Category Archives: Reflections

What affects me as I try to grasp it.

on Literature, Public-Personal

An Inchoate Apocalyptic Aesthetic

Here’s one from quite some time ago–my junior year at The Master’s College, in fact. I’m going to offer it in as near to its “student paper” form as possible. Some of the very sketchy analysis here formed the basis for both my pursuit of Nineteenth Century Poetry as a field and my eschatologically-oriented approach to H. P. Lovecraft’s fiction in my master’s thesis.

Yes, at this stage I reflexively lumped all “seems evolutionary” lines of reasoning in the “reject” basket, much like at this point in my thinking “seems Catholic” would have been a reason to reject something. We are shaped by many things before we are fully formed, friends!

 

Peter G. Epps
Victorian Age
Dr. Pilkey
5/7/98
Tennyson’s Forward Glance

In Memoriam A.H.H. opens on a note of bleary agnostic resignation, but ends on a nearly apocalyptic affirmation of the glory of God’s rule of creation. In so doing, Tennyson reflects the fact that “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” but that “the end of the commandment is charity out of a pure heart, and of a good conscience, and of a faith unfeigned.” Therefore, while his beginning and end both acknowledge the superiority of God and the rightness of his goals, the beginning reflects the fearful insipidity of those who have not come to a right knowledge of God. The conclusion, on the other hand, reflects a fuller understanding of and submission to God’s ability to guide the universe.

The opening lines state flatly Tennyson’s agnostic view of God’s work, where he speaks of a God “Whom we, that have not seen thy face,\by faith, and faith alone embrace,\Believing where we cannot prove.” Further, Tennyson seems able only to acknowledge that God’s arbitrary crushing of man is accompanied by a like arbitrary raising of him; he seems unable to sense any purpose in this. Fear is the key here; it is precisely a lack of faith that makes it so necessary to constantly affirm one’s faith. That which faith truly apperceives is already seen as certain; it is that which one doubts that one must attempt to consciously affirm by faith. It is this state, however, of fearing the consequences of either accepting or rejecting the truth, that allows the Spirit fertile ground to work in men’s lives. In Tennyson’s case, it seems that such a work occurred on some level.

Tennyson acknowledges the need of such a work when he says,

    We are fools and slight;
We mock thee when we do not fear:
But help thy foolish ones to bear;
Help thy vain worlds to bear thy light.

Forgive what seem'd my sin in me;
What seem'd my worth since I began;
For merit lives from man to man,
And not from man, O Lord, to thee.

The constant cry for forgiveness and the almost cringing tone is indicative of one who has not learned confidence in the love and promises of God, who still believes that God is too far beyond human thought to make any ethical standard applicable, or any final understanding possible.

Over the course of the work, however, Tennyson achieves a number of moments of clarity; the finest is in his epilogue. In closing, Tennyson speaks in glowing terms of a final marriage, one reserved for the end of time, which he sees typified in his sister’s marriage. The language is brilliant and full of hope, and the climax comes at the very last:

A soul shall draw from out the vast
And strike his being into bounds,

And, moved thro' life of lower phase,
Result in man, be born and think,
And act and love, a closer link
Betwixt us and the crowning race

Of those that, eye to eye, shall look
On knowledge; under whose command
Is Earth and Earth's, and in their hand
Is Nature like an open book;

No longer half-akin to brute,
For all we thought and loved and did,
And hoped, and suffer'd, is but seed
Of what in them is flower and fruit;

Whereof the man, that with me trod
This planet, was a noble type
Appearing ere the times were ripe,
That friend of mine who lives in God,

That God, which ever lives and loves,
One God, one law, one element,
And one far-off divine event,
To which the whole creation moves.

Of course, it cannot be ignored that Tennyson is powerfully influenced by the growing evolutionary consensus of his day; nor can it be supposed that he had an unclouded vision of the future state. At the same time, there is a powerful image in these lines of the coming man—that which has been missing from the agnostic piety of the Christianity to which Tennyson weakly appealed in his opening lines. It is the same appeal as that which Nietzsche makes when he postulates Ubermensch, the same as the appeal of the Marxist utopian fantasies of the great socialist worker. It is the lost Christian hope of the race which God has spanned time and space to collect, of those whose faith has made them whole by their apprehension of the grace of God in Christ. In the end, it is the hope of the future Sons of God which Tennyson’s poetic fervor envisions; it is the Bride of Christ who meets the Lamb face to face for the first time who exclaims, “Worthy!” in his lines. Tennyson’s hope which subsumes his grief is the knowledge that somehow, in some way, God will raise men above their present pitiful state and make them one with His divine presence in their midst. Recognizing this, Tennyson shakes of his languor and exclaims, affirming in the feast his pleasure and the sense of Hallam’s final glorification.

“For by Him, and through Him and to Him are all things; to whom be glory forever and ever. Amen.”

Credo, on Theology, Public-Personal

Timely Background Information

A lot of folks are not familiar with canon law, but knowing its background and grounding assumptions can really help you sift confusing matters:

THE OBLIGATIONS AND RIGHTS OF ALL THE CHRISTIAN FAITHFUL (Cann. 208 – 223)

Can. 208 From their rebirth in Christ, there exists among all the Christian faithful a true equality regarding dignity and action by which they all cooperate in the building up of the Body of Christ according to each one’s own condition and function.

Can. 209 §1. The Christian faithful, even in their own manner of acting, are always obliged to maintain communion with the Church.
§2. With great diligence they are to fulfill the duties which they owe to the universal Church and the particular church to which they belong according to the prescripts of the law.

Can. 210 All the Christian faithful must direct their efforts to lead a holy life and to promote the growth of the Church and its continual sanctification, according to their own condition.

Can. 211 All the Christian faithful have the duty and right to work so that the divine message of salvation more and more reaches all people in every age and in every land.

Can. 212 §1. Conscious of their own responsibility, the Christian faithful are bound to follow with Christian obedience those things which the sacred pastors, inasmuch as they represent Christ, declare as teachers of the faith or establish as rulers of the Church.
§2. The Christian faithful are free to make known to the pastors of the Church their needs, especially spiritual ones, and their desires.
§3. According to the knowledge, competence, and prestige which they possess, they have the right and even at times the duty to manifest to the sacred pastors their opinion on matters which pertain to the good of the Church and to make their opinion known to the rest of the Christian faithful, without prejudice to the integrity of faith and morals, with reverence toward their pastors, and attentive to common advantage and the dignity of persons.

Can. 213 The Christian faithful have the right to receive assistance from the sacred pastors out of the spiritual goods of the Church, especially the word of God and the sacraments.

Can. 214 The Christian faithful have the right to worship God according to the prescripts of their own rite approved by the legitimate pastors of the Church and to follow their own form of spiritual life so long as it is consonant with the doctrine of the Church.

Can. 215 The Christian faithful are at liberty freely to found and direct associations for purposes of charity or piety or for the promotion of the Christian vocation in the world and to hold meetings for the common pursuit of these purposes.

