[Lenin] was famous for claiming that “Communism is Soviet Power plus the Electrification of the whole countryside.” Electricity had, for him and for most other high modernists, a nearly mythical appeal. That appeal had to do, I think, with the unique qualities of electricity as a form of power. Unlike the mechanisms of steam power, direct waterpower, and the internal combustion engine, electricity was silent, precise, and well-nigh invisible. For Lenin and many others, electricity was magical. Its great promise for the modernization of rural life was that, once transmission lines were laid down, power could be delivered over long distances and was instantly available wherever it was needed and in the quantity required… Man’s work and even the work of the steam-driven plow or threshing machine were imperfect; the operations of an electric machine, in contrast, seemed certain, precise, and continuous. Electricity was also, it should be added, centralizing. It produced a visible network of transmission lines emanating from a central power station from which the flow of power was generated, distributed, and controlled. The nature of electricity suited Lenin’s centralizing vision perfectly.

— James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, 166

Like planned cities, planned languages are indeed possible. Esperanto is one example; technical and scientific languages are another, and they are quite precise and powerful means of expression within the limited purposes for which they were designed. But language per se is not for only one or two purposes. It is a general tool that can be bent to countless ends by virtue of its adaptability and flexibility. The very history of an inherited language helps to provide the range of associations and meanings that sustain its plasticity. In much the same way, one could plan a city from zero. But since no individual or committee could ever completely encompass the purposes and lifeways, both present and future, that animate its residents, it would necessarily be a thin and pale version of a complex city with its own history. It will be a Brasília, Saint Petersburg, or Chandigarh rather than a Rio de Janeiro, Moscow, or Calcutta. Only time and the work of millions of its residents can turn these thin cities into thick cities. The grave shortcoming of a planned city is that it not only fails to respect the autonomous purposes and subjectivity of those who live in it but also fails to allow sufficiently for the contingency of the interaction between its inhabitants and what that produces.

— James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, 143–44

I personally believe that [the doctrine of the Trinity] has constantly stimulated the course of thought in the West as a challenge and invitation to try and think that which continually transcends the limits of human understanding.

— Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful (and other essays), 5

The great philosopher’s comment — near the outset of his classic essay in aesthetics, “The Relevance of the Beautiful” — hints at the challenge of articulating in a theological/philosophical register something which can only truly be “understood” through being loved, through being worshipped. Here I want to draw attention to a few of the features of my previous articulation of — not the doctrine of Trinity exactly, but its raison d’être.

1. The articulation of this doctrine is an exercise in biblical interpretation. To be specific, this exercise requires, and presupposes, a kind of theological interpretation of a) the Scriptures of Israel, b) the New Testament, and c) the two Testaments together.
2. It thus presupposes — even as it inevitably influences — an account of interpretation, viz., an understanding of hermeneutics, which (in order to be adequate for the task) must be philosophically informed.
3. It also presupposes an account of how the Testaments relate to one another; which is to say it presupposes an account of history — and an adequate account of history must be, well, historically informed.
4. Furthermore, it presupposes an understanding of creation, as what the Creator is not. Yet that creation is capable of decisively receiving the Creator’s divine nature in the Incarnation of the Eternal Son; thus, the account of nature and creation must itself be Christologically informed.
5. Finally, it presupposes an account of the church: the community that identifies itself as called by the Father of Jesus Christ, its members sharing in his eternal inheritance through adoption and experiencing (subjectively and objectively) the presence of his life-giving Spirit, and worshipping the Three in — as — One accordingly. (Not to mention: the church has sought to say some authoritative things about the Three-as-One from time to time.)

At least these five factors, as one constructs them, will impinge upon the particular shape and articulation of one’s Trinitarian construction: a two-Testament approach to biblical interpretation; a philosophically informed hermeneutics; a sense of the biblical relation to history; a Christologically informed account of nature and creation; an understanding of the church and its worship. I am certain there are more. (I have not even mentioned where most Protestant theology has begun the task since the sixteenth century: the doctrine of revelation!) But the complexity of the task suggests that the particularities of the doctrine will thus inevitably be, in a sense and to a degree, contingent.

