I’m teaching a class on New Testament Ethics at church, and this week we’re studying the Sermon on the Mount. I came up with this matrix for various ways the Sermon has been read. How might you combine the cells on this matrix?
Month: March 2012
I’m auditing a patristics class at St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary. This week we’re reading some of Gregory of Nyssa’s writings. Gregory was Bishop of Nyssa in the Fourth Century, and is one of the great Fathers of the Church.
Among other things, we read the Prologue from Gregory’s Commentary on the Song of Songs, in which he defends his allegorical method of interpreting the Song. Biblical scholars and theologians today will not be entirely comfortable with allegorizing, but I think Gregory’s general comments are helpful in our age of polarization between rigid literalism and “scientific” critical exegesis:
“[w]e must pass to a spiritual and intelligent investigation of scripture so that considerations of the merely human element might be changed into something perceived by the mind once the more fleshly sense of the words has been shaken off like dust.”
It’s possible to misread this statement to suggest that the literal sense doesn’t matter. But I don’t think that’s what Gregory means. He’s saying, rather, that interpretation can’t stop at the literal sense, because at that level the text is merely human.
Gregory presents a number of examples in which scripture’s “literal” sense would in fact render it unintelligible. Such examples, he says, “should serve to remind us of the necessity of searching the divine words, of reading them, and of tracing in every way possible how something more sublime might be found which leads us to that which is divine and incorporeal instead of the literal sense.”
Again, the phrase “instead of” here seems jarring. Yet it is not that the literal sense is irrelevant. It is that careful study of the literal sense yields insights into the spiritual sense.
The most interesting of Gregory’s examples is his discussion of the two trees in the Garden of Eden:
[H]ow is it possible that there are two trees in the middle of paradise, one of salvation and the other of destruction[?] For the exact center as in the drawing of a circle has only one point. However, if another center is somehow placed beside or added to that first one, it is necessary that another circle be added for that center so that the former one is no longer in the middle.
He continues,
There was only one paradise. How, then, does that text say that each tree is to be considered separately while both are in the middle? And the text, which reveals that all of God’s works are exceedingly beautiful, implies the deadly tree is different from God’s. How is this so? Unless a person contemplates that truth through philosophy, what the text says here will be either inconsistent or a fable. (Emphasis added.)
Note that Gregory lived long before the our scientific age, and long before historical-critical investigation of the Biblical texts. We live after both the natural sciences and Biblical scholarship have demonstrated that texts such as Genesis 2 cannot be read simply as “literal” history or science. But this is no more a problem for us than it was for Gregory, if we understand, as he did, that taking in the text’s literal sense is only the very start of interpretation.
Yet, a note to be fair: not all ancient interpreters agreed. Indeed, disagreements were often sharp. Then, as now, there were arguments between allegorizers and literalists. Here, for example, is another excerpt we were assigned to read, from Theodore of Mopsuestia, Bishop of Mopsuestia in the Fourth Century, in his Commentary on Galatians:
Those people [the allegorizers], however, turn it all into the contrary, as if the entire historical account of divine Scripture differed in no way from dreams in the night. When they start expounding divine Scripture ‘spiritually’ — ‘spiritual interpretation’ is the name they like to give to their folly — they claim that Adam is not Adam, paradise is not paradise, the serpent is not the serpent. I should like to tell them this: If they make history serve their own ends, they will have no history left.
Everything old is new again! And we were also given an interpretive article by Margaret Mitchell of the University of Chicago, which notes that the “Alexandrine” allegorizers and “Antiochene” literalists were not so neatly polarized as some might think: she notes that both Alexandrine and Antiochene exegesis often “was a tool for enacting particular ecclesiastical, theological, and social agendas.” Yes, everything old is new again!
So what might we learn? Perhaps that there are many ways of reading, and the interpretive task never ends.
(Image credit: Wikimedia Commons)
The Wall Street Journal’s today featured a review of Jonathan Haidt’s book The Righteous Mind. Haidt, the reviewer says, suggests that humans “are selfish primates who long to be part of something larger and nobler than ourselves. We are 90 percent chimp and 10 percent bee.” The Chronicle of Higher Education features several columns on neuroscience and free will.
