Category: Theological Hermeneutics

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Biblical Studies Scripture Spirituality Theological Hermeneutics

Job: "Behold, These are the Fringes of His Ways"

M82, IMG SRC= http://hubblesite.org/gallery/album/galaxy/pr2001008e/Chapters 26 and 27 of the book of Job provide a sort of pivot in the text.  In his responses to his friends, Job’s sense of God’s ineffability seems to expand, while his sense of his ability to demand answers from God seems to shrink.  Job continues to maintain his righteousness, to be sure, and in Chapter 27, he even seems to echo the retribution theology of his friends.[1] But in Chapter 26, Job confronts his friends with the vastness of God’s creation:

He stretches out the north over empty space
And hangs the earth on nothing.
He wraps up the waters in His clouds,
And the cloud does not burst under them.
He obscures the face of the full moon
And spreads His cloud over it.
He has inscribed a circle on the surface of
the waters
At the boundary of light and darkness.  (Job 26:7-10 NASB)

Even these wonders, however, only hint at God’s greatness:  “Behold,” Job says,

these are the fringes of His ways;
And how faint a word we hear of Him!
But His mighty thunder, who can
understand?  (Job 26:14)

The picture above is of Messier 82, a galaxy in Ursa Major.  I’ve observed it through my big telescope in a dark sky, and it appears much like the picture — a long, thin, fuzzy patch of light.  M82 is a “starburst” galaxy, meaning it contains regions that produce new stars.  In fact, M82 contains 197 different star-forming regions, each of which is as massive as 200,000 of our Suns.  At the center of this galaxy, there is a black hole that is as massive as 30 million of our Suns.  It also contains an object that seems to move at four times the speed of light and that sends out radio waves unlike anything else ever discovered in the universe, which scientists remain unable to identify.

So that fuzzy patch of light in the telescope is a galaxy of billions of stars, that is actively spewing out millions of new stars, with a gaping black hole at its center and a warp-speed unidentified object traversing its bounds.  And all of that is just a small part of “the fringes of His ways.”  I look at the Hubble photograph or through my telescope and it is as though I’m the sick, bleeding woman who reached out to touch the fringe of Jesus’ robe in the hope she would be healed (see Matthew 9:20).

The “fringe” in Matthew 9 refers to tassels that Jewish men wore to remind them of the Torah.   The word used in Job 26:14 is ketzot, which refers to the edge or far end of a thing.  The “tassels” in Numbers 15:38 are tzitzit, an unrelated term, so there is no direct linguistic parallel.  Still, I like the parallel concept of the “fringe” or “far end” as a reminder of God’s distance.  It is an infinite distance that God nevertheless allows us to glimpse and touch, if only at the fringe, through His creation, His Law, and His incarnation in Christ.  Just that glimpse and touch are enough to settle the mind and stop the bleeding, even if — or maybe because — we know that what is glimpsed and touched is just a distant, unformed edge that recedes towards a horizon beyond comprehending.

 

 

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[1]  The text of these chapters is difficult to reconstruct, and some scholars think portions of these speeches in fact belong to Job’s friends and not to Job.  But in canonical context, these chapters are assigned to Job, and we can read as though Job is the speaker as a form of theological hermeneutic.

 

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Scripture Theological Hermeneutics

De La Torre: Genesis and Liberation

Here’s a clip from liberation theologian Miguel De La Torre’s “Belief” Commentary on Genesis.  I’m not a liberation theologian, but I appreciate many of the insights liberation theology brings to the table, even if at times liberationists seem to wander off the ranch.  I think it’s important to read theology diversely and widely, particularly the theologies of folks who look and think differently than myself.

In any event, I think De La Torre strikes an important chord here:

In spite of the sensational 1925 Scopes trial, the attempt to make the teaching of creationism normative continues to this day.  Those advocating a fundamentalist agenda want to reconcile the Bible with science in order to create a harmonious worldview, an endeavor undertaken by a small minority of scholars within academia.  For them the earth, contrary to the fossil evidence, is only six to ten thousand years old.  To render the biblical text as a science book is problematic, for in the final analysis it leads to bad science, bad theology, and bad hermeneutics….  Frankly, those on the margins of society do not seem to care.

The dominant culture usually looks for answers to questions that are simply unimportant to the social location of those living under oppressive structures.  It is rare to find any biblical and theological scholars of color participating in the creationism debate.  When people live under repressive structures, they turn to the Bible for the strength to survive another day, not to figure how long a day lasted in Genesis….  Debates over the scientific validity of the Bible become a luxurious privilege for those who do not endure discriminatory structures.  For many in the dominant culture the objective in reading the Bible is to answer such questions, usually simplistically….

