[The] course of History is predictable in the degree to which all men love themselves, and spontaneous in the degree to which each man loves God and through Him his neighbour.
— from W. H. Auden, “The Meditation of Simeon,” in For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio, 51
In turning away from Hegel the [nineteenth century] acknowledged that, having reached the summit of its desires and achievements, it was dissatisfied with itself, that this was after all not what it had intended. It set Hegel aside and tried again, but did not even reach such a peak a second time, and thus manifestly it was bound to be even less satisfied than it was before, although it pretended to be. Where does the fault lie? In Hegel? Those who study him will not receive this impression. If it is a question of doing what the entire nineteenth century evidently wanted to do, then Hegel apparently did it as well as it could possibly be done. Or is the reason that afterwards the age of the great men was past, that there was no genius present in the second half of the century to carry out the better things which the century it seems had in mind in turning away from Hegel? But it is always a bad sign when people can find nothing to say but that unfortunately the right people were lacking. This should be said either always or never. Every age, perhaps, has the great men it deserves, and does not have those it does not deserve. The question only remains, whether it was a hidden flaw in the will of the age itself, perfect as the expression was that it had found in Hegel, which was the reason why it could not find any satisfaction in Hegel and therefore not in itself, and yet could not find any way of improving upon and surpassing Hegel, and therefore itself. It might of course be possible that Hegelianism indeed represented in classic form the concern of the nineteenth century, but precisely as such came to reveal the limited nature of this concern, and the fact that it was impossible to proceed from it to the settlement of every other question of truth. And that for that reason it was, curiously, condemned.
— Karl Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century, 374. The whole lecture is an absolute tour de force: elucidating both what, for both philosophers and theologians, makes Hegel such an immensely attractive option — and why Hegel, taken on his own terms (like nineteenth-century thought as a whole), ultimately represents a cul de sac for those disciplines.
Piranesi:
[Both] sides in the Reformation and post-Reformation controversies seemed to conceive of tradition as something comparable with Scripture, either complementing it or a rival to it. Both Scripture and tradition are objectified: they are that which we seek to understand, there is a distance between them and us who seek to understand them. There are a good many hidden assumptions behind all this: the idea, for instance, that what is revealed is a collection of truths, so that if tradition supplements Scripture, what we mean is that in addition to the apostolic witness that was written down in the Scriptures, there are other truths which have, as it were, been whispered down the ages, and not written down [n.b.: this suggests a parallel to the concept of the “Oral Torah” in rabbinic Judaism]. These truths are objective, independent truths, which we who seek them will, if we go about it the right way, come across and recognize. The problem of how we know at all, what it is that is taken for granted when we seek to understand God’s revelation, has not been broached with any very searching intensity.
— Andrew Louth, Discerning the Mystery: An Essay in the Nature of Theology, ch. 4. One perhaps tangential question regarding this immensely perspicuous point, which perhaps Louth will go on to address: is this hypothesized “deposit of unwritten truth” not exactly the sort of thing that advocates of “Sacred Tradition” (whether Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox) often appeal to today in their (anti-Protestant) apologetics — a deposit, to be specific, left unwritten by the apostles but codified within just a few generations (unlike the rabbinic notion of Oral Torah, transmitted unwritten for over a thousand years!) in the writings of various Fathers? Sacred Tradition is presented as filling the temporal gap between what can be found in the New Testament writings and the full emergence/documentation of Christian culture and doctrine, in such a way that its acceptance is quite on par with the acceptance of the New Testament itself (e.g., the names of St. Peter’s successors as Bishop of Rome, the continuity of the papal office, and the essential nature of the doctrine of the papacy to salvation). Not to put too fine a point on it, but is this not how (say) St. Irenaeus speaks about the “rule of the truth” which he firmly accepts as apostolic in a sense precisely complementary to Scripture? I take Louth’s main point to be correct, both substantively and as a matter of the history he is discussing: but if so it has, shall we say, rather broad ramifications.
Addenda: Well, perhaps I should not be surprised to find that, at least in the period of the Fathers, Louth does go on to address my question.
Whereas tradition understood in a human sense is perhaps the continuity of man’s search for the truth, and whatever progress there is in such a search, tradition in the sense of the tradition of the Church is the continuity of the divine sending, the divine mission, which the Church has received from her Lord and which she pursues in the world. … The Church’s sending is in the power of the Spirit: the heart of the Church’s tradition, Holy Tradition, is the life of the Holy Trinity, in which the Church participates through the Holy Spirit.
Well and good. What about the content of the tradition? Louth goes on to quote a number of passages from St. Irenaeus, precisely on the point I questioned above, to this effect:
Irenaeus speaks of the character of the Church which is preserved through the succession of bishops… not just the articles of faith handed down by the apostolic succession of bishops, but the whole character of the Christian community, its rites, its ceremonies, its practices, and its life. … [For] Irenaeus the tradition of the Church is not, like the traditions to which the gnostics appealed, simply some message, truth, or ideology, but a life, something lived. … The rule of truth, then, is the faith, the fundamentals of Christian belief… This is the tradition which has been handed down from the apostles and is received in baptism: the fact that it is received is almost as important as what is received — tradition is not something we make up, but something we accept.
To inhabit and appropriate “Sacred Tradition”, then, is to be part of the Church that transmits the tradition that is Christianity — the “tradition” of the whole of Christian life. Finally Louth comes to St. Basil the Great, and returns to the question of the “unwritten traditions”:
The examples Basil gives of such unwritten traditions are all liturgical practices: the sign of the cross, prayer toward the East, the epiclesis at the Eucharist and indeed most of the rest of the Eucharistic prayer, the blessing of water in baptism, of oil, and so on. The secret tradition is not a message, but a practice, and the significance of such practice. We come back to the fact that Christianity is not a body of doctrine that can be specified in advance, but a way of life and all that this implies. Tradition is, as it were, the tacit dimension of the life of the Christian[.] … What this seems to suggest is that ultimately the tradition of the Church is the Spirit, that what is passed on from age to age in the bosom of the Church is the Spirit, making us sons in the Son, enabling us to call on the Father, and thus share in the communion of the Trinity.
