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].

Theological parallels between Israel's wisdom traditions and salvation-historical traditions

It's often said that Israel's wisdom traditions are devoid of the kind of theology one finds elsewhere in the Old Testament. Brueggemann represents the majority opinion: 

wisdom teaching, in the book of Proverbs as elsewhere, completely lacks the primary marks of Israel's history or of Israel's covenantal tradition. As a consequence in this teaching, Israel stands alongside its non-Yahwistic neighbours in pondering the inscrutible mystery of life, even as that mystery permeates the most concrete and mundane dimensions of daily existence [*]

The following is a thought experiment in relation to this. Assuming a single theological pattern, in which God creates a material universe for the purpose of giving it to humanity to enjoy, yet making that enjoyment conditional upon obedience to will, I came up with the following parallels:

Wisdom:

i) The ultimate telos of wisdom is "salvation," understood in the "this worldly" sense of a long happy life in the land.

ii) The means of achieving this is through 1) discovering and then 2) implementing the insights of wisdom.

iii) The place where one goes in order to acquire this salvific information is the created order, in both its "natural" and "social" dimensions (i.e. through the observation of natural and sociological patterns and the development of codes of conduct).

iv) The epistemological condition for comprehending this reality is "the fear of the Lord." There is no neutral starting point.

v) The source of this information is the Lord. I.e. God himself, through revelation of himself, creates the epistemological conditions by which we can perceive his will in creation.

vi) The reason why this reality (wisdom) does what it does (i.e. give life) lies within the will of the Lord. It's what he wants.

vii) Identifying this reality (wisdom) is equivalent to identifying the Lord's will/purpose (i.e. to offer us salvation in a material paradise).

viii) Wisdom reveals the Lord to the degree that it reveals his will, which is for a healthy created order (Garden-of-Eden-style).

This seems to correspond to the theological logic found in the Pentateuch:

i) The ultimate telos of history is "salvation," understood in the "this worldly" sense of a long happy life in the land.

ii) The means of achieving this is through 1) discovering and then 2) implementing God's revealed will (Torah).

iii) The place where one goes for this salvific information is the Lord's history with his people, in both its experienced and then narrated/liturgically re-enacted dimensions (i.e. tradition and Scripture).

iv) The epistemological condition for comprehending this reality (i.e. truly understanding the spirit of the law, its purpose) is thankfulness to the Lord for what he has done prior to the revelation of his will (e.g. I.e. redemption from Egypt; this experience provides the categories for understanding how to treat ones own slaves).

v) The source of this information is the Lord.

vi) The reason that this reality (his will in Torah) does what it does (i.e. give life) lies within the will of the Lord. It's what he wants.

vii) Identifying this reality is equivalent to identifying the Lord's will/purpose (i.e. salvation).

viii) History (as narrated in the Pentateuch) reveals the Lord to the degree that it reveals his will, which is a healthy created order (i.e. saved from Egypt for Canaan).

Given these parallels, you can see how the Bible exerted a certain "co-ercion" on early Jewish interpreters (Sirach, Wisdom of Solomon) to collapse wisdom and torah into one reality. This wasn't an attempt to impress the Greeks, it was a response to the total witness of Scripture, a response consistent with the Bible's own logic.

To make the parallels more explicit, you get the following pairings:

Law / Wisdom (object to be sought)

Thankfulness for historical preservation / Fear of the Lord (epistemological condition for perceiving this)

land of milk and honey / a good long life (goal of seeking)

obedience / obedience (means of implementation)

the Lord / the Lord (source)

instruction from priests, parents, Scripture etc. / instruction from wise men, parents, Scripture etc. (vehicle for source)

history / creation (location)

Any thoughts?

[*] Brueggeman, An Introduction to the Old Testament, 306.

"Ontological thirst": my new favourite phrase

While perusing the fascinating collection of essays contained in Resurrection: Theological and Scientific Assessments, I came across what has now become one of my favourite phrases: "ontological thirst." We all have it, though I wonder how many theories of "theological hermeneutics" are constructed in denial of that fact?

The context of the quote is the relation between science and theology, rather than theological hermeneutics, thought I do think that Welker's essay has hermeneutical implications (for the relationship between "history" and "ontology" go here and here).

Here's the context for the phrase:

Only knowledge of reality constitutes truth, and only truth can quench the thirst that leads to research. ... The point of departure [for scientists and theologians] is difficult. We recognize ... that we find ourselves in a worldwide cultural communication but with multiple rationalities. .. Within this pluralism of rationalities, however, science and theology share something in common. Both are driven by ontological thirst, by the thirst to know reality as it is. Both shun delusion. Both are pursued by truth-seeking communities." (Resurrection, p. xiii).

