Category: Historical Theology

Origen on Adam, Part 3: Origen on the Bible and Adam

Post author By dopderbeck
Post date September 6, 2016
1 Comment on Origen on Adam, Part 3: Origen on the Bible and Adam

This is the third post in my series about Origen and “Adam.”

Origen’s Interpretive Strategies: Impossibilities and “Stumbling Blocks”

Any discussion of Origen’s view of Adam and the Fall must begin with Origen’s strategies for interpreting the Biblical creation narratives. Origen is often cited, and faulted, for an excessive reliance on fanciful allegorical Biblical interpretation. But Origen’s method was crafted in significant part because of the challenges the Hebrew scriptures presented to any highly educated Greek Christian in the Second or Third Centuries. Origen read the Biblical texts carefully and knew, well before modern historical criticism or Darwinian science, that many of the narratives could not constitute literal history. At the same time, Origen did not simply write off those narratives as merely non-historical.[1] Instead, Origen suggested that elements of the narratives should be taken as essentially historically accurate, while other elements should be understood as “stumbling blocks” intentionally included by the Holy Spirit.

In On First Principles, for example, Origen states that

If the usefulness of the law and the sequence and case of the narrative were at first sight clearly discernible throughout, we should be unaware that there was anything beyond the obvious meaning for us to understand in the scriptures. Consequently, the Word of God has arranged for certain stumbling-blocks, as it were, and hindrances and impossibilities to be inserted in the midst of the law and the history, in order that we may not be completely drawn away by the sheer attractiveness of the language, and so either reject the true doctrines absolute, on the ground that we learn from the scriptures nothing worthy of God or else by never moving away from the letter fail to learn anything of the more divine element.[2]

These “stumbling-blocks,” Origen said, included things “which did not happen, occasionally something which could not happen, and occasionally something which might have happened but in fact did not.”[3] In particular, Origen argued that parts of the creation narratives obviously were not literal: “who is so silly,” he asked, “as to believe that God, after the manner of a farmer, ‘planted a paradise eastward in Eden,’ and set in it a visible and palpable ‘tree of life,’ of such a sort that anyone who tasted its fruit with his bodily teeth would gain life; and again that one could partake of ‘good and evil’ by masticating the fruit taken from the tree of that name?”[4] Nevertheless, he thought parts of the narratives might still be historically true: “[s]ometimes a few words are inserted which in the bodily sense are not true, and at other times a greater number.”[5] Origen never fully articulated a method for separating the historical from the non-historical other than to “carefully investigate how far the literal meaning is true and how far it is impossible” and then to “trace out from the use of similar expressions the meaning, scattered everywhere through the scriptures of that which when taken literally is impossible.”[6]

Adam and Eve as Historical, Or Not?

Although Origen did not regard the “Trees” in the “Garden” as literal things, in On First Principles he did seem to suggest that Adam and Eve were both real individuals and symbolic of larger dimensions of humanity. For example, in DP IV.III.7, in a complex passage commenting on Paul’s distinction between physical and “spiritual” Israel in 1 Corinthians 15, Origen traces the historical lineage of the Israelites and says Jacob was “born of Isaac, and Isaac descended from Abraham, while all go back to Adam, who the apostle says is Christ . . . .” Origen then noted that “the origin of all families that are in touch with the God of the whole world began lower down with Christ, who comes next after the God and Father of the whole world and thus is the father of every soul, as Adam is the father of all men.”[7] Further, Origen suggested, “Eve is interpreted by Paul as referring to the Church [and] it is not surprising (seeing that Cain was born of Eve and all that come after him carry back their descent to Eve that these two should be figures of the Church; for in the higher sense all men take their beginnings from the Church.”[8] In texts such as these Origen seemed to assume that Adam and Eve were real people even as they symbolize larger truths.

Yet it is unclear whether in these texts Origen was simply reading off the literal sense of the Biblical text without commenting on its historicity. In other texts, Origen seemeed to limit the historical content of the Biblical references to Adam. Most notably, in his major apologetic work, Against Celsus, Origen responded to an early philosophical objection against what would seem a forerunner of Augustine’s biologistic view of original sin by noting that the Hebrew term “Adam” is used generically for all of humanity.[9] Here Origen said that “the subjects of Adam and his son will be philosophically dealt with by those who are aware that in the Hebrew language Adam signifies man; and that in those parts of the narrative which appear to refer to Adam as an individual, Moses is discoursing upon the nature of man in general.”[10] He concluded that “[f]or in Adam (as the Scripture says) all die, and were condemned in the likeness of Adam’s transgression, the word of God asserting this not so much of one particular individual as of the whole human race.”[11]

Even here, Origen seemed to hedge his bets about the historicity of Adam. The apparent qualification in the translation quoted above from Contra Celsus that scripture asserts the universality of sin “not so much of one particular individual as of the whole human race” is interesting. This could suggest that the historical reference is real, or probably real, but of secondary importance. In Migne’s Greek version text, this phrase reads “οὐχ οὕτως περὶ ἑνός τινος ὡς περὶ ὅλου τοῦ γένους” – “truly in this way about anything belonging to the former as about the entire race” (my literal translation).[12] Whether Origen meant here that the reference to Adam signifies primarily the entire human race and only incidentally a historical man, or that the reference is “truly” only symbolic of the entire human race, is unclear. In any event, as Bouteneff notes, Origen could on different occasions speak of “Adam” both as a generic term for humanity and as an actual person in the genealogical line of Israel.[13] It is probably best to conclude that Origen saw no reason to think a historical Adam was “impossible” and that therefore that the literal sense should be taken as historical.

