Month: July 2005

I recently finished C.S. Lewis’ Reflections on the Psalms, and he had some things to say on the question of Scripture’s inspiration as well as the realtionship between the OT and the NT that I thought were blog-worthy.

In chapter 10 Lewis takes up the question of “second meanings.” How is that the church can read the Psalms as being about Christ when it seems clear that this is not how the Psalmist(s) would’ve intended them? For instance, from Psalm 8 we read:

What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him?

For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour.

Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under his feet. (verses 4-6)

On its face this is talking about “man” in general – i.e. humankind.

But in the Letter to the Hebrews we get this:

For unto the angels hath he not put in subjection the world to come, whereof we speak.

But one in a certain place testified, saying, What is man, that thou art mindful of him? or the son of man that thou visitest him?

Thou madest him a little lower than the angels; thou crownedst him with glory and honour, and didst set him over the works of thy hands:

Thou hast put all things in subjection under his feet. For in that he put all in subjection under him, he left nothing that is not put under him. But now we see not yet all things put under him.

But we see Jesus, who was made a little lower than the angels for the suffering of death, crowned with glory and honour; that he by the grace of God should taste death for every man. (2:6-10)

And again in First Corinthians:

But now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the firstfruits of them that slept.

For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead.

For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.

But every man in his own order: Christ the firstfruits; afterward they that are Christ’s at his coming.

Then cometh the end, when he shall have delivered up the kingdom to God, even the Father; when he shall have put down all rule and all authority and power.

For he must reign, till he hath put all enemies under his feet.

The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.

For he hath put all things under his feet. But when he saith all things are put under him, it is manifest that he is excepted, which did put all things under him.

And when all things shall be subdued unto him, then shall the Son also himself be subject unto him that put all things under him, that God may be all in all. (15:20-28)

This suggests that a “Christological” interpretation of this Psalm was common in the early church. And the numerous other allusions to and quotations from the Psalms in the NT indicate that reading the Psalms Christologically was widespread. And, of course, the Psalms became the basis for the daily prayer of the church as we find it in the services of the Divine Office (continuing a tradition inherited from Judaism). And if the NT can be trusted, the Lord himself quoted from the Psalter at key points in his ministry, implicitly identifying himself with the Psalmist (e.g. Ps. 22).

The question Lewis asks is this: is the church, in interpreting the Psalms (and other parts of the OT) this way, foisting an alien interpretation on them? Or is there a deeper logic at work?

Now, the old style of exegesis might have said that the Psalmist or Isaiah, or whoever was consciously referring to Christ (or at least the Messiah) and so it is in no way foreign to the material to see them as pointing to Jesus Christ. However much that may be true of some of the more explicitly “messianic” material, it pretty clearly doesn’t apply to everything the church has read Christologically (such as Psalm 8).

Lewis thinks there is a sense in which we can say that we are reading these texts rightly when we give them a Christological spin, and this leads into a discussion of his views on the inspiration of scripture.

He distinguishes his view from the liberal/modernist view that sees Scripture as merely a collection of writings reflecting human religious experience and the fundamentalist view that the Bible is inerrant in every detail. He points out that he has been accused of being a fundamentalist because critics suppose that the only way he could believe in the miraculous events recounted in the Bible would be if he had an a priori commitment to its inerrancy. But the real reason he doesn’t discount stories of the miraculous automatically is because he sees no philosophical grounds for doing so. The historical reliability of a given narrative has to be determined on other grounds.

Lewis is quite content to admit, for instance, that the Genesis creation story is a “myth” in the sense that it is an imaginative recounting of events and realities that are ineffable, or at least that were unobserved by any human being. He quotes St. Jerome as saying that Moses told the story of Creation “in the manner of a popular poet.” He even happily concedes that the creation story in Genesis incorporated elements from the myths of surrounding cultures.

The key difference, for Lewis, is that these human “raw materials” were “taken up” into a whole whose composition was in some way guided by God’s Spirit:

Thus at every step in what is called–a little misleadingly–the “evolution” of a story, a man, all he is and all his attitudes, are involved. And no good work is done anywhere without aid from the Father of Lights. When a series of such re-tellings turns a creation story which at first had almost no religious or metaphysical significance into a story which acheives the idea of true Creation and of a transcendent Creator (as Genesis does), then nothing will make me believe that some of the re-tellers, or some one of them, has not been guided by God.