Can. 216 Since they participate in the mission of the Church, all the Christian faithful have the right to promote or sustain apostolic action even by their own undertakings, according to their own state and condition. Nevertheless, no undertaking is to claim the name Catholic without the consent of competent ecclesiastical authority.

Can. 217 Since they are called by baptism to lead a life in keeping with the teaching of the gospel, the Christian faithful have the right to a Christian education by which they are to be instructed properly to strive for the maturity of the human person and at the same time to know and live the mystery of salvation.

Can. 218 Those engaged in the sacred disciplines have a just freedom of inquiry and of expressing their opinion prudently on those matters in which they possess expertise, while observing the submission due to the magisterium of the Church.

Can. 219 All the Christian faithful have the right to be free from any kind of coercion in choosing a state of life.

(source: http://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG1104/__PU.HTM)

on Literature, Public-Personal

From my First Published Article

In my first year in graduate school at Baylor University, I had the pleasure of taking a seminar in Robert & Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poetry with Dr. Mairi Rennie, of Oxford, visiting head of the Armstrong Browning Library.  Based on her suggestions, I extended and finished my seminar paper, which was published in Studies in Browning and His Circle the following year.

I’ve selected an excerpt which I am pleased with, in its working with texts and the insight it helps to establish (one I capitalize on later in the paper), and also—quite intentionally—one that reflects my prejudice, at the time, about “Romanism.”  I will point out that what I say in this excerpt is definitely true of Robert Browning’s attitude toward the Catholic Church:  he was reputedly a vehement anti-Catholic through much of his life, and had been reared in a radical dissenting sect (developing such an infatuation with the work of Percy Bysshe Shelley in adolescence that he declared himself an atheist for a couple years).  You will not fail to notice, though, that at the time I originally wrote this I reflexively adopted the same perspective.  I am most grateful that I have been afforded the time and gracious opportunity to thoroughly reverse that attitude!

Here, then, an excerpt from “Tipping the Scales:  Contextual Clues in Bishop Blougram’s Apology”:

“Healthy vehemence.”  The first issue in unravelling Blougram is, of course, its dramatic form.  Whether Browning’s use of the dramatic form is intended to insure an ultimate relativity of perspective or to engage the reader in an active, rather than passive, process of understanding, its immediate effect is to obscure whatever “truths” the poem may convey behind the limited and possibly suspect viewpoint of an artificial character.  The speaker’s coloring of the facts of experience will, of course, depend on his reactions to that experience.  It is especially interesting, then, that the narrator of the epilogue in Blougram characterizes Gigadibs’ final reaction to his dinner with Blougram as “healthy vehemence.”  The idea of “health” becomes a key reason to believe that it is the later Gigadibs of the epilogue, not the early Gigadibs seen through Blougram’s eyes, nor Blougram himself, that is the intended protagonist of Blougram.

The image of “health” recurs in a later poem of Browning’s, “Confessions.”  In this brief poem, a dying man recounts the view of life he derives from the memory of a secret love affair carried on in his youth.  The ending, “How sad and bad and mad it was– / But then, how it was sweet!” is a typical Browning affirmation of the beauties of love when acted on courageously.  The most intriguing image in the poem, however, comes in a passing phrase uttered by the speaker:  “is the curtain blue / Or green to a healthy eye?”  The speaker then gives his own perspective:  “To mine . . . Blue.”  The question and answer provide a key example of Browning’s use of literary and Biblical contexts.

The question concerning “blue or green” is a reference to the literal coloring of perception caused by jaundice.  More specifically, it echoes the line “all looks yellow to the jaundiced eye” from Pope’s Essay on Criticism.  A glance at the passage in which this line appears reveals the exquisite craftsmanship of the allusion:  Pope is defending the truly original poet against overzealous critics, and says,

Yet shun their fault, who, scandalously nice,
Will needs mistake an author into vice;
All seems infected that the infected spy,
As all looks yellow to the jaundiced eye.

The plea, of course, applies equally well to the words of the dying man, whose description of the forbidden love affair gives the reader no real reason to believe it was an immoral encounter, and to Browning himself, whose critics persistently misread him.  The important statement, however, for both the dying man and (by implication from Pope’s context) the poet, is “To mine, it serves for the old June weather / Blue above lane and wall.”  The yellow cast of jaundiced perception would make the curtain appear green, but the speaker’s vision is healthy:  he sees blue.  It is those who censure him that are “infected” and “jaundiced.”

The charge of infected perception invokes a familiar Biblical context as well.  Paul, defending the believer’s liberty against external laws, says, “Unto the pure all things are pure: but unto them that are defiled and unbelieving is nothing pure.”  As is the case with Pope’s attack on “scandalously nice” critics, so Paul’s warning about fastidious religionists reverts the charge of immorality on those who do not have a fundamentally healthy perspective.  In this context, the dying man speaking to his minister (“reverend sir”) is able to level a substantial critique against superficial moralisms; not only are they the product of a “jaundiced eye,” but they reflect a heart that is “defiled and unbelieving.”

The identification of “healthy vehemence” with spiritual and mental clarity also occurs in Browning’s paradigmatic religious poem, Christmas Eve.  In the poem, the speaker moves through four major viewpoints:  the Zionist chapel, his own initial position, Roman Catholicism, and higher criticism.  In the end, the speaker rejects the mere dogma of Romanism and the mere data of criticism in favor of the most vehement expression of love for God, that of the Zionist chapel.  The transformation of the speaker’s perspective, though, is not a mere intellectual assent or mystical abnegation of self:  it is a healing.  While the speaker “cannot bid / the world admit [God] stooped to heal / My soul,” he is certain that (like Paul and Mary Magdalene) “he named my name”; like the woman in Matthew 9:20-22, he leaps out to seize “the hem of the vesture” for healing and springs “at a passionate bound” back into the chapel.  Having been healed, he is now able to make the affirmation “I choose here!”

The image of health in Blougram, then, should be taken as a serious indication of perspective.  Indeed, Blougram himself argues from the premise that health equates with affirmation when he asserts that the early Gigadibs’ skepticism must force him to “keep [his] bed, / Abstain from healthy acts that prove [him] a man” in order to avoid making any assumptions.  The argument is sound as far as it goes; Gigadibs’ apparent refusal to have any faith if he can’t have all faith is inconsistent with his own actions.  Blougram is more consistent:  he avoids such “healthy acts” as those represented by Napoleon and Shakespeare because he prefers to dine, / Sleep, read and chat in quiet.”  However, as the later Gigadibs’ reaction of “sudden healthy vehemence” illustrates, Blougram’s self-justification undermines itself by demonstrating that he suffers from a “jaundiced eye” because he is “defiled and unbelieving.”

on Theology, Public-Personal

Learning by Contraries

So let me dig back to 1999 for the first bit of Past Scholarship to post, here.

I will not be posting any links for this paper, and you won’t find it on any of my profiles or on my site (though if you search the Internet Archive you can find a *reference* to it).  I deliberately expurgated this document once I had matured enough to realize just how badly I had wandered into rank heresy in the middle of my explorations and controversies as I finished college.  This paper was originally titled “The Origin of Original Sin,” and was an attack on the Reformed understanding of Total Depravity that, in a terrible fit of overzealous argumentation, attempted to both attack that view as “too Catholic” and to demonstrate that there had been a swerve away from the true teaching that led to Augustine’s view of the subject.