That’s a pretty effective rejoinder to my question. This is what it means that the Christian tradition is “living:” that it is, perhaps, the outward expression of the presence in the Church of the Spirit, who is Lord and Giver of Life.
Understood like this, tradition is not another source of doctrine, or whatever, alongside Scripture, but another way of speaking of the inner life of the Church, that life in which the individual Christian is perfected in the image of God in which he was created. Speaking of it as tradition brings out the fact that it is received, that it is participated in, that it is more than the grasp that the individual has of his faith.
I remain curious to see how Louth deals with more contemporary advocates of Tradition who, presumably, remain trapped within the post-medieval object-subject division.
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.
Evangelical theology is trapped in a perpetual struggle between its two uneasily coexisting traditions: biblical theology and systematic theology. The dispute is always the same. It never ceases, never disappears, never makes real progress on genuinely reconciling the traditions, but continues forever. The players come and go, the ostensible matter of controversy shifts, but the arguments never change. This is happening, in one form, right now with John Mark Comer and the New Calvinists; it happened in the last decade with the debate over the Gospel between “Team King Jesus” and “Team Gospel Coalition”; it happened in the decade before that with N. T. Wright and John Piper on justification (funny how the New Calvinists keep popping up here!); and so forth ad infinitum. Squint a bit, and even the early stages of the Reformation outline the same form of controversy: Luther the doctor of Old Testament, Zwingli the advocate of expository preaching, and so forth for the “Bible” side, and Eck, Cajetan, various Popes, et al for the “theology” side. (My personal favorite example of this is the pair of books published by IVP Academic a few years ago, authored respectively by Hans Boersma and Scot McKnight: Five Things Theologians Wish Biblical Scholars Knew and Five Things Biblical Scholars Wish Theologians Knew.)
Here is the general form of the controversy. Note that whenever it wells up and spills over, it can do so under the impulse of either tradition, but really identifying such responsibility is difficult; it is just one perpetual-motion controversy, and so the whole thing (at least when viewed as neutrally as possible) is a chicken and egg problem. However, let us suppose it is (re)triggered by the Bible side:
This process — which I describe above with great love for both sides, and with tongue firmly in cheek — is a kind of dialectical expression of the basic aporia of the evangelical tradition. Belonging myself, however uneasily, to a stream of that tradition, I believe and affirm unhesitatingly every word of what follows in this paragraph, and thus belong to the realm and feel the force of the aporia. The Bible possesses a unique and singular authority, an authority distinct from and superior to any human tradition. What it speaks to us shares fully in the eternal authority of the Triune God, of Whom it testifies singularly and authoritatively and Who is singularly and authoritatively God (the Shema means more, but not less, than this). It is therefore of supreme importance to understand and obey what it is speaking. However, there is no non-traditioned, perfectly rational position from which any human can interpret the totality of what it is speaking. Add to this that the content and message of the tradition, as we now express it, is derivative from but not identical to the content and message of the Bible: it is, unavoidably, at a minimum that content and message — which was originally imparted in one moment of history — interpreted and therefore translated into a new moment of history. This renders its traditioned re-presentation remarkably contingent when viewed historically, even as such tradition is simultaneously inescapable and necessary. It is only the (theological) confession of Divine Providence which guards for us this sheer contingency from tipping into simple invalidity.
Thus, the Bible’s authority seems to be not just an article of faith but the greatest article of faith, the article of faith on which all other articles of faith depend — but simultaneously the more it becomes an article of faith, the less contact it seems to have with not only reality as historically experienced but also its own text and matter. Thence the divide between biblical and systematic theologians. The biblical theologians protest when the systematicians take the text of the Bible beyond what it presents itself to us as being; the systematic theologians protest when the biblicists set the Bible over against the articles of faith which depend upon it, which it has generated, and are in turn what we live. This dynamic is constantly re-presenting itself at the level of the matter under controversy. Take the doctrine of God. The more that, for instance, under the influence of philosophical criticism, God becomes absolutely transcendent, unqualifiedly impassible, and so forth, the less contact this God-concept seems to have with the God represented in the narratives of Scripture, which naturally invites rebuke — but equally a God-concept simply transposed out of the narratives of Scripture invites this philosophical criticism: if God were not absolutely transcendent and unqualifiedly impassible, could the sorts of exalted things Scripture says (and we are invited to say) about His faithfulness and justice and so on really be maintained?
“As ministers,” Barth remarks in one of his great early essays, “we ought to speak of God. We are human, however, and so cannot speak of God.” Put differently: we must re-present the Bible, but can we — and may we? Everyone wants to live “the religion of the Bible,” but nobody can live “the religion of the Bible” in the strictest sense of the word, because the Bible does not so much present as generate a “religion” which is both greater and lesser than itself. Nobody wants to “go beyond what is written” — but nobody can truly “not go beyond what is written,” because as soon as one asks the question “what is written?” it inevitably comes coupled with the question “how do you read it?” Both parties in the debates are permanently trapped in this dialectic. Everyone involved knows all this, at a more or less tacit level. The debates are almost entered into with a sigh of dismayed recognition, as a performance that must be undertaken yet whose non-outcome is fully known and expected. At times they seem to be an exercise in deflecting our attention from this basic aporia: like the head of Medusa, it cannot be looked at directly, hence it turn us to stone (or, yet worse, to Rome). No new Aquinas or Calvin or Barth has come along, someone who can embody both traditions so persuasively and definitively as to reconcile them and generate a new synthetic tradition of evangelical theology. Is such a reconciliation possible? Where could such a figure come from? Who is sufficient for these things?