Is "canonical exegesis" too difficult?

Christopher Hays, in a review of Childs' The Struggle to Understand Isaiah as Christian Scripture, has the following to say about the difficulty of doing the kind of exegesis Childs called "canonical":

The intellectual entrance fee for writing good theological exegesis must be very steep. If Childs or his heirs want to claim an elevated status for their project, that ambition should come with an even higher standard of training and preparation than “mere” historical-philological scholarship. Childs certainly met any standard that anyone could set, but not every theological interpreter does. He once called for a “single method” comprising both dimensions of the text, but it is here that his omission of 20th century theologian-exegetes is most lamentable: Younger scholars pursuing a “single method” approach receive no road map from Childs—they cannot learn, in this book, from the successes and errors of their immediate predecessors. (Nor do younger scholars who are less inclined to be sympathetic receive any constructive criticism, unless they are acolytes of Brueggemann.) 

Even if Childs had explained his “single method,” there are few who can and will ever master all of the necessary skills. It may be that the array of tools one needs to conduct theological biblical criticism is so extensive that canonical criticism is not really a young scholar’s game. How then could theological exegesis be carried out without requiring one person to master both biblical studies and theology?[*] 

I appreciate the final question. I'd say that one must strain to master both. Perhaps the solution to the problem lies in the way that university/seminary curricula are structured and integrated? Can they be adapted so that future students can receive the foundation they need to go on and wrestle with the "substance" of the text?

[*] "Bard Called the Tune," JTI 4.1 (2010), 151.

A further (Jewish) critical thought on the Oxford Psalms Conference

In my last post I shared some critical thoughts about the recent Oxford Psalms conference. Given that I'm a Christian and one of my issues with the logic of the conference had to do with that fact, I'm delighted that a Jewish friend of mine shared her critical thoughts on the matter in response to the post. She wasn't present for various reasons, but one of them will become clear in her comments (which I post with permission):

I'd like to add my own pesky little issue here which has less to do with the content (although ultimately it most likely does) but rather the organization of the conference. If it was the intention of the organizers to foster a dialogue between communities I do wonder what prompted them to schedule the conference exactly on one of the important Jewish festivals, i.e. Sukkot? By this scheduling blunder they effectively excluded and silenced one particular segment of the Jewish academic and clerical community (namely the Orthodox). I do realize that there were some Jewish participants; however these would not represent, speak for and from that particular segment which is also part of the larger Jewish group. This is interesting because it is exactly that absent group that takes the Psalter (or they would prefer Sefer Tehillim) very seriously as a living tradition, both in liturgy as well as in individual petionary prayer. So, as far as the organizers are concerned – for the umpteenth time in comparable circumstances: it’s their loss. Sad thing though is, they probably don’t even realize that they did suffer a loss and will whisk it away as an irrelevant irritant….

This fact was pointed out at the conference, for which the organizers apologized. I'm not sure of the reasoning, but I think there were organizational complications that couldn't be avoided. However, given that the explicit agenda of the conference was to encourage a mutual "moving beyond" differences in Christian and Jewish exegesis, the absence of an incredibly significant segment of the Jewish population - a segment which stands in most continuity with the traditions that define Judaism - seriously limits the conference's capacity to make progress on its stated goals.

Critical thoughts on the Oxford Psalms Conference

I've just returned from the Oxford Psalms conference, of which Bob MacDonald has provided an overview in a series of posts (along with some photos and a youtube video of the reconstructed Temple Psalmody we heard in the chapel). The experience was enriching, eye-opening, and in particular motivating as far as my own particular strand of work is concerned (Childs' approach to the Bible). Despite a technical hiccup with the publication of my abstract, I had two amazing conversations with two of the Psalms' greatest contemporary students: Erhard Gerstenberger and Frank-Lothar Hossfeld. The beauty of these two separate dialogues is that Hossfeld and Gerstenberger are in fact Gegenspieler as far as methodology is concerned: Gerstenberger representing the "older" form critical approach (an approach whose presuppositions are rightly still foundational for much contemporary interpretation) and Hossfeld representing the "newer" synchronic approach (Sitz im Buch rather than Sitz im Leben). Part of my thesis is that there is, in fact, a bridge over the apparent chasm that separates these two approaches (one that allows for two-way traffic), and that Childs, properly understood, is the man who has brought that reality most clearly to view.