A Dual Fall, Or Not

At the same time, in this passage in Contra Celsus Origen also hints at a notion of the human fall that extends beyond the “historical”:

And the expulsion of the man and woman from paradise, and their being clothed with tunics of skins (which God, because of the transgression of men, made for those who had sinned), contain a certain secret and mystical doctrine (far transcending that of Plato) of the souls losing its wings, and being borne downwards to earth, until it can lay hold of some stable resting-place.[14]

References such as this one led many ancient critics, and still convince many modern scholars, to conclude that Origen believed in a two-stage Fall: a first fall of preexistent souls from paradise and “into” physical bodies, and a second fall of physical “Adam.”[15] Bouteneff, however, sides with another line of scholarship that views these apparent “stages” of the human fall simply as different modes of discourse through which Origen seeks to explain the spiritual meaning of the diverse Biblical texts.[16]

A full effort at resolving this interpretive disagreement is beyond the scope of this post, but there are passages in On First Principles that could support either or both views. For example, at one point Origen seems to understand the cycle of fall and return as an allegory of every person’s spiritual journey: “when each one, through participation in Christ in his character of wisdom and knowledge and sanctification, advances and comes to higher degrees of perfection,” God is glorified. [17] Because God always offers forgiveness, “[a] fall does not therefore involve utter ruin, but a man may retrace his steps and return to his former state and once more set his mind on that which through negligence had slipped from his grasp.”[18] In other places, though, Origen’s text seems to echo the Platonic mythology more literally. For example: “All rational creatures who are incorporeal and invisible, if they become negligent, gradually sink to a lower level and take to themselves bodies suitable to the regions into which they descend; that is to say, first, ethereal bodies, and then aeriel.”[19]

The Importance of “Matter”

One hint at a constructive resolution of the ambiguities in Origen’s views about the Fall might lie in Origen’s lengthy discourse on “matter” in Book IV, Chapter IV of On First Principles, which serves as a summary of the entire treatise. Origen understood “matter” to be “that substance which is said to underlie bodies.”[20] Origen noted that humans exist bodily in various states, such as “awake or asleep, speaking or silent,” that do not comprise a human person’s “underlying substance.”[21] The philosophical problem Origen was confronting here is the relationship between the “one” and the “many” (or the “universal” and the “particular”), which is so central Greek thought, and his division between substance and particulars was classically Platonic.[22] However, in this part of his treatise, Origen also was attempting to show how the Christian doctrine of creation differed from the Aristotelian idea, which may also be present in Plato’s Timaeus, of the eternity of the cosmos.[23] Origen, like other early Christian writers, sought to counter this reasoning in light of the Biblical revelation about the temporality of the immaterial creation.[24]

Although Origen wanted to deny the eternity of the material cosmos, he recognized that a radical disjunction between God’s eternal being and the purposes of creation – as though at some defined point in time God suddenly decided to create matter – would compromise God’s eternity and simplicity by introducing a temporal sequence into God’s own life. Origen therefore borrowed another move from Platonism that would become a classically Christian – indeed, eventually an Augustinian – move: he located the unchangeable substance, the “one,” in the eternal mind of God, and separated it from the created matter that will receive its form. Here is how Origen summarized his conclusion:

since, then, as we have said, rational nature is changeable and convertible, so of necessity God had foreknowledge of the differences that were to arise among souls or spiritual powers, in order to arrange that each in proportion to its merits might wear a different bodily covering of this or that quality; and so, too, was it necessary for God to make a bodily nature, capable of changing at the Creator’s will, by an alteration of qualities, into everything that circumstances might require. This nature must needs endure so long as those endure who need it for a covering; and there will always be rational natures who need this bodily covering.[25]

Concerning Adam, in other words, from eternity past God knew Adam would fall, and therefore God created a material body for Adam appropriate to a fallen creature. While “Adam” is a changeable and imperfect being, God’s intellect and foreknowledge are perfect and unchanging. Consistent with the “two-stage fall” reading of Origen, then, it is probably true that Origen envisioned the pre-material fall of Adam as an actual event in the ontology of creation, but there is also a sense in which that pre-material ontology of creation for Origen is an ideal in God’s eternal mind rather than a series of events in the “historical” timeline of creation. The “pre-material” fall therefore was not so much part of a sequence of “historical” events as a trans-historical reality that is manifested in history. As discussed in my next post, this ontological connection between the trans-historical and the historical ties directly into the relationship between Christology and theological anthropology.

______________________________________

[1] See Bouteneff, Beginnings, 103-107.