And how, then, shall we live? For we must, we cannot but, go on with living even as we theologize, and if our theology — in all its detail and in its grand sweep — has nothing really to do with our living (if, that is, such a thing is even possible) then it is a grand experiment in foolishness, in “wise words taught by mere human wisdom.” The controversy wells up again, and again, and again because all parties recognize that in it the form of our life before God is somehow at stake. There is a way (that is, The Way) and it must be walked in. I am tempted to conclude here on a note of despair for the insolubility of this problem, and yet I cannot despair entirely. For, low and gentle, yet firm, I hear again the voice of The Way, cutting through the noise of the controversies and of my own mind, speaking the simplest words of all, inviting, beckoning, pleading: “Come to Me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”
For this reason I do not and cannot ultimately choose a “side” in these theological controversies. Rather, wherever I encounter them — on either side — I will tend to throw in my lot with those who seek to speak and live the words of The Way after Him. I will trust in His words — His Word — to me, because there is no deeper metaphysical or ontological substrate than this trust. That is why any of us have ended up in these controversies to begin with, after all: Before we ever wrestled with the concept of history, or the hermeneutics of Biblical narrative, or the concept of God, we heard the Voice of the Way and found ourselves irresistibly drawn towards Him, found ourselves convinced that He is the Truth and the Life, came to know Him as the pearl of great value to have which it is worth selling all. And that is where we will still be after the controversies cease, when we will see no longer as in a mirror dimly but face to face.
Here I would like to advance the admittedly speculative hypothesis that the peculiar quality of music lies in its ability to produce a highly specific form of relating to the world, one in which our relationship to the world as a whole becomes tangible and thus can be both modulated and modified. Music in a way negotiates the quality of relation itself, whereas languages and sign systems can only ever thematize one particular relationship to or segment of the world at a time… [Listening] to music has a different orientation than seeing, grasping, or feeling. The experience of music suspends the division between self and world, transforming it in a way into a pure relationship. Music is the rhythms, sounds, melodies, and tones between self and world, even if these of course have their source in the social world and the world of things. The universe of sound consists in its ability to express or generate all manner of different and differently nuanced relationships: strife, loneliness, desolation, resentment, alienation, and tension, as well as yearning, refuge, security, love, responsivity. This pure relational quality adheres to music in all of its manifestations, high culture as well as pop culture, and allows us to comprehend how it is that music and dance have always been so closely linked. …
[95] Only from this perspective can we understand how, on the one hand, music possesses the power to change the way we are situated in the world (our “attunement”), while, on the other hand, we crave different kinds of music depending on our relationship to the world at a certain moment. Even (and especially) music that expresses sadness, melancholy, hopelessness, or strife is capable of moving us, because we are able to experience it as resonating with our own sadness, melancholy, or strife, i.e. with our own relationships to the world. We experience being moved by such sounds as something positive (even and especially when we are brought to tears) and not at all as something that itself makes us depressed. To the contrary, it is when we are no longer touched, moved, or gripped by music that we experience alienation or, in extreme cases, depression, as it is then that we experience the world as mute, even as it is still so loud. …
If my contention is correct that music negotiates the quality of relation (to the world) itself, then we can begin to understand the eminently important function that it is capable of fulfilling in modern society. Music affirms and potentially corrects, moderates, and modifies our relation to the world, repeatedly re-establishing it as the “ur-relationship” from which subject and world origi-nate… Seen from this perspective, the “musicalization” of the world since the twentieth century seems to be an almost inevitable correlate (because complementary in its effects) to the growing reification of our two-sided bodily relationship to the world[.]
— Hartmut Rosa (tr. James C. Wagner), Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World (London: Polity, 2019), 94–95
[Our] work is not done simply by distinguishing between good resonance and bad alienation. Rather, it is here that our conceptual problems begin. First, it is possible to identify experiences that exhibit characteristics of “negative” resonance, either because they are directly harmful to subjects or because they have normatively undesirable or even disastrous “side-effects.” Second, the longing for total and lasting resonance with the world itself turns out to be a subjectively pathological and in political terms potentially totalitarian tendency. Third (and relat-edly), we shall see that forms and phases of alienation are not only unavoidable, but also required for the subsequent development of resonant relationships. It will, moreover, prove necessary to conceptually differentiate between brief, often intense moments of resonant experience and lasting resonant relationships, which are necessary to provide a stable and reliable basis for such repeatable experiences.
— Hartmut Rosa (tr. James C. Wagner), Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World, 39
Eighteenth-century man was the man who could no longer remain ignorant of the significance of the fact that Copernicus and Galileo were right, that this vast and rich earth of his, the theatre of his deeds was not the centre of the universe, but a grain of dust amid countless others in this universe, and who clearly saw the consequences of all this. What did this really apocalyptic revolution in his picture of the universe mean for man? An unprecedented and boundless humiliation of man? No, said the man of the eighteenth century, who was not the first to gain this knowledge, but certainly the first to realize it fully and completely; no, man is all the greater for this, man is in the centre of all things, in a quite different sense, too, for he was able to discover this revolutionary truth by his own resources and to think it abstractly, again to consider and penetrate a world which had expanded overnight into infinity—and without anything else having changed, without his having to pay for it in any [24] way: clearly now the world was even more and properly so his world! It is paradoxical and yet it is a fact that the answer to his humiliation was those philosophical systems of rationalism, empiricism and scepticism which made men even more self-confident. The geocentric picture of the universe was replaced as a matter of course by the anthropocentric.
