed a hermeneutical spiral that invited deeper recognition and better comprehension of both as true and canonical. The church is the community that lives in — lives out — that hermeneutical spiral.
Of course, in the present situation there is not one “church.” The prayer of Christ in John 17 that all his followers would be one has so far been answered only in a mystical sense if at all. Which church am I to trust to provide the perspective of faith from which I interpret? While no answer seems likely to be truly satisfactory this side of the eschaton (one thinks of Robert Jenson’s remark about the “impossibility” of doing theology in the situation of a divided church), a few principles seem to flow from the above. Trust the providence of God placing one in a particular tradition. Trust a church that seeks basic doctrinal and ethical conformity with the generations that recognized the canon of Scripture: orthodox Trinitarianism, Chalcedonian Christology, the basic pattern of New Testament ethics. Trust a church that seeks to submit itself to the New Testament and live out what it hears the voice of God speaking. Most of all, trust a church that preaches Christ, the crucified and risen One.
Interpreting the New Testament from the perspective of faith means that I am freed to begin my investigation of the canonical writings with the deposit of theological teaching laid down in the rule of the truth. It means that I accept the church’s historic judgment about ruling out — and ruling in — certain categories of readings on explicitly theological grounds; Marcion’s read of Paul is right out. It means joyfully identifying my scholarship as from (and for) the church, rather than some other, less cosmically significant community of interpretation. The beginnings of New Testament Theology are in the basics of Christian theology, not in some other discourse; and the basics of Christian theology are found in the Christ’s church.
III.
The third phrase flows directly out of the second. Interpreting the New Testament according to the purpose of faith means not only situating my interpretation in the church but for the church. What is the church’s task in interpreting the New Testament? It is listening to the voice of God in order to be given life and governed by it. It is the unfolding of the sacred text for the upbuilding of the members of the body in faith.
The Kantian ideal of the disinterested scholar, excising her own interests when coming to a text in bold pursuit of the truth wherever it might lead, was in its best form a noble fiction. Even a valuable fiction, perhaps; there can be no doubt that the historical-critical posture uncovered real insights into the text and history of Scripture, with which all who seek to be intellectually honest must reckon. Yet far more often the fiction was exposed within a generation or two as a vicious lie. The “life of Jesus” research of the nineteenth century produced (in the memorable image of Albert Schweitzer) a succession of scholars staring down deep wells, seeing their own faces dimly reflected, and triumphantly declaring that they had discovered the real Jesus — Who looked, after all that labor, just like them. The enormous philological and linguistic scholarship that produced Kittel’s Dictionary turned out to be not only based on disastrously misguided semantic theory (memorably skewered in James Barr’s 1961 The Semantics of Biblical Language) but also shot through at numerous points with the pernicious strain of racialized anti-Judaism that infected German biblical scholarship from at least the late nineteenth century right up to 1945. Because it is done by human beings and not by God, scholarship usually turns out to have an “interest” — especially when it is declared most energetically, as in the classic historical-critical mode, that all interests have been put aside.
What use then for the historical-critical method in Christian scholarship, or indeed in New Testament Theology? The proper analogy is the one St. Augustine recommended with respect to pagan philosophy: the Egyptian goods asked of Israel’s neighbors on the night of the Exodus. Carried — baptized, even — through the Red Sea, the precious metals and beautiful things can be righteously put to the task of building and beautifying the Tabernacle. The Bezalels and Oholiabs of the Christian academy are free to use whatever materials and tools they find God commanding them to use in their work; God even promises that His Spirit of wisdom and understanding will guide them. But the Egyptian gold can also be molded into a deadly idol. Wrede and Troeltsch were merely being honest: if Moses delays in coming down from the mountaintop, Aaron is ready to submit to a very different spirit and replace New Testament Theology with the history of religious ideas found in early Christian literature. “Look, I threw the gold into the fire, and out came this calf!” is the time-worn protest of scholars affecting shock that their deliberately faithless investigations of the New Testament have produced the dissolution of faith in the pews. That idolatry is nonsensical and self-defeating is, historically speaking, no proof against its indulgence.