Thus something originally merely natural–the kind of myth that is found among most nations–will have been raised by God above itself, qualified by Him and compelled by Him to serve purposes which of itself it would not have served. Generalising this, I take it that the whole Old Testament consists of the same sort of material as any other literature–chronicle (some of it obviously pretty accurate), poems, moral and political diatribes, romances, and what not; but all taken into the service of God’s word. Not all, I suppose, in the same way. There are prophets who write with the clearest awareness that Divine compulsion is upon them. There are chroniclers whose intention may have been merely to record. There are poets like those in the Song of Songs who probably never dreamed of any but a secular and natural purpose in what they composed. There is (and it is no less important) the work first of the Jewish and then of the Christian Church in preserving and canonising just these books. There is the work of redactors and editors in modifying them. On all these I suppose a Divine pressure; of which not by any means all need have been conscious.

The human qualities of the raw materials show through. Naivety, error, contradiction, even (as in the cursing Psalms) wickedness are not removed. The total result is not “the Word of God” in the sense that every passage, in itself, gives impeccable science or history. It carries the Word of God; and we (under grace, with attention to tradition and to interpreters wiser than ourselves, and with the use of such intelligence and learning as we may have) receive the word from it not by using it as an encyclopedia or an encyclical but by steeping ourselves in its tone or temper adn so learning its overall message. (pp. 110-112, 1958 Harcourt Brace edition)

From this Lewis concludes that we can’t rule out multiple meanings to the texts since behind the process of their composition, editing, collection, and canonization there was another will and purpose.

If the Old Testament is a literature thus “taken up”, made the vehicle of what is more than human, we can of course set no limit to the weight or multiplicity of meanings which may have been laid upon it. If any writer may say more than he knows and mean more than he meant, then these writers will be especially likely to do so. And not by accident. (p. 117)

And if, as Christians believe, the Psalter was not placed in the same book as the New Testament by accident, then it is certainly legitimate to read and pray the Psalms as pointing to Christ, even though the original authors wouldn’t have intended them that way.*
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*In his little book on the Psalms Dietrich Bonhoeffer reinforces the point. Bonhoeffer recommends that Christians pray the Psalms because they are both the word of man to God and the word of God to men. They teach us how to pray in the way God wants. Moreover, they are the prayers that Jesus himself prayed, and continues to pray. When we pray the Psalms, says Bonhoeffer, we are uniting our prayer to that of Christ himself:

“…it is a dangerous error, surely very widespread among Christians, to think that the heart can pray by itself. For then we confuse wishes, hopes, sighs, laments, rejoicings–all of which the heart can do by itself–with prayer. And we confuse earth and heaven, man and God. Prayer does not simply mean to pour out one’s heart. It means rather to find the way to God and to speak with him, whether the heart is full or empty. No man can do that by himself. For that he needs Jesus Christ….If he takes us with him in his prayer, if we are privileged to pray along with him, if he lets us accompany him on his way to God and teaches us to pray, then we are free from the agony of prayerlessness. …If we want to pray with confidence and gladness, then the words of Holy Scripture will have to be the solid basis of our prayer. For here we know that Jesus Christ, the Word of God, teaches us to pray. The words which come from God become, then, the steps on which we find our way to God.”

People are rightly horrified by the killing of an innocent man in the London subway who police mistook for a terrorist. The Philly Inquirer ran a heart-wrenching story today on the man – Jean Charles de Menezes, a Brazilian who came to Great Britain in search of a better life.

What I couldn’t help but think about though, is the thousands of other innocent people we’ve killed “inadvertantly” in the course of our “war on terror.” I put “inadvertantly” in scare quotes not because I think we intentionally kill innocent civilians, but because we knew beforehand that some number of innocents would be killed in the course of our campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. Reliable estimates are hard to come by, but one recent report put the civilian toll in Iraq around 25,000. Granted those are not all people directly killed by U.S. forces, but even one-third that number is a lot of Jean Charles de Menezeses.

Now, just war theory tells me that killing civilians may be permissible so long as it is not willed as an end or a means and the evil of those deaths is “outweighed” by the good that is accomplished. But how does one tally up the goods and evils here? How do we weigh those lives lost against the goods we may have accomplished – greater security for ourselves and others who might have been targeted by terrorism or freedom from the boot of Saddam’s tyranny for Iraqis. Even with the best of outcomes (one that is by no means assured) – a free and prosperous Iraq – how do we weigh that good against the evil that was caused as its necessary side-effect?

Trailer for Walk the Line (Johnny Cash biopic) online (via Amy Welborn). And is Phoenix doing his own singing? Sounds like it.

Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the entrance. So she came running to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one Jesus loved, and said, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we don’t know where they have put him!”

So Peter and the other disciple started for the tomb. Both were running, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. He bent over and looked in at the strips of linen lying there but did not go in. Then Simon Peter, who was behind him, arrived and went into the tomb. He saw the strips of linen lying there, as well as the burial cloth that had been around Jesus’ head. The cloth was folded up by itself, separate from the linen. Finally the other disciple, who had reached the tomb first, also went inside. He saw and believed. (They still did not understand from Scripture that Jesus had to rise from the dead.)

