Barth, Ps 24, and the unity of the Testaments

Christians believe that the Old Testament witnesses to  God-in-Jesus. Jesus himself made this clear to his disciples as he walked with them on the road to Emmaus, opening their eyes to the way the Law and the Prophets spoke of his suffering and resurrection. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately, if you enjoy thinking about this kind of thing), he didn’t leave behind a divinely inspired hermeneutical key which can infallibly illuminate the manner in which the Old Testament goes about doing this. We are left with a frustrating inner conviction but the impossibility of proving this conviction to the unbeliever. This reminds me of Jesus’ response to the Pharisees’ demand for a sign, when he simply states that what he says is true because he is the one who says it. I can imagine how frustrating that must have been! Somehow the truth is “self-affirming.”

For my part, I do believe that the Old Testament witnesses to God-in-Jesus, and the church has consistently confessed the same (cf. the abundant allegorical interpretation for the vast majority of the church’s history, including throughout the Reformation). However, like many in the church, I also struggle to back up this claim with a philosophical or theological account of how this happens. To draw another analogy with responses to the historical Jesus, I find myself in the similar position of Jesus’ neighbours in Nazareth, who , when confronted with his claim that he is the initiator of the kingdom of God, responded with the question: “isn’t that Joseph’s son… ?” (note the title of a recent book whose contents would seem to affirm this surface recognition as the last word on the matter). The analogous Christian version that I hear again and again is: “is that the God of the New Testament?” The answer is “yes,” and if you can’t figure out why or how than you better take stock of the adequacy your own grasp of the gospel. I experience this challenge regularly.

This is not to say that there are not a host of helpful theses that each in their own way shed light on the phenomenon, allowing Christians to both deepen their own faith as well as present it to others. The recognition of mystery ought to function as an invitation to enter it, rather than as an excuse to just give up wrestling with the issue in the first place (cf. A. Louth, Discerning the Mystery).

One thesis that touches on this issue was made by Karl Barth, which I will now share in massively reduced form (primarily because I have only read this thesis in a paper about something else, namely  the influence of Barth on Miskotte). It’s about the continuity  and discontinuity between the Testaments:

Similarity	Disimilarity
Both Testaments see God as one who freely initiates relationship with human kind.	The OT has a variety of covenants and only an implicit Messianic hope. The NT has only one covenant and the Messiah is identified as Jesus of Nazareth.
Both Testaments recognize the mysterious hiddenness of God.	The OT sees this hiddenness in God’s judgement of the nations, including Israel. The NT sees this in God’s judgement of his Son. God’s judgement in the NT is, in some sense, final.
Both Testaments have an “already-not yet” eschatology (my phrase), as God is both one who is already experienced but also one who is coming.	The NT not only see’s Jesus as the One who is coming, it is waiting for the one who has already come [though I have to admit, I don’t see how this is any different from the OT perspective, for there God also already came … ].

The framework for these similarities/differences is Barth’s concept of the relationship between Divine Revelation and time. There are three “times,” the time of the expectation of revelation (Old Testmaent), the time of the fulfilment of revelation (Jesus’ history), and the age of remembering the fulfilment of revelation (New Testament). It’s important to note that the NT is not the fulfilment of the OT (contra Louth, cited above), Jesus is. The NT and OT both function to point to a single referent that stands outside of themselves. They do this in their own idiom and from their own perspective (hence the differences), but their referential object is the same (hence the similar structure and content).

As you may have noticed from my comments in square brackets, it seems to me as if Barth is not doing full justice to the OT (though feel free to correct me here). In short, he seems to overemphasises the NT’s “already” element in contrast to the OT’s “not yet.” Isn’t it the case that the OT already witnesses to a past fulfilment that provides the “ontological” ground for the possibility of the history that ensues? The example I’m thinking of is the opening strophe of Ps 24: “The earth is the LORD’s … for he has founded it upon the seas … .” Isn’t this past act as decisive in its grounding of God’s history with his people as Jesus’ resurrection from the dead? E. Otto talks of God’s acts here as  creating the “Möglichkeit” (possibility) for the obedience found in vv. 3-6: There can be such a thing as a righteous, obedient Jacob (v. 6), because God’s stabilization of the earth in the face of chaos guarantees the validity of such obedience. In a similar way, the New Testament talks of resurrection life in the Spirit creating a heart of flesh and the capacity to be obedient to the Torah.