As many of you will know was quite inevitable, I ended up having to start my criticism of what I mistakenly viewed as “corruption” in Church teaching with Justin Martyr, who was just barely too young to have known the last of Jesus’ own Apostles; and I more-or-less implicated almost all of the Fathers and Doctors of the Church that I knew of in the “corruption.”  Somewhere in that process, someone less steeped in an anti-Catholic tradition might have realized that an interpretation of the development of Christian doctrine that supposed the Church was almost wholly overtaken in serious error on chief points of faith well before the canon of Scripture was thoroughly stabilized–before the Trinity and the relationship of Christ’s human and divine natures could be clearly defined–proved far, far too much.

In fact, eventually I came to see that this was too audacious–and, finally, that it was self-refuting. My return to a concern for confessional orthodoxy from this brief but intense period of error and excess took only a couple of years; my ability to move away from the dilemma of choosing one error or another on these matters, however, took longer to develop. My doctoral dissertation, completed in 2009, contains in part an extended meditation on original sin that is the recantation of these errors and the completion of the process of understanding that began with this Spring 1999 Independent Study and the deep dive into the Fathers that it occasioned.

Concilio_Trento_Museo_Buonconsiglio.jpg

I’ve carefully chosen an excerpt that does show my interaction with Scripture and my discomfort with what I understood of Reformed theology (which at that point was mostly American conservative evangelicalism overtaken by Dordtian Calvinism, the “TULIP” variety). I have quite deliberately avoided passages which contain obvious heresies, because there is simply no point in letting those arguments surface.

Here, then, a brief selection from “The Origin of Original Sin,” a polemical historical theology work of 100+ pages completed for an Independent Study course with Dr. Brian Morley at The Master’s College:

Chapter six of Genesis records the corruption of the antediluvian civilization. As humanity multiplied and those who walked with God (“sons of God”) intermarried with others, “the LORD said, ‘My Spirit shall not strive with man forever, because he also is flesh'” (3). God here identifies the fact that sinful humanity is rapidly effacing the influence of His Spirit.[An alternate reading clarifies the action here: “the LORD said, “My Spirit shall not rule in man forever, in his going astray he is flesh” (NAS Gen 3:3 note) (emphasis added).] In keeping with His promise of an ultimate defeat for the serpent and a Redeemer for man, God averted the disaster of an total suppression of truth by destroying all humanity except righteous Noah, who “found favor in the eyes of the LORD” (8). By the time God spoke to Noah, He had allowed sin to run to its extremity: verse five records that “the LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great on the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.” Had Noah not been “a righteous man, blameless in his time,” the entirety of creation would have been annihilated (6-9). This passage provides dramatic testimony to the universal sinfulness of mankind, and for the pervasive effects of Adam’s sin. Once again, however, it must be noted that nothing in the passage implies that the sins of the antediluvian world were an inevitable result of Adam’s sin. In fact, Enoch and Noah are identified, without prelude, as persons who “walked with God” (5:22, 6:9). Later Scripture testimony will clarify that even these men did sin, and that it was “by faith” that they were righteous (Heb 11:5-7). For now, it is sufficient to realize that their righteousness and daily walk with God are recorded about them as facts in their own right long before theories of imputation became popular.

In chapter fifteen of Genesis, the Lord (through Moses) records a simple statement which forms the cornerstone of Biblical soteriology. Paul and James center their demonstrations of man’s responsibility in salvation on the declaration that Abraham “believed in the LORD; and He reckoned it to him as righteousness” (6). While Paul’s use of this verse in the Epistle to the Romans has made it a primary source of imputation theory, it should be noted that here, in its actual context, it is simply a statement of fact. God accounted Abraham’s faith as righteousness. Paul quotes this in the course of a proof that justification is by faith, apart from works of the Law. James quotes it in the course of a demonstration that faith is not passive but active in man—and that true faith produces a moral change which does eventuate in right action. In light of the teaching that the reckoning here is an artificial process, God recording Christ’s merit in the place of Abraham’s, it should be observed that there is no reason to believe that a just and truthful God keeps a double set of books. If God accounts faith in His promises as righteousness, that accounting must be intrinsically true; any difficulties in interpretation of later teaching must not be allowed to vitiate this premise.

One passage frequently used to bolster the Reformed view of original sin is a statement from the book of Job that “man is born for trouble, as sparks fly upward” (5:7). Indeed, this passage does appear to bear on this view of man and God. Eliphaz claims to have heard in a vision, “Can mankind be just before God? Can a man be pure before his Maker?” (4:17) The ensuing revelation portrays God as arbitrary and beyond all moral standards, and man as too lowly to understand God’s purposes. Eliphaz continues in this vein on his own, arguing that suffering is universal and that God reduces man to helplessness before He will help him. Job is given no solution except to hope that God will finish inflicting pain on him and begin to bless him again. That this is all in accord with the Reformed view of man’s total inability and God’s absolute and arbitrary sovereignty must be admitted; that it is truth must be denied, based on the context. This is a recording of a false teaching arrived at on the basis of a vision that is at best a delusion; quite probably, it is in fact a demonic deception. Eliphaz relates the source of his insight as follows:

Now a word was brought to me stealthily, And my ear received a whisper of it. Amid disquieting thoughts from the visions of the night, When deep sleep falls on men, Dread came upon me, and trembling, And made all my bones shake. Then a spirit passed by my face; The hair of my flesh bristled up. It stood still, but I could not discern its appearance; A form was before my eyes; There was silence, then I heard a voice (4:12-16) (emphasis added).

Certainly, if one were to read this in a neutral context one would not class this as at all related to divine revelation; while God has used visions, there is no record of God revealing doctrine through nightmares! Some would appeal to the fact that Isaiah was troubled and trembled at the presence of God (Is 6:5). This can be readily dismissed, however; Eliphaz and his two friends are denounced as false teachers in the forty-second chapter of Job, where God says,

My wrath is kindled against you and against your two friends, because you have not spoken of Me what is right as my servant Job has . . . and My servant Job will pray for you . . . that I may not do with you [according to your] folly, because you have not spoken of Me what is right (7, 8).

Whatever the source of Eliphaz’s vision, it was not divine. The teaching he expounds so clearly, of the helplessness of man before the arbitrary sovereignty of God, is identified as falsehood by God Himself.

Quotables, Reflections

We Rest On Thee

Some years ago, I had the chance to be in a production of the reader’s theatre play Bridge of Blood, and this set of words for the “Finlandia Hymn” portion of Sibelius’s wonderful composition continues to be pretty powerful with me.

Here’s the playwright’s own contextualization of his use of the song, from notes for a production of the play at Cedarville University:

Public-Personal, Reflections

The Other One

In my Introduction to Literature course, I wrote this alternate version of the Day One Essay:

For a literature class like ours, I would use this quotation a bit differently than for other classes I teach.  There are a number of ways I can approach a passage like this, but I want to evaluate the way Chesterton uses paradox to provoke and smooth controversy, and to offer some observations about what seem to me to be some faults in the style of the passage.