[2] Origen, On First Principles, trans. G.W. Butterworth (Notre Dame: Ave Maria Press 2013), IV.II.9. Following scholarly convention, this text will be referred to hereafter as DP, the initials for the Latin title of the text, De Principiis. The Section, Chapter and Paragraph numbers to the standard scholarly division of the text will be provided. Unless otherwise indicated, Butterworth’s translation is from a Greek version of the text.

[3] DP IV.II.9.

[4] DP IV.IV.1.

[5] DP IV.II.9.

[6] DP IV.III.4.

[7] DP IV.III.7.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Origen, Contra Celsus, trans. Frederick Crombie (Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing 1884), available at http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0416.htm, 4:40. Citations to this text will use the standard scholarly abbreviation C. Cels. and will refer to the standard scholarly section and paragraph divisions.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Jaques-Paul Migne, Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Series Graeca (Parise: Imprimerie Catholique 1857), Vol. 11, available on Google Books athttps://books.google.com/books?id=qAkRAAAAYAAJ. A Greek text file from Migne, from which I made my translation, is available at http://khazarzar.skeptik.net/pgm/PG_Migne/Origenes_PG%2011-17/Contra%20Celsum.pdf. A good article describing Migne’s collection is available on Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrologia_Graeca.

[13] Bouteneff, Beginnings, 111.

[14] C. Cels. 4:40.

[15] See Bammel, Caroline P. Hammond, “Adam in Origen,’ in Rowan Williams, ed., The Making of Orthodoxy: Essays in Honour of Henry Chadwick, 62-93 (Cambridge: CUP 1989).

[16] Bouteneff, Beginnings, 108.

[17] DP I.III.8.

[18] Ibid.

[19] DP I.IV.1. He continues: “And when they reach the neighborhood of the earth they are enclosed in grosser bodies, and last of all are tied to human flesh.” Ibid.

[20] DP IV.IV.6.

[21] DP IV.IV.7.

[22] For a discussion of this problem in Platonism generally, see Gerald A. Press, “Plato” and Lloyd P. Gerson, “Plotinus and Neo-Platonism” in Richard H. Popkin, ed., The Columbia History of Western Philosophy (New York: Columbia Univ. Press 1999). For a discussion of the problem of particulars and universals in Platonism, see Balaguer, Mark, “Platonism in Metaphysics”, in Edward N. Zalta, ed., The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2016 Edition, Sec. 3 (“The One Over Many Argument”), available at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/platonism/#3.

[23] See ibid. (noting that “we absolute deny that matter should be called unbegotten or uncreated”). For Aristotle’s discussion of the eternity of the cosmos see Aristotle, On the Heavens, trans. J.L. Stocks (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1927), Books I and II, available at http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/heavens.2.ii.html. The Hellenistic Jewish philosopher Philo, with whose work Origen was well-acquainted, was also very concerned about this question. See Philo, On the Eternity of the World, in The Works of Philo, trans Charles Duke Yonge (London: H.G. Bohn 1854-1890), available at http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/yonge/book35.html. For a discussion of the relationship between Origen’s thought and Philo’s, see David T. Runia, Philo and the Church Fathers: A Collection of Papers, Chapter Six (New York: E.J. Brill 1995).

[24] See, e.g., Harry A. Wolfson, Patristic Arguments Against the Eternity of the World, Harvard Theological Review 59:4 (Oct. 1966), 351-367.

[25] DP IV.IV.8.

Historical Theology Origen Patristics Science and Religion

Origen on Adam

800px-origen-768x911 This will begin a series of posts on how the 3rd Century theologian Origen might help us think about “Adam.” The question “who was Adam” presents difficult issues for Christian theology. Following the lead of St. Augustine, “Western” Christian theology historically has emphasized the implication of each human being in the primordial sin of Adam – that is, Western theological traditions tend toward robust versions of the doctrine of “original sin.”[1] There are significant philosophical, critical, and scientific problems with this approach.[2] Philosophically, it is unclear why it is just for God to hold the rest of humanity accountable for Adam’s actions. [3] Critically, it is unclear that the Hebrew scriptures ever meant to suggest any doctrine of “original sin” or whether the locus classicus for the doctrine in the Pauline New Testament literature was properly translated and understood by Augustine.[4] Scientifically, it is now clear from various lines of evidence that the population of anatomically modern humans evolved gradually over millions of years from a common ancestor shared with the great apes, and that the present human population could not have genetically derived from a single common ancestral pair.[5] In other words, a flatly literal “Adam and Eve,” which seems to be required by the Augustinian view, is scientifically impossible.