So how do I interpret the relation of Ps 24:1-2 in relation to the NT? Jesus can’t have “fulfilled” it because Ps 24:1-2 is not pointing forward to a moment yet to be fulfilled, it is pointing back to something already established once and for all. As mentioned, the relation  seems to be of a structural nature. In fact, the analogy can be expanded to apply to Jesus’ entire mission, for just as in Ps 24 strophe 1 (vv. 1-2) is the precondition for strophe 2 (vv. 3-6), these two strophes are somehow “consummated” by strophes 3 and 4 (vv. 7-10; on my interpretation of the poetic structure, I should add). Similarly, Jesus was raised from the dead (strophe 1), has cleansed his people (strophe 2) and will return again to consummate his work (i.e. Advent; strophes 3-4). Except that even here our analogy runs into conceptual difficulties, for it is the case that  Jesus’ death, resurrection, and ascension are all contained in vv. 7-10: his death was a battle with death, his resurrection was his victory and his ascension was its consummation (i.e. Ascension not advent). So are vv. 7-10 about Christ’s return to earth as king or his ascension to heaven to be enthroned? In addition to this, where does this leave strophe 1 if the resurrection in is the final two strophes? The odd thing is that strophe 1 in fact has the same content as strophes 3-4, albeit on a “mythological” rather than “historical” plain! Strophe 1 is also a kind of battle, this time with the seas, and it is also a proclamation of victory, i.e. the establishment of a viable living space. So does Ps 24 taken on its own, regardless of its correlation to an external event in time (not in space: Jesus was crucified in Jerusalem!) contain its own odd witness to “ontological-unity-in-temporal-sequence”? Srophes 3 and 4 “consummate” strophe 1, even as the “recapitulate” its content. The “chronos” is different but not the “chairos.”

 The intermediate conclusion  all this mind bending has for me is that every time I try and relate Psalm 24 to the Gospels my temporal categories are consistently being confirmed (there is a genuine analogy) and subverted. It’s like a lover who tempts me with a kiss and a flash of her eye-lashes but teasingly disappears around the corner, leaving a trail of perfume to beckon me on (Song of Songs was always had a hermeneutical function for church and synagogue!).  I see the analogy, am breathless at the sheer scope of who Jesus is and what he has achieved, and yet still am left to struggle and see how the past and present within an Psalm’s “narrative world” is “fulfilled” by the Gospel’s presentation of past and present, a past and present that can be collapsed into one moment.

I mentioned above that the OT’s inevitable and consistent challenge to the Christian claim about its Christological content ought to primarily be a challenge to Christians, not to prove their faith to the sceptics but to deepen the content of their own faith, which is always far from perfect. I can’t claim to have a concrete answer to my issue with Ps 24 above (though I’m working on it!), but it has forced me to return to my own construal of the “gospel” and to see it with new eyes. Of particular relevance here is the concept of the relation between the “ontological” and “economic” Trinity, God in himself and God for us. McGlasson summarizes the relation as follows:

God’s sending of his Son for our salvation and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit are a replication in time of God’s eternal self-identity. God’s redemptive love for humanity is an expression of God’s free decision to draw us into a relationship with himself, which is based on the relationship of love that he himself is (McGlasson, Invitation, 198).

As Barth implies above, the NT is not the fulfilment of the OT, it points to it’s fulfilment. This means that drawing structural analogies between the OT and the NT can only take us so far. They point us in the right direction, as the content of the NT is the same as the OT. But the reality itself is greater than what is at most the partial testimony of both Testaments (cf. Childs, Biblical Theology). Hence the necessity of higher level dogmatic theology in order to grasp what is really going on in Scripture. The practice of theology, after all, originally consisted in nothing other than meditation upon the mystery of the ontological trinity. I think I ought to learn to do the same.  


[For a post on Moberly's interpretation of the Emmaus story, go here; see also my post Reading in a Revised Frame of Reference].

What is Christian allegory?

Here's what the Orthodox theologian Andrew Louth has to say from his excellent book Discerning the Mystery:

- "... allegory is a way of holding us before the mystery which is the ultimate 'difficulty' of the Scriptures - a difficulty, a mystery, which challenges us to revise our understanding of what might be meant by meaning; a difficulty, a mystery, which calls on us for a response of metanoia, change of mental perspective, repentance" (p. 110).

- Allegory "is an attempt to respond to the mira profundatis of Scripture, seen as the indespensible witness to the mystery of Christ" (p. 112)

- Allegory is not a technique for solving problems, but an art for discerning mystery (p. 113).

- Allegory is "a way of focusing on the mystery to which the Scriptures bear witness" (p. 114)

Note that on this account, allegory is less a matter of the Christian interpreter playfully exercising his or her interpretative freedom with the text and more a matter of a disciplined penetrating of the text to that which is is really all about. Allegory thus presupposes the existence of an real textual referent.