Then the disciples went back to their homes, but Mary stood outside the tomb crying. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb and saw two angels in white, seated where Jesus’ body had been, one at the head and the other at the foot.

They asked her, “Woman, why are you crying?”

“They have taken my Lord away,” she said, “and I don’t know where they have put him.” At this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not realize that it was Jesus.

“Woman,” he said, “why are you crying? Who is it you are looking for?” Thinking he was the gardener, she said, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will get him.”

Jesus said to her, “Mary.” She turned toward him and cried out in Aramaic, “Rabboni!” (which means Teacher).

Jesus said, “Do not hold on to me, for I have not yet returned to the Father. Go instead to my brothers and tell them, ‘I am returning to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’”

Mary Magdalene went to the disciples with the news: “I have seen the Lord!” And she told them that he had said these things to her. (John 20:1-18)

Continuing with my lazy-blogging, let me throw out another article written by someone else. This essay, by Croatian theologian Miroslav Volf analyzes the ecclesiology of 1 Peter in light of Ernst Troeltsch’s church/sect dichotomy which H. Richard Niebuhr picked up on in his Christ and Culture.

Volf thinks that Christians should not be countercultural per se – i.e. shouldn’t define themselves by what they’re against. Nor, however, should they uncritically accept the values of the social world they find themselves in. Rather, rooted in a specifically Christian identity, they will find various aspects of the surrounding culture acceptable or not as they critically sift through them.

The stress on Christian difference notwithstanding, the “world” does not seem a monolithic place in 1 Peter. We encounter evil people who persecute Christians and who will continue to do the same, blaspheming what is most holy to Christians (4:4,12). We come across ignorant and foolish people who will be silenced by Christian good behavior (2:15). We meet people who know what is wrong and what is right and are ready to relate to Christians accordingly (2:14). Finally, we encounter people who see, appreciate, and are finally won over to the Christian faith (2:12; 3:1). Thus, the picture is more complex than just the two extreme and contrary reactions. This testifies to a sensitivity in 1 Peter for the complexity of the social environment.

One of the really appealing things about this is that, according to Volf, our confidence in our identity in Christ is precisely what enables us to be humble in the face of those who are different rather than trying to dominate them.

It might be appropriate to call the missionary distance that 1 Peter stresses soft difference. I do not mean a weak difference, for in 1 Peter the difference is anything but weak. It is strong, but it is not hard. Fear for oneself and one’s identity creates hardness. The difference that joins itself with hardness always presents the other with a choice: either submit or be rejected, either “become like me or get away from me.” In the mission to the world, hard difference operates with open or hidden pressures, manipulation, and threats. A decision for a soft difference, on the other hand, presupposes a fearlessness which 1 Peter repeatedly encourages his readers to assume (3:14; 3:6). People who are secure in themselves-more accurately, who are secure in their God-are able to live the soft difference without fear. They have no need either to subordinate or damn others, but can allow others space to be themselves. For people who live the soft difference, mission fundamentally takes the form of witness and invitation. They seek to win others without pressure or manipulation, sometimes even “without a word” (3:1).

Found this essay at Harbinger.

ADDENDUM: This article from The Christian Century sheds some more light on where Volf is coming from, I think. He endorses, with some qualifications, the attempts of some conservative Christians to practice what he calls “selective separatism.”

Via Confessing Evangelical comes a discussion of The DaVinci Code and various pseudo-Christian neo-gnosticisms by N.T. Wright (go to page 22 of the PDF). Wright points out, among other things, that it was orthodoxy, not the privatized spirituality of the gnostics, that provided a challenge to the political status quo:

[T]he divinity of Jesus is already firmly predicated by Paul, within twenty or thirty years of Jesus’ death. John and Hebrews – and indeed Luke and Matthew, who are almost as explicit – are written by 90 or so at the latest, quite possibly much earlier. The idea that Jesus was ‘just a good man’ who ‘walked the earth and inspired millions to live better lives’ is a modern trivialization that, to do them justice, even the Nag Hammadi documents do not perpetrate.

In particular, the resurrection of Jesus was central to early Christianity; and his death was consequently interpreted, from extremely early in the movement, as (a) the fulfilment of the Jewish scriptures, (b) the defeat of all rival spiritual powers and (c) the means of forgiveness of sins. Early Christianity was not primarily a movement which showed, or taught, how one might live a better life; that came as the corollary of the main emphasis, which was that the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob had fulfilled his age-old purposes, had dealt with the powers of evil, and had launched his project of new creation upon the world. The early Christian gospel, which was then written up in the four canonical gospels, was the good news, not that a new teaching about hidden wisdom had appeared, enabling those who tapped into it to improve the quality of their lives here or even hereafter, but that something had happened through which the evil which had infected the world had been overthrown and a new creation launched, and that all human beings were invited to become part of that project by becoming renewed themselves.

