The Glory of Kings: A Festschrift for James B. Jordan

Fyodor Dostoevsky
(Christian Encounters Series)

Athanasius
(Foundations of Theological Exegesis and Christian Spirituality)

The Four: A Survey of the Gospels

Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom

From Behind the Veil: The Epistles of John

Deep Exegesis:The Mystery of Reading Scripture

Jane Austen
(A Biography)

Solomon Among the Postmoderns

The Baptized Body

1 & 2 Kings
Brazos Theological Commentary

The Promise Of His Appearing: An Exposition Of Second Peter

A Great Mystery: Fourteen Wedding Sermons

Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, And Hope In Western Literature

Miniatures & Morals: The Christian Novels of Jane Austen

The Priesthood of the Plebs: A Theology of Baptism

A Son To Me: An Exposition of 1 & 2 Samuel

Against Christianity

From Silence to Song: The Davidic Liturgical Revolution

Ascent to Love: A Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy

Blessed Are the Hungry: Meditations on the Lord's Supper

A House For My Name: A Survey of the Old Testament

Heroes of the City of Man: A Christian Guide to Select Ancient Literature

Brightest Heaven of Invention: A Christian Guide To Six Shakespeare Plays

Wise Words: Family Stories That Bring the Proverbs to Life

The Kingdom and the Power: Rediscovering the Centrality of the Church

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Bible: What’s Israel For?

Van Leeuwen offers this superb description of the purpose of Israel among the nations: “In the life, society, state and culture of Israel the Lord the Creator is active in carrying out his purposes.  The religious ideas, the mythology, cult and ritual, the social and legal traditions, yes, and even the political structure of the Gentile peoples are incorporated into the life of Israel. The promised land lies right at the centre of the ‘sphere of influence’ of the ancient civilizations; and Israel’s history unfolds itself amidst the history of the neighbouring great powers.  In this special situation Israel is called to be a light to the nations and the salt of the earth: she is to be the paradigm of God’s creation. . . .

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Bible: Ends of the land

In his brilliant Christianity and World History, Arend Th. van Leeuwen argues that the phrase “ends of the earth” as a description of the GEntile lands alludes to the land/sea distinction of the original creation, and also that it puts the Gentiles in the position of being the “frontier” or “borderland” of Israel, the land ruled from Zion.  ”Ends of the land” is probably a better translations.

He spells out some of the implications: “Were the Gentiles to be abandoned to their own myth and to their own fate and regarded from the viewpoint of their own religion, they would constitute no part of God’s creation; they would stand outside, a total negation. That however is not, and never has been, the case.  They are not abandoned to their myth or their fate, but are involved from the outset in God’s mighty acts of creation; they belong to the earth which the Lord has rescued out of the primeval ocean; they are ‘the ends’ toward which God’s purpose is direct, the ultimate reason for the world which he has begun on his mountain of Zion, centre of the earth.”

Bible Theology - Ecclesiology: Thomas, Democrat

Twice in the opening question of the Summa, Thomas justifies some institution or practice in the church with a reference to the need for saving truth to be communicated to the uneducated many.

Are sacred doctrine, and revelation, necessary?  Yes, and partly because “the truth of God such as reason could discover would be known by a few,” an elite with the leisure and training to pursue philosophical contemplation.

Should Scripture use metaphors?  Yes, Thomas answers, and partly so that “even the simple who are unable by themselves to grasp intellectual things may be able to understand it.”

Two reflections: First, this ain’t Aristotelian.  Second, Thomas, an advocate for the plebs!

Bible: First the flood

First comes the flood, wiping away the world that then was. Then God calls Abram from the nations, inserting Himself into the world through His chosen.

First comes the flood of Babylonians, wiping out the temple.  Then Yahweh sends Israel out into the nations, inserting Himself into the world through His chosen people.

First comes the flood of Romans, wiping out Herod’s temple and demolishing Jerusalem.  Then Yahweh scatters His people to the four winds blown by the wind of His Spirit.

Bible Bible - NT - Timothy: God-breathed

Craig Allert’s A High View of Scripture? The Authority of the Bible and the Formation of the New Testament Canon (Evangelical Ressourcement: Ancient Sources for the Church’s Future) is mostly about the implications of the history of canon-formation for our understanding of what the Bible is, our understanding of canon and inspiration.  Much of the book is a historical review of the process of the formation of the NT, but toward the end he addresses the question of inspiration directly.  He focuses attention on 2 Timothy 3 in an effort to discover what the Bible itself says about inspiration.