And therein lies the problem I have with an otherwise excellent conference: the complete silence  (beyond a few minor footnotes) concerning Childs' own contribution to the field that, I would claim, he helped shape into its present form. I find this problematic for a minor and for a major reason. Of minor significance is simply the irony that it is ultimately the work of Brevard Childs that has made the peculiar scope of this particular conference possible in the first place. Am I exaggerating? Perhaps - I'm not an expert on the history of scholarship. But before Childs' ground-breaking work, did not "Wirkungsgeschichte" belong in the church/Jewish history department? And wasn't "Jewish/Christian" dialogue a concern of systematic theology? And why should the Psalm's liturgical actualization within a community of faith now migrate from the department of liturgy to that of Biblical exegesis? Aside from the obvious (though seemingly forgotten) fact that it was Childs who put both the Psalm superscriptions and the shape of the Psalter on the interpretive agenda, was he not also the first to insist that the full scope of research questions displayed at this conference was in fact an integral and necessary part of the exegesis of the text itself?

My primary concern here is not, however, about apportioning recognition where it is due. My major concern is with the coherence of the conference itself and, along with that, the discipline of Biblical studies. One impression that accompanied me throughout the conference was the disjointed manner by which the various fields of research were brought into relation. A historical critical reading of a Psalm was simply one possibility alongside an analysis of the history of its interpretation. The musical renditions of the Psalms in the chapel were aesthetic (perhaps spiritual), but not connected in any academically accountable way with the actual meaning of the texts themselves. Even talk of the "convergence" of Jewish and Christian interpretation in the modern period seemed disconnected from actual faith claims made by these communities (can Christian exegesis be non-Christological?) as well the constructive interpretive proposals made by Biblical exegetes, whose primary task is to look at the meaning of the text itself.

It is one thing to present an "array" of approaches to the Psalms, but the very act of arraying presupposes that there is some unity which the diversity of approaches ought, in some sense, to illuminate. Even in a so-called "postmodern" context, a conference such as this one must at least, at rock bottom, assume the presence of a single subject matter: the Psalms themselves. Are they not the ultimate object of research? Ought not the various subject areas thus arrayed function to enlighten our reading of the Psalms themselves rather than something else connected to the psalms? I fear that the very telos of such a conference is threatened when there is no attempt to bring diachronic, synchronic, reception history (etc.) perspectives into dialogue with each other, a dialogue that is about the Psalms themselves.

If the conference was not about the Psalms, what was it about? What was its unifying object of inquiry? If one is to argue - as seems implied - that illustrating the tension between peshat and midrash is interesting in its own right, that questions of the ordering of the Qumran Psalms or Rastafarian reinterpretation or medieval religious usage are all interesting in their own right, then it seems that the only thing uniting these approaches is the phenomenon of human cultural endeavour, as it is engaged in referring to or preserving or creating or inspiring or involving in some manner Israel's psalms. It seems that our Psalms conference was ultimately an exercise in cultural anthropology. If what matters is what humans have done and do then it is perfectly understandable that Rashi is simply juxtaposed with Akhenaten, the Temple archives with Anglo-Saxon Psalters, Qumranic textual variants with postmodern paraphrase. On this view, the proper object of inquiry is not the text itself as a vehicle of some concept or reality but us, humanity in its aspect as cultural being. The consequence is that the intertextual web is expanded indefinitely and Biblical studies migrates to the cultural anthropology department, where it threatens to dissolve upon arrival.

The irony in this is that the conference's explicit agenda was theological, not anthropological. It's title, "Conflict and Convergence," points to a desire to overcome readings by the Jewish and Christian faith communities which are mutually exclusive. The assumption is that the modern university can now, finally, after centuries of conflicting exegesis, provide a context whereby the exegeses of these two religious entities can finally "converge." Yet, can an approach to the Bible which is ultimately anthropological fulfil that task? Though both Jews and Christians confess that God's Word comes in humans words, those human words are also understood to be vehicles of God's Word. This is why Scripture is "holy," it has something to do with God, and not just in phenomenologically sense that they claim this to be so, but in the ontological sense that it really is. Christians and Jews are ultimately not interested in what humans have done or do with the Psalms, they are interested in what they should do because of the Psalms.

I would summarize my issue with the Oxford conference as a question: what constitutes the coherence under-girding the broad (and ever expanding) scope of interests arrayed for our attention? If, as the conference has implied, that coherence is human existence per se, the conference's own theological agenda will be undermined. But is there another way of conceiving the unity of the approaches? Could it be that Old Testament studies' typical Sitz im Leben in the theology rather than anthropology department is not an accidental misjudgement but rather an indication of the true coherence under-girding both the text and community? And if so, what does this kind of coherence mean for Jewish and Christian dialogue? Which is another way of asking, "how do we grasp the meaning of the Psalms?"