In particular, this included from the start a strong political critique. Not the tired old left-wing harangue in Christian dress, of course, but a more subtle, more Jewish, more devastating critique: Jesus is Lord, therefore Caesar isn’t. That is there in Paul. It is there in Matthew. In John. In Revelation. That is why, from at least as early as the second century, the Roman empire was persecuting the people who were reading Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul and the rest – not, we note, the people who were reading ‘Thomas’, ‘Philip’ and the other Nag Hammadi codices. Why would Caesar worry about people rearranging their private spiritualities?

[…]

One of the basic fault lines in the contemporary western world is the line, which does not coincide with the huge left-right polarisation in America or its equivalents in Britain and Europe, between neo-gnosticism on the one hand and the challenge of Jesus on the other. Neognosticism (‘search deep inside yourself and you’ll discover some exciting things, and the only real moral imperative is that you should then be true to what you find’) is not a religion of redemption. It appeals to both the pride that says ‘I’m really quite an exciting person, whatever I may look like outwardly’ – the theme of half the cheap movies and novels in today’s world – and to the stimulus of ever-deeper navel-gazing (‘finding out who I really am’). The challenge of Jesus, in the twenty-first century as in the first, is that we should look away from ourselves and get on board with the project the one true God launched at creation and re-launched with Jesus himself. The gospel demands that we submit to Jesus as Lord and allow all other allegiances, loves and selfdiscoveries to be realigned in that light.

God’s project, and God’s gospel, are rooted in solid history as opposed to gnostic fantasy and its modern equivalents. Genuine Christianity is to be expressed in self-giving love and radical holiness, not self-cossetting self-discovery. And it lives by, and looks for the completion of, the new world in which all knees will bow at the name of Jesus; not because he had a secret love-child, not because he was a teacher of recondite wisdom, not because he showed us how we could get in touch with the hidden feminine, but because he died as the fulfilment of the scriptural story of God’s people and rose as the fulfilment of the world-redeeming purposes of the same creator God. If there is any Holy Grail hidden in Durham, it might be the memorials to Lightfoot and Westcott, who gave us a century ago the solid scholarship upon which a robust and refreshing view of Christian origins can still be founded.

Since I criticized Joseph Bottum’s article on the “new fusionism,” it seems only fair to note that he has a really good article on capital punishment in this month’s FT. (Not that Mr. Bottum was losing sleep over criticisms from these parts!)

The Christian Century on Joel Osteen.

It’s actually a pretty balanced article giving Osteen credit for having a multi-racial ministry for one thing. It also points out that the “prosperity” gospel isn’t necessarily as far from the Christian mainstream as one might think:

In some ways Osteen echoes an ancient and venerable Christian tradition that borrows from Aristotle in calling itself “eudaemonistic.” That is, Christianity offers the happiest life possible. The church fathers and medieval thinkers who picked up this philosophical tradition did have ample biblical material with which to integrate it. “Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart,” the psalmist promises. “Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you,” Jesus says. What Christian could fail to agree that our faith claims to offer the fullest life of joy and abundance possible?

Though the author points out that Scripture has a decisively less rosy take on wealth to say the least.

Plus, there are other serious theological deficiencies in Osteen’s preaching, the writer thinks:

Osteen’s version of the gospel is full of “ifs.” If we enlarge our vision, if we choose to be happy, if we think thoughts and speak words of victory and blessing, if we give of ourselves abundantly—then God will bless us with everything we want. The conditional nature of these sentences is telling. This is not a gospel of grace, in which God acts in spite of our lack of faithfulness to redirect our wants. Instead this is a gospel of reward in which God does nothing until we get our act together. In traditional Christian theology, Protestant and Catholic alike, we can do nothing in and of ourselves to merit God’s favor. Rather, God comes to us in Christ when we are without merit, without ability to please God and without reason to think we can be saved or helped. Such a view of grace is surely part of the grumpy theology Osteen seeks to upend—but it is central to Christianity.

More here.

Since Alberto Gonzales does not have a public record of opposing Roe v. Wade or being otherwise pro-life, some media outlets seem to have dubbed him a “moderate” choice for the Supreme Court.

Gene Healy explains why you should be troubled by a Gonzales nomination whatever your stance on abortion (via Unqualified Offerings).

I ranted a bit about Gonzales here.