In response to these concerns, many contemporary theologians suggest that “Eastern” traditions, which are less connected to the “Western” / Augustinian view of original sin, can more easily manage these tensions.[6] Some of these writers seek to bring Eastern views into conversation with modern liberal or neo-orthodox theology, which tends to emphasize the metaphorical nature of the Biblical creation accounts, and with the trend in recent theology towards social Trinitarianism, which can map onto a social (rather than Western “individualistic”) ontology of what it means to be “human.”[7]

These gestures towards “Eastern” thought are helpful in the sense that they do highlight the “mythic” dimensions of the Biblical creation narratives and the irreducibly social construction of human identity. They tend, however, towards broad generalizations that often do not account for the more nuanced and complex philosophical matrix that informed many of the Eastern Church Fathers as they thought about creation, humanity, and the Fall. In this regard, Origen is an interesting figure to study because of the historic anathemas against his supposedly aberrant neo-Platonic views about the pre-existence of souls.[8] As we shall see, Origen did indeed draw heavily on Platonism, but his views about Adam and the Fall were far more subtle than is often supposed. Indeed, I will argue that elements of Origen’s views could be useful to a contemporary Christian theology of Adam and original sin.

In my next post, I’ll examine some threshold problems in locating “Origen’s views” about Adam.

____________________________________________

[1] For a good summary of the doctrine and its Augustinian roots, see Ian McFarland, “The Fall and Sin,” in John Webster, Kathryn Tanner, and Iain Torrance, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Systematic Theology (Oxford: OUP 2007), 140-157.

[2] For a general discussion of contemporary objections to the Augustinian doctrine of original sin, see Alistair McFadyen, Bound to Sin: Abuse, Holocaust and the Doctrine of Sin (Cambridge: CUP 2000), at pp. 40-41.

[3] Concerning objections to the Augustinian doctrine, see McFarland, “The Fall and Sin.” For a more in-depth discussion, see David Kelsey, Eccentric Existence: A Theological Anthropology, Vol. 1 (Louisville: Westminster John Knox 2009); Veli Matti Karkainnen, Creation and Humanity: A Constructive Christian Theology for the Pluralistic World, Vol. 3 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans 2015), Chapter 15.

[4] See, e.g., Peter Bouteneff, Beginnings: Ancient Christian Readings of the Biblical Creation Narratives (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic 2008).

[5] For a general overview of the evidences for human evolution, see Steve Jones, Robert Martin, and David Pilbeam, eds., The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Human Evolution (Cambridge: CUP 1996). For a series of articles on why population genetics precludes a single genetic ancestor of all modern humanity, See Dennis Venema, BioLogos Forum,” Letters to the Duchess,” available at http://biologos.org/blogs/dennis-venema-letters-to-the-duchess/series/adam-eve-and-human-population-genetics.

[6] For a general discussion of the “Eastern” view, see Peter Bouteneff, “Christ and Salvation,” in Mary B. Cunningham and Elizabeth Theokrotoff, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Orthodox Christian Theology (Cambridge: CUP 2008), 94; Timothy Ware, The Orthodox Church (New York: Penguin Books 1997), 222-225.

[7] See, e.g., Kelsey, Eccentric Existence; Karkainnen, Creation and Humanity, Chapter 15.

[8] For a discussion of the historical disputes over Origenism, see Joseph Trigg Wilson, Origen (London: Routledge 2002).

Historical Theology Patristics Science and Religion Theology

Behold, the Man

I have a new post up on the BioLogos blog. Here it is:

Anyone interested in the faith and science conversation knows that there currently is considerable, heated debate over the problem of “Adam.” Genetic studies conclude that the modern human population could not have arisen from only one primal couple. Excellent Biblical scholars and theologians from various perspectives argue over whether “Adam” should be thought of as part of a population of early humans, or as an entirely non-historical figure. And of course, many Christians continue to insist that scientific data that appears to contradict a particular Biblical / theological interpretation of human origins should be rejected out of hand.

I’d like to suggest that this argument is in significant ways misplaced. The participants in this debate all seem to agree that what makes us “human” can be defined by genes and population studies. There is a pressing need for them to conform theology to population genetics, or to conform population genetics to theology, because the story of our genes is implicitly equated with the story of what it means to be “human.” The hypothesis that there was a “first human” – a capital-A “Adam” – can be tested in our genes.

But “genes” do not make us “human.” What makes us “human” is the irreducible phenomena of all of our material and immaterial being as persons.

Nothing we observe in the universe is flat. By “flat” I mean having only one aspect or “layer.” Consider, for example, an apple. What is it? Is it the fruit of an apple tree? The seed-carrier – the potentiality – of new apple trees? Beautiful and delicious? Skin, flesh, and core? Water and organic molecules? Caloric energy and roughage? Hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon? Physical laws? All of these things comprise some of what we mean by “apple,” but none of them are what an “apple” is. The reality that is “apple” cannot be reduced to any one of its aspects or layers.

It is possible to think of these aspects or layers hierarchically, with “higher” layers that emerge from “lower” ones. Physical laws emerge from quantum probabilities; molecules emerge from physical laws; seeds, skin, flesh and core emerge from complex arrangements of molecules; beauty and delight emerge from the connection of skin, flesh and core to human sense perception;¹ “apple” emerges from all of this (and more) combined with the human cultural experience of this thing we call “apple.”

Notice that some “layers” can impinge or “supervene” on lower ones – for example, human sense perception and cultural experience do something to this thing confronting the subject in order for it to become “apple.” But notice also that “apple” is not merely a cultural construction. The word or signifier “apple,” of course, could be arbitrary, but there is an objective reality to the thing signified. The layer of human sense perception and cultural experience supervenes upon, but does not create, the lower-order reality from which it emerges.