Interpreting the New Testament for the purpose of faith means that I pursue biblical scholarship that serves the people of God — and God Himself. It means that I seek interpretations and angles on the text that glorify God and are, to use the patristic language, “fitting” of God’s character and attributes. It also means that I avoid tearing down and plucking up the faith of my brothers and sisters in the church by my scholarship, seeking rather to build up and to plant — understanding myself as at best God’s worker and craftsman; they are God’s field and building. Likewise, it means that I interpret with an eye to the practical effects of similar interpretations that have come before — which necessitates knowing the history of interpretation and accepting that it is possible that earlier, churchly interpreters may have understood the text better than me despite my being “up to date.” It means, I submit, that I accept something like the medieval understanding of multiple senses of Scripture, rather than restricting my investigations to a probably nonexistent singular sense — even as I seek to keep myself and my interpretations more rooted in the “plain sense” than at least some medieval exegetes were willing to do. New Testament Theology necessitates an expansive understanding of the interpreter’s task along some lines; historical and grammatical exposition will not be sufficient, and no scholar has the self-control necessary to stick exclusively to those tasks anyway. Better to expand the task along such lines, then, that explicitly seek to serve and strengthen the church.
IV.
All this has so far resulted in only principles of interpretation. What would a work of New Testament Theology produced according to this proposal, functioning on the principles we have outlined, actually look like?
It would first of all be shaped canonically: not seeking to track a theological idea’s development from historically earlier to later sources, but from canonically earlier to later texts. Start with the teaching of Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels. Look from the differing angle of the Gospel of John. See how the Spirit-empowered followers of the Way apply and teach about it in the Acts of the Apostles. Watch how the apostles and their friends — Paul, James, Peter, Jude, John, the writer of Hebrews — discuss it in their letters. Observe finally how it is transfigured in the Apocalypse. To be sure, there is (as Childs recognized) a necessary place for discussing the historical development of the ideas, but let it be done within the context of each text, rather than as a control on which texts are discussed and in which order. Leave the “history of religious ideas” to the departments of religious studies, which are better-versed in that sort of thing anyways; let scholars — theologians — of the New Testament be unapologetically theological.
Then, with the differing canonical perspectives on that theological idea expounded, they should be synthesized. Let coherence emerge between the differing perspectives; not a root coherence that best explains the historical development of the various perspectives, but an apex coherence that best draws their gaze up to a single focus. Such a coherence may not be explicitly found in any of the New Testament texts, nor be plausibly identifiable as what any of the New Testament writers might have specifically thought they meant. Its discernment may require the Scriptural imagination of the theologian or the application of insights from the history of interpretation and theology. (It may even take prayer to discern.) None of this should be cause for theological concern: “For now we see in part and we prophesy in part…”
As the Pauline dictum suggests, New Testament Theology may ultimately be an eschatological discipline. The promise of the historical-critical method was originally that the one true meaning of the text and an accurate, coherent history of development could be arrived at and universally agreed upon, so that a more solid foundation might be laid for Christian reading of the New Testament than was supplied by the New Testament itself. That turned out to be a pipe dream which eroded its own foundations. Turning away from this dream in pursuit of the above vision of New Testament Theology may be better-founded — upon divine promises rather than human self-assurance — but the kind of apex theological coherence described above will certainly be impossible to achieve in a manner that satisfies everyone. This should be no counsel of despair, but rather a spur to perpetual, eager investigation of the canon’s theological import: “For when the perfect comes, the partial shall pass away… Therefore, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.”
We may… assert that the ontological judgments of the early ecumenical creeds were the only satisfying and indeed logical outcome of the claims of the [New Testament] read together with the Old. That is to say, for a Christian faith that upholds the unity of the Bible and the continuing authority of the [Old Testament], the one God is Trinity in himself, affirmed on the basis of his economic expression. There is no other way to justify the claims about and worship of the fully human Jesus Christ within an OT framework. It is likewise with the Spirit: given the authority of the OT, to recognize the “personhood” of the Spirit in coordination with the claims of the NT regarding the Spirit’s inseparability from Jesus Christ in worship and in presence is to affirm that the Spirit, too, is of the “same essence” as the Father and the Son. For the church to turn its back on the creeds is to turn its back upon the OT. So, too, to turn its back upon the OT is to loosen entirely the restraints that operate in the creedal formulations of the Trinitarian nature of the one Lord God. To speak about the one Lord God of the OT as Father, Son, and Spirit requires that this one God is in fact triune and, conversely, that the Father, the Son, and the Spirit are of one and the same essence with respect to their reality, which, in turn, is the ground of worship.
