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.
The church’s continual struggle in understanding the literal sense of the text as providing the biblical grounds for its testimony arises in large measure from its canonical consciousness. On the one hand, it recognizes that textual meaning is controlled by the grammatical, syntactical, and literary function of the language. On the other hand, these formal criteria are continually complemented by the actual content of the biblical texts which are being interpreted by communities of faith and practice. The productive epochs in the church’s use of the Bible have occurred when these two dimensions of scripture constructively enrich and balance each other as establishing an acknowledged literal sense.
— Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments, 724
Five points, both historical and theological, to render credible the preaching of New Testament slavery texts:
Slavery in the Greco-Roman world is not to be equated, historically speaking, with antebellum American race-based chattel slavery.
Nevertheless, Greco-Roman slavery was, from the perspective of Christian morality, a violent, unjust, and dehumanizing system: differently shaped in the form of its evil than the American form, but reprehensible nonetheless.
The New Testament canon contains both (a) prudential, theologically grounded guidance for life under such a system and (b) moral and theological lessons that, developed and applied over time within a Christianizing society, should have — and largely did — inevitably resulted in the eradication of the slave system.
These different witnesses are not to be conflated, even when they emerge from the same texts (e.g., the book of Philemon), but neither are they in opposition to one another. The Christian tradition, drawing on this textual heritage, is right to now condemn all forms of slavery as unjust violations of divine law. Neither does this obviate the moral responsibility of those who exist within systems of slavery to adhere to Christian ways of living.
The fact that the New Testament and early Christian “strategy” (a misleading word in this context) for the eradication of slavery involves, in a sense, accommodating its ongoing existence during the Christianization of society is not a warrant against, in a modern society with its moral norms already re-framed by Christianization, using appropriate mechanisms of law and even force to destroy enduring systems of enslavement. To say that would be to simultaneously radically enlarge and disastrously narrow the sufficiency of Scripture.
We come, then, to a first paradox of modernity… that its own drive has often been toward forms of political repression far worse than most things perpetrated in despised Christendom. … [The] assertion of the rights of the many has paradoxically, dialectically perhaps, achieved the opposite, the subversion of the many by new and in some cases demonic versions of the one.
— Colin Gunton, The One, the Three, and the Many, 33.
The early church’s theological reflection on the God of Israel did not turn on certain isolated Old Testament passages from which to find a warrant for a developing christology, but rather it turned on the issue of the nature of God’s presence within the life of Israel in all its historical specificity. The God of the covenant who had bound himself to a people in love, had revealed himself as both transcendent and immanent, seen and unseen, the God of the Patriarchs and of all nations. The church confessed to know a totally sovereign creator who yet chose to reveal himself in the forms of his creation, who entered time and space in order to redeem the world. In short, the church’s reflection on God found itself inexorably drawn into Trinitarian terminology in order to testify to God both as the revealed and revealer, the subject and object of self-manifestation.
— Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments: Theological Reflection on the Christian Bible, 369.
Of course, I’m not actually against citation, in the sense of needing to show your work and avoid plagiarism. But what I am against is citation as a substitute for persuasive argument or citation as demonstration that one is In the Know about the scholarly canon for a field.
Is your case dependent on previous scholarship? Of course it is. So tell me that you’re dependent, but spell out the nature of your dependence. The best practice here is to re-present to me, in your own words, the part of their argument that influenced or persuaded you, as clearly as possible. If you can’t clearly draw the lines of dependence, at least give me your own articulation of your position and mention, in the footnotes, “Here (and throughout) I am undoubtedly dependent on $AUTHORNAME; cf. $WORK, $PAGENUMBERS.” This gives me the ability to evaluate the strength of your foundations myself, and the opportunity to be persuaded that you are right. Citing, however, someone else’s methodological work — even if it is a standard work in the field — without re-presenting the relevant aspects takes those opportunities for persuasion and evaluation away from me. I simply have to take for granted that you have a) read and represented $AUTHORNAME properly and b) that $AUTHORNAME is a trustworthy guide to these issues.
And what if I have no access to this author’s works? What if I don’t yet have the technical background to evaluate either of the above questions? In this case, the unexplained citation functions to shore up the boundaries of the guild, with your place within and mine without: “If you haven’t read $AUTHORNAME on this, I really don’t know how to talk to you.” It’s a gesture in the direction of an Important Book as an appeal to authority — in the logical fallacy sense. Of course there is always authority. But as a writer, especially in a scholarly mode, it is critically important that you a) assess what authorities you are placing yourself under and b) show your readership why they are good authorities. There is a way to cite Important Books that invites the novice reader into the scholarly conversations whose terms have been set by the Important Books, rather than shutting them out of the conversations until such times as they have read and understood the Important Books.