It is here that Childs can, once again, provide a pointer for the future (providing he is divested of the distortion that constitutes much of his own reception history). Childs was not only the originator of attempts to appropriate the full breadth of Jewish and Christian exegesis, seen as being intimately connected to the diachronic and synchronic dimensions of the text, he did so for the sake of a single object of inquiry: the Biblical text itself. Which is the same thing as saying: he did it for the sake of the subject matter of the Biblical text. Already in the preface to his ground-breaking 1974 Exodus commentary (although admittedly it took a while for the ground to break) we gain hints at his grasp of the potential organic connection between the history "to" the text and the history "from" the text, a history that, despite its temporal extension in our time, turns to rotate on that central hub that is the Bible's own time, which is God's time.

Childs' own proposals for the coherency of the discipline are bound to remain contentious (even when correctly understood), and this is necessarily so because of their unapologetically confessional rootage. But the challenge he poses still remains open to those who would unknowingly walk in his footsteps without taking a glance at the interconnected coordinates he set to map the way: What is the Bible ultimately about? What is the most adequate context for its study? Wherein lies the coherence under-girding the diversity of fields of research displayed and awkwardly correlated  at the Oxford Psalms conference? In other words, and I think this is the decisive question: what constitutes their unity? Can the answer to this question - regardless of where it falls on the ideological spectrum - be anything other than confessional?

My hope is that one day Childs will indeed get the credit he deserves. I do not hope this for his sake, however, but for the sake of Biblical interpretation, which is for the sake of the interpretive community, whether Jewish, Christian, or secular.

Why was the early church persecuted?

I'm off to Holland for a few days. Before I drive off, here's an interesting excerpt from N.T. Wright's The New Testament and the People of God. I have certain theological issues with Wright's approach to Biblical exegesis (e.g. I don't think "worldview" = "theology" - I find that rather "anthropocentric", and I disagree with his the way he appropriates both the Old and the New Testaments for the contemporary church), but the guy's a stellar historian and eloquent to match. The following is interesting food for thought:

But why was the early church persecuted? Why is any group persecuted? We have already looked at the pagan persecutions, and the answer at first sight is various: because Nero wanted a scapegoat; because the Christians were suspected of secret vice; because they were atheists; because they would not do the required homage to the emperor. All of these make sense, and are clearly part of the sufficient condition for persecution in each instance; but they do not quite explain the regularity of the persecution, nor the apparent frequency of people, not themselves in authority, informing against Christians. Lots of cults in the empire practised vice, whether secretly or openly; plenty of people had eccentric theological views; some, like Cynic philosophers, made light of their obligations to the authorities. The Christians came into all of those categories in the popular mind, but none of them is big enough to do justice to the evidence.

What we seem to be faced with is the existence of a community which was perceived to be subverting the normal social and cultural life of the empire precisely by its quasi-familial, quasi-ethnic life as a community. Evidence of similar phenomena abounds in our own time. A member of a tight-knit Roman Catholic community in rural Quebec becomes a Baptist; his house is burned down, he has to flee the village, and the police do nothing. A Protestant pastor in Northern Ireland makes a gesture of reconciliation, on Christmas Day, towards the Roman Catholic priest on the other side of the square; he receives death threats, at the communion rail, from senior members of his own congregation. A Muslim boy in the occupied West Bank, cared for in a Christian hospital, converts, and is unable to return to his family because they will kill him. A Jewish woman is told that if she becomes a Christian her right to live in Israel will be called into question. When communities react like this, it can only be because they feel that their very foundations are being shaken. Mere belief—acceptance of certain propositional statements—is not enough to elicit such violence. People believe all sorts of odd things and are tolerated. When, however, belief is regarded as an index of subversion, everything changes. The fact of widespread persecution, regarded by both pagans and Christians as the normal state of affairs within a century of the beginnings of Christianity, is powerful evidence of the sort of thing that Christianity was, and was perceived to be. It was a new family, a ‘third race’, neither Jew nor Gentile but ‘in Christ’. Its very existence threatened the foundational assumptions of pagan society. In Crossan’s happy phrase, apropos Matthew’s story that Pilate’s wife had troubled dreams on the night of Jesus’ trial,

That never happened, of course, but it was true nonetheless. It was a most propitious time for the Roman Empire to start having nightmares.