I hope it seems obvious that this passage seeks to provoke controversy by appearing to contradict common sense.  In fact, the larger text this is drawn from is full of examples of just this, and just a little up the page from this very passage he directly mentions the antithesis of this assertion.  We generally think of people with sharp, strong beliefs as more likely to get into disputes, and we associate that strong emotion readily with “bigotry” and violence.

Chesterton provokes us, then, by challenging our belief.  He claims “indifference” causes bigotry and even “monstrous persecutions,” and thus tempts us to react before we have reflected on the meaning of his words.  In a very small way, he tempts us to act like “bigots” about the definition of “bigotry,” at least by that common definition.  Not being willing to be thought hasty, though, we may try to understand his intended meaning–and then he has us.

For Chesterton has in view the ordinary state of interest and concern–of what has been called “studious seriousness”–that one shows in matters that are important.  When the “appalling frenzy” comes, it sweeps away those who react to the horrors and celebrities and outrages of the moment; it is only those who have spent time and effort to form initial judgments with reasons they can explain, who have actively committed themselves to principles they cannot easily back down from, who are emboldened and empowered to speak reasonably and responsibly to the needs of the moment.  Chesterton’s paradox, then, is that he suggests that those most committed to study and argue in their leisure are least likely to be swept up in thoughtless currents of bigotry and violence.

At the same time as Chesterton provokes with his paradox, he also soothes.  This happens in two ways.  One we might describe by noticing that Chesterton’s writing is, in vulgar phrase, “too danged cheerful.”  That is, Chesterton puts so many bits of clever language, paradox, and wordplay before us that we are likely to feel at every turn that we would like to throw a beer in his face, or buy the next round, or both.  He provokes, but he is having so much fun doing it that we are likely to be drawn in, at least a little bit.  Notice, in this passage, that he lets us–his readers–off the hook; we are not likely to think of ourselves as “indifferent,” or as not being “peopl who cared,” until we reason more deeply about our habits–the sting of that reasoning comes only after we have been soothed by the distance he allows us to gain from the provocation.

This basic pattern–a provoking paradox, a soothing abstraction, a subtextual jab to our consciences–is one Chesterton uses over and over.  I will not dispute its effectiveness.  I do think there is a risk, however, that impels me to urge writers to use this sparingly.  Over time, the need to provoke tempts each writer into more and more contrived paradoxes, often obfuscating the relatively simple.  At the same time, the abstractions required to provide emotional distance and explain the provocation become more complex and opaque.  The reader is likely to find them more elaborate than the situation can actually bear.  As a result, both the traction of the paradox in the mundane world and the sharpness of the jab to the reader’s conscience are weakened, turned into mush.

I think I may clearly exemplify this problem by simply changing one word in one sentence:  “Bigotry may be roughly defined as the anger of men who have [only] opinions.”  This sentence is now logically contradictory to the original.  I actually agree with the main point of the original phrase, too.  Using ordinary definitions of “opinion” and “argument” that I establish in my Rhetoric classes, however, I could totally rewrite the whole passage to make a slightly different point.  In other words, the style of the paradox is not very tightly related to the substance of the point.

Thus at once I notice the power of Chesterton’s style, and in passing my agreement with his point, while yet hoping that a habit of merely clever paradoxy will not slip into your writing style or mine.  Such a style might, after all, prove to be another expression of “indifference”–of what might be called “sloth,” in fact.  Rejecting such “indifference” should, it is to be hoped, enable us to reason and respond well–not least by weighing carefully the fitness of our words.

Public-Personal, Reflections

My Day One Essay

For the first day of class this term, I did not speak to my students.  I simply presented them with a prompt and had them use the time to write a response to this quotation from G. K. Chesterton:

Of course, to be fair, and to make it easier to remain silent, I did the writing myself.  (in the first class, and in another class that was a different course; I wrote poems during the other sections, rather than rewrite the same piece multiple times.)  What follows is my response to my prompt, as transcribed from the legal pad I wrote it down on:

There are several reasons I offered you this quotation to begin our class.  I can discuss some of these with you later.  For just two examples, this passage sets up a conversation I like to have in Rhetoric classes about the meaning of words such as “fact” and “assertion” and “argument” by using “opinion” in a controversial manner.  For another, really technical-sounding, reason, I like the way Chesterton’s point here coincides with a Gadamerian defence of prejudice.  Most simply, though, this bumptious-sounding passage brings us rapidly to the heart of the subject we are here to study–the relationship between reasoning in public and being well-informed on matters that should concern us all.

By “indifference” Chesterton does not mean having no feelings–no one could be “terrible” in “frenzy” without emotions.  What he means is a bit more subtle than that.  Consider two possible responses to seeing an upsetting event on television.  One person talks to all his friends about how gross or scary it was, or maybe joins a bunch of friends to stand outside where there’s a protest.  There are some emotions on display–but has he really done anything that commits him to further action and makes him fit to act and advocate wisely and well?  I suggest he has not.

By comparison, consider his friend who has a habit of being well informed and well prepared.  She wants to know whether the reactions she hears are realistic and proportionate.  She is not content to be merely “open-minded” or “skeptical,” so she actively studies available learning from a variety of disciplines and traditions.  When she ends up talking to others about this problem, she already has some idea what she thinks, and has reasons for her view–she knows what her “initial judgment,” or “prejudice,” is.  As a result, her friends have to offer her better reasons than the ones she’s already found, if they want to move her to a new, possibly better, position.

This movement, from preparation to “exigence” (the moment when others might disagree with you) to a more decided and defined understanding, is what we call “reasoning.”  We do not merely shout what we think at any moment at each other, but prepare our thoughts so that we can give reasons to our friends–and even our rivals, opponents, or enemies.

When we prepare by studying and thinking carefully, and reason with others, most people will feel an obligation to give their own reasons, or at least to criticize our reasons.  Responding to reasons with reasons, and weighing those reasons for fitness and relative importance, is what “reasonable” people do, and “responsible” people expect this to be usual in their conversations.  People who abuse this process with lies or manipulations are justly called “unreasonable” and “irresponsible,” and we can safely refuse to consider their views until we hear reasonable and responsible expressions of similar views.

When people are “indifferent” to matters that they ought to study and fail to prepare for reasonable and responsible discourse, they are overwhelmingly likely to be swept along with crowds of others who do not care enough to learn, but who can be counted on to do what this celebrity or that party leader tells them, especially if they can be made frightened or angry enough.  “Indifferent” people can be easily manipulated by a charming or famous or surprising person, especially if that person is well-liked by the news and entertainment media.  From street protests to the DMV, from tech support to a mass rally for a radical politician, most of the bad results you see are easily attributable to “indifference” in this sense.  It is through our failure to take responsibility to learn and speak and act reasonably that we become slaves.