Louth emphasises this dimension of penetration when he talks about the relation between the allegorical (or mystical) sense of the text and its plain sense (which he, rather misleadingly it seems to me, also calls its historical sense) as being one of movement, a movement through the plain sense to the spiritual sense. Thus he can say:

the movement to allegory is not at all a movement away from history, but we might say a movement into history, into the significance of the sacred events that are the object of our faith. The literal sense is the object of faith: this is what we are to believe, to believe in, in a God who meets us in history, becomes man in Jesus of Nazareth. The allegorical sense represents our attempt to understand the mystery we discern here. It is a move from fides to intelligentia (p. 116)

There is no doubt a move back again, from spiritual sense to literal, but I haven't got that far yet.

For parallels between historical criticism and allegorical interpretation, see my post Historical Criticism and Medieval Allegory: Some Parallels.

For my whole thread on the issue of the spiritual and literal sense of Scripture, go here, in particular the post on the relation between the literal and spiritual senses.

Louth drew on Childs (or the "complentarity of tradition and scripture")

Brevard Childs drew on Andrew Louth's Discerning the Mystery in his Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments, especially when talking of the dialectic between the literal and plain sense of the text. I'm reading through Louth's interesting book at the moment and I have just discovered that Louth had already paid Childs the compliment. Here's what he has to say (which, I should add, shows an excellent grasp of what Childs was trying to get at in his Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture):

The tendency of the historical-critical method has been to concentrate on originality and regard what is not original as secondary: but if we see here a process of inspired utterance and reflection on - comment on - inspired utterance within the tradition, itself regarded as inspired, then we have a more complicated, but, I suggest, truer picture. The formation of the Hebrew Scriptures is an object lesson in the kind of complementarity of Scripture and tradition - or inspired utterance and tradition - that I have outlined. The art of understanding is more complicated, and richer, than an attempt to isolate the earliest fragments and to seek to understand them in a conjectured 'original' context: we hear the voice and the echoes and re-echoes, and it is as we hear that harmony that we come to understanding. As I see it, it is this perception that underlies the notion of 'canon criticism' [sic], associated particularly perhaps with the name of Brevard Childs. (Louth, Discerning the Mystery, 108-109).

He mentions in a footnote that some of these concerns had already been raised by A.G. Herbert (especially The Throne of David (London, 1941) and The Authority of the Old Testament (London, 1947) ).

For an more extended quote on the symbiosis of tradition and scripture from the same chapter, check out a post by Ora et Labora.

For an extremely detailed blog thread working through Louth's book section by section, check out Sister Macrina's A Vow of Conversation.

The awesomeness of Andrew Louth ...

... consists, for me, in his ability to elucidate the canonical approach of Brevard Childs, and perhaps that of Karl Barth, as evidenced in my post on Barth's biblical exegesis. Interpretation of the Bible is all about the subject matter, and that has huge hermeneutical implications (see my The Bible and the Historian). I still have only access to Louth via my reading of Childs and the wonderful posts of Sister Macrina. Here is her latest goody which has just sent me reeling in ecstasy:

At [the heart of the patristic understanding of "mysticism" is] the understanding of Christ as the divine mysterion: an idea central to the epistles of the Apostle Paul. This secret is a secret that has been told; but despite that it remains a secret, because what has been declared cannot be simply grasped , since it is God’s secret, and God is beyond any human comprehension. The secret of the Gospel is the hidden meaning of the Scriptures: for Christians the whole of what they call the ‘Old Testament’ finds its true meaning in Christ. God’s plan for humankind to which the Scriptures bear witness is made plain in the Incarnation. And this is the most common context, as we have seen, for the use of the word mystikos: it refers therefore to the hidden meaning of the Scriptures, the true meaning that is revealed in Christ, a meaning that remains mysterious, for it is no simple message, but the life in Christ that is endless in its implications. Christians, however, share in the life of Christ pre-eminently through the sacraments - mysteria in Greek - and the word mystikos is used therefore in relation to the sacraments as a way of designating the hidden reality, encountered and shared through the sacraments. The final use of the word mystikos refers to the hidden reality of the life of baptized Christians: a reality which is, as St Paul put it, ‘hid with Christ in God’ (Col. 3: 3). (205)

A completed thread on A. Louth's Discerning the Mystery

I am delighted to announce that Sister Macrina Walker, osco, author of the blog A Vow of Conversation, has completed a thorough review of Andrew Louth's important work, Discerning the Mystery: An Essay on the Nature of Theology. Why is he important? To be honest, from my perspective it's because his name keeps popping up in Brevard Childs' work in an area that is foundational to the entire enterprise of theological exegesis: the nature of allegory. I have yet to read the book myself and am glad to have to opportunity to catch a preview in Sister Macrina's posts.