— Karl Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century: Its Background and History, 23–24
Might take this down later…
———
It gives me no pleasure to have (exclusively in private) accurately “predicted” the outcome of this election. Nor do I take it as an indicator of any special prescience. Elections — especially national elections — are complex, highly contingent things. Nevertheless, I think my basic heuristic has been confirmed:
The fundamentally unserious approach to politics which the Democratic Party has taken for the last eight years has now been given (what should be) its decisive rebuke. In that period Democrats have insisted, wall-to-wall, that Trump was a fascist; that he represented a unique threat to democracy; that their opposition to him was specifically about him and not about their distaste for his constituents’ values (this last was always far and away the hardest to believe and the least persuasively presented). At almost no points have they actually behaved as though they believed any of this.
Consider some counterfactuals. If Democrats really thought that Donald Trump were, say, America’s Mussolini, what differing decisions would they have taken?
Americans — and many men and women around the world — are about to pay, I think, a serious price for the Democrats’ unseriousness. Not that I wish Harris had won the election, exactly. I did not vote for her, could not have done so in good conscience, and do not wish her to be president. I would be deeply disturbed by many of the policies which a Harris administration would enact (just as I expect to be under a second Trump administration). In either case, I would and do fear for the peace of the world. Republicans’ unseriousness as well deserves now, and has deserved for nearly a decade, a profound rebuke which it has not received — or perhaps which, in the complete desiccation of public conservatism and the total remaking of the Party of Lincoln according to the image of Trump, it has received in full. If at any point I thought the Republican Party qua party ought to be saved, I do not think so now and have not thought so for several years. Nevertheless it is the Democrats whom I consider responsible for where we are now, more even in a way than Trump himself, who possesses fearsome political showman instincts but clearly did not expect to win in 2016 and even seemed surprised last night to be winning again in 2024. The Democrats, faced with Candidate, then President, then Candidate Trump again, had and should have taken opportunity after opportunity to demonstrate they really were the party of the people, the party in touch with reality, the party of national unity: the party willing to pitch a big tent and pursue a broadly constructive vision together. Instead they have been persistently reactive, elitist, divisive, ideologically purist, and deconstructive.
Eight years ago, I woke up the morning after the election and wrote a private journal entry expressing my deep sense of shame that so many people like me — white, male, theologically conservative Christian — had voted for Donald Trump to be president of the United States. I do not repudiate that now. I still feel ashamed, for both my “tribe” and the whole nation, that Trump has been and most likely will again hold the highest office: that is a deeply shameful state of affairs. I similarly am deeply dismayed at the ongoing rationalization by (mostly white and male) Christians that Trump is (e.g.) a contemporary King David, or Cyrus, or what have you, though such rationalizations have faded in force and frequency as Trump has shown increasingly less and less interest in maintaining a pretense of sympathy to evangelical Christianity or even pro-life positions. (As far as I can tell, Trump understands that with the fall of Roe his “beautiful Christians” have now received their reward in full, and are thus permanently beholden to him; it mystifies me that so many of my fellow Christians apparently cannot see how nakedly transactional Trump’s commitment to the pro-life cause always was, despite the remarkable degree to which he was willing to deliver on that transaction.) Nevertheless, shame is no longer my dominant sensation. Think of the business axiom: “Your system is perfectly designed to produce the results it is producing.” America’s Democrats are an essential part of that system. They may not like the outputs, but they have spent the last eight years and more oiling the machinery to perfection. Now comes their reckoning: Donald Trump (and J.D. Vance) in the White House, a Republican-controlled Senate, most probably a Republican House as well, and a remarkably youthful six-seat conservative majority on the Supreme Court. Will they learn? Will they bear fruits in keeping with repentance?
Addendum: I am not an anarchist, nor a leftist (neither of which, furthermore, are coextensive). Nevertheless the two reactions which have seemed most effectively to put their finger on the matter at hand are those of the anarchist-ish Justin Smith-Ruiu (though you’ll have to pardon the somewhat self-consciously erudite prose) and of the leftist-ish Tyler Austin Harper. Somewhere in the overlap of these two takes, I think, is the heart of the matter.
Addendum secundo: Jake Meador, as usual, is bang on as well.
A catena of quotations from Schweitzer’s elegant concluding chapter — whatever one makes of his own historical portrait of Jesus, which is the complementary strand in his thought to the below (indeed the number of ellipses etc. indicates that the two are twisted together in this chapter like a double helix), it is very hard to deny the force and incision of this polemic against the projection-as-historicization of Jesus:
Whatever the ultimate solution may be, the historical Jesus of whom the criticism of the future, taking as its starting-point the problems which have been recognized and admitted, will draw the portrait, can never render modern theology the services which it claimed from its own half-historical, half-modern, Jesus. He will be a Jesus, who was Messiah, and lived as such, either on the ground of a literary fiction of the earliest Evangelist, or on the ground of a purely eschatological Messianic conception. In either case, He will not be a Jesus Christ to whom the [397] religion of the present can ascribe, according to its long-cherished custom, its own thoughts and ideas, as it did with the Jesus of its own making. …
The study of the Life of Jesus has had a curious history. It set out in quest of the historical Jesus, believing that when it had found Him it could bring Him straight into our time as a Teacher and Saviour. It loosed the bands by which He had been riveted for centuries to the stony rocks of ecclesiastical doctrine, and rejoiced to see life and movement coming into the figure once more, and the historical Jesus advancing, as it seemed, to meet it. But He does not stay; He passes by our time and returns to His own. What surprised and dismayed the theology of the last forty years was that, despite all forced and arbitrary interpretations, it could not keep Him in our time, but had to let Him go. He returned to His own time, not owing to the application of any historical ingenuity, but by the same inevitable necessity by which the liberated pendulum returns to its original position. …
[398] We modern theologians are too proud of our historical method, too proud of our historical Jesus, too confident in our belief in the spiritual gains which our historical theology can bring to the world. The thought that we could build up by the increase of historical knowledge a new and vigorous Christianity and set free new spiritual forces, rules us like a fixed idea, and prevents us from seeing that the task which we have grappled with and in some measure discharged is only one of the intellectual preliminaries of the great religious task. We thought that it was for us to lead our time by a roundabout way through the historical Jesus, as we understood Him, in order to bring it to the Jesus who is a spiritual power in the present. This roundabout way has now been closed by genuine history.