Sociologist Christian Smith draws these strands together in a critical realist framework in his excellent book What Is a Person?: Rethinking Humanity, Social Life, and the Moral Good from the Person Up. In a critically realist approach to culture and human personhood, Smith suggests, “[h]uman beings do have an identifiable nature that is rooted in the natural world, although the character of human nature is such that it gives rise to capacities to construct variable meanings and identities….” Culture is a social construction, but it is not merely a social construction. Human beings are social, but they are not subsumed by the social. The reality we inhabit is “stratified”: it includes both the reality of individual conscious human agents and the reality of the social structures that emerge from the cultures created by those agents. These “personal” and “cultural” layers of the world interact with each other dynamically, each continually informing and changing the other.

Smith’s approach is helpful, but perhaps it does not go far enough. For Smith, as for critical realists in general, the phenomena of human culture remain subject to some degree of granular disaggregation, at least analytically. A phenomenological approach suggests that no “thing” can be broken into components and still comprise that “thing” – the genes that encode for apple trees are not apple seeds, apple seeds are not apple trees, and apple trees are not apples. The critical realist framework of stratification, emergence, and supervenience functions as a very useful heuristic device, but to describe what an apple is, we must approach the phenomenon of “apple” in its fullness. To know whether something falls into the kind “apple,” we must hold an ideal of everything an apple is, and compare the subject to the ideal.

And because of the transcendence of the ideal concept of “apple,” we can begin to speak of the relative excellence of particular instantiations of apples. What is an “excellent” apple? What distinguishes the excellent apple from a poor one? We can only ask such questions if “apple” means something more than the particular physical specimen in hand, whether firm, sweet and tart, or bruised and sour.

The same is true of human “persons.” We can say almost nothing about a “person” merely by observing genes, because genes are not “persons.” Populations genetics studies can provide models of the dispersion of genes through groups of biological entities, but they can tell us nothing whatsoever about when the first “human person” emerged. Indeed, for population genetics qua population genetics, there simply are no “persons” – for this is a science of the movement of genes, not a philosophical, sociological, or theological description of “persons.”

So what of “Adam?” It is often suggested that in Romans 5:12 Adam is a type of Christ. But, in fact, in Paul’s thought, as well as for the early Church Fathers, Christ is the type, the typos, a notion derived from the “stamp” or “seal” on an official document. There is a hint in Romans 5 of a truth that would only become clarified later in Christian theology – that the pre-incarnate Christ, the second person of the Trinity, always was. Whereas Arius declared that “there was a time when he [Christ] was not,” Nicea established the orthodox Christology of Christ’s eternal sonship. Thus Christ is and was the Redeemer, the one for whom creation was made and in whose death and resurrection creation always finds its fulfillment. Adam’s failure was that he went against type – he did not conform to Christ but rather tried to become something else, and thereby the true nature of humanity was broken.

Is the typos of Christ reducible to a set of genes? Surely not. It resides not in genes or in any other created thing but rather in the Triune life of God Himself. We might speak, in a roughly analogical way, of ideas we hold in our minds – say, the idea of a perfect Bordeaux, ruby-red, silky, smoky, plummy, luxurious. We could labor to instantiate that idea, combining genes and terroir and water and light and care, and perhaps we might achieve it, to the point where upon taking a sip we exclaim, “this – this – is Bordeaux. Nothing else is worthy of that name.”

This is what God said of Adam, when he gave him breath and a name. It is not something that God said of any other creature, even apparently some creatures that a modern population geneticist or paleoanthropologist might designate as ancestrally human based on genes or bones. Yet that Adam, and each of us in that Adam, fail to participate fully and unreservedly in the true nature of the true human, the nature of Christ. And so Pontius Pilot, an unwitting prophet, said of Christ: “behold, the man” (John 19:5, KJV). And so also Paul invites us to see: the sinful man, the broken seal, the first created Adam; and the true type, the seal of humanity’s future, the perfect Adam, the Christ. None of this is about the definitions and categories of modern science, as helpful and important as they may be for the progress of scientific thought. It is, rather, about the fullness of what it means to be human.

Notes

1. Human sense perception, of course, is an emergent property of an even more complex set of relations that give rise to the human “person.”

Beauty of the Christian Faith Historical Theology Theology

The Beauty of the Christian Faith: Introduction: Sources: Reason

Post author By David Opderbeck
Post date July 25, 2011
2 Comments on The Beauty of the Christian Faith: Introduction: Sources: Reason

I’m working on an adult curriculum titled “The Beauty of the Christian Faith.” It explores the basic elements of Christian faith as expressed in the Nicene Creed. I’ll be posting excerpts as they’re done. Here’s the fourth part of the introduction. Prior posts can be accessed through the Beauty of the Christian Faith Page.

Introduction

The sources of Christian theology are scripture, tradition, reason, and experience. Every variety of Christian theology draws on each of these sources. One of the first decisions we must make when thinking theologically is how to understand the nature of, and relationship between, these sources.