In the end, it is slavery that Chesterton warns us against–slavery to those in power, maybe, but definitely slavery to our own ignorance and passions, as those are echoed and amplified by millions of others, and manipulated by those who are eager to sell us things.  For in believing that the world exists to keep our desires met, that being consumers can make us happy and hard thinking will make us sad, we become enslaved–and we are likely also to become bigots.

Poetry, Reflections

Last Day on the Kickstarter Campaign to Promote The Clay Pot and Offer Signed Copies

I hope all of you know how encouraging you are to me, and how grateful I am to you–and for you.

Here’s the latest update.

For a long time, now, my “scriptorium” standing desk has been under the watchful eyes of an image of Christ the Teacher.  Not because I imagine that my work is properly “sacred,” but because I think everything true, good, and beautiful comes from and return to that one God who makes Himself and all things intelligible to us in Christ Jesus.  I hope that something in my work goes beyond my little life’s experiences, is caught up in the transformation of all things.

So when I ask for help with my art, I’m very sincere when I say that your encouragement to me and my gratitude to you are the main things I can see exchanged–and I am very happy when we can share in each other’s work so concretely, can make something really and visibly good happen in this world.

I think we can still see this thing work out, because as Kickstarter starts rotating this up in the “almost finished” results, some new folks will see it for the first time. Please keep sharing, and back if you can, because we are now well and truly in the last day of this project.

Here’s me, reading from The Clay Pot, one more time, for now:

Quotables, Reflections

vita brevis

“Hear my prayer, O Lord,
and give ear to my cry;
hold not thy peace at my tears!

For I am thy passing guest,
a sojourner, like all my fathers.

Look away from me, that I may know gladness,
before I depart and be no more!”

(source: Psalm 39 RSVCE)

Here’s one I still like best in an older version, with a more craggy beauty:

Hear my prayer, O Lord, and give ear unto my cry; hold not thy peace at my tears: for I am a stranger with thee, and a sojourner, as all my fathers were.

O spare me, that I may recover strength, before I go hence, and be no more.

(source: Psalm 39 KJV)

on Theology, Public-Personal

Not Hard to Refute the Canard

Would you believe it?  Earlier this year, I actually heard someone claim that “The Church never even had a position on abortion until the 1880s” while walking to sing in the choir at Mass!  This is just one of the mendacious arguments held by some who could know better, with just the tiniest amount of effort.

Here, let’s just put two simple and obvious texts–outside the Bible, in the Christian tradition, and before the Nicene Creed was formulated.  Just for starters.

Thou shalt not kill; thou shalt not commit adultery; thou shalt not corrupt youth; thou shalt not commit fornication; thou shalt not steal; thou shalt not use soothsaying; thou shalt not practise sorcery; thou shalt not kill a child by abortion, neither shalt thou slay it when born; thou shalt not covet the goods of thy neighbour;

(source: Didache)

People will frequently try to make something out of the difficulty faced by St. Augustine or St. Thomas Aquinas, among others, in differentiating the crimes of contraception, abortion, and homicide clearly–given the lack of clear science on the early stages of human development.

But there is really no doubt that from the earliest days the Church not only condemned infanticide, but also the deliberately induced death of a child in the womb:

You shall not use magic. You shall not use witchcraft; for He says, You shall not suffer a witch to live. You shall not slay your child by causing abortion, nor kill that which is begotten; for everything that is shaped, and has received a soul from God, if it be slain, shall be avenged, as being unjustly destroyed. You shall not covet the things that belong to your neighbour, as his wife, or his servant, or his ox, or his field. You shall not forswear yourself; for it is said, You shall not swear at all. But if that cannot be avoided, you shall swear truly; for every one that swears by Him shall be commended. You shall not bear false witness; for he that falsely accuses the needy provokes to anger Him that made him.

(source: Apostolic Constitutions, Book VII)

So let’s just quit destroying justifying grace in our lives, and tempting others, on the verge of meeting Jesus, right?  And at any rate, let’s don’t use easily-refuted folly to do it.

Reflections

Angry? Try Resolve, not Rage.

It’s fine to be angry, but what we want is resolve, not anger.

Anger coalesces around a perceived injustice, and assumes hope that things could be better, so in proportion it is good. But anger does not intrinsically suggest a course of action, so repeatedly arousing and manifesting anger is an exhausting cycle.

On the other hand, just attempting to still anger, to shut it down and make it go away, involves denying that sense of justice or abandoning that hope. That’s not a good idea at all; although in cases a malformed conscience or a traumatized emotional makeup may have a hair-trigger for an out-of-proportion response to certain injustices, the solution is to recognize and correct that disproportion. And while some wishful thinking masquerades as hope, only well-grounded expectations of real goods–real hope–can possibly serve in the place of hope. And, for what it’s worth, real hope is always an infused virtue, something the Holy Spirit makes real in you, directed toward the triumph of the Son of God in your life and in the world.

So we must not commit the grave sins of despair or of stifling truth and justice. But anger by itself is just exhausting, a ready pathway to acedia.  And when we begin to feel the despair of anger unlinked from effective action, we start to lash out at others and to engage in emotional blackmail (bitterness also isolates us, which starts the “misery loves company” wheel turning).

We should strive to resist both emasculation and enervation.

What we need is resolve, friends.

Let me allow a pagan with an out-of-proportion sense of this virtue to stir up your thinking on the matter:

Although all things are not to be judged in this manner, I mention it in the investigation of the Way of the Samurai. When the time comes, there is no moment for reasoning. And if you have not done your inquiring beforehand , there is most often shame. Reading books and listening to people’s talk are for the purpose of prior resolution. Above all, the Way of the Samurai should be in being aware that you do not know what is going to happen next, and in querying every item day and night. Victory and defeat are matters of the temporary force of circumstances.

(source: Yamamoto Tsunetomo – Wikiquote)

Tsunetomo also criticizes the legendary Forty-Seven Samurai for waiting a year to make circumspect plans (in fact, history suggests they were politicking to protect their families and other interests), rather than either attacking at once or committing seppukku (the real role of ritual suicide in historical Japanese culture is an extensive conversation best saved for another time, but let’s just say that for Tsunetomo it was a mostly legendary act in a mostly legendary story).  He says:

Concerning the night assault of Lord Asano’s ronin, the fact that they did not commit seppuku at the Sengakuji was an error, for there was a long delay between the time their lord was struck down and the time when they struck down the enemy. If Lord Kira had died of illness within that period, it would have been extremely regrettable.

(source: Yamamoto Tsunetomo – Wikiquote)

Now, important things are missing in this account during a relatively settled period of the Shogunate, but there is an insight into virtue that is solidly present in Tsunetomo that is missing elsewhere.

If your anger is justified–that is, if you have just cause and you have hope that change can be effected–then translate it into action by the shortest path possible.

And on an ongoing basis, continue to express and to call forth in others the resolution to act, to take the shortest path from identifying a wrong to righting it, every day.

Do not judge the value of a resolution by its likelihood of success, but by whether the action itself is possible, just, and has reasonable hope of succeeding.  Many a necessary action is unlikely to achieve all you desire, but is there something you can do that will in fact make a difference?

