William Baird’s three-volume History of New Testament Research is enormously helpful as a description of the, well, history of New Testament research; he gives short summaries of key figures' careers and works, followed by descriptions of their key contributions to the history of scholarship. I am less enthused by his evaluations. Commenting, in the first volume, on the “Pietists” Francke, Bengel, and Wesley, he writes: “When they conclude… that the Bible is not to be interpreted like any other book, the Pietists align themselves with the past and not the future” (90). It is hard to know what to make of a judgment like this, which contextually it is clear Baird intends as a criticism. Obviously, as a matter of the progress of history (within the horizon of the 16th to 19th centuries), this is true; these writers would have been horrified by the dictum of Jowett’s which Baird quotes (strangely without quotation marks!). But whether the progression of that history, within that 400-year horizon, was good is another matter entirely; and indeed the third volume of the work opens with a discussion of the work and influence of Karl Barth, whose career derived its initial impetus from forcibly rejecting many of the evaluative assumptions that had evolved during that historical progression. Surely there are valid hermeneutical critiques, even criticisms, of Francke, Bengel, and Wesley to be made — but is a vague appeal to the past and the future the best that can be done?

Historical researchers always have before them the temptation of what C.S. Lewis called “chronological snobbery.” It is in their best interest never to take it.

Five points, both historical and theological, to render credible the preaching of New Testament slavery texts:

1. Slavery in the Greco-Roman world is not to be equated, historically speaking, with antebellum American race-based chattel slavery.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.

There are meetings that should be emails, and emails that should be meetings; discernment (φρονήσις) consists in distinguishing between them.

However, true wisdom (σοφία) consists in distinguishing between doctoral dissertations that should have been podcast series, and podcasts that should be doctoral dissertations.

I find the frequently-seen typo of “martial” for “marital” very funny on its own. (If — per Michael Pollan — gardening is war, can marriage be, too?) When, as in a newsletter I read this morning, the context is “how to keep your marriage from descending into conflict when you have kids,” the resulting phrase “martial happiness” acquires a new layer of self-referential comedic brilliance.

A less critical remark about the Reformation section of The Master and His Emissary. One intriguing feature of this section is a passing comparison of those two great Martins, Luther and Heidegger, as both being “somewhat tragic figure[s]” whose work was “hijacked” and ultimately unleashed “an anarchic destruction of everything [they] valued and struggled to defend” (314). This is an interesting parallel, and I think reveals more than McGilchrist recognizes in the moment.

Luther’s great flaw — a flaw that he inherited from 1300 years of Christian tradition, radicalized by his apocalyptic self-understanding, knit uncomfortably close through his theology, and bequeathed to later generations with horrendous and anti-Christian consequences — was his personal and theological anti-Judaism. On the Jews and their Lies is of course the most (in)famous and horrifying expression of this flaw, and is admittedly a document that requires some historical contextualization — Luther, like practically everyone else in the sixteenth century, thought the Second Coming was close at hand, which meant a mass conversion of Jews to Christianity was imminent; when it became clear that this was failing to happen, his bitter reaction was expressed with the most splenetic language he could muster. But really (as we can see more clearly now in the wake of the Shoah) even the most robust Protestant must admit that Luther’s formulation of justification — not to mention some of his more polemic statements in defense of it — depends on such a sharp antithesis, even opposition, between Law and Gospel that it has historically proved difficult for Lutherans (other than Luther himself, an Old Testament scholar extraordinaire) not to see progressively greater and greater justification for casting aside Torah, Moses, and Israel entirely. Lutheranism’s theological failure mode is Marcionism (as seen in Adolf von Harnack), and Marcionism bears more than a passing family resemblance to Christian anti-Judaism; which, with the modern invention of racial essentialism, was radicalized into Christian anti-Semitism.

Meanwhile, The Master and His Emissary was published in 2009, and is absolutely dependent on Heidegger’s philosophy; somewhere McGilchrist calls him the most comprehensive expositor of the right hemisphere worldview in intellectual history. (In my view, the book’s real muse — the Beatrice to McGilchrist’s Dante — is Hegel, but Heidegger plays the part of Virgil throughout.) As scholars have been discovering since Heidegger’s Black Notebooks began to be published in 2014, Heidegger embraced and creatively rearticulated the Nazi ideology during its period of ascendancy and regnancy, and remained — at least in private, once it was no longer permissible to be public about it — a defender of Nazism until his death, long after the exposure of Nazi Germany’s numerous crimes against humanity and above all the Jews. (Apparently Richard Wolin’s recent Heidegger in Ruins (Yale, 2023), is the important book on this topic, though I haven’t read it… yet.) McGilchrist’s book evinces none of this — and it is hard to blame him for it, given the genuine importance of Heidegger to all subsequent twentieth-century thought and the timing of the Black Notebooks' publication; but I am, to say the least, intrigued to see how, if differently, Heidegger may be treated in The Matter with Things (2021).