There was a danger of our thrusting ourselves between men and the Gospels, and refusing to leave the individual man alone with the sayings of Jesus. There was a danger that we should offer them a Jesus who was too small, because we had forced Him into conformity with our human standards and human psychology. To see that, one need only read the Lives of Jesus written since the ‘sixties [1860s], and notice what they have made of the great imperious sayings of the Lord, how they have weakened down His imperative world-contemning [sic] demands upon individuals, that He might not come into conflict with our ethical ideals, and might tune His denial of the world to our acceptance of it. Many of the greatest sayings are found lying in a corner like explosive shells from which the charges have been removed. No small portion of elemental religious power needed to be drawn off from His sayings to prevent them from conflicting with our system of religious world-acceptance. We have made Jesus hold another language with our time from that which He really held.
In the process we ourselves have been enfeebled, and have robbed our own thoughts of their vigour in order to project them back into history and make them speak to us out of the past. It is nothing less than a misfortune for modern theology that it mixes history with everything and ends by being proud of the skill with which it finds its own thoughts—even to its beggarly pseudo-[399]metaphysic with which it has banished genuine speculative metaphysic from the sphere of religion—in Jesus, and represents Him as expressing them. …
[400] Because it is thus preoccupied with the general, the universal, modern theology is determined to find its world-accepting ethic in the teaching of Jesus. Therein lies its weakness. The world affirms itself automatically; the modern spirit cannot but affirm it. But why on that account abolish the conflict between modern life, with the world-affirming spirit which inspires it as a whole, and the world-negating spirit of Jesus? Why spare the spirit of the individual man its appointed task of fighting its way through the world-negation of Jesus, of contending with Him at every step over the value of material and intellectual goods—a conflict in which it may never rest? For the general, for the institutions of society, the rule is: affirmation of the world, in conscious opposition to the view of Jesus, on the ground that the world has affirmed itself! This general affirmation of the world, however, if it is to be Christian, must in the individual spirit be Christianised and transfigured by the personal rejection of the world which is preached in the sayings of Jesus. It is only by means of the tension thus set up that religious energy can be communicated to our time. There [401] was a danger that modern theology, for the sake of peace, would deny the world-negation in the sayings of Jesus, with which Protestantism was out of sympathy, and thus unstring the bow and make Protestantism a mere sociological instead of a religious force. There was perhaps also a danger of inward insincerity, in the fact that it refused to admit to itself and others that it maintained its affirmation of the world in opposition to the sayings of Jesus, simply because it could not do otherwise. For that reason it is a good thing that the true historical Jesus should overthrow the modern Jesus, should rise up against the modern spirit and send upon earth, not peace, but a sword.
— Albert Schweitzer (tr. William Montgomery), The Quest of the Historical Jesus: A Critical Study of its Progress from Reimarus to Wrede (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1910), 396–401.
The dispute arises in part because there are really two types of continents: Those recognized by cultures around the world, and those recognized by geologists. Cultures can define a continent any way they want, while geologists have to use a definition. And geological research in recent years has made defining continental boundaries less simple than it might have once seemed as researchers find evidence of unexpected continental material.
From an amusing NYT Science article entitled “How Many Continents Are There? You May Not Like the Answers." Of course, the obvious Polanyian question is — are geologists not a culture?
A strong co-sign to this from Matt Martens, on “The Problem of Voting for Candidates who Promise to Do Evil”. To his final paragraphs about the “lesser of two evils” and “throwing your vote away” questions with which weirdos like me (and him) are ceaselessly plagued I would like to add two things.
Christians are resurrection people. That is to say, the non-negotiable ground of our faith — and therefore also of the whole of our lives — is the belief that Jesus of Nazareth, having been quite definitively condemned by His own people’s leaders and shamefully executed at the hands of the occupying Roman state, was raised from the dead on the third day in cheerful defiance of those verdicts. (“He that dwelleth in heaven shall laugh them to scorn!") From the earliest days, as soon as His friends had got over their initial shock, they came to reflect upon His resurrection as the singular and definitive demonstration that in His death God had triumphed over not only all earthly and spiritual principalities and powers but also the deeper corrupting principles of Sin and Death from which those principalities derived their authority. This meant that the Christians had a sure ground for hope — both beyond and within their earthly lives — precisely from beyond the horizons of earthly power. Bishop Lesslie Newbigin is supposed to have remarked, “I am neither an optimist nor a pessimist. Jesus Christ is risen from the dead!” Here is the point: A resurrection person ought not constrain his or her horizons of hope — and therefore of evaluation, of judgment, of choice — to those provided by earthly powers and principalities. They are simply too small, too narrow, too weak, to contain the immense possibilities that are disclosed and promised by Life sprung from the tomb. The kingdom of God is (as Jesus taught us) like a mustard seed. It appeared small and insignificant when it was planted. But after nearly two thousand years of growth, it has become a great tree that shades the whole world, and its leaves are for the healing of the nations.