The doctrine of the Trinity is the theological/philosophical apparatus necessary to talk sensibly about and hold together an apparent paradox as truth:

1. “Hear, O Israel: YHWH is our God, YHWH is One” (Deut. 6:4). The foundational theological confession about the identity and nature of God in Israel’s Scriptures — the confession on which the theological unity of those Scriptures depend — is that there is one God, the sole subject of worship, the sole Creator of heaven and earth and all that is in them, incomparable with any other putative god, incommensurable with any creaturely reality.
2. “Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey all that I have commanded you” (Mt. 28:19f). The foundational theological confession about the identity and nature of God in the New Testament — the confession on which the theological unity of that Testament depends — is that the One God of Israel is to be rightly worshipped in the person of the Father of Jesus Christ; also worshipped in the person of Jesus Christ, the unique and eternal Son of the Father; and also worshipped in the Spirit of Jesus Christ, who is given freely by the Father to all those who belong to Jesus Christ.
3. And yet these three are not three gods, but one God.

In other words: the Church is right to worship Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as God alone, and in that worship they are (despite appearances!) in essential continuity with Israel’s worship of the One God YHWH. That is what the doctrine of the Trinity is seeking, in a theological register, to articulate.

We have together produced a type of university in which teaching and enquiry in the humanities (and often enough also in the social sciences) are marked by four characteristics. There is first a remarkably high level of skill in handling narrow questions of limited detail: setting out the range of possible interpretations of this or that short passage, evaluating the validity of or identifying the presuppositions of this or that particular argument, summarizing the historical evidence relevant to dating some event or establishing the provenance of some work of art. Secondly, in a way which sometimes provides a direction for and a background to these exercises of professionalized skill, there is the promulgation of a number of large and mutually incompatible doctrines often conveyed by indirection and implication, the doctrines which define the major contending standpoints in each discipline. Thirdly, insofar as the warfare between these doctrines becomes part of public debate and discussion, the shared standards of argument are such that all debate is inconclusive. And yet, fourthly and finally, we still behave for the most part as if the university did still constitute a single, tolerably unified intellectual community.

— Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition, 7–8

The testimony of history suggests that the phenomena of “nation” and “empire” are both equally ineradicable from human political life. There is a chicken-and-egg aspect to the relation, albeit with (over the course of millennia) both chickens and eggs getting larger and larger, and with the caveat that historically the egg of the nation really did come first. To (over)simplify: imperial projects emerge out of national projects that reach beyond their “national” boundaries, either in response to a regional power vacuum of some sort or as a desire to take over an existing imperial project, while national projects emerge (or re-emerge) from the desire to self-define over against a broader imperial project and/or the other national projects uneasily coexisting within that imperial frame. Once you have the first empire, all nations' self-definition is somehow reacting to the context of empire. The modern exemplar of this dynamic is the rise of 19th century European nationalisms within and without the Habsburg empire: the nations and nationalisms in question positioned themselves and their national projects relative to (i.e., over against) the Vienna system, whether or not they had really been ruled by Vienna for some time. There are ancient exemplars, too: the empire incorporated by the Assyrians (who had a robust national project if ever there was one!) was taken over and expanded by the Babylonians, then by the Medes and the Persians, then by Alexander the Great.

The specialist in the history of either period might now protest that there are many salient and irreducible differences between Alexander’s empire and the Habsburgs'. Certainly, I am oversimplifying: a nation is not a nation is not a nation, and an empire is not an empire is not an empire. Such forms inhere only imperfectly in this crude matter. But if there is not such a thing as a “nation” or an “empire” (and the permanent squabbling over how to define these terms suggests this is in fact the case), there are such things as “nationalism” and “imperialism.” Not things, exactly. Rather, they are basic political impulses or desires: not, in themselves, goods or virtues, but tendencies of political aspiration that exist in a permanent and uneasy dialectic.