But why did Jews persecute Christians? Were they not both in the same boat—branded as atheists, regarded as the scum of the earth, scorned when doing badly and resented when doing well? The answer here clearly lies in the ferocity of polemic between different pressure-groups, parties and/or sects within the same parent body. Sibling rivalry is fiercest when the siblings have an inheritance to share, or when one feels that another is ruining the chances of any of them inheriting it at all. Reading between Paul’s lines, that seems to have been what was going on in his case at least. The Pharisees’ programme of Torah-intensification was radically questioned by the Christian movement, not because they threw open their doors to Gentiles (lots of Jews ate with Gentiles; there was, as we saw in chapter 8, something of a regular sliding scale of assimilation, and so far as we know the Pharisees did not use violence to curb it), but because they claimed that precisely in doing so they were celebrating the fulfilment of Israel’s long-cherished hopes. This has a direct analogue in Paul’s surely deliberate irony in 1 Corinthians 7:19: neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything, since what matters is keeping the god-given commandments, of which of course circumcision is one. There are some things that can only be expressed through such irony and apparent contradiction, and I suspect that the early Christian claim is one of them: the claim, that is, to be acting in accordance with the whole divine purpose for Israel, precisely in dismantling those aspects of traditional praxis, and in disregarding those traditional symbols, by which for centuries Jews had ordered their lives.

Here we reach the heart of it. What evokes persecution is precisely that which challenges a worldview, that which up-ends a symbolic universe. It is somewhat threatening to other first-century Jews to regard your community as the true Temple, and perhaps it is just as well to keep such ideas within the walls of an enclosed community in the desert; but since the belief, as held in Qumran, involves an intensification of Torah, the vicarious purification of the Land, the fierce defence of the race, and the dream of an eventually rebuilt and purified physical Temple in Jerusalem itself, one can imagine Pharisees debating it vigorously but not seeking authority from the chief priests to exterminate it. It embodied, after all, too many of the central worldview-features. The equivalent belief as held within Christianity seems to have had no such redeeming features. No new Temple would replace Herod’s, since the real and final replacement was Jesus and his people. No intensified Torah would define this community, since its sole definition was its Jesus-belief. No Land claimed its allegiance, and no Holy City could function for it as Jerusalem did for mainline Jews; Land had now been transposed into World, and the Holy City was the new Jerusalem, which, as some Jewish apocalyptic writers had envisaged, would appear, like the horses and chariots of fire around Elisha, becoming true on earth as it was in heaven. Racial identity was irrelevant; the story of this new community was traced back to Adam, not just to Abraham, and a memory was preserved of Jesus’ forerunner declaring that Israel’s god could raise up children for Abraham from the very stones. Once we understand how worldviews function, we can see that the Jewish neighbours of early Christians must have regarded them, not as a lover of Monet regards a lover of Picasso, but as a lover of painting regards one who deliberately sets fire to art galleries—and who claims to do so in the service of Art.

I therefore suggest that the beginning of the break between mainline Judaism and nascent Christianity came not with AD 70, not with some shakily reconstructed decree promulgated by the historically dubious ‘Council of Jamnia’, but with the very early days in which a young Pharisee named Saul believed it his divine calling to obtain authority to attack and harry the little sect. Analogies within the Jewish world suggest that this pattern is correct. The deep divisions between the Essenes and the Hasmoneans on the one hand, and the Pharisees on the other, emerge bit by bit in the Essene writings, and yet the actual splits which produced them clearly occurred at specific times which considerably antedate those writings. So, too, the even deeper division between those who claimed to be the heirs of the scriptural promises on the basis of Temple, Land, Torah and race, and those who claimed the same thing on the basis of Jesus and his spirit, goes back behind any writings or decrees which we possess or can guess at, to the moment when some hitherto frightened and puzzled Jews came to the conclusion that Israel’s hope, the resurrection from the dead, the return from exile, the forgiveness of sins, had all come true in a rush in Jesus, who had been crucified. This, it should be noted carefully within present debate, does not make Christianity anti-Jewish, any more than the Essenes, the Pharisees, or any other sect or group, were anti-Jewish.

The church, then, lived under pressure from the very first. It is perhaps this, as much as anything else, which kept it united when so many other pressures might have driven it towards division.

Wright, N. T. (1992). The New Testament and the People of God (449–452). London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.

Historical criticism and theological reality: a case study

In light of the recent debates on the relation of faith and critical Biblical scholarship (see espeically the long dialogues on John Hobbins' blog here, as well as on mine here), I thought I'd provide an exegetical example for how it is possible to be one - critical (in the sense of "analytical" and not "cynical") - as well as the other - religiously committed (in the sense of subscribing to the basic theological truth claims of the Bible). Whether the result is successful or not I leave for you to judge. I don't want to claim that the relation is easy (contra this simplistic view)[*], but I do claim that with humility and the capacity to "eschatologically" suspend one's judgement ("one day this will come together - at some level, somehow"), the dialectic between reason and revelation can be fruitful.