He spends  several pages, for instance, discussing the meaning of the hapax theopneustos.  It is not a strong performance.

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Bible: Good and Necessary Consequences

As the subtitle suggests, Carlos Bovell’s By Good and Necessary Consequence: A Preliminary Genealogy of Biblicist Foundationalism is a genealogical critique of what he calls biblicist foundationalism, defined as “the decision to restrict confessional theology to the deduction of good and necessary consequences from express biblical statements.”  The book is largely an examination of how deduction and “axiomaticism” worked in ancient and medieval philosophy, in order to show that the Reformed notion of deduction “is not at all commensurate with the classical invention and subsequent philosophical appropriations of axiomatic and deductive methodologies, not to mention contemporary estimations of axiomatic procedure.”  It is “a historically-conditioned innovation that was naturally elicited from Protestants by the prevailing intellectual milieu of the seventeenth century.”

Reformed Protestants adopted this deductive foundationalism in reaction to widespread skepticism and “to shore up Reformed versions of the Christian faith against the triple threats of Catholicism, religious enthusiasts, and the rational and literary skeptics.”  It was a theological appropriation of Cartesian method.  The resulting epistemological turn in theology does not represent “an inherently Christian (or even biblical) preoccupation with epistemic justification.”

There’s a good bit to admire and affirm in this dense and carefully argued book.  I have some objections, though.

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Bible: Because it’s the Bible

Peter James, et. al., (Centuries of Darkness: A Challenge to the Chronology of Old World Archaeology) are no fans of the “devout breed of archaeologist happy to dig with a trowel in one hand and a Bible in the other.”  At the same time, they are critical of the knee-jerk skepticism about biblical dates that “can be as blind as faith itself.”

They note that since Darwin “biblical texts have been subjected to the most painstaking scrutiny and dissection using the tools of literary criticism.  The dates the Old Testament gives, even those for historical periods which are potentially useful to archaeology, have been altered, mangled, or rejected in an arbitrary fashion.”

Why? They have a theory: “It seems that the Bible has suffered from this kind of hypercritical treatment simply because it is the Bible.”

Bible: History to Tradition

Forty years ago, Donovan Courville (Exodus Problem and Its Ramifications (2 Volume Set)) concisely summarized the slide of biblical scholarship from treating the Bible as history to treating it as a collection of “traditions” with an ever-diminishing historical core.  Chronology was a central issue in this development:

“If . . . we had been led to an internally consistent picture of the history of the ancient world aside from the details provided by Scripture, there would be some basis for regarding this theory as having some degree of factual basis.  One could then disregard the details of Scripture that demand a dire crisis in Egypt at the time of the Exodus and bypass such details as the nature and significance of the plagues, the number of escapees, the size of the pursuing army, the destruction of the Egyptian armies in the Red Sea, the death of the Exodus pharaoh in the Red Sea debacle, and the 40-years’ wilderness wandering with miraculous provision of food and drink for the multitude.”

But this process leaves us with “problems of gigantic proportions that have no necessary relation to Scripture, yet for which explanations bordering on the incredible must be invoked to evade their import.”  Tradition is trundled in to cover over the historical anomalies, first covering “a relatively few minor details while retaining a large ‘historical kernel,’” later reducing “this ‘historical kernel’ to near the vanishing point.”

Sounds oddly familiar….

Bible: Ad Litteram & “FV”

What is the literal sense?  In the current issue of the IJST, R. R. Reno suggests that it involves attending to the text: “We want to bring out minds and hearts into obedience to God’s Word rather than to float in a spiritual world of our imaginings. . . . If we are to believe what the Bible says, then we must attend to what the Bible says.”  Attending to the text is not, however, what classic Protestant theology has meant by interpreting according to the literal sense.  Reno offers the example of Charles Hodge “redefining the literal sense as something other than the literal sense.”  It works like this:

Following Protestant tradition, Hodge argued that the Scriptures are perspicuous and the literal sense immediately accessible to anyone: “The Bible is a plain book . . . It is intelligible by the people.”  For Hodge, Scripture is the standard of saving truth and thus, Reno suggests, it ought to follow “that what the Bible says ought to govern our faith.”

But this is not what Hodge finally claims:

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Bible: Glory of Kings

For those of you who have not purchased or at least ordered your copy of The Glory of Kings: A Festschrift for James B. Jordan (and shame, shame if you haven’t), the folks at First Things have put up a teaser, R. R. Reno’s wonderful Foreword to the book.  It’s available here:  http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2011/10/13/james-b-jordan-and-the-glory-of-kings/.