And these desires have, as have all human aspirations and efforts here under the sun, virtuous and vicious aspects to them. The virtuous aspects of nationalism stem from the love of and gratitude for what is immediately given to me: it is good to be grateful for one’s own place and family and history and traditions, and to be in a sense protective of the goodness and justice of their continued existence (insofar, of course, as these traditions are good and just!), and to feel a sense of solidarity with all those who share those goods. The vicious aspects come in as soon as one says, “Oh Lord, I thank thee that thou hast made me a $NATIONALITY — not one of those $OUTGROUP-NATIONALITIES over there, whom I hate and assuredly You hate too.” The good of nationalism is the love of the particular, and the evil of nationalism is the hatred of other particulars as threats to my particular. It needs to be leavened by the genuine love of the universal.

For the virtuous aspects of (what one might call) imperialism stem from the love of and gratitude for those who are not immediately given to me: it is good to love and feel solidarity with those who do not share my place and family and history and traditions, because what we do share is humanity, is personhood. It is good to grieve when other persons, even those distant from me, do not enjoy the goods and fruits of justice and cultural flourishing. It is also good to want to share one’s own goods with those who lack those goods, and to want to share in the goods that others have. The vicious aspects come in as soon as one says, “And because we here must have the goods that they have there—” or “they must be given the goods that we have here” — “we are justified in dominating them, for the good of all parties.” The good of imperialism is the love of the universal, and the evil of imperialism is the hatred of other particulars as threats to the universal. It needs to be leavened by the genuine love of other particulars.

I said above that these basic political desires and aspirations exist in a permanent and uneasy dialectic; that nationalism and imperialism beget one another in a perpetual cycle. This is, I think, because we humans are easily dissatisfied — it is easiest to see the failings of whatever desire dominates one’s own political situation, nationalist or imperialist, and to thus overlook the failings of the alternative — and also because we are vicious. It is hard — maybe impossible? — to hold a pure nationalism or a pure imperialism without being consumed by the vicious aspects of either. The worst state for any person is probably to be a vicious nationalist and a vicious imperialist at the same time, as many (most?) empire-builders in history have probably been. But the best state would be to desire the virtuous form of both: a universal kingdom, with no geographical or temporal borders to compromise its perfection, ruled with perfect justice by a righteous king, so that every particular — every person — under the reign of this universal may flourish as itself, becoming the most glorious version of itself.

Nationalists and imperialists both, in their own ways, long for this kingdom. Their desires are incomplete, malformed versions of this longing: they are unable to hold together loving both the particular and the universal. Their last state will be worse than their first. But there is One who can.

Technology is the human’s achievement, not his failing even though the use he chooses to make of it may be fallen indeed. If the products of human technē become philosophically and experientially problematic, it is, I would submit, because we come to think of them as autonomous of the purpose which led to their production and gives them meaning. We become, in effect, victims of a self-forgetting, losing sight of the moral sense which is the justification of technology. Quite concretely, the purpose of electric light is to help humans see. When it comes to blind them to the world around them, it becomes counterproductive. The task thus is not to abolish technology but to see through it to the human meaning which justifies it and directs its use… not to abolish the works of technology but to bracket them, to escape their fascination in order to rediscover their forgotten meaning.

— Erazim Kohák, The Embers and the Stars: A Philosophical Inquiry into the Moral Sense of Nature, 24–25

Part I: Jesus the Human

1. Jesus of Nazareth raised bodily from the dead [resurrection accounts, post-resurrection appearances]
2. The bodily, human life of Jesus vindicated by his resurrection as enacting true humanity [all over the Gospels]

Part II: True Humanity, Creation, and Sin

3. Jesus: the true image of the invisible God [Colossians 1 and intertexts]
4. The image of God as royal status [Genesis 1 and the rest of the Bible]
5. Sin I — irresponsibility: rejecting the responsibilities that come with royal status [lots that can go here]
6. Jesus: the second Adam [1 Corinthians 15, Romans 8]
7. The Church: bride of the Lamb, second Eve [Revelation 21 and intertexts]
8. The first Adam and the first Eve [Genesis 2]
9. Sin II — idolatry: choosing knowledge of good and evil apart from life, leading to death and corruption [Genesis 3]
10. Jesus: the temple of the Holy Spirit [man, it’s just everywhere]
11. Christians: temples of the Holy Spirit [1 Corinthians 3 & 6, Romans 6]
12. Sin III — sacrilege: offending against the presence of God [Leviticus, Romans 6, 1 Corinthians 3 & 6, Ephesians 5]