Do not forget to pray.  And do not forget that prayer which is merely wishing, which is unlinked from hope–reasonable expectation of good, based in God’s promises well understood–is unlikely to be effective.  (Do it anyway, but don’t do it alone; that’s how you heal your prayers and actions both.)

In this way, it is possible to know peace and also to insist that others act, to insist vehemently and with conviction, without constantly stirring up anger in ever-increasing doses with ever-less hope.

It is hard to do, I know.  Our circumstances, and our outraged loves, are constant invitations to despair.  You must move beyond anger to resolve, though, to keep hope alive.

Yes, it is hard.

It is necessary for you to do it.

on Theology

OK, How Does Episcopal Rule Relate to Congregational Polity, Anyway?

An excellent friend posts a position in an intramural [American conservative evangelical] Protestant difference of practice that has engendered considerable discussion–and not a few schismatic sects–over the last several centuries:

There are many reasons for [emphatically choosing plural-elders over single-pastor congregational rule]. The primary reason, though, is that the NT’s utterly consistent testimony confirms a plurality of elders as the *only* model that can claim NT legitimacy. For one who tries to take both clear teaching and consistent precedent seriously, this matters. Is our Baptist and evangelical tendency toward a single-pastor model evidence that we have grown up since the NT era or grown away from our origins? I would strongly suggest the latter.

(source: Timothy Berg on Facebook)

Now, I had opportunity to comment a little, but I didn’t want to accidentally start a distracting brouhaha by opening up a Catholic/Protestant “front” in the conversation.  In fact, the main goal of my comments was to help stifle any arguments in the form “that’s like Catholicism, ergo it must be wrong,” which at an absolute minimum is an intellectually disabling form of argument.

Nonetheless, I found the form of argument interesting, and fraught with one or two hermeneutical problems that should be addressed.  I think Dan Wallace does a great job of laying out the case, here, and my objections are obviously going to go to framing assumptions–presuppositions–rather than to the language analysis itself (what I differ with there, I differ with only *because* the Protestant approach forecloses certain meanings).

I note with approval a useful canon of interpretation in Wallace’s article, though I would here apply it to different effect:

do not follow an interpretation which is only possible; instead, base your convictions on what is probable.

(source: Who Should Run the Church?)

Now, Wallace would of course agree with me that in some situations where the context that informs the text’s literal/historical sense is sufficiently remote from the contemporary context of readership, we have to proceed by differentiating possible readings from impossible ones.  And I would agree with him that it is a really bad idea to argue from a possible reading of one passage against the probable reading of several passages.

And I take it as given that the model we see in the New Testament involves plural “elders…in every place,” and that there is no clear rationale for distinguishing elder, bishop, presbyter, and priest from each other as clearly as we distinguish these from deacons.  With some variation from the days of James in Jerusalem, when the Twelve replenished their numbers by choosing Matthias, through the days of the commissioning of Paul and Barnabas, then Paul and Silas, as well as the missionary work of the other Apostles, we see some things clearly.  The “laying on of hands,” for example, confers ordination–and confers the Spirit to further and make evident the gift grace for service to the Body of Christ, though these two are distinguishable.  There were city-by-city organizations for ministry, and the Church derived its first impetus for organization from the synagogue.  We should all agree that the term “presbyter,” for elder, is specifically derived from the leaders in the synagogue, and that whatever variations developed were due to the unusual ministry of the Apostles, the world-altering fact of the Resurrection, and the colossal scale on which Christianity outgrew its Jewish roots and differentiated itself from movements that tried to tow it back into expectation of a restored Temple rather than the Christian work “to proclaim the Lord’s death until He comes.”  All subsequent developments in polity, we agree, require for their justification–if they are to bind as matters of faith or morals, to require obedience of all the faithful–the direct command of Christ or the warrant of Apostolic institution (or both).  We would probably even agree that there is a “deposit of faith” that follows directly from Christ’s teaching and His authorization of the Apostles to set in order His Church.

Where we would disagree, of course, is on whether the “deposit of faith” includes the work of Christ and the teaching of His Apostles “baked into” the institution of the Church itself, so that it includes what the Apostles taught the Churches directly, with its written component being the Scriptures, and the constant practice of all the churches being the historical context among and against which the Scriptures are proclaimed.  Intrinsic to the case for remaining Protestant is the argument, in more and less Restorationist forms, that the visible Church at some point lapsed from being the Church of the Vincentian Canon and became subject to recognition only by those who are successful in discerning the maximum coherence of teachings and practices with the Bible.  In support of this contracting recognizeability of the Body of Christ, of course, Protestant theology invariably (and, in the case of its Lollard/Hussite/Zwinglian strains, quite deliberately) contracts the importance and authority of that Body.  “Go to church” becomes a moralizing exhortation reft of any particular reason, beyond one’s own best judgment about matches between one’s own reading of the Bible and some group’s doctrinal statement, why one should go to any particular assembly of those who desire to become the Body of Christ.

Now, I mention that because Dan Wallace, who is an *amazing* scholar of the text of the New Testament, and whose work at CSNTM is exemplary–would that such work was being done among Catholics!–as well as my estimable friend Tim Berg and many another participant in such conversations, inherits the same block in his understanding that I inherited.  A massive wall of negation surrounds Protestantism, and it is sourced from the narratives of hundreds of years of polemic and rationalization.  I wrote many, many pages on assumptions very similar to these:

In Ignatius (an early Christian writer who died in c. AD 117), at the beginning of the second century, already a monarchical episcopate exists.  It is interesting that Roman Catholics especially appeal to this as a model for their practices (since they rely on the tradition found in patristic writers like Ignatius far more than on divine revelation).  Those who deny the Pauline authorship of the pastoral epistles (i.e., 1-2 Timothy and Titus) also see the pastorals as reflecting a one-elder situation (=monarchical episcopate) because they regard the pastorals as having been written during the time of Ignatius.

But evangelicals should not consider arguments from either camp as weighty.  In particular, if we equate either what the early church fathers practiced or believed as totally in line with the New Testament, then we have some significant retooling to do in our churches today.  Some examples:

Didache (c. AD 100-150)–gives several regulations about baptism and fasting, much of which is pure legalism.  (For example, in one place he says, “Let us not fast as the Jews do, who fast on Mondays and Thursdays.  Instead, let us fast on Wednesdays and Fridays.”  In his discussions of baptism, he argues that cold water is better than warm, etc.–all arguments that have nothing whatever to do with the biblical revelation).

Most early church fathers (i.e., 2nd-3rd century AD) didn’t have a clue about grace, eternal security, the gospel.  The church very quickly degenerated into basic legalism.  It was not until Augustine that the church recovered some of this.  But then it fell into the dark ages, waiting for a young monk from Germany to nail his protests on the door of the Wittenberg Church.  Dr. Ted Deibler (former chairman of Church History at Dallas Seminary) used to say, “the one thing we can be certain of learning from church history is that we learn nothing from church history.”  He meant by this that we are on very dangerous ground if we assume uniformly correct theology from the church fathers.