My case study is Childs' analysis of the plague traditions in Exodus. I've already given a detailed overview of the "kerygmatic" nature of these traditions here. Today I focus on the question of the theological reality lying behind these witnesses (a question systematically ignored in Biblical studies as being, somehow, and yet inconceivably to me, "irrelevant").

Childs holds that the literary sources in Exodus grew out of a response to a prior tradition which was religiously authoritative for them. Exegetically more significant, however, is the question of the nature of this response. Childs holds that they are a theological response to a theological problem present within that ancient tradition.

For example, Childs notes the presence of a “strange atmosphere” of “historical distance” that pervades the combined testimony of the final edited form of the text.¹ His search for the original Sitz im Leben of these traditions has led him through the history of transmission to “a primary, non-derivable stage.” There is, prior to the construals of J, P, and E (etc.), a level of tradition in which Moses is universally seen to be a man “possessed of power to perform miracles.” Yet, despite this power, he was unable to force the king of Egypt to release the Israelites.

In fact, this fundamental failure of the miracles to subdue Pharaoh accounts for the variety of reflections which sought an explanation. Pharaoh's heart was hardened; Pharaoh continued to renege on his promise; the magicians used magic to copy Moses. Only in the plague stories was a tradition retained in which such great miracles, constantly repeated, continued to fail. The fact that ultimately plague X did not accomplish its end, did not remove the difficulty of the earlier one, nor explain the failure.²

Childs concludes:

the sense of the mystery of Pharaoh's resistance lies at the root of the tradition. Now it is apparent that the essential problem with which we began is not ultimately form-critical in nature, but profoundly theological. The interpreter is still faced with the task of penetrating the mystery of God's power before human pride.³

Indeed, within the body of the commentary itself (i.e. interpretation of the final form rather than the prolegomena of form and literary criticism), Childs notes that despite the presence of different sources, in the final form there is no real tension.

Rather, they contribute to the richness of the narrative and vary the pattern of the series to prevent the threat of monotony in recounting the long series. Because the concessions reach an impasse, in the final analysis there is no real conflict in terms of content between the ... approaches to Pharaoh's resistance.⁴

What Childs has done here isn't in itself full-blown theological exegesis (which, given that the Bible is theological, is the most legitimate form of exegesis). That comes when one starts to think about the nature of the historical experience, and the nature of the responses to that experience. As I showed in my last post, a significant element of that response was the canonical shaping of Scripture itself. We thus move from "diachronic" to "synchronic" yet all the while with an eye to that one reality that (who) evoked the tradition, the source, the redaction, the interpretation in the first place.

What is the content of the Bible and how can we perceive it? Does a commitment to a dichotomy between faith and reason, the latter being compartmented to the sphere of private piety, really help us to understand the Bible itself? I think Hendel's claims will result in a methodological and thus exegetical catastrophe of the first order.

[*] "Der Konflikt von persönlichem Glauben und kritischer Bibelwissenschaft ist nichts Ungewöhnliches. Er tritt meist schon im Studium und bevorzugt bei Studenten mit pietistischem Hintergrund auf, die allerdings bald ergreifen, dass nicht die Geschichte den Glauben, sondern der Glaube Geschichte macht." (p. 45). [for translation see comments]Wie bitte? Is this supposed self-evident? The fact that it contradicts 2000 years of Jewish and Christian theology and the very substance of the Bible itself would imply that this is at best a personal decision on the part of the author. And as far as conservative students are concerned, I don't have the statistics but I can tell you that a large number don't simply "get" this "fact," they lose their faith altogether and leave the church (or stay in the church but abandon the creed to become sociologists of religion, cultural analysts, or social workers).

1Childs, Exodus, 142.

2Childs, Exodus, 149.

3Childs, Exodus, 149.

4Childs, Exodus, 155. Emphasis mine.

Theology, science, and Hendel

A lengthy discussion has ensued from my post responding to Hendel's recent critique of SBL. To put it starkly: I'm claiming that Hendel wishes to impose a particular theological dogma as a norm for determining who may legitimately read the Bible. This is a faith decision. There's nothing wrong with this per se - confessional schools do it as a matter of course, including, ironically, those institutions which gave birth to and still nourish critical Biblical study: the German theological faculties (see this fascinating article on the legal status of Gerd Lüdemann).

I'm grateful to Michael and Kyle, two valuable interlocuters who sit on opposite sides of the fence on this issue. Kyle has shared a link to an interesting article that might put Hendel's comments into perspective: "What Has Theology Ever Done for Science?" According to the author, the answer is "quite a lot." Of particular interest to me is the way that the actual content of our theology can effect the scientific enterprise, for better or worse.