Part III: The Shape of True Human Life

13. Human companionship: friendship and marriage
14. Human fruitfulness: discipleship and procreation
15. Unavoidably long excursus chapter on sexual behavior, human sexuality, and sexual bioethical issues which nevertheless has to be framed by (14) and (15)
16. Human vocation: rest and work
17. Human uniqueness: relation to other living creatures and to machines
18. Possibly (alas) another unavoidably long excursus chapter on technology and medicine
19. Human teleology: resurrection life and end-of-life bioethical issues

Obviously 3–5, 6–9, and 10–12 would be key individual units of argumentation. Having now made the sketch, it occurs to me that as a whole that section would map, albeit imperfectly, onto the traditional “threefold office” of Christ: 3–5 corresponds straightforwardly to the royal office, 6–9 (somewhat less straightforwardly) to the prophetic office, and 10–12 to the priestly office. Of course, the traditional order is prophet, priest, king, so maybe some reordering is called for. But the value of this order, I think, is that it anchors the whole testimony about humanity in the status with which it is created, the status that produces the subsequent vocations. That may be the wisest apologetic move, since most people (at least in the ex-Christian West), Christian or not, now come programmed with an intuitive sense of the dignity and worth of every person. That sense often lacks controls, but it may be the most natural starting point.

EDIT: Thinking more about this, it seems really important to have established multiple ways to talk about sin when we come to Part III and the different “ethical” topoi. Irresponsibility, idolatry, and sacrilege are far from perfect terms for Sin I, II, and III (for one thing, they aren’t all alliterative!), but they get at the need for multiple axes of evaluation. Some things that defy a Christian view of the human person in the realm of medicine, for instance, are not sacrilegious exactly… but still idolatrous and irresponsible. I want better terms for these categories. But one needs some such categories.

Why you should not use ChatGPT, large language models, or other “artificial intelligence” (falsely so-called) tools in your research or work, for any of the synthetic tasks (summaries of data or information, etc.) for which it is proposed as a helpful time-saver:

1. The process of pattern recognition and synthetic integration is the basis of how human beings come to know and understand the world.
2. This process is an inextricably bodily process in humans. (This is true of human cognition in general: the whole of the human body, not just the brain, is involved in every act of thought — and in fact other bodies are involved, too, because thought is an intersubjective process. But I digress.)
3. ChatGPT and similar tools are, however, definitionally disembodied. Even if they are in fact “just pattern-recognition machines” (dubious), by virtue of being disembodied their pattern “recognition” is not the same as the real thing in humans.
4. In fact, insofar as ChatGPT exists in the physical world, it is under a very different sort of embodiment — a non-organic sort — which is antithetical to the human sort.
5. Therefore, ChatGPT and so forth cannot be trusted to faithfully simulate human knowing — and if the mechanism cannot be trusted neither can the results.
6. Additionally, by using such a tool, a human being forgoes the opportunity to practice and experience such knowing, kneecapping his or her capacity to learn from the experience.

In a nutshell: the promise of LLMs is “impersonal knowledge” — but no such thing exists. Relying on it is thus, in a meaningful sense, worse than nothing.

Addendum: true personal certainty is much rarer than one thinks. Strictly speaking I am, I think, only confident that 2 + 2 = 4; very confident, since I know from trustworthy authorities that arithmetic may be proven logically consistent and from experience that categories of twos added together produce fours. Confident enough, even, to bet my life (if such a bet were necessary) that adding two to two in any life-threatening scenariorio would make four. Confidence is a real part of knowledge. But am I certain that 2 + 2 = 4? I do not understand the rules and axiomata of mathematical logic by which such statements are proven logically certain in the strong sense. I could, I suppose, be living in a remarkable delusion which has filtered out all experiences of 2 + 2 failing to equal 4 — which seems highly unlikely, but is that not just what such a deluded person might say? My certainty is “only” functional, which is actually — a species of confidence. Is there anything regarding which I am truly certain?

