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.
We come, then, to a first paradox of modernity… that its own drive has often been toward forms of political repression far worse than most things perpetrated in despised Christendom. … [The] assertion of the rights of the many has paradoxically, dialectically perhaps, achieved the opposite, the subversion of the many by new and in some cases demonic versions of the one.
— Colin Gunton, The One, the Three, and the Many, 33.
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.
Of course, I’m not actually against citation, in the sense of needing to show your work and avoid plagiarism. But what I am against is citation as a substitute for persuasive argument or citation as demonstration that one is In the Know about the scholarly canon for a field.
Is your case dependent on previous scholarship? Of course it is. So tell me that you’re dependent, but spell out the nature of your dependence. The best practice here is to re-present to me, in your own words, the part of their argument that influenced or persuaded you, as clearly as possible. If you can’t clearly draw the lines of dependence, at least give me your own articulation of your position and mention, in the footnotes, “Here (and throughout) I am undoubtedly dependent on $AUTHORNAME; cf. $WORK, $PAGENUMBERS.” This gives me the ability to evaluate the strength of your foundations myself, and the opportunity to be persuaded that you are right. Citing, however, someone else’s methodological work — even if it is a standard work in the field — without re-presenting the relevant aspects takes those opportunities for persuasion and evaluation away from me. I simply have to take for granted that you have a) read and represented $AUTHORNAME properly and b) that $AUTHORNAME is a trustworthy guide to these issues.
And what if I have no access to this author’s works? What if I don’t yet have the technical background to evaluate either of the above questions? In this case, the unexplained citation functions to shore up the boundaries of the guild, with your place within and mine without: “If you haven’t read $AUTHORNAME on this, I really don’t know how to talk to you.” It’s a gesture in the direction of an Important Book as an appeal to authority — in the logical fallacy sense. Of course there is always authority. But as a writer, especially in a scholarly mode, it is critically important that you a) assess what authorities you are placing yourself under and b) show your readership why they are good authorities. There is a way to cite Important Books that invites the novice reader into the scholarly conversations whose terms have been set by the Important Books, rather than shutting them out of the conversations until such times as they have read and understood the Important Books.
Scholarship is always iterative and cumulative. Even Socrates — a figure of practically immeasurable importance! — is, in a sense, just the first philosopher to have his teachings recorded in a large, well-preserved corpus; not the first person ever to think in quite the way that he did. Everyone is, like Newton, standing on the shoulders of giants. A major contemporary biblical scholar (to take the field I know best) will cite in perfunctory fashion a great authority of the previous generation, a pioneer of the field. Okay, I say to myself: I am a novice in this field; if I want to understand, I must row back up the stream of influence. I read the great authority, and find that he (in biblical scholarship it is practically always a he) is himself claiming dependence on a prior pioneer. I climb further and see that there are competing interpretations of the prior pioneer’s legacy, and that the great authority may have subtly transmuted his forerunner’s thought to be more congenial to his project. And repeat ad infinitum — well, not truly infinitely; but if I can ever make it to the source of this large river of impressive, learned scholarship, which has become its own canon of authority, what I may find as the wellspring is — in a surprising number of cases — a wild speculation in a footnote by a nineteenth-century German biblical scholar. And I find that this scholar’s own methodological presuppositions are practically impossible to assess without understanding Hegelian philosophy, and that the core biblical insight that launched a thousand dissertations had actually been inspired by a remark of Hegel’s. Which then requires its own understanding — and I cannot understand Hegel.
Did my original major contemporary biblical scholar, not herself presupposing Hegelianism, take care to know what meat she was chewing and what bones she was spitting out? Quite possibly. But if she did not bother to show me the foundations and persuade me that they are solid, a great part of my own assessment of her work is foreclosed in advance. I am increasingly sensitive — allergic — to sloppy appeals to external authority in biblical and theological scholarship. Show me your hermeneutical presuppositions in your exegesis, yes; but also tell me what they are and why you presuppose them. And if you implicitly protest, by citation rather than explanation, that the telling would take too much time and too many pages, and really I should just read your other book — or this journal article you wrote, or your mentor’s journal article or book — to understand them… then I’m increasingly inclined to put your book down, and I will probably not cite you in the future.
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.
Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling is a great and important philosophical work, of course; but nobody had ever told me that it was funny. Savagely funny, even. The discourse of Johannes de Silentio skewers at every point those self-consciously modern persons who are “unwilling to stop with doubting everything but [go] further” (5). I am helpfully informed by the endnotes that this refers to certain Danish Hegelians — and given the role of Hegel’s philosophy in the more technical part of the book, that is a perfectly defensible historical reading; but the irony with which the text is saturated cuts at those in every generation who hold that they have acquired full “proficiency in doubting” (6) from their very beginning. The work, for all that Kierkegaard is genuinely interested in exploring the philosophical problemata of Genesis 22, uses humor as its sharpest surgical tool to cut away the audience’s layers of self-conscious Rationality and Skepticism and expose the comical, self-deluding pretense that Reason is ever able to surpass Faith and “go further.”
You would hardly know any of this from the scholarly introduction, the myriad references and summaries in other philosophical/theological works, or the Wikipedia article. These generally fundamentally — and I presume not inaccurately — historicize it, one way or another: as Kierkegaard wrestling with and justifying his decision to break his engagement to Regine Olsen, as a riposte against the Hegelian treatment of ethics, or the like. But the historical element cannot be permitted to take the sting out of the irony that is so essential to its effect as a work of philosophy, classically construed as an enterprise in convincing the reader that (as in Rilke’s poem) “you must change your life.” The humor is that unparaphraseable, unextractable aspect that makes it great.
It seems utterly clear to me that, for instance, the last lines of the Exordium before the “four paraphrases” are pure irony: “That man was not an exegetical scholar. He did not know Hebrew; if he had known Hebrew, he perhaps would easily have understood the story and Abraham” (9). For what follows are, judged by the rest of the work, four failed exegetical paraphrases of the story: proof that the story is not “easily understood” by any means, proof that no rationalization adequately captures the movement of faith.” Lest anyone be tempted to think that the simple man in the Exordium was merely lacking in learning, was not actually entering more closely than the Hebrew scholars into the experience of faith and of Abraham, Kierkegaard demonstrates — with brilliant mockery — that the basically paraphrastic resources of the “exegetical scholar” are insufficient to the task. The proverbs about the mother and the weaned child that conclude each paraphrase offer a kind of demonstrated rebuttal to the possibility of paraphrasing, of explaining and principlizing, such a story; exactly what Johannes de Silentio goes on to demonstrate in the rest of the work. What matters is the reader’s confrontation by the text of Genesis 22 — by the incomprehensibility, the miraculousness, of Abraham’s faith in God; what matters also, mutatis mutandis, is the reader’s confrontation by the text of Fear and Trembling — to feel one’s own pretenses to complete rationality caught, exposed, even flayed.
UPDATE: I forgot about this passage, which — rich irony! — captures this dynamic marvelously:
There is a lot of talk these days about irony and humor, especially by people who have never been able to practice them but nevertheless know how to explain everything. I am not completely unfamiliar with these two passions; I know a little more about them than is found in German and German-Danish compendiums. Therefore I know that these two passions are essentially different from the passion of faith. Irony and humor are also self-reflective and thus belong to the sphere of infinite resignation. [51]
[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
I am testing out utilizing Micro.blog as a kind of reading journal: a low friction platform for the kinds of reflections that haven’t yet generated full-scale essays, but which I do want to work out at greater length than a text message permits. (And having abandoned Twitter, which I never really felt comfortable utilizing for that purpose.)