I'd like to emphasize once again that I affirm the existence of an empirically reality that can be comprehended by reason and which can constrain our interpretations in a limited number of directions. Contrary to the author of the article above, however, I do no think that this necessarily contradicts "postmodernism" - though it does depend whose postmodernism we are talking about (for my interaction with an inadequate variety, see my posts on Walter Brueggemann). A very helpful take on this is James K.A. Smiths' The Fall of Interpretation . I quoted this book precisely on the issue of subjectivity and objective reality in my post Postmodernists believe in objective reality too! (Smith, by the way, also happens to author an excellent blog).

Doing exegetical justice to Israel's view of history

Brevard Childs claims that the Biblical view of history is constituted by a dialectical tension between empirical history and God's unique action in history (see my post The dialectical nature of Biblical history for details). Once this is recognized, what are the implications for exegesis? In his Biblical Theology (pp. 100-101), Childs suggests the following four avenues:

1. Israel's history reflects both an inner and an outer dimension, i.e. there is both confessional witness and common public testimony. The contrast lies in viewing history from Israel's confessional stance, from within a community of faith, rather than from a neutral, phenomenological reconstruction. Nevertheless, the relation between the two is subtle, as neither perspective functions as a hermetically sealed system which functions in absolute independence from the other. The theological challenge is to exegete the passages in such a way as “to avoid rationalistic assumptions of a common reality behind all religious expression or the threat of super-naturalism which would deny in principle any relation between an outer and inner side of historical events.”

2. Israel's history involves both divine and human agency. The biblical witness to divine intervention in time and space is threatened if a historical methodology interprets such formulations as merely literary conventions which must be made to conform to the general laws of historical causality. However, the Bible reflects a great variety of relationships between the human and divine which spans a spectrum from closest interaction to harshest discontinuity. The exegetical challenge is "to do justice to the different dimensions of textual intensity (Dichtigkeitsgrad) without being trapped into rigid philosophical systems of historical causality."

3. Israel's history is construed within the Old Testament as oscillating between the past, present and future. The methodological challenge is to avoid a theological move “which would objectify Israel's history into a separate sphere of Heilsgeschichte which functions independently of all common experience. Conversely it is not helpful to flatten Israel's special historical experiences into general chronological patterns which have been reconstituted from extra biblical sources.”

4. Israel's history is depicted within the Old Testament in terms of foreground and background, i.e. there is conscious selection. One must learn to do justice to to Israel's peculiar assigning of significance to certain events and situations while denigrating others. The challenge is to avoid the arrogance of correcting Israel's judgement on the assumption of modern critical superiority while maintaining a sophisticated historical sensitivity which can "adjudicate the just claims arising from two sides of this genuine dialectical tension."

Childs on the "dialectical" nature of the Biblical view of history

In his overview of the Christian exegetical tradition, Brevard Childs notes that an intense interest in the nature of history has been an enduring characteristic of the Christian interpretation of the Bible from its inception (2004:317). This is hardly surprising when one considers the central role of historical events in both biblical testaments (see Childs' comments here). How, then, does the Bible itself present history?

Childs claims that a tension is expressed between ordinary and divine events, between an "inner" and "outer" dimension, or between a "confessional" and "secular" perception. According to Childs, within the Bible the relation between these two dimensions of history is “dialectical”, summarized as the tension between empirical history and God's unique action in history. The dialectic is such that the two dimensions cannot be fused, and yet they cannot be separated either. It is thus appropriate that throughout its exegetical history the Church has, on the one hand, committed itself to both dimensions of this reality, yet on the other hand, she has never reached a consensus on the relation of the two. The problem this tension posed for the Church was exacerbated with the advent of the Enlightenment, which fundamentally questioned the directness of the relation between textual account and historical event.

Childs is critical of both Conservative and Liberal reactions to this problem. For Childs, the Conservative position is historically untenable and blunts theological issues, whereas the Liberals are forced to adopt some form of a philosophical system, such as idealism, existentialism, or social functionalism, in order to escape radical religious relativism. In light of this quandary, Childs has attempted to provide a new approach which attempts

to do justice to the theological integrity of Israel's witness while at the same time freely acknowledging the complexities of human knowledge and the serious challenge of modernity to any claims of divine revelation (Biblical Theology, 99).

I will summarize his proposal in my next post.

Beauty and the Piss Christ.