Being resurrection people therefore comes with a remarkable freedom with respect to the powers and principalities, and the whole cultural-symbolic-religious structure that keeps them in place. We serve them not. There are indeed many ‘gods’ and many ‘lords’ in heaven and on earth — but for us, One God and One Lord! They wish to occupy the center of our lives, thoughts, decisions, fears, anxieties — but Jesus, enthroned in heaven and reigning here through the Holy Spirit (Whose power raised Him from the dead), has already displaced them. They wish us to submit to them, to accept their terms of service, to make their devils' bargains — but we have already and exclusively submitted to Jesus, Who has overthrown them. What this means in the context of this election is that I am supremely unconcerned about “throwing away” my vote by withholding it from either major-party candidate (in a swing state no less!). If you see the devil, as Luther may have remarked, spit in his face and go on your merry way.* The bipolar political system has set itself up as an idolatrous orthodoxy, and the only thing to do with an idol is to desecrate it however you can. I will not cast my vote for a candidate whom I understand to be the “lesser of two evils” merely because he or she is the “lesser” one. Think about what the “lesser of two evils” language assumes: two options, both evil, no alternatives. Jesus came to set me and you free from such false dichotomies! How can those of us who died to sin still live in it? What does it profit a man if he gains the world — or at least his preferred presidential candidate in office for a few years — but loses his soul? I do not accept the terms and conditions.
None of this means that I am not — that Christians ought not be — deeply dismayed by the evils of the world; indeed, those who live by the resurrection should be most dismayed by and most tireless in opposing the principles of crucifixion. Neither am I blind to the real effects that this election will have on me, on my neighbors, on my future children, on those who live (unlike me) far from the heart of the American Empire; both, I think, lesser and greater effects than is generally supposed. In a way I am less concerned about whom I, or anyone else, may vote for than how I approach the task of voting for someone — and of living: in the full fear and love of God, and according to the dictates of the conscience that fear and love shape. I am, like St. Paul, not aware of anything against myself in this matter, but I am not thereby acquitted. It is God who judges me. Therefore do not pass judgment before the appointed time, before the Lord comes, when whatever has been in darkness will be brought into the light and the secrets of the heart will be revealed. On that day I will give account to God for every careless word. So vote for a major party candidate if you like, if your conscience permits you to do it — but do it in fear and trembling for the reckoning that is coming. For our nation, yes: but also for your soul.
* Admittedly, Luther probably said “fart in his face” instead — or something even more pungent. He was Christendom’s greatest scatologist.
[While] the Enlightenment — heterogeneous, contradictory, and complex as its ideas may have been — did gradually come to establish the concept of the self-determined way of life as an effective cultural benchmark in the realms of politics and pedagogy, religion and aesthetics, the economy and everyday practice, it generally tended to supplement this concept with the idea that reason, nature, and the (political) common good would come to provide a “natural” limit to the spaces opened up by the ideal of self-determination and thus a more or less generalizable, socially acceptable way of life and concept of happiness. Over the course of the nineteenth and especially the twentieth century, the demand for self-determination expanded into ever more spheres of life, while the idea that this demand could be substantially or essentially limited by reason, nature, and community became increasingly less plausible and lost much of its binding force. At the same time, social institutions were gradually reshaped to become dependent on anonymous actors. From education to the professions [19], from the supermarket to party democracy, from the religious constitution to the art market to the use of media, subjects capable of acting and making decisions in accordance with individual preferences have become a functional requirement of modern institutions.
— Hartmut Rosa (tr. James C. Wagner), Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World (London: Polity, 2019), 18–19
A truly stunning passage — nay, demolition job — on the whole historical-critical project from Albert Schweitzer, which deserves and demands to be quoted in full:
For the last ten years [i.e., the first decade of the 1900s] modern historical theology has more and more adapted itself to the needs of the man in the street. More and more, even in the best class of works, it makes use of attractive head-lines as a means of presenting its results in a lively form to the masses. Intoxicated with its own ingenuity in inventing these, it becomes more and more confident in its cause, and has come to believe that the world’s salvation depends in no small measure upon the spreading of its own “assured” results broad-cast among the people. It is time that it should begin to doubt itself, to doubt its “historical” Jesus, to doubt the confidence with which it has looked to its own construction for the moral and religious regeneration of our time. Its Jesus is not alive, however Germanic they may make him.
It was no accident that the chief priest of “German art for German people” found himself at one with the modern theologians and offered them his alliance. Since the ‘sixties [i.e., the 1860s] the critical study of the Life of Jesus in Germany has been unconsciously under the influence of an imposing modern-religious nationalism in art. It has been deflected by it as by an underground magnetic current. It was in vain that a few purely historical investigators uplifted their voices in protest. The process had to work itself out. For historical criticism had become, in the hands of most of those who practised it, a secret struggle to reconcile the Germanic religious spirit with the Spirit of Jesus of Nazareth. It was concerned for the religious interests of the present. Therefore its error had a kind of greatness, it was in fact the greatest thing about it; and the severity with which the pure historian treats it is in proportion to his respect for its spirit. For this German critical study of the Life of Jesus is an essential part of German religion. As of old Jacob wrestled with the angel, so German theology wrestles with Jesus of Nazareth and will not let Him go until he bless it—that is, until He will consent to serve it and will suffer Himself to be drawn by the Germanic spirit into the midst of our time and our civilisation. But when the day breaks, the wrestler must let Him go. He will not cross the ford with us. Jesus of Nazareth will not suffer Himself to be modernised. As an historic figure He refuses to be detached from His own time. He has no answer [311] for the question, “Tell us Thy name in our speech and for our day!” But He does bless those who have wrestled with Him, so that, though they cannot take Him with them, yet, like men who have seen God face to face and received strength in their souls, they go on their way with renewed courage, ready to do battle with the world and its powers.