Bible: Oil-based faith

Oil is an extremely important part of the biblical world in a number of ways.  Oil is a food.  Oil is used for cooking.  Oil is placed on grain offerings that are baked or fried before being offered to Yahweh (Leviticus 2), and the bread on the table of showbread is baked with oil (Exodus 29:2).  Because of its property as a food, the word is sometimes translated as “fatness,” which can describe the fertility of a land or the prosperity of a people.  “Fertile valley” in Isaiah 28:1 is actually “oily valley.”  By the same token, the failure of the olive tree is a sign of famine, loss of food and fatness.  Fertile olive trees represent the righteous in the house of God (Psalms 52:8), and children are olive trees around our table (Psalm 128:3).

Oil for lamps.  Oil keeps lights going.  When they begin to gather materials for the tabernacle, the Israelites bring oil for light as well as for anointing )Exodus 25:6).  Pure beaten olive oil is used in the lampstand (Exodus 27:20).  The beaten oil of the lamps has to be replenished regularly so that the lamp burns continuously.  Not only does oil make fire burn in lamps, but oil is, visually, as James Jordan notes, liquid light.  Makes light, and also golden like light.

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Bible: Transference

Bonaventure said that we must transfer “to the divine that which pertains to the creature.”  This is no unfortunate necessity.

Rather, “God’s glory requires this transference.  For, since God is greatly to be praised, lest he should ever lack praise because of the scarcity of words, Holy Scripture has taught us that the names of creatures – indefinite in number – should be transferred to God, in order that jut as every creature glorifies God, so also every name that is ascribed to  creatures might glorify him, and in order that he who is so glorious that not one single name can do justice to him – for he surpasses, as it were, every name – might be glorified by all the names.”

Bible Theology - Pneumatology: Doves and Eagles

The Spirit is a dove.  So is the Bride in the Song, since she is her Lover’s inspiration and since she is formed by the Dove into the image of the Dove, so that the Bride and the Dove can moan with one voice of longing for the Lover’s return.

Jonah’s name means “dove,” and he flutters over Nineveh like Noah’s dove over the waters of the new world.

The Spirit is also the glory-eagle that carries (Exodus 19:4) hovers over Israel (Deuteronomy 32:11) as they come out of Egypt.  Eagles fly high and nest in the heights; they are swift, energetic, and fierce.  Eagle enemies swoop onto Israel (Deuteronomy 28:49), snipping off a branch from the tree to replant far away (Ezekiel 17).  The Spirit must be an eagle to wrench Israel away from Pharaoh.

Bible: Inspiration

It would be difficult to find a better short statement on the inspiration of Scripture than this:

“Those things revealed by God, which are contained and presented in the texts of Holy Scripture, were written under the influence of the Holy Spirit. . . . In the process of composition of the sacred books, God chose and employed human agents, using their own faculties and powers, in such a way that while he was acting in them and through them, they committed to writing, as genuine authors, everything which he willed – but only what he willed. Since, then, everything that the inspired authors or ‘sacred writers’ affirm should be considered to be affirmed by the Holy Spirit, the books of Scripture should be confessed as teaching firmly, faithfully, and without error that truth which God wished to be sealed in the sacred books for the sake of our salvation. . . . But since God, in Sacred Scripture, has spoken in a human way through human beings, the interpreter of Sacred Scripture – in order to grasp what God has wished to communicate to us – must carefully investigate what the sacred writers really intended to signify, and what it has pleased God to reveal to us in their words.”

It’s all there: The emphasis is on what’s contained “in the texts”; the writing is done under the influence of the Spirit but without cancelling the human faculties and powers; the texts contain “everything” God willed and “only what He willed”; what Scripture affirms, the Spirit affirms; and thus, Scripture teaches “firmly, faithfully, and without error” whatever God wanted to place in these books.  And the hermeneutical conclusions are sound too.

The quotation is from Dei Verbum, Vatican II’s Constitution on Divine Revelation.

Bible: Pervasive Interpretive Pluralism

Augustine doesn’t think interpretive pluralism as a big problem:

“What difficulty is it for me when these words can be interpreted in various ways, provided only that the interpretations are true? What difficulty is it for me, I say, if I understand the text in a way different from someone else, who understands the scriptural author in another sense? In Bible study, all of us are trying to find and grasp the meaning of the author we are reading, and when we believe him to be revealing truth, we do not dare to think he said anything which we either know or think to be incorrect. As long as each interpreter is endeavoring to find in the holy Scriptures the meaning of the author who wrote it, what evil is it if an exegesis he gives is one shown to be true by you [i.e., God], light of all sincere souls, even if the author whom he is reading did not have that idea and, though he grasped a truth, had not discerned that seen by the interpreter.”