Haidt’s perspective seems to offer a helpful corrective to some reductionistic accounts of morality in which all “moral” actions are revealed as merely selfish. The Chronicle columns offer some standard reductionstic physicalist fare, such as Jerry Coyne’s entry. Coyne argues that “free will is ruled out, simply and decisively, by the laws of physics. Your brain and body, the vehicles that make “choices,” are composed of molecules, and the arrangement of those molecules is entirely determined by your genes and your environment.”
This, of course, assumes that the “laws of physics” are the full and final composition of reality — an assumption that is metaphysical and not within the purview of empirical science.
In contrast, philosopher Alfred Mele correctly observes that the empirical evidence for brain-state determinism is flimsy at best. Yet even Mele assumes the metaphysical starting point of physicalism. He just isn’t willing to accept reductive physicalism on empirical grounds.
Michael Gazzinga agrees that free will is an illusion, but argues that we should act as if it were real. Gazzinga states that, notwithstanding brain determinism,
Holding people responsible for their actions remains untouched and intact since that is a value granted by society. We all learn and obey rules, both personal and social. Following social rules, as they say, is part of our DNA. Virtually every human can follow rules no matter what mental state he or she is in.
Gazzinga is one of the more subtle thinkers on the relation of law, ethics and neuroscience. In my doctoral research, I’ll spend some time addressing his arguments. In short, what he is saying here seems to me to be literally non-sensical. To use terms like “value” and “granted” is to slip into the language of metaphysics and agency. In a deterministic universe, there are no “values” — stuff just happens. And nothing is “granted,” for that implies a decision whether to give or withhold consent — again, in a deterministic universe, stuff just happens.
The best Chronicle entry is by philosopher Hilary Bok, who correctly argues that “free will” is a philosophical rather than strictly scientific-empirical question. Bok offers a compatibilist framework for “free will” in a physicalist universe. Here, I think, Bok’s approach (and all “compatibilist” approaches drawn from analytic philosophy) is grossly inadequate. She assumes, as do Gazzinga and Coyne, a materialist metaphysic. She should recognize that whether materialism is true also is not properly a scientific-empirical question.
This is a place at which theology and “science” are indeed in conflict, at least insofar as “science” purports to circumscribe metaphysical questions. Theology unabashedly asserts that the physical universe is not all there is. We might debate the nature and existence of the “soul” (I believe in the “soul,” though with some careful qualifications against pseudo-Cartesian dualisms), but by definition “theology” implies God and not just physics.
But really, there shouldn’t be a conflict at this point. “Science” should recognize its limits.
Categories
A Brainbow
This picture shows individual neurons in the hippocampus of a mouse that has been genetically engineered to express fluorescent proteins. You can watch the neural circuits fire in technicolor.
Categories
(De)(Re)Constructing the Blog
You may have noticed, dear reader, that I haven’t posted in a month. It’s been a busy month, mostly filled with good activities. I’ve also been pondering this blog — what it has been in the six or seven years I’ve been writing it, and what it should, if anything, be. For better or worse, I’m an inveterate scribbler, and I want to keep this outlet open. I hope that, at its best, it isn’t a space for foolish arguments, but rather is in some way helpful and edifying to some people. It is, of course, just a blog, and should be read in that light: not as anything final or authoritative, but merely the often disjointed and ill-formed thoughts of one person seeking to participate in the life of Christ in the world.
In that spirit, I’m making an effort to change up the blog a bit and to try something a bit more constructive and structured. I’ve added five new categories, which correspond to the new Pages above. My goal is to offer one post each week month in each of these categories:
βιβλία — reflections on the texts of the Hebrew and Christian scriptures.
φιλοσοφία – reflections on philosophy, particularly the Christian philosophical tradition of faith seeking understanding.
πνεύμα — reflections on spiritual life.
πόλις — reflections on political theology, law and culture.
φύσις — science and nature.
I hope some people will continue to read and enjoy; and I hope in some way there will be hints and echoes here and there of the presence of the Author of Life.