Scholarship is always iterative and cumulative. Even Socrates — a figure of practically immeasurable importance! — is, in a sense, just the first philosopher to have his teachings recorded in a large, well-preserved corpus; not the first person ever to think in quite the way that he did. Everyone is, like Newton, standing on the shoulders of giants. A major contemporary biblical scholar (to take the field I know best) will cite in perfunctory fashion a great authority of the previous generation, a pioneer of the field. Okay, I say to myself: I am a novice in this field; if I want to understand, I must row back up the stream of influence. I read the great authority, and find that he (in biblical scholarship it is practically always a he) is himself claiming dependence on a prior pioneer. I climb further and see that there are competing interpretations of the prior pioneer’s legacy, and that the great authority may have subtly transmuted his forerunner’s thought to be more congenial to his project. And repeat ad infinitum — well, not truly infinitely; but if I can ever make it to the source of this large river of impressive, learned scholarship, which has become its own canon of authority, what I may find as the wellspring is — in a surprising number of cases — a wild speculation in a footnote by a nineteenth-century German biblical scholar. And I find that this scholar’s own methodological presuppositions are practically impossible to assess without understanding Hegelian philosophy, and that the core biblical insight that launched a thousand dissertations had actually been inspired by a remark of Hegel’s. Which then requires its own understanding — and I cannot understand Hegel.
Did my original major contemporary biblical scholar, not herself presupposing Hegelianism, take care to know what meat she was chewing and what bones she was spitting out? Quite possibly. But if she did not bother to show me the foundations and persuade me that they are solid, a great part of my own assessment of her work is foreclosed in advance. I am increasingly sensitive — allergic — to sloppy appeals to external authority in biblical and theological scholarship. Show me your hermeneutical presuppositions in your exegesis, yes; but also tell me what they are and why you presuppose them. And if you implicitly protest, by citation rather than explanation, that the telling would take too much time and too many pages, and really I should just read your other book — or this journal article you wrote, or your mentor’s journal article or book — to understand them… then I’m increasingly inclined to put your book down, and I will probably not cite you in the future.
There are meetings that should be emails, and emails that should be meetings; discernment (φρονήσις) consists in distinguishing between them.
However, true wisdom (σοφία) consists in distinguishing between doctoral dissertations that should have been podcast series, and podcasts that should be doctoral dissertations.
I find the frequently-seen typo of “martial” for “marital” very funny on its own. (If — per Michael Pollan — gardening is war, can marriage be, too?) When, as in a newsletter I read this morning, the context is “how to keep your marriage from descending into conflict when you have kids,” the resulting phrase “martial happiness” acquires a new layer of self-referential comedic brilliance.
Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling is a great and important philosophical work, of course; but nobody had ever told me that it was funny. Savagely funny, even. The discourse of Johannes de Silentio skewers at every point those self-consciously modern persons who are “unwilling to stop with doubting everything but [go] further” (5). I am helpfully informed by the endnotes that this refers to certain Danish Hegelians — and given the role of Hegel’s philosophy in the more technical part of the book, that is a perfectly defensible historical reading; but the irony with which the text is saturated cuts at those in every generation who hold that they have acquired full “proficiency in doubting” (6) from their very beginning. The work, for all that Kierkegaard is genuinely interested in exploring the philosophical problemata of Genesis 22, uses humor as its sharpest surgical tool to cut away the audience’s layers of self-conscious Rationality and Skepticism and expose the comical, self-deluding pretense that Reason is ever able to surpass Faith and “go further.”
You would hardly know any of this from the scholarly introduction, the myriad references and summaries in other philosophical/theological works, or the Wikipedia article. These generally fundamentally — and I presume not inaccurately — historicize it, one way or another: as Kierkegaard wrestling with and justifying his decision to break his engagement to Regine Olsen, as a riposte against the Hegelian treatment of ethics, or the like. But the historical element cannot be permitted to take the sting out of the irony that is so essential to its effect as a work of philosophy, classically construed as an enterprise in convincing the reader that (as in Rilke’s poem) “you must change your life.” The humor is that unparaphraseable, unextractable aspect that makes it great.