— C. Kavin Rowe, “Biblical Pressure and Trinitarian Hermeneutics,” reprinted in Method, Meaning, and Context in New Testament Studies, 147
There could be a worse hermeneutical lens (read: many, many worse lenses) for New Testament theology than the four poems that anchor the opening narrative in Luke’s Gospel: Mary’s song (1:46–55), Zechariah’s prophecy (1:68–79), the angels’ announcement (2:10–14), and Simeon’s blessing (2:29–32).
The doctrine of the Trinity is the theological/philosophical apparatus necessary to talk sensibly about and hold together an apparent paradox as truth:
“Hear, O Israel: YHWH is our God, YHWH is One” (Deut. 6:4). The foundational theological confession about the identity and nature of God in Israel’s Scriptures — the confession on which the theological unity of those Scriptures depend — is that there is one God, the sole subject of worship, the sole Creator of heaven and earth and all that is in them, incomparable with any other putative god, incommensurable with any creaturely reality.
“Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey all that I have commanded you” (Mt. 28:19f). The foundational theological confession about the identity and nature of God in the New Testament — the confession on which the theological unity of that Testament depends — is that the One God of Israel is to be rightly worshipped in the person of the Father of Jesus Christ; also worshipped in the person of Jesus Christ, the unique and eternal Son of the Father; and also worshipped in the Spirit of Jesus Christ, who is given freely by the Father to all those who belong to Jesus Christ.
In other words: the Church is right to worship Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as God alone, and in that worship they are (despite appearances!) in essential continuity with Israel’s worship of the One God YHWH. That is what the doctrine of the Trinity is seeking, in a theological register, to articulate.
To the disciples: “Unless you change and become like a little child, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (Mt. 18:3)
To the chief priests and elders: “The tax collectors and the prostitutes go into the kingdom of heaven before you” (Mt. 21:31)
This is what I mean, in yesterday’s post, by “Do not rule out any kinds of questions and observations from the conversation, even ones that (initially) seem unsuited to Bible study or insufficiently sophisticated.” Ask the questions that little children would ask; ask the questions that those on the outs from elite society would ask. This is, notably, difficult for those formed by elite society! The whole enterprise of contemporary Western elite education is meant as much to inculcate the habits of mind and speech proper to the ruling class in its next generation as to render that class accessible to the lower socioeconomic strata. Note well that this last sentence is not a criticism, per se, of contemporary Western elite education; indeed it’s a sentence that could hardly have been written without it. (The various so-called critical theories mostly exist, not principally for the powerless to critique the powerful, but for the already powerful to engage in the discipline of self-critique.) Nevertheless the ruling strata are always peculiarly able and constantly tempted — by Mammon, mostly — to drown out the voice of the Word by virtue of those habits of mind and speech. Wherefore it is a most useful and spiritually edifying exercise to treat them, as frequently as possible, as rubbish. Change, at least for the hour of Bible study, and become like a little child; ask questions of the text (of Jesus!) that the tax collectors and the prostitutes would ask, and follow their lead into the kingdom. With such people Jesus prefers to feast.
Sit silently together for 5 minutes. No distractions allowed!
Discuss any questions and observations that occur to you, taking notes. Do not rule out any kinds of questions and observations from the conversation, even ones that (initially) seem unsuited to Bible study or insufficiently sophisticated.
Look for, and name, patterns that emerge in the questions and observations.
Reconvene and repeat, rereading the notes from last time.
That’s all it takes to have a great Bible study. You don’t need a scholarly guide or a commercially produced book study. You don’t need knowledge of the Greek New Testament or the Hebrew Bible, though those are occasionally useful bonuses to be deployed with tremendous care and caution. You certainly don’t need pre-written questions, whether from a celebrity Christian author or ChatGPT (perish the thought). What you really need is time and space for contemplation. There are no Bible study “tools” that can substitute for that now-threatened resource. The Word of God is living and active, and the modern technological world represents a colossal project of seeking to drown out its voice. Silence the noises, and listen to the Spirit.
Actually, there is one “tool” you do need, and should incorporate into the discussion process after you’ve read the book or section under consideration a few times together. That tool is the rest of the Bible. The whole canon of Scripture is your indispensable guide to understanding each part. Many modern Bibles include a cross-reference system; some of these references are more valuable than others, but figure out which ones are the most fruitful, and read those passages (with their full contexts!) aloud too. Commentaries, too, are useful in this context, because they can point out theological parallels and connections that are too macro-scale to fit into the cross-reference system. But most of all, use your own intuitions developed through reading the Bible: “this bit here sounds awfully like…” is the right instinct to follow. Commentaries and cross-references are really only useful insofar as they build up your own biblical literacy and instincts. Let the different parts of the canon speak to and about one another.