But the historic Jesus and the Germanic spirit cannot be brought together except by an act of historic violence which in the end injures both religion and history. [Note: !!!!!!!!!] A time will come when our theology, with its pride in its historical character, will get rid of its rationalistic bias. This bias leads it to project back into history what belongs to our own time, the eager struggle of the modern religious spirit with the Spirit of Jesus, and seek in history justification and authority for its beginning. The consequence is that it creates the historical Jesus in its own image, so that it is not the modern spirit influenced by the Spirit of Jesus, but the Jesus of Nazareth constructed by modern historical theology, that is set to work upon our race.
Therefore both the theology and its picture of Jesus are poor and weak. Its Jesus, because He has been measured by the petty standard of the modern man, at variance with himself, not to say of the modern candidate in theology who has made shipwreck; the theologians themselves, because instead of seeking, for themselves and others, how they may best bring the Spirit of Jesus in living power into our world, they keep continually forging new portraits of the historical Jesus, and think they have accomplished something great when they have drawn an Oh! of astonishment from the multitude, such as the crowds of a great city emit on catching sight of a new advertisement in coloured lights.
— Albert Schweitzer (tr. William Montgomery), The Quest of the Historical Jesus: A Critical Study of its Progress from Reimarus to Wrede (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1910), 310–11.
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?”
Relativ-ism, plural-ism, modern-ism, secular-ism — these are agendas, characteristic to the ethos of the present age, which we must resist accommodating or tacitly embracing in our thoughts, plans, and decisions; such resistance depends on carefully cultivating our core commitments and pruning the habits that express those commitments.
Relativ-ity, plural-ity, modern-ity, secular-ity — these are brute facts, descriptive of the reality of the present age, which will provide friction and resistance to our thoughts, plans, and decisions unless we deliberately shape our plans and decisions to them; such shaping depends on carefully observing how these facts work in and on us and our neighbors.
The logic of Genesis 1:26 affirms (at least!) three statements about the imago Dei:
Lots more to say, but that all seems foundational.
Polanyi has the rationalists’ number, a decade before Foucault et al:
I do not suggest, of course, that those who advocate philosophic doubt as a general solvent of error and a cure for all fanaticism would desire to bring up children without any rational guidance or contemplate any other scheme of universal hebetation. I am only saying that this would be what their principles demand. What they actually want is not expressed but concealed by their declared principles. They want their own beliefs to be taught to children and accepted by everybody, for they are convinced that this would save the world from error and strife. In his Conway Lecture of 1922, republished in 1941, Bertrand Russell revealed this in a single sentence. After condemning both Bolshevism and clericalism as two opposite dogmatic teachings, which should both be combated by philosophic doubt, he sums up by saying: ‘Thus rational doubt alone, if it could be generated, would suffice to introduce the Millennium.’ The author’s intention is clear: he intends to spread certain doubts which he believes to be justified. He does not want us to believe the doctrines of the Catholic Church, which he denies and dislikes, and he also wants us to resist Lenin’s teaching of unbridled revolutionary violence. These disbeliefs are recommended as ‘rational doubts’. Philosophic doubt is thus kept on the leash and prevented from calling in question anything that the [sceptic] believes in, or from approving of any doubt that he does not share. … Since the sceptic does not consider it rational to doubt what he himself believes, the advocacy of ‘rational doubt’ is merely the sceptic’s way of advocating his own beliefs.
— Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Toward a Post-Critical Philosophy, 297
Ultimately, I do want to tell people to please try and chill out, yes. No, I don’t think AI Jesus is about to come and initiate the Rapture, and the desire for that to be true seems to be derived from very naked psychological needs. We live in a mundane world, a world of homework and waiting for the bus and sorting the recyclables and doing the laundry and holding your shirt over your nose when you enter a public bathroom and trying to find a credit card that offers a slightly better points program. It just keeps going, day after day after grinding day. You never get removed from it, never escape it. And yes, there’s transcendence and beauty and fun and satisfaction and growth and meaning, all of it! But you find that all in the mundane, generally; those few who spend their lives in a state of constant stimulation and novelty, well, God bless them. Most of the time they didn’t get there through their choices but through random chance. I’m saying all of this because I think a lot of people spend their time yearning for some great fissure in their lives where there’s a massive and permanent division between the before and the after, and all of this AI stuff is giving rational people an excuse to be irrational. (Of course, this is the number two fantasy behind the great American civic religion, “Someday, I’ll be a celebrity.”)
You have to imagine a life you can live with, where you are, when you are. If you don’t, you’ll never be satisfied. Neither AI nor anything else is coming to save you from the things you don’t like about being a person. The better life you absolutely can build isn’t going to be brought to you by ChatGPT but by your own steady uphill clawing and through careful management of your own expectations. You live here. This is it. That’s what I would tell to everyone out there: this is it. This is it. This is it. You’re never going to hang out with Mr. Data on the Holodeck. I know that, for a lot of people, mundane reality is everything they want to escape. But it could be so much worse.