Allegorical interpretation and eschatology: Origen and his school in particular promoted a view of scripture which was quite fanciful.

In sum, the argument for a single leader of each church is especially persuasive to Roman Catholics because it did occur throughout church history.  Yet, such traditions can never replace the Word of God.

(source: Who Should Run the Church?, emphasis added)

Now, I’ve intentionally bolded three sentences that exist to maintain the “wall” against Catholicism that is inherent in limiting the “possible” meanings of the New Testament language about leaders in the Church so that congregational polity with either single-pastor or plural-elder principles appears “probable.”  It is only after we have decided on congregational polity, after all, that the semantic field in which we must find places for bishop, presbyter, elder, etc. is discernible.

Let me repeat those emphasized sentences, explicating the negation in each:

  • “Catholics…rely on the tradition found in patristic writers like Ignatius far more than on divine revelation”–the negation here concerns “divine revelation,” namely, “Ignatius and the fathers do not provide sound evidence of the proper understanding of divine revelation.”
  • “Most early church fathers…didn’t have a clue about grace, eternal security, the gospel”–the negation is explicit, and flabbergasting.  If one means that the early church fathers do not have an American conservative evangelical faith in many respects, then that is assuredly true; but at the minimum we would have to make a case-by-case examination of the divergences.  After all, it remains possible that the martyrs were more credible than are today’s Christian book publishing cartels, does it not?  Of course, given that the same councils that defined the Trinity also declared that the united voice of the fathers on any point of Biblical interpretation was definitive, it will go hard with any movement that attempts to define and defend orthodoxy as a transmissible body of the faith, rather than a series of ad hoc persuasions.  Indeed, evangelicalism has spent a generation or so awakening to its difficulties in this regard.
  • “Such traditions can never replace the Word of God”–Again, the negation here is that the “traditions,” i.e., the united voice of the fathers, the universal practice of the Church, the unfolding of the deposit of faith, are somehow to be read over against “the Word of God.”  But how should this even be possible, if the Word of God is Jesus Christ, living, and the Word of God is Jesus Christ, written in the Scriptures?  The resurrected Jesus Christ, speaking to His Apostles in person and recorded in the Scriptures, says “I am with you always,” and His Church replies, “We proclaim your death, O Lord, and profess your Resurrection, until you come again.”  How would it be possible for the Scriptures to function without the living Word of God, or for there to be a tradition properly called Christian apart from those Scriptures?  It just won’t do.

The problem for those functioning on the other side of these negations is threefold.  We’ll set aside the first, which is that when examined head-on, they just won’t hold up.  They misrepresent Catholic tradition, or Scripture, or history, or some combination of these.  Believe me, I know this can get bad.  I’ve been there myself.

Second, there’s a hermeneutical problem that I think is both cause and consequence of this barrier for many contemporary evangelicals, one that gets worse the more deeply one reads into the fathers while trying to remain loyal to one’s Protestant forebears.

See, when you cut off the applicable meaning of the Scriptures from the history of their use and interpretation, denying the divine authority under which they were retained and compiled and canonized, the centrality of the liturgical and ecclesial uses of the Scriptures, etc.–when all of that becomes history helpful only in ascertaining the state of the text, which is then to be interpreted literally on its own horizon (by some historical-grammatical or historical-critical method) and then “applied” by a series of ad hoc persuasive utterances directly to the contemporary situation–then you flatten the meaning of the Scriptures considerably.  It ceases to be possible to understand the canonical form of Scripture *as* interpretive, for one thing; attempting to recuperate the canonical sense of the Scriptures will require some elaboration of the theory of inspiration that is impossible to source from Scripture, a faintly “possible” but wildly improbable theory of illumination.  As a matter of reasoning from the history of the Church, it will be simple cherry-picking:  the Fathers will be right where they agree with my reading of the Scriptures, and dispensable where they don’t.

In this flattened reading of the Scriptures, it ceases to be possible to see both what the Apostles wrote and what they did–to see not only the teaching in support of the fact, but the fact itself, as relevant expressions of a divinely granted authority that we all, when we are honest, agree the Apostles had.  In this flattened reading of Scripture, it never ceases to be necessary to maintain a distinction between the infallibility of the writers of what were generally recognized and eventually canonized as the Scriptures and their fallibility, even when teaching with great authority, otherwise; but it must always be rejected as inconsistency (even as wildly improbable, absurd) that their successors had at the very least a considerable advantage over us in recognizing the difference.

Which brings me to the third problem, which is that this set of negations makes it impossible to account for the actual history of the Church.  Wallace comes close to conceding this, because he is a good enough student of history to know that it all comes down to one throw, here:  either the tradition he inherits is correct, and all visible Christianity was wildly corrupted from the death of John until after Diocletian’s persecution and Constantine’s legalization of Christianity, at which point Augustine somehow revived it from coals; or Ignatius of Antioch, the close associate of Polycarp who was probably John’s own disciple, who certainly could have known the Beloved Disciple and certainly was a monarchical bishop of an Apostolic See (Antioch), knew more than a twenty-first century Christian, however astute, about what Christ’s own Apostles had taught and done about ordering the Church that Jesus founded in them.

If nothing else, bear in mind that Ignatius lived and moved among the parts of the Church that had known immense investment of first-generation Apostolic time and teaching and suffering, that had been producing martyrdoms since the first missions there, and yet had enjoyed multiple Apostles teaching there over decades.  These were not places where faint words had been remotely heard and possibly misconstrued; they were the places addressed in letters like St. Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians, which addresses no major pastoral problem–but urges them to avoid divisions, an urging given still more emphatically in the letter St. Ignatius wrote to the same church.

If crucial concepts–concepts constantly discussed, no less–were not only developed in less definite forms, but mangled badly enough to disqualify the fathers as authentic interpreters of the faith, then what happened to the Church that Jesus founded, in the generation immediately following his Apostles?  There is no tension between resisting anachronism in theology (the tendency to grab sentences from Scriptures or patristic texts without regard for the historical unfolding of Christ’s teachings) and affirming that the Apostolic Fathers must have been generally right about those things they regarded as central and that their successors built on.  There is considerable tension between “upon this rock I will build my Church, and the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it” and the view that after the Apostles not the world, but the whole visible church herself, promptly lapsed into such grave error that their witness is disqualified–and did so until Diocletian, Constantine, and Augustine led us into light.  Diocletian’s persecution did Providentially provide the impetus for canonizing and defining many things which otherwise might conceivably have dwelt in obscurity, and Constantine’s legalization of Christianity provided the space for historical efforts to realize a Gospel-ordered cosmos to begin (and err, and struggle, and begin again, and so on).  And Augustine is surely a great light to the Church, perhaps alongside St. Thomas Aquinas as the twin epochs of Christian thought since the twilight of the Apostles.  But St. Augustine surely would not agree that his testimony was over against the early fathers (though surely he did not mind correcting mistakes when he found them); and still less would he agree that his efforts were contrary to a high view of a presently united Church (living and dead), with a monarchical episcopacy centered in Rome!