Reason

“Reason” is the application of the tools of the intellect, including language, observation, logic, and rational argument, to the available data.

The relationship between “faith” and “reason” is a rich and sometimes contentious area of reflection in the Christian tradition. Christians have always been aware of the limitations of human reason. Some of these limitations are “natural” – humans cannot know and understand everything that God knows and understands, precisely because we are human creatures and not God. Some of these limitations are the result of sin. Because of sin, apart from God’s grace humans tend to ignore and distort many basic truths.[1] Nevertheless, Christians have always agreed that theology must be informed by human reason.

Perhaps the most profound statement of this relationship comes from the 11th Century theologian St. Anslem: “faith seeks understanding” (“fides quaerens intellectum”). Right “understanding” – the correct application of reason – presupposes faith. This is true even for a person of no religious faith at all. In order to believe that reason is a reliable process, we must at least assume that the universe we observe is in some sense real, orderly and predictable. If the observed universe were an illusion brought about by a feverish dream or a malicious demon, for example, or if the laws of nature were radically different in the past than they are today, there would be no basis upon which to believe that our beliefs about things like cause and effect are true – we could not make any inferences from our observations of the world. But there is no way to prove for certain that the observed universe is not a grand deception with a false history – for if it were a grand deception, we would be deceived in our attempts at any such proof!

This problem is called “Descartes’ Demon,” after Renee Descartes, a brilliant 17th Century mathematician and philosopher. Descartes sought an indubitable foundation for rational knowledge. As he reflected on this problem, he realized that, at the very least, he must really exist – or else he could not reflect on the problem of his own existence! The fact of his own existence, he believed, was beyond doubt, because to doubt that fact is to presume a “self” capable of doubt. This led him to make his famous statement that “I think therefore I am” (“Cogito ergo sum”). Descartes believed that from this sure foundation of self-knowledge, using observation and reason, he could establish many other facts for certain.

Most contemporary philosophers recognize that, even if the Cogito is correct, it fails to provide the sort of firm foundation Descartes sought. Perhaps self-consciousness is itself an illusion. Perhaps what appears to be “conscious” thought is really an epiphenomenal delusion based in entirely mechanistic biological processes. Some modern neuroscientists believe precisely this about the human mind.[2] And even if self-consciousness cannot reasonably be doubted, the “self” might be deceived about what kind of “self” it is, and about what exactly it is capable of perceiving and what kind of mental tools it can apply to those apparent perceptions.

In fact, over a thousand years before Descartes, St. Augustine made a similar observation about self-knowledge and the certainty of one’s own existence. Augustine, however, was more attuned to human fallibility than Descartes. When Augustine peered into his own soul, he saw an enormous capacity for rebelliousness and self-deception, along with a yearning for God. Augustine therefore understood self-knowledge as a springboard to faith in God.[3]

This exercise shows that everyone must employ “faith” as a basis for reason. Even people who claim to believe nothing but that which can be rationally “proven” must rely on assumptions that cannot be proven about their own minds, their own perceptions, and the universe we inhabit. “Rationalism” is self-defeating.

It is tempting at this point to discount reason entirely in favor of faith. Some Christians and other religious people take this approach, at least in some areas of their lives. For example, some Christians continue to follow certain “health and wealth” preachers even when those preachers are exposed as cheats and frauds.[4] This is the opposite error to “rationalism”: “fideism.”

Christian theology is neither rationalistic nor fideistic. “Reason” is an important source of Christian theology because we are informed by faith commitments about God, ourselves, and creation. These include that: God exists; God is the creator of all things; God is a reasonable being; God created humans in His image, with a capacity for observation and reason; creation bears the characteristics of order and intelligibility because creation proceeds from and depends upon God’s will; and God is not a deceiver and is the author of Truth. We might summarize it this way: “all Truth is God’s Truth.” Faith and reason are not at odds; they are in fact necessary to each other.

[1] The precise manner in which sin distorts human reason is a subject of intense debate across different Christian traditions. Christians in the Catholic and Orthodox traditions tend to hold a “higher” view of human reason, even though affected by sin, than Christians in the Protestant traditions. Among Protestants, Calvinist-Reformed Christians tend to hold a “lower” view of human reason than those informed by the Arminian-Wesleyan-Pietist streams of the faith. We will explore these differences in more detail in the module on “Humanity as Creation.”

[2] This claim, however, is self-defeating. How could a neurobiological machine with no true consciousness “believe” anything?

[3] Augustine’s reflections on this process are contained in his Confessions – a classic of Christian spirituality and of Western literature.

[4] The point here is not to suggest that God never miraculously heals or miraculously provides for people today. We have many reasons to believe God sometimes acts today in ways we must call “miraculous.” Moreover, God is always the source of every good thing we receive. Nevertheless, it is sadly the case that there are many false “health and wealth” preachers seeking their own gain, who prey on gullible, desperate, and poor people throughout the world.

Beauty of the Christian Faith Historical Theology Theology

The Beauty of the Christian Faith: Introduction: Sources: Tradition

Post author By David Opderbeck
Post date July 25, 2011

I’m working on an adult curriculum titled “The Beauty of the Christian Faith.” It explores the basic elements of Christian faith as expressed in the Nicene Creed. I’ll be posting excerpts as they’re done. Here’s the third part of the introduction. Prior posts can be accessed through the Beauty of the Christian Faith Page.