I’m continuing to be amazed by the depth and prescience of Polanyi’s Personal Knowledge. Here is a sequence of quotations from (really, the bulk of) chapter 8, “The Logic of Affirmation,” section 12, “The Fiduciary Programme”:
The critical movement, which seems to be nearing the end of its course today, was perhaps the most fruitful effort ever sustained by the human mind. The past four or five centuries, which have gradually destroyed or overshadowed the whole medieval cosmos, have enriched us mentally and morally [TC: morally? somewhat dubious] to an extent unrivalled by any period of similar duration. But its incandescence had fed on the combustion of the Christian heritage in the oxygen of Greek rationalism, and when this fuel was exhausted the critical framework itself burnt away. [pp. 265–66]
We must now recognize belief once more as the source of all knowledge. Tacit assent and intellectual passions, the sharing of the idiom and of a cultural heritage, affiliation to a like-minded community: such are the impulses which shape our vision of the nature of things on which we rely for our mastery of things. No intelligence, however critical or original, can operate outside such a fiduciary framework. [p. 266]
Our mind lives in action, and any attempt to specify its presuppositions produces a set of axioms which cannot tell us why we should accept them. Science exists only to the extent to which there lives a passion for its beauty, a beauty believed to be universal and eternal. Yet we know also that our own sense of this beauty is uncertain, its full appreciation being limited to a handful of adepts, and its transmission to posterity insecure. Beliefs held by so few and so precariously are not indubitable in any empirical sense. Our basic beliefs are indubitable only in the sense that we believe them to be so. Otherwise they are not even beliefs, but merely somebody’s states of mind. [p. 267]
[We] can voice our ultimate convictions only from within our convictions—from within the whole system of acceptances that are logically prior to any particular assertion of our own, prior to the holding of any piece of knowledge. If an ultimate logical level is to be attained and made explicit, this must be a declaration of my personal beliefs… An example of a logically consistent exposition of fundamental beliefs is St. Augustine’s Confessions. Its first ten books contain an account of the period before his conversion and of his struggle for the faith he was yet lacking. Yet the whole of this process is interpreted by him from the point of view which he reached after his conversion. He seems to acknowledge that you cannot expose an error by interpreting it from the premisses which lead to it, but only from premisses which are believed to be true. His maxim nisi credideritis non intelligitis [“unless ye believe, ye shall not understand”] expresses this logical requirement. It says, as I understand it, that the process of examining any topic is both an exploration of the topic, and an exegesis of our fundamental beliefs in the light of which we approach it; a dialectical combination of exploration and exegesis. Our fundamental beliefs are continuously reconsidered in the course of such a process, but only within the scope of their own basic premises. [p. 267]
[The] greatly increased critical powers of man… have endowed our mind with a capacity for self-transcendence of which we can never again divest ourselves. We have plucked from the Tree a second apple which has for ever imperilled [sic] our knowledge of Good and Evil, and we must learn to know these qualities henceforth in the blinding light of our new analytical powers. Humanity has been deprived a second time of its innocence, and driven out of another garden which was, at any rate, a Fool’s Paradise. Innocently, we had trusted that we could be relieved of all personal responsibility for our beliefs by objective criteria of validity—and our own critical powers have shattered this hope. Struck by our sudden nakedness, we may try to brazen it out by flaunting it in a profession of nihilism. But modern man’s immorality is unstable. Presently his moral passions reassert themselves in objectivist disguise and the scientistic Minotaur is born. The alternative to this, which I am seeking to establish here, is to restore to us once more the power for the deliberate holding of unproven beliefs. We should be able to profess now knowingly and openly those beliefs which could be tacitly taken for granted in the days before modern philosophic criticism reached its present incisiveness. Such powers may appear dangerous. But a dogmatic orthodoxy can be kept in check both internally and externally, while a creed inverted into a science is both blind and deceptive. [p. 268]
Recall: this work was written at the same time as Gadamer’s Truth and Method and Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and predates by over two decades MacIntyre’s trilogy that runs from After Virtue through Whose Justice? Which Rationality? to Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry. Those works, of course, have immense value in their own right (though I am beginning to suspect that Kuhn ought to be read as basically a special case of Polanyi). Yet it is remarkable how many of their core insights are anticipated here and elsewhere. MacIntyre’s “there is no rationality that is not of some tradition”? Here it is. Gadamer’s “the Enlightenment instilled an unjustified prejudice against prejudices”? Bingo. Kuhn’s recognition of regnant scientific “paradigms” that depend largely on the standards of scientific satisfaction in a given period, rather than the totality of available evidence? Ding, ding, ding. It’s all in here, folks, at least in highly compressed form.
Of course, Polanyi’s prose — which I am finding far slower even than MacIntyre’s — is a real hindrance to his reception. (The above quotations, some of which are remarkably snappy, are not exactly representative!) But in my own fields of theology and biblical studies, I cannot help thinking that discussions of method and comparison of different works which do not attend to these core insights amount only to so many exercises in wheel-spinning. Such exercises, at best, may result in a good workout — but at the end you are still sitting in the same place you were, with a great deal of sweat and exhaustion but no forward progress to show for it. Is forward progress then possible? That is the burden of the final chapters of Personal Knowledge.
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”?
I’m quite enjoying the early pages of (the first volume of) Tom Greggs’ Dogmatic Ecclesiology. But unfortunately he has not managed to transcend the post-Barthian theologian’s penchant for the occasional syntactical monstrosity:
But simultaneously, we must recognize that from the side of the created history and time which God has put in place, there is no God aside from the God who is known within the spatiotemporal boundedness of creation—no God aside from the God of the church. God as God self-determines Godself for creation is God in God’s eternal being, known in God’s revelation to the life of the church. This is not because of an overemphasis on the created order over against the sheer magnificent plenitude of God’s being, but because, in the sheer magnificent plenitude of God’s being, God has determined Godself for all eternity to be for creation and to be the God who makes Godself known as being pro nobis for the world by being pro nos within God’s community of the church.
Oof. I mean, it’s comprehensible, if you read it a few times. But should we need to? Perhaps it is fitting that attempts to say meaningful things about the inner life of the Holy Trinity tend to stretch human language beyond not only its metaphorical but also its syntactical capabilities.
(And while there — this is the exact sort of sentence that convinced me, when starting grad school, that capitalizing grammatically masculine pronouns for the Deity was a far preferable solution than the “Godself” locution.)
No knock on Greggs’ book. I’m sure there’s not a modern theologian who has avoided this problem. But it’s representative.