Bible: Biblicism

I wrote this early this morning and forgot to press “Publish,”

First Things posted an exchange between Christian Smith and me on the topic of biblicisim: http://www.firstthings.com/

Bible History: New Israel

After quoting extensively from Isaac Watts’s nationalistic renditions of the Psalms (Psalm 47 is made to say “The British islands are the Lord’s, / There Abraham’s God is known”), Willie James Jennings (The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race) writes that “Britain is mapped onto the biblical journey of Israel.  Israel’s history disappears, and the British nation appears as the real history of God with God’s people.  There is no continuity between Israel’s history and that of other nations.  All that remains is a kind of parallelism between Israel and Britain.  It would be a vast mistake to lose sight of the soteriological effect Watts is properly building on in his vernacular operation.  The articulation of a relationship between the God of Israel and that of other peoples is precisely the desired telos of the Christian gospel.  However, Watts offers no material connection between the desired telos and the people of Israel.”

Bible: Religious reading

Paul Griffiths is always wise: “religious reading requires the establishment of a particular set of relations between the reader and what is read.  These are principally relations of reverence, delight, awe, and wonder, relations that, once established, lead to . . . close, repetitive kinds of reading. . . . The questioning of authority and the concern with preliminary issues of method and justification (intellectual attitudes and concerns typical of modernity) make the establishment of such relations almost impossible because of the endless deferral of commitment that such attitudes bring with them.  Commitment to some body of works as an endlessly nourishing garden of delights is essential to religious reading; and authoritative direction as to which works are of the right sort is a necessary condition for religious engagement with them.”

Bible Classics: Epic, Nation, Cosmos

In his dense 1967 monograph on Homer and the Bible, Cyrus Gordon argued that the Iliad was written not for the sake of art only but to inspire the imagination of a Greek nation: “it does not divide Greek from Greek.  The Trojans and their allies are treated with as much decorum and honor as the Achaeans and their allies.  Moreover, in the Catalogue of Ships and in scattered descriptions of heroes (on both sides) and their genealogies, satisfaction is given to all the elements of the Hellenic world: in Greece, Asia Minor, and the islands.  Pilgrims from widely scattered areas, attending the festivals where the Iliad was read, could listen with pride to the glories of their own epic hero, no matter whether they were Ionian, Cretan, or Peloponnesian.  The Iliad tells how once the Greek world had participated in the glorious and manly Trojan War; listening to the Iliad could only inspire the entire Greek people with heroic sentiments and the vision of nationhood.”

The Pentateuch and especially the Patriarchal narratives, he suggests, had the same function for Israel, as Ugaritic myth did for Ugarit.  He concludes,  ”Israel, Greece and Ugarit had texts for the great problem in that part of the world: national union.”  Yet, he goes on to indicate how different the Pentateuch is from the other epics: “It is infinitely more many-sided than any other national epic of any age.  But perhaps its most distinctive feature is its universal framework.  Genesis leads up to the Patriarchs with the story of the Creation and the peoples of the world, showing how Israel fits into the broad scheme of things.”  Even in form of its “national epic,” Israel is evidently not merely a nation for itself, but a nation for the life of the world.

Bible Bible - NT - Revelation: Pity the Radical

Pity the radical.  For every radical, there’s always someone more radical still, someone who plays “more radical than thou” with greater skill.

Recent New Testament scholarship has highlighted the “counter-imperial” import of the gospel.  In some ways, this is a healthy recovery of the political resonances of the New Testament, but too often these interpretations ignore or neutralize contrary evidence (often using the tools of historical criticism).  For Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza (The Power of the Word: Scripture and the Rhetoric of Empire), however, the problem with the anti-imperial readings is that they are insufficiently critical of the New Testament itself.

She finds anti-imperial interpreters like Horsley far too conservative.  Writers like Horsley “have highlighted the interplay of religion and politics in the emperor cult, identified the imperial cross-cultural patronage system, and elaborated Paul’s counterimperial gospel, which is regarded as being patterned after but totally different from the gospel of Caesar.”  But these works fail to see that “even resistance literature will re-inscribe the structures of domination against which it seeks to argue.”

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