Introduction

Tradition

Tradition is the historical teaching, reflection, and worship of the Christian Church.

For Catholic, Orthodox, and some protestant Christians, some documents produced by Church leaders throughout history are given special status. At various times, Church leaders met in “councils” to deal with controversial questions. When these councils included Bishops from both the Eastern and Western parts of the Church and were convened by a sovereign political authority (an Emperor), they were called “ecumenical” councils (“ecumenical” means “worldwide”).

During its first few hundred years, the Church faced vital and difficult questions about the nature of God and Christ. How do the Father, Son and Holy Spirit comprise one God? Was Christ fully God? Was he also fully human? These questions went to the heart of the Christian story. In a series of ecumenical councils, the Church hammered out statements and definitions relating to these questions. These included the First Council of Nicea in A.D. 325, which led to the creation of the Nicene Creed – the basic text for our study in this class.

After this period, differences between the Eastern and Western branches of the Church became more pronounced and difficult. There were numerous reasons for these differences, which included genuine theological debate as well as geography, culture, politics, and even war.[1] By 1054 A.D., the Eastern and Western branches of the Church had definitively split, with the Western branch adhering to the central authority of the Bishop of Rome – the Pope. There were numerous other councils held after this split both in the East and in the West, which the Catholic and Orthodox Churches respectively continue to take as authoritative. However, there were no further ecumenical councils that produced any statement, such as the Nicene Creed, that would win broad acceptance in all branches of the Church.

As mentioned in the section on “Scripture,” the Reformation of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries represents another significant break in the broad stream of Church history. The Eastern churches had split with the West over the primacy of the Pope and other matters, but the Eastern Churches continued to understand themselves as existing under the authority of the line of Bishops (including the Bishop of Rome) extending directly from the Apostles. The Reformation became something far more radical: for many (but not all) of the heirs of the Reformation, it led to the complete rejection of the kind of authority historically given to the Bishops by both the Western (Catholic) and Eastern churches. The rejection or redefinition of “apostolic succession” perhaps is the most significant legacy (for good or ill, depending on your perspective) of the Reformation.

Scholars of the Reformation today debate whether the Reformation’s key early figures – people such as Martin Luther and John Calvin – really intended the massive schism their movement produced. Luther, for example, at first hoped for more subtle changes within the Roman church, and some scholars today suggest that he hoped for reconciliation with Rome well into his later life. In any event, these “Magesterial” Reformers did not reject “tradition” out of hand. To the contrary, they accorded high status particularly to the early history of the Church, including the ecumenical councils. They believed that their movement was entirely consistent with the teachings of those early ecumenical councils.

In addition to documents from official Church councils, “tradition” includes the Church’s historical reflection and worship. Christianity produced many of the most brilliant minds in the history of Western civilization. Writers such as Irenaeus of Lyon, Maximus the Confessor, Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, Karl Barth, and many others, have left us with a rich legacy of theological literature. Christianity also produced beautiful art, architecture, liturgies, music, poetry, and mystical writings. All of these resources are part of our “tradition.”

[1] The city of Constantinople, the historic seat of the Eastern churches, was sacked and pillaged by Crusaders under the authority of the Pope in 1203 A.D. The attack on Constantinople was not part of the Crusaders’ original mission and may not have been intended by the Pope, but it nevertheless sealed the split between East and West.

Hermeneutics Historical Theology Song of Songs Spirituality Theological Hermeneutics

A Prayer for Study of Song of Songs: William of St. Thierry

Post author By David Opderbeck
Post date June 3, 2011

Here is a wonderful prayer from William of St. Thierry, which is a prelude to his study of the Song of Songs. This is from The Church’s Bible Commentary.

As we approach the epithalamium, the marriage song, the song of the Bridegroom and the Bride, to read and weigh your work, we call upon you, O Spirit of holiness. We want you to fill us with your love, O love, so that we may understand love’s song — so that we too may be made in some degree participants in the dialogue of the holy Bridegroom and the Bride; and so that what we read about may come to pass within us. For where it is a question of the soul’s affections, one does not easily understand what is said unless one is touched by similar feelings. Turn us then to yourself, O holy Spirit, holy Paraclete, holy Comforter; comfort the poverty of our solitude, which seeks no solace apart from you; illumine and enliven the desire of the suppliant, that it may become delight. Come, that we may love in truth, that whatever we think or say may proceed out of the fount of your love. Let the Song of your love be so read by us that it may set fire to love itself within us; and let love itself be for us the interpreter of your Song.

Hermeneutics Historical Theology Song of Songs Theological Hermeneutics Theology

Gregory the Great: On Scripture (Song of Songs)

Post author By David Opderbeck
Post date June 2, 2011

Here’s a wonderful quote from Gregory the Great on the nature of scripture. He is commenting on the Song of Songs — a text I’m studying for some small group settings and adult classes I’m leading. This was reproduced in the wonderful The Church’s Bible Commentary on Song of Songs. Notice that, for Gregory — as for all the Church Fathers — discerning the meaning of scripture was a spiritual exercise that involved drawing out the divine meaning from the human words.