Important to explore, in all fields of life and thought: the practical difference between confidence and certainty. I.e., what action is the right one to take in any given situation may depend significantly on whether you are confident in vs. certain of a given outcome.

In a technological age, philosophy, too, tends to conceive of itself as a technē. To some writers, it has come to appear as one of the special sciences, whose subject matter is language, whose task is the analysis of arguments, and whose virtue is technical proficiency. Others take philosophy to be a metatheory whose subject matter is the theories of other philosophers and scientists, whose task is speculative construction, and whose virtue is sophistication in the peculiar sense of maximal remoteness from lived experience, so that the author who writes fifth-generation commentaries thinks himself more advanced than the preceding four generations of commentators—and far more so than the naïve observer upon whose original insight they all comment. Both linguistic analysis and theoretical construction are, surely, legitimate tasks. Yet the thinkers whose insight withstood the test of time, from Socrates to Husserl, were of a different breed. They were the perennial beginners, taking the sense of lived experience in its primordial immediacy for their subject matter. Their stance was one of wonder, not of sophistication; the task they undertook was one of articulation—and their virtue was naïveté, a willingness to see before theorizing, to encounter the wonder of being rather than enclose themselves in cunningly devised theories.

— Erazim Kohák, The Embers and the Stars: A Philosophical Inquiry into the Moral Sense of Nature, xi

David Brooks:

“Without even thinking about it, we in the creative class consolidate our class standing through an ingenious code of ‘openness.’ We tend to like open floor plans, casual dress, and eclectic ‘localist’ tastes that are willfully unpretentious. This seems radically egalitarian, because there are no formal hierarchies of taste or social position. But only the most culturally privileged person knows how to navigate a space in which the social rules are mysterious and hidden.”

I think often about two subspecies, or effects, of the phenomenon Brooks describes in this last sentence. The first is how the abandonment of clear status-signaling and deferential modes of address in hierarchical settings — academia and ecclesia being two such realms — actually makes it more challenging for entrants from lower economic and culturally powerful strata to a) accurately navigate those realms upon entering, when they possess the lowest level of power in the hierarchy, and b) be recognized as having truly arrived once they ascend to the higher levels of power. The second is how the contemporary world, despite the radically increased cultural visibility of neurodivergence, is in certain experiential ways a more hostile environment for persons on the autism spectrum, who need clear rules and overt signals for social settings rather than the muddy and inconsistent rules and covert signals with which our neurotypical ruling class is comfortable. Deference and clear social rules are contingent, socially constructed fictions; but they were and are useful fictions, in ways wholly unappreciated by their meritocratic destroyers. No society can function without socially constructed useful fictions. The question is whether or not the new set represents genuine improvement over the old.

UPDATE: My (very clever) wife pointed out that the therapeutic language and culture predominant among the teenage to early-30s set is another manifestation of this phenomenon. The need to “normalize” being “not okay,” seeing a therapist (and talking with friends about what “my therapist says”), having some form of neurodivergence or (at least) severe social anxiety, etc., can be read as both a response to the low-deference, muddy-social-rules culture we now live in and a replacement for older forms of deference and clear social rules. It serves as a way to cope with the unpredictability (uncontrollability?) of the world and as an imposition on it of new, somewhat clearer rules. It makes some social facts certain again. One cannot, in 2023, dismiss a diagnosis (even a self-diagnosis) of a mental health disorder, or do other than honor the boundaries that one’s friend declares he or she is setting, or veto anything that one’s friend’s therapist says — although thanks to a certain ubiquitous podcast advertiser, the idea that you can “get a new therapist” anytime your old one makes you uncomfortable has now been, er, normalized, which severely blunts the scalpel edge that true talk therapy ought to have, slicing through our self-protective layers of irony and self-deception to get at and treat the genuine underlying problems!