And, incidentally, as you do this, don’t worry overmuch about historical questions of whether or not “the writer of Book X knew and was referencing Book Y.” For modern people, these kinds of questions are red herrings that lead us astray from the actual task of understanding the words in the canon. Of course the words emerge from a historical setting. They are still in our Bibles because generations of the faithful following God’s Way realized that these words transcended (without obviating) the particularities of their original historical settings and were speaking to them, with divine import and power, in the divine Now: “as long as it is called ‘Today.'” Rather settle for trusting a) the intentionality of the canon’s later editors and compilers, who definitely knew what they were doing, and b) the divine intentionality of the Spirit of God in guiding the authors, editors, and compilers through that process.
The church’s continual struggle in understanding the literal sense of the text as providing the biblical grounds for its testimony arises in large measure from its canonical consciousness. On the one hand, it recognizes that textual meaning is controlled by the grammatical, syntactical, and literary function of the language. On the other hand, these formal criteria are continually complemented by the actual content of the biblical texts which are being interpreted by communities of faith and practice. The productive epochs in the church’s use of the Bible have occurred when these two dimensions of scripture constructively enrich and balance each other as establishing an acknowledged literal sense.
— Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments, 724
Five points, both historical and theological, to render credible the preaching of New Testament slavery texts:
Slavery in the Greco-Roman world is not to be equated, historically speaking, with antebellum American race-based chattel slavery.
Nevertheless, Greco-Roman slavery was, from the perspective of Christian morality, a violent, unjust, and dehumanizing system: differently shaped in the form of its evil than the American form, but reprehensible nonetheless.
The New Testament canon contains both (a) prudential, theologically grounded guidance for life under such a system and (b) moral and theological lessons that, developed and applied over time within a Christianizing society, should have — and largely did — inevitably resulted in the eradication of the slave system.
These different witnesses are not to be conflated, even when they emerge from the same texts (e.g., the book of Philemon), but neither are they in opposition to one another. The Christian tradition, drawing on this textual heritage, is right to now condemn all forms of slavery as unjust violations of divine law. Neither does this obviate the moral responsibility of those who exist within systems of slavery to adhere to Christian ways of living.
The fact that the New Testament and early Christian “strategy” (a misleading word in this context) for the eradication of slavery involves, in a sense, accommodating its ongoing existence during the Christianization of society is not a warrant against, in a modern society with its moral norms already re-framed by Christianization, using appropriate mechanisms of law and even force to destroy enduring systems of enslavement. To say that would be to simultaneously radically enlarge and disastrously narrow the sufficiency of Scripture.
The early church’s theological reflection on the God of Israel did not turn on certain isolated Old Testament passages from which to find a warrant for a developing christology, but rather it turned on the issue of the nature of God’s presence within the life of Israel in all its historical specificity. The God of the covenant who had bound himself to a people in love, had revealed himself as both transcendent and immanent, seen and unseen, the God of the Patriarchs and of all nations. The church confessed to know a totally sovereign creator who yet chose to reveal himself in the forms of his creation, who entered time and space in order to redeem the world. In short, the church’s reflection on God found itself inexorably drawn into Trinitarian terminology in order to testify to God both as the revealed and revealer, the subject and object of self-manifestation.
— Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments: Theological Reflection on the Christian Bible, 369.
[The] history of interpretation serves as a major check against all forms of biblicism in showing the distance between the biblical text and the interpreter and the degree to which the changing situation of the reader affects one’s hearing of the text. This observation should not lead to cultural relativism, but to a profounder grasp of the dynamic function of the Bible as the vehicle of an ever fresh word of God to each new generation. It is a strange irony that those examples of biblical interpretation in the past which have truly immersed themselves in a specific concrete historical context, such as Luther in Saxony, retain the greatest value as models for the future actualization of the biblical text in a completely different world. Conversely those biblical commentators who laid claim to an objective, scientific explanation of what the text really meant, often appear as uninteresting museum pieces to the next generation.”
— Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments: Theological Reflection on the Christian Bible, 88