It seems utterly clear to me that, for instance, the last lines of the Exordium before the “four paraphrases” are pure irony: “That man was not an exegetical scholar. He did not know Hebrew; if he had known Hebrew, he perhaps would easily have understood the story and Abraham” (9). For what follows are, judged by the rest of the work, four failed exegetical paraphrases of the story: proof that the story is not “easily understood” by any means, proof that no rationalization adequately captures the movement of faith.” Lest anyone be tempted to think that the simple man in the Exordium was merely lacking in learning, was not actually entering more closely than the Hebrew scholars into the experience of faith and of Abraham, Kierkegaard demonstrates — with brilliant mockery — that the basically paraphrastic resources of the “exegetical scholar” are insufficient to the task. The proverbs about the mother and the weaned child that conclude each paraphrase offer a kind of demonstrated rebuttal to the possibility of paraphrasing, of explaining and principlizing, such a story; exactly what Johannes de Silentio goes on to demonstrate in the rest of the work. What matters is the reader’s confrontation by the text of Genesis 22 — by the incomprehensibility, the miraculousness, of Abraham’s faith in God; what matters also, mutatis mutandis, is the reader’s confrontation by the text of Fear and Trembling — to feel one’s own pretenses to complete rationality caught, exposed, even flayed.
UPDATE: I forgot about this passage, which — rich irony! — captures this dynamic marvelously:
There is a lot of talk these days about irony and humor, especially by people who have never been able to practice them but nevertheless know how to explain everything. I am not completely unfamiliar with these two passions; I know a little more about them than is found in German and German-Danish compendiums. Therefore I know that these two passions are essentially different from the passion of faith. Irony and humor are also self-reflective and thus belong to the sphere of infinite resignation. [51]
[The] history of interpretation serves as a major check against all forms of biblicism in showing the distance between the biblical text and the interpreter and the degree to which the changing situation of the reader affects one’s hearing of the text. This observation should not lead to cultural relativism, but to a profounder grasp of the dynamic function of the Bible as the vehicle of an ever fresh word of God to each new generation. It is a strange irony that those examples of biblical interpretation in the past which have truly immersed themselves in a specific concrete historical context, such as Luther in Saxony, retain the greatest value as models for the future actualization of the biblical text in a completely different world. Conversely those biblical commentators who laid claim to an objective, scientific explanation of what the text really meant, often appear as uninteresting museum pieces to the next generation.”
— Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments: Theological Reflection on the Christian Bible, 88
I am testing out utilizing Micro.blog as a kind of reading journal: a low friction platform for the kinds of reflections that haven’t yet generated full-scale essays, but which I do want to work out at greater length than a text message permits. (And having abandoned Twitter, which I never really felt comfortable utilizing for that purpose.)
A less critical remark about the Reformation section of The Master and His Emissary. One intriguing feature of this section is a passing comparison of those two great Martins, Luther and Heidegger, as both being “somewhat tragic figure[s]” whose work was “hijacked” and ultimately unleashed “an anarchic destruction of everything [they] valued and struggled to defend” (314). This is an interesting parallel, and I think reveals more than McGilchrist recognizes in the moment.
Luther’s great flaw — a flaw that he inherited from 1300 years of Christian tradition, radicalized by his apocalyptic self-understanding, knit uncomfortably close through his theology, and bequeathed to later generations with horrendous and anti-Christian consequences — was his personal and theological anti-Judaism. On the Jews and their Lies is of course the most (in)famous and horrifying expression of this flaw, and is admittedly a document that requires some historical contextualization — Luther, like practically everyone else in the sixteenth century, thought the Second Coming was close at hand, which meant a mass conversion of Jews to Christianity was imminent; when it became clear that this was failing to happen, his bitter reaction was expressed with the most splenetic language he could muster. But really (as we can see more clearly now in the wake of the Shoah) even the most robust Protestant must admit that Luther’s formulation of justification — not to mention some of his more polemic statements in defense of it — depends on such a sharp antithesis, even opposition, between Law and Gospel that it has historically proved difficult for Lutherans (other than Luther himself, an Old Testament scholar extraordinaire) not to see progressively greater and greater justification for casting aside Torah, Moses, and Israel entirely. Lutheranism’s theological failure mode is Marcionism (as seen in Adolf von Harnack), and Marcionism bears more than a passing family resemblance to Christian anti-Judaism; which, with the modern invention of racial essentialism, was radicalized into Christian anti-Semitism.