• To the disciples: “Unless you change and become like a little child, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (Mt. 18:3)
• To the chief priests and elders: “The tax collectors and the prostitutes go into the kingdom of heaven before you” (Mt. 21:31)

This is what I mean, in yesterday’s post, by “Do not rule out any kinds of questions and observations from the conversation, even ones that (initially) seem unsuited to Bible study or insufficiently sophisticated.” Ask the questions that little children would ask; ask the questions that those on the outs from elite society would ask. This is, notably, difficult for those formed by elite society! The whole enterprise of contemporary Western elite education is meant as much to inculcate the habits of mind and speech proper to the ruling class in its next generation as to render that class accessible to the lower socioeconomic strata. Note well that this last sentence is not a criticism, per se, of contemporary Western elite education; indeed it’s a sentence that could hardly have been written without it. (The various so-called critical theories mostly exist, not principally for the powerless to critique the powerful, but for the already powerful to engage in the discipline of self-critique.) Nevertheless the ruling strata are always peculiarly able and constantly tempted — by Mammon, mostly — to drown out the voice of the Word by virtue of those habits of mind and speech. Wherefore it is a most useful and spiritually edifying exercise to treat them, as frequently as possible, as rubbish. Change, at least for the hour of Bible study, and become like a little child; ask questions of the text (of Jesus!) that the tax collectors and the prostitutes would ask, and follow their lead into the kingdom. With such people Jesus prefers to feast.

1. Read a whole book (or, if impractical, a large, cohesive section) of the Bible aloud in a group.
2. Pray for illumination (Cranmer’s famous Collect for Scripture is good here.)
3. Sit silently together for 5 minutes. No distractions allowed!
4. Discuss any questions and observations that occur to you, taking notes. Do not rule out any kinds of questions and observations from the conversation, even ones that (initially) seem unsuited to Bible study or insufficiently sophisticated.
5. Look for, and name, patterns that emerge in the questions and observations.
6. Reconvene and repeat, rereading the notes from last time.

That’s all it takes to have a great Bible study. You don’t need a scholarly guide or a commercially produced book study. You don’t need knowledge of the Greek New Testament or the Hebrew Bible, though those are occasionally useful bonuses to be deployed with tremendous care and caution. You certainly don’t need pre-written questions, whether from a celebrity Christian author or ChatGPT (perish the thought). What you really need is time and space for contemplation. There are no Bible study “tools” that can substitute for that now-threatened resource. The Word of God is living and active, and the modern technological world represents a colossal project of seeking to drown out its voice. Silence the noises, and listen to the Spirit.

Actually, there is one “tool” you do need, and should incorporate into the discussion process after you’ve read the book or section under consideration a few times together. That tool is the rest of the Bible. The whole canon of Scripture is your indispensable guide to understanding each part. Many modern Bibles include a cross-reference system; some of these references are more valuable than others, but figure out which ones are the most fruitful, and read those passages (with their full contexts!) aloud too. Commentaries, too, are useful in this context, because they can point out theological parallels and connections that are too macro-scale to fit into the cross-reference system. But most of all, use your own intuitions developed through reading the Bible: “this bit here sounds awfully like…” is the right instinct to follow. Commentaries and cross-references are really only useful insofar as they build up your own biblical literacy and instincts. Let the different parts of the canon speak to and about one another.

And, incidentally, as you do this, don’t worry overmuch about historical questions of whether or not “the writer of Book X knew and was referencing Book Y.” For modern people, these kinds of questions are red herrings that lead us astray from the actual task of understanding the words in the canon. Of course the words emerge from a historical setting. They are still in our Bibles because generations of the faithful following God’s Way realized that these words transcended (without obviating) the particularities of their original historical settings and were speaking to them, with divine import and power, in the divine Now: “as long as it is called ‘Today.'” Rather settle for trusting a) the intentionality of the canon’s later editors and compilers, who definitely knew what they were doing, and b) the divine intentionality of the Spirit of God in guiding the authors, editors, and compilers through that process.

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.

Brevard Childs:

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:

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.

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.

Brevard Childs:

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]

Brevard Childs:

[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