As St. Augustine says,

It follows after commendation of the Trinity, “The Holy Church.” God is pointed out, and His temple. “For the temple of God is holy,” says the Apostle, “which (temple) are ye.” This same is the holy Church, the one Church, the true Church, the catholic Church, fighting against all heresies: fight, it can: be fought down, it cannot. As for heresies, they went all out of it, like as unprofitable branches pruned from the vine: but itself abideth in its root, in its Vine, in its charity. “The gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”

(source: NPNF1-03. [sermon to Catechumens on the Creed])

And here is the problem for my friends who strive to be faithful while laboring under the negations imposed on them by generations of Protestant polemic, and regarding which Catholic apologetics are often profoundly unhelpful.  (I, personally, want to kick every apologist who responds to sola Scriptura by arguing that Scripture isn’t that important, or is useless unless you have someone looking over your shoulder to tell you what it means.  I mean, have these people *read* the Magisterium on the subject of Scripture?)

How can it be that the Church should have labored so long under such a privation of sound teaching, should have managed to canonize the Scriptures while her own governance and theology were so utterly wrongheaded?  What would it mean for Jesus to tell that Church, “the Comforter, when I send Him, will lead you into all truth”?  How can it be held that the Trinity, the Incarnation, the rejection of Arianism and Pelagianism and Donatism and Semi-Pelagianism and Montanism and Manichaeanism and Marcionism and, and, and–that the Church got all of these right, and canonized Scripture correctly, but did so in such radical ignorance or corruption of teaching that it is disqualified as an interpreter of Scripture throughout that whole history?  In what way does this not immediately devolve into a cherry-picking scavenger hunt through Church history, one that directly anticipates the postmodern condition so literally as to suggest that Protestantism itself is coterminous with the modernity which has inflicted that decay upon itself?

And now we’re back to problem one:  No, no, it just won’t do.  That can’t be true.

Now, after all that–taking all that as prolegomenon to the work at hand–let me try to recommend a simple understanding of what is both “possible” and “probable” when we observe the unity of the New Testament with the actual work done by the Apostles, as reliably witnessed by their immediate disciples and the very Successors of the Apostles (like St. Augustine) relied on by our Protestant friends as important Christian teachers.

The really essential thing that is ignored in pretty much all congregational-polity exegesis of the Scriptures is that most of the language about the organization of the Church in the New Testament does not address a single congregation at all.  It is addressed, and this is how the Church has always understood it, to the local Church, that is, the Church as organized in a particular city.  Think about the way the Acts of the Apostles are organized; yes, they met “from house to house,” and they also assembled in the Temple, but the Church in Jerusalem had a head (James) who was part of a global authority (the Twelve).  In Antioch, there was the apostolic presence of Peter, who had to be reckoned with when Paul thought things were being done incorrectly.  “In every place” there were elders–presbyters, synagogue-like leaders recognized in the existing community and ordained “by the laying on of hands” to assist in the Apostolic work and lead the local communities.  No matter which words you use, during the time of the Pauline Epistles (which does not, by at least twenty years, comprehend the whole of the Apostolic Age) there were clearly levels of authority–Christ’s own Apostles, those they ordained, and those ordained by those ordained men, and all those in distinction from deacons, and from other helpers in the work.

Now, it is a fact of Church history that the term “presbyter” came to be used slightly differently in different Apostolic Sees, different regions of the Church as it came to be by the end of the 2nd C.  That is fine.  There is also diversity of usage within the Scriptures, as is made evident by the difference between “elder” in synagogue parlance, “elder” in a general communal sense, and “elder” in a sense that pretty clearly means bishop/priest.

And, in fact, the Church has no theological need to be embarrassed that “presbyter” clearly means bishop, episkopos, in one place and time–and just as clearly means “priest” but not “bishop” in another–and seems to include “deacon” as well as “priest” in another.  The word is, after all, more general in sense than these specialized terms.  It would therefore take its local sense from the place, time, and situation of writing; and that such things could diverge over time is no surprise.  But still more to the point, the Church herself understands the priesthood as one thing, existing in a diversity of manifestations.

The priest is an authorized delegate of the bishop, ordained as a presbyter but not as a bishop.  He participates in the bishop’s ordination, because the bishop and priests (and, as understood for many centuries in Roman Catholic practice and teaching, also the deacons) are all called together to teach and rule one local church, that is, the whole network of parishes and religious institutes that make up a See, the Church “at Ephesus” or “at Rome” or “in Oklahoma City.”

So we do believe in a plurality of presbyters and an essential singularity of ordination within each local church.  The bishop and priests are called *together*, with one ordination in various degrees of fullness.  To see the essential similarity between the New Testament Church, that is, the one Jesus founded in the Apostles and upon “this Rock,” and today’s Catholic Church, you need only adjust your definition of “local church” back to the one St. Paul would recognize:  “the church of God which is in Corinth…among the Thessalonians…in Ephesus…”

And then perhaps it will be easier to acknowledge what St. Paul meant in these and similar texts:  1 Corinthians 11:2; Ephesians 3:7-10; 2 Thessalonians 2:15; 2 Timothy 1:6-7; 1 Timothy 3:14-16.

(for further reading, try this article on Apostolic Succession and this one on Biblical support for the doctrine.)

on Theology

A Little Note on the Gospels

John and Mark do not mention Peter walking on water. Seems like a fairly important event not to include in their Gospels! Do you have a quick guess why?

(source: Facebook Conversation)

OK, I totally stole someone else’s conversation on Facebook.  But it was a good question, and I never could resist trying to answer good questions (yes, even as a kid).

My answer:

John has all three Synoptics available when he writes his Gospel, so he feels much more free to develop themes and frame the events, rather than repeat them. Mark is the briefest of the Gospels, and is traditionally believed to be John Mark’s recording of Peter’s testimony to the life of Christ. One could hypothesize that Peter declined to put himself in the spotlight, but that is probably not necessary. Matthew’s outline was probably known to all, as he likely compiled a “sayings Gospel” in Aramaic almost 20yrs before writing his Greek Gospel (we don’t have the Aramaic text today). I would suggest that Luke, gathering the greatest breadth of testimony, had Matthew’s information and most of Mark’s in hand when writing. So it makes sense that several accounts found in Luke and Matthew are not elsewhere.

Here are a few loose threads for further reading on the subject:

Flawed but still helpful Wikipedia discussion of the “Hebrew Gospel Hypothesis.”

Good discussion of the authorship of Matthew’s Gospel by Jimmy Akin:

Regardless of what sources this individual may have used, the book exhibits far too much literary architecture and organization to be a patchwork document assembled without a single authorial vision. As evidence for this fact, I would point both to large-scale structures in the work, like the fact that the sayings of Jesus that are scattered in Mark and Luke tend to be gathered into collected discourses on distinct topics that are then organized chiastically

(source: Let Matthew Be Matthew)

Evangelical scholar William Varner’s work on the Didache, which discusses the strong literary evidence that Didache, James, and Matthew in Greek have a common Aramaic–>Greek source that would have to be available in Palestine before the late 50s.  (that’s the 50s, not the ’50s.)