Meanwhile, The Master and His Emissary was published in 2009, and is absolutely dependent on Heidegger’s philosophy; somewhere McGilchrist calls him the most comprehensive expositor of the right hemisphere worldview in intellectual history. (In my view, the book’s real muse — the Beatrice to McGilchrist’s Dante — is Hegel, but Heidegger plays the part of Virgil throughout.) As scholars have been discovering since Heidegger’s Black Notebooks began to be published in 2014, Heidegger embraced and creatively rearticulated the Nazi ideology during its period of ascendancy and regnancy, and remained — at least in private, once it was no longer permissible to be public about it — a defender of Nazism until his death, long after the exposure of Nazi Germany’s numerous crimes against humanity and above all the Jews. (Apparently Richard Wolin’s recent Heidegger in Ruins (Yale, 2023), is the important book on this topic, though I haven’t read it… yet.) McGilchrist’s book evinces none of this — and it is hard to blame him for it, given the genuine importance of Heidegger to all subsequent twentieth-century thought and the timing of the Black Notebooks' publication; but I am, to say the least, intrigued to see how, if differently, Heidegger may be treated in The Matter with Things (2021).
So, if Heidegger is the prophet of the right hemisphere — does that make Nazism the right hemisphere’s most seductive, and most horrifying, failure mode?
Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary is a refreshingly ambitious, generally idiosyncratic, and colossally erudite work, but its brief (ten out of 462 pages) treatment of the Reformation is not one of its high points. This is, I think, signaled by his citing Friedrich Schleiermacher’s comparison of Reformation and Enlightenment as sharing the animating principle “everything mysterious and marvellous is proscribed” (315) — a very Enlightenment perspective on the Reformation, always seeking to ally the Reformers to a cause which the Reformers would not have recognized! McGilchrist is selective, as he must be in a book of this length, and focuses on the change in hermeneutics of image vs. word (and the accompanying spasms of iconoclasm); but here I think the simplicity of that heuristic betrays his reading of the period as a whole. It’s a phenomenological reading which is straightforwardly read up into the theological frameworks of the Reformers, rather than engaging the right-to-left-to-right intellectual motion that would actually incorporate (aufgehoben?) the animating theological concerns of the period. The only substantive discussion of Reformation theological concerns is a paragraph which makes Luther sound almost like a proto-Heidegger in his concern for the outer authentically presenting the inner (needless to say, this is not how Luther conceived of his theological revolution).
In general, the Reformation is blamed for all that is left-hemispherical in this period, when it is far from clear that the “real” culprit (if such can actually be identified) in accelerating left hemisphere dominance during the sixteenth century is not in fact the habits of mind and scholarly methods of Renaissance humanism. Erasmus was as fond of the sensus literalis as Luther or Zwingli, and before the century was up Richard Hooker was retrieving “participation” as the essential doctrinal category. (Frankly, I think the preceding twenty pages on the Renaissance, which are often uncritically laudatory, would probably have benefited from interacting with C.S. Lewis’s hilarious excoriation of so-called Renaissance humanism in English Literature in the Sixteenth Century.) Somewhat bizarrely, the doctrine of transubstantiation is conscripted to his Reformation narrative as a left-hemisphere rationalization and hyperspecification of the right-hemisphere Eucharistic mystery; but this, being a creature of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, he cannot possibly blame on the Reformers or the Reformation, and thus he is forced to say that “At the Reformation this problem re-emerged” (316). That it did, and yes, the memorialist view of the Lord’s Supper looks awfully like left-hemisphere rationalization; but it is, crucially, an equal and opposite reaction against an existing and well-established of left-hemisphere rationalization. The replacement of presentation with re-presentation in Christian theology significantly antedates 1517, which suggests that “Reformation” as popularly understood is the wrong category. The most significant omission from McGilchrist’s description (does such an omission rise to the level of an outright error?) is the whole phenomenon of the Counter-Reformation, which radicalized the standardization and schematization of scholastic theology in Rome no less than took place in Geneva, for all that the Roman church hung onto images.
To be clear: many of McGilchrist’s critiques of the Reformation churches and theology are worth pondering. I find the Reformed iconoclasm of the period profoundly distasteful (St. John of Damascus was right about images, people! it’s time to admit it!), and the schematizing, diagrammatizing tendency in second-generation Calvinist theology (Perkins, Beza, etc.) is an undoubtedly striking exemplum of left hemisphere thinking! But I am unconvinced by McGilchrist’s sweeping diagnosis that the Reformation “reversed” the “cardinal tenet of Christianity:” that “the Word is made Flesh” became “the Flesh is made Word.” As Athanasius teaches in the evergreen On the Incarnation, the Logos became sinless flesh so that our sinful flesh might be restored to its original glory as logikos. Flesh and Word are, ultimately, made for one another. The truly “cardinal” tenet of Christianity is not, after all, the Incarnation of the Word (which runs it a close second) — it is the resurrection of the Word’s crucified Flesh, and the promise of resurrection to all flesh that is infused with the Word’s power.