For it is the same with the words and meanings of sacred Scripture as it is with the colors and subjects of a painting; and anyone who is so intent upon the colors in the painting that he ignores the real things it portrays is immeasurably silly. For if we embrace the words, which are spoken externally, and disregard their meanings, as if knowing nothing of things that are portrayed, we are clinging to mere colors. “The letter kills,” it is writte, “but the spirit gives life” (2 Cor. 3:6). For the letter covers the spirit in the same way that the husk conceals the grain. The husks, however, are food for beasts of burden; it is the grain that feeds human beings. Whoever, then, makes use of human reason casts away the husks that belong to beasts of burden and hastens to consume the grain of the spirit.

To be sure, it serves a good purpose for mysteries to be hidden by the cloak of the letter, seeing that wisdom that has been sought after and pursued is savored the more for that….

Hence when we attend to words that are employed in human intercourse, we ought to stand as it were outside our humanity, lest, if we take in what is said on the human level, we detect nothing of the divinity that belongs to the things we are meant to hear….

For Scripture is a sort of sacred mountian from which the Lord comes within our hearts to creat understanding. This is the mountian of which the prophet says, “God shall come from Lebanon, and the holy one from the dense and overclouded mountain” (Hab. 3:3). The mountain is dense with the thoughts it contains and “overclouded” with allegories. One must be aware, however, that we are instructed, when the voice of the Lord sounds on the mountain, to wash our clothing and be purified of every fleshly pollution, if we are hurrying to come to the mountain. Indeed, it is written that if a wild beast should touch the mountain, it would be stoned (Heb. 12:20). Now a beast touches the mountain when people given over to irrational urges hasten toward the height of sacred Scripture do not understand it as they ought, but irrationally bend their understanding of it to the service of their own pleasure.

Epistemology Historical Theology Humor Law and Policy Photography and Music Spirituality

CLS v. Martinez: An Ugly Decision Arising from Ugly Circumstances

Post author By David Opderbeck
Post date June 28, 2010

Today the Supreme Court released its opinion in Christian Legal Society v. Martinez. If you have heard about this case from the press or from an advocacy group and are concerned about it, I’d encourage you to read the entire opinion as well as the concurrence and dissent. The whole package is ugly, I think. It seems that the principles of freedom of expression, association and religion have been mired in a Dickensian procedural swamp, which was either created by the majority or conveniently used by the majority to bypass the big issues presented by the case. I urge interested readers to peruse the entire 75 pages of all the opinions, so that you may experience for yourself how a question of important Constitutional moment can be drowned in the turgid waters of civil procedure.

The majority opinion, written by Justice Ginsberg, holds that U.C. Hastings’ “all comers” policy was content-neutral and reasonably related to the school’s policy of promoting a diverse forum for student activities. The all comers policy stated that approved student organizations must admit any student to membership or eligibility for leadership, regardless of the student’s status or beliefs. A pro-choice group, then, would have to admit pro-choice students, a Democrat club would have to admit Republicans, the Christian Legal Society would have to admit non-Christians or people who do not live according to the CLS’ views on sexual ethics, and so on.

Indeed, the all comers policy does seem content-neutral as Justice Ginsberg describes it. On its face, the all comers policy itself seems silly and unworkable — it essentially would require that no student organization can stand for anything other than the principle that it is good to encourage diverse viewpoints — but not unconstitutional.

In contrast, the dissent, written by Justice Alito and joined by Justices Roberts, Scalia and Thomas, goes into great detail about the factual circumstances of Hastings’ adoption of the all comers policy. In short, according to Justice Alito, the all comers policy was “adopted” as a litigation strategy late in the game. The policy really at issue, Hastings’ “Nondiscrimination Policy,” only prohibited discrimination based on a select few protected categories — race, color, religion, national origin, ancestry, disability, age, sex or sexual orientation. Enforcement of the Nondiscrimination Policy against groups, such as CLS, that discriminate in one of these categories on the basis of religious beliefs raises a very difficult Constitutional question: do the freedoms of religion, speech and association mean that the government must accommodate religious groups that discriminate based on categories such as sexual orientation?

In a previous post, I summarized the issues in the case, and expressed my view that the whole thing was an unfortunate manifestation of ongoing confusion by Christians about the relationship between American government and Christian faith. In his dissent, Justice Alito expresses disappointment with the majority and suggests that the majority’s opinion is “a serious setback for freedom of expression in this country.” He might be right, but maybe not for the reasons he expresses. In one sense, I’m glad the majority found a way to avoid deciding the more difficult issues presented by the Nondiscrimination Policy. There is a hard tension between citizenship in the Church and citizenship in a liberal (meaning classically liberal) pluralistic democracy. I don’t think it’s a tension that we in the Church should want to press up against so hard. Sometimes, the wiser course for the life and mission of the ekklesia is to maintain a faithful witness without suing for full government recognition of all our rights.