For more online material on Andrew Louth, the Statesman has a series of articles.

Christian truth and scriptural referentiality

I probably shouldn't just copy quotes from other people's blogs, but this one is just so beautiful that I can't resist it. Sister Macrina Walker posted the following from a certain Father Andrew Louth, a theologian who will be getting far more of my attention in the future:

For the central truth, or mystery, of the Christian faith is primarily not a matter of words, and therefore ultimately of ideas or concepts, but a matter of fact, or reality. The heart of the Christian mystery is the fact of God made man, God with us, in Christ; words, even his words, are secondary to the reality of what he accomplished. To be a Christian is not simply to believe something, to learn something, but to be something, to experience something. The role of the Church, then, is not simply as the contingent vehicle - in history - of the Christian message, but as the community, through belonging to which we come into touch with the Christian mystery. [*]

Christian truth as a matter of fact, as a reality. That is the thrust of my current thread looking at the meaning of the regula veritatis (rule of truth) in the early church. It was something that Childs, much to the surprise of many, emphasised throughout his career, an emphasis that gave his brand of "canonical exegesis" its particular profile. As he said in penultimate publication:

Is there a determinate meaining within the biblical texts of the Chrisitian Bible? Traditional Christian exegesis took it for granted that the biblical witness was directed toward a specific reference. Its testimony provided access to the mysteries of divine reality. At times the reality perceived was earthly, bound in time and space. At other times it was a transcendent reality related directly or indirectly to sense perception, but requiring divine inspiration for its full comprehension. Accordingly, scripture contains multiple meanings, but all joined in some manner to a referent.[**]

Grasping this fact in all its subtle dialectical complexity should be a primary task of all those engaged in so-called "theological exegesis." It should function as a kind of compass guiding us through the murky disputes concerning the relationship between diachronic and synchronic exegesis, between literalistic and metaphorical reading, between academic and homiletic interpretation etc. etc.

I also think that grasping this truth leads to the joy that what we love about this world is lovable, and what we hate is redeemable, and that somehow, in all our broken particularity, faith makes total sense.

I have discussed this issue in a thread dealing with the sensus spiritualis and sensus literalis, summarised here (in which, I should add, my identification of the theological referent with the spiritual sense was challenged in the comments. I'd appreciate any feedback on the dialogue!)

[*] Andrew Louth, Discerning the Mystery. An Essay on the Nature of Theology, (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983) 74. (Biblicalia, by the way, posts on a cheap offer of this book by Eighth Day Books here).

[**] B.S. Childs, The Struggle to Understand Isaiah as Christian Scripture, 313.

The Truth of Christianity and a newly discovered blog

I was delighted to receive a comment from a certain Sister Macrina Walker, ocso, a Cistercian monastic of Koningsoord Abbey in the Netherlands. Not only is she well informed concerning good BelgianTrappist beer, she has her own blog, A Vow of Conversation. According to the "About" section, she has "questions about the role of tradition in theology and became increasingly aware of the shortcomings of a typically Western modern-cum-postmodern theology that is cut of from the life of faith and the tradition of the Church." She's particular interested in the Church Fathers, with a completed thread dealing with the Syrian Fathers here (she also links to a fascinating Syrian Encylopaedia , the WikiSyriaca, here).

If that isn't enough to make her blog worth reading, she also happens to be a big fan of Andrew Lowth, a scholar whose significance I am slowly beginning to grasp.

As always, it's Brevard Childs who got me onto the Lowth trail. Childs' later work was dedicated to finding continuity in the Christian tradition, evidence of a theological force creating a Wirkungsgeschichte with a certain profile. Key is the centrality of the hermeneutical category of allegory and the distinction between a literal and a spiritual sense to Christian scripture. It is Childs' influence by Karl Barth - especially his understanding of Scripture as "witness" - that enabled continuity between Childs' historical critical, canonical, and later ... well ... "theological" exegesis.

It's so incarnational it hurts. In a nice way.

Here's a great Lowth quote, taken from Sister Macrina Walker's personal introduction:

For the truth that lies at the heart of theology is not something there to be discovered, but something, or rather someone, to whom we must surrender. The mystery of faith is not ultimately something that invites our questioning, but something that questions us.

Andrew Louth, Discerning the Mystery. An Essay on the Nature of Theology (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983) 95.