A friend of mine here in Bonn organized an informal salon last weekend on the topic of "beauty." Various people get together and make various cultural contributions. I didn't have time to think up anything myself, so I simply did a German translation of a wonderful post that Ben Myers wrote a while back entitled Desire and Beauty: An Augustinian Anecdote. Interestingly enough, somebody else brought along a picture of Serrano's (in)famous Piss Christ, which Jason Goroncy also posted on a while back. It seems to me that on the surface these two posts diametrically contradict each other. Augustine talks of God as beauty itself, the actual substance of the form of beauty that we see in created things. Regardless of what we think, God is ultimately the real reason why we yearn for beauty in the first place. Serrano goes on to visually present precisely this God - and yet this image is in fact the opposite of what any healthy individual would consider to be "beautiful": a corpse, tortured to death, soaked in human fluid. How do I synthesize that? This is my own inadequate attempt - please help me to fill in the gaps:

The God that Augstine describes - beauty itself - never, in fact, enters into one-to-one unmediated relation to humanity. The basic Biblical metaphor for the relation between God and man is not a disembodied, formless, spiritual experience, but the Garden of Eden. This image brackets the Two Testaments like an inclusio and it pops up repeatedly and in various permutations throughout the rest of Scripture too. Whatever it means to enter into relation with God, it is always presented as a relationship with God the Creator. How does the Nicene Creed begin and end?

We believe in one God,

the Father, the Almighty,

maker of heaven and earth,

of all that is, seen and unseen.

...

We look for the resurrection of the dead,

and the life of the world to come. Amen.

However we conceive of God, then - Augustine's beauty itself - it can only be done within the context of the totality of God's good creation: interpersonal relationships, delicious smells, and spiritual fulfilment and all. The God who meets us in created forms is not a substance that supersedes the form, it is a substance that fills the form and thus redeems it (I think Ben's anecdote illustrates this wonderfully). We can rightly consider beauty in this world as a foretaste of what God has in store for us, his Kingdom, and a "post-taste" of something that once was but was lost (cf. Ps 24).

What does this have to do with the Piss Christ? This is something I'm still struggling to comprehend, as until now I've been used to thinking of the crucifixion in juridical rather than ontological categories. It has something to do with God's way of "filling the forms" ... God so loved this world, this cosmos, that he entered its deepest chambers in order to exhaust their darkness and bring light ... . As long as we live this side of the consummation, we have to train our vision to be able to see God everywhere, even in that place where God the Son cried "Why have you forsaken me?"

I can't wait until the day when form and content become truly co-extensive, the day when - as the poem on Jason's post puts it - there will no longer be such a thing as "useless beauty."

Update: Jason Goroncy has given a helpful response to my post in the comments section of his original post, which you can read here. I've taken the liberty of reposting his response in the comments to this post. He basically affirms my point and enriches it by drawing on a paper by Trevor Hart entitled "Ugly as Sin? Beauty, Holiness, and the Crucified." Well worth a read.

The religious significance of ethnic Israel and the canonical shape of Esther

In response to my recent post on Biblical scholarship and the State of Israel, a friend has highlighted the complexity involved in claiming theological continuity between Biblical Israel and the modern Jewish people. The term itself is ambiguous in the Old Testament. As he says:

What does the OT mean by the moniker 'Israel' in any case? Sometimes it's the North only, other times it's both North and South, and at times it's only the South. And then of course at numerous times it is commodius, and includes people entirely outside the North and South altogether, as in the 'sojourner'. On this last example, there is the matter of the 'catholicity' of Israel, and thus the inclusion of those who are not 'Israelite' but who are part of 'Israel' nonetheless by association (similar to the status of the others on the ark as "saved" because they were "with" Noah, or those whose blessing depends on their standing relative to Abraham)

His conclusion is that "to be 'Israel', canonically defined, was never only or even primarily about physical lineage, but by participation and association."

I don't feel adequate right now to fully stake a position on this issue. I'll just cite one of the starkest quotes on the issue that I am aware of by Brevard Childs, a scholar who has deeply impacted my way of understanding the Bible. The context is a conclusion concerning the theological implications of the canonical shape of Esther:

Perhaps the basic theological issue at stake in this disagreement has been more clearly formulated by R. Gordis: 'It is fundamental to the Jewish world-outlook that the preservation of the Jewish people is itself a religious obligation of the first magnitude' (Megillat, 13). In my judgment, Gordis' assertion holds true for Christian theology if kept within the critical guidelines which have been fixed by the canonical context of Esther.

On the one hand, the book of Esther provides the strongest canonical warrant in the whole Old Testament for the religious significance of the Jewish people in an ethnic sense. The inclusion of Esther within the Christian canon serves as a check against all attempts to spiritualize the concept of Israel - usually by misinterpreting Paul - and thus removing the ultimate scandal of biblical particularity. On the other hand, the canonical shape of of Esther has built into the fabric of the book a theological criticism of all forms of Jewish nationalism which occurs whenever 'Jewishness' is divorced from the sacred traditions which constitute the grounds of Israel's existence under God (Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture, 606-607).