So, if Heidegger is the prophet of the right hemisphere — does that make Nazism the right hemisphere’s most seductive, and most horrifying, failure mode?

Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary is a refreshingly ambitious, generally idiosyncratic, and colossally erudite work, but its brief (ten out of 462 pages) treatment of the Reformation is not one of its high points. This is, I think, signaled by his citing Friedrich Schleiermacher’s comparison of Reformation and Enlightenment as sharing the animating principle “everything mysterious and marvellous is proscribed” (315) — a very Enlightenment perspective on the Reformation, always seeking to ally the Reformers to a cause which the Reformers would not have recognized! McGilchrist is selective, as he must be in a book of this length, and focuses on the change in hermeneutics of image vs. word (and the accompanying spasms of iconoclasm); but here I think the simplicity of that heuristic betrays his reading of the period as a whole. It’s a phenomenological reading which is straightforwardly read up into the theological frameworks of the Reformers, rather than engaging the right-to-left-to-right intellectual motion that would actually incorporate (aufgehoben?) the animating theological concerns of the period. The only substantive discussion of Reformation theological concerns is a paragraph which makes Luther sound almost like a proto-Heidegger in his concern for the outer authentically presenting the inner (needless to say, this is not how Luther conceived of his theological revolution).

In general, the Reformation is blamed for all that is left-hemispherical in this period, when it is far from clear that the “real” culprit (if such can actually be identified) in accelerating left hemisphere dominance during the sixteenth century is not in fact the habits of mind and scholarly methods of Renaissance humanism. Erasmus was as fond of the sensus literalis as Luther or Zwingli, and before the century was up Richard Hooker was retrieving “participation” as the essential doctrinal category. (Frankly, I think the preceding twenty pages on the Renaissance, which are often uncritically laudatory, would probably have benefited from interacting with C.S. Lewis’s hilarious excoriation of so-called Renaissance humanism in English Literature in the Sixteenth Century.) Somewhat bizarrely, the doctrine of transubstantiation is conscripted to his Reformation narrative as a left-hemisphere rationalization and hyperspecification of the right-hemisphere Eucharistic mystery; but this, being a creature of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, he cannot possibly blame on the Reformers or the Reformation, and thus he is forced to say that “At the Reformation this problem re-emerged” (316). That it did, and yes, the memorialist view of the Lord’s Supper looks awfully like left-hemisphere rationalization; but it is, crucially, an equal and opposite reaction against an existing and well-established of left-hemisphere rationalization. The replacement of presentation with re-presentation in Christian theology significantly antedates 1517, which suggests that “Reformation” as popularly understood is the wrong category. The most significant omission from McGilchrist’s description (does such an omission rise to the level of an outright error?) is the whole phenomenon of the Counter-Reformation, which radicalized the standardization and schematization of scholastic theology in Rome no less than took place in Geneva, for all that the Roman church hung onto images.

To be clear: many of McGilchrist’s critiques of the Reformation churches and theology are worth pondering. I find the Reformed iconoclasm of the period profoundly distasteful (St. John of Damascus was right about images, people! it’s time to admit it!), and the schematizing, diagrammatizing tendency in second-generation Calvinist theology (Perkins, Beza, etc.) is an undoubtedly striking exemplum of left hemisphere thinking! But I am unconvinced by McGilchrist’s sweeping diagnosis that the Reformation “reversed” the “cardinal tenet of Christianity:” that “the Word is made Flesh” became “the Flesh is made Word.” As Athanasius teaches in the evergreen On the Incarnation, the Logos became sinless flesh so that our sinful flesh might be restored to its original glory as logikos. Flesh and Word are, ultimately, made for one another. The truly “cardinal” tenet of Christianity is not, after all, the Incarnation of the Word (which runs it a close second) — it is the resurrection of the Word’s crucified Flesh, and the promise of resurrection to all flesh that is infused with the Word’s power.