‘Does God exist?’ becomes the overall quest of those residing within the dominant culture.  In contrast, from the margins of society the question becomes, ‘What is the character of this God who we claim exists?’  While the evangelistic mission of many Euro-Americans is to convince the nonbeliever to believe, those who reside on the underside of society see their evangelistic venture to be that of convincing the undervalued (nonperson) of his or her humanity based on the image of God that dwells within all humans.

 

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Cosmos Hermeneutics Science and Religion Scripture Song of Songs Theological Hermeneutics

Gregory of Nyssa on the Trees in the Garden

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)

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Hermeneutics Patristics Theological Hermeneutics Theology

The Fathers on Scripture

I’m auditing a Themes in Patristic Theology class at St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary with Dr. John Behr.  A good portion of the first class was a reading of Melito of Sarids’ homily On Pascha.  There is some controversy about whether Melito was anti-Semitic, but as Fr. Behr explained it, the references to “Israel” in this text are really references to us, the hearers, as we approach the table:  we are the reason Christ died.

Here are some notes on on the lecture about the Fathers’ approach to scripture:

1.  Scripture is cryptic.  “If it were not cryptic, it wouldn’t be scripture.”  “You don’t have to work at interpreting a shopping list.”

2.  Scripture is harmonious.  It all speaks about Christ.

3.  Scripture is contemporary — it wasn’t written primarily for the benefit of the original hearers, but primarily for our benefit.

4.  Scripture is inspired, and inspiration is inseparable from how Christ opens the book to us.  It requires an “inspired” reading which turns on an ongoing encounter with Christ.  Christ is not a “lens” through which we view scripture, but is already present in scripture.  Scripture is a sort of thesaurus or treasury of Christ.

My sensibility as a theological interpreter who wants to be conversant with Biblical Studies might lead me to place more emphasis on the text’s reception by the original hearing community.  But with the Fathers, and Barth, and all good theological interpreters, notice this sense that scripture’s power isn’t so much in its static content as in its life as the reader encounters Christ in and through the text.

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Biblical Studies Theological Hermeneutics Theology

Christian Smith and "The Bible Made Impossible": Comments on Some Reviews

The Englewood Review of Books today offers a good review by Michael Bowling of Christian Smith’s book The Bible Made Impossible.

When I first read Smith’s book, I thought he had nailed some important points, but that he had overlooked the important “theological interpretation” approach that animates a diverse group of contemporary readers (for example, the authors of the excellent Brazos Theological Commentary series). I was interested, then, to read Wheaton professor Daniel Treier’s summary in Books & Culture of the recent theological interpretation conference at Regent College, in which Treier briefly addresses Smith’s book.  Treier is a leading evangelical advocate of theological interpretation.

On the whole, I think Treier’s comments are good.  However, I think Treier is mistaken to attribute all the problems Smith observes to “sociological” factors. The issue is surely theological: the weak ecclesiology and nominalist / voluntarist God of much of Protestantism and particularly of modern evangelicalism.

Treier notes that Smith’s newly-adopted Catholic tradition also has its problems — a proposition no one could dispute.  But if, as Treier suggests, the celibate male Priesthood has caused problems (if Treier is referring here to the Clergy sex abuse scandals, the causal link in fact is unclear at best), then those are inherently theological as well.  (A pinched theology of sexuality?)

I believe Hans Boersma’s “Heavenly Participation” is on the right track.   (There is an excellent and friendly exchange between Treier and Boersma in the current Christian Scholars Review.)  Whatever the “Priesthood of all Believers” means, the individualistic heritage of the Reformation needs to be reformed and re-sourced.  And “sola scriptura,” practiced as it usually is as “sol_o_” scriptura, is neither theologically sound nor “Biblical” (see Acts 15) nor historically accurate nor — not surprisingly, as this always flows from theology — sociologically viable.

 

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Spirituality Theological Hermeneutics

Fear, Revelation, and the Global Economy

This is the cover image from last week’s Economist magazine. The cover article offers some frightening insights about the global economy. But even though this is genuinely disturbing news, we in the Church can take great comfort in Christ’s words in Revelation 1:17-18: “Do not be afraid. I am the First and the Last. I am the Living One; I was dead, and now look, I am alive for ever and ever! And I hold the keys of death and Hades.”  This, in fact, is the central message of Revelation, the hermeneutical key for the entire text:  “do not be afraid.”  This is why it’s particularly a shame that so may radio and television preachers distort the message of this text.  It’s not about predicting the future of the “end times,” the “rapture,” and so-on.  It’s about patience, endurance, perseverance, and not being afraid when the world around us seems chaotic.  It’s about not being afraid because not even death and Hades can overcome the victory of God in Christ.

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Theological Hermeneutics Theology

Perspectives on Theological Hermeneutics Video

Here’s a video I did on theological hermeneutics for an adult class I’m teaching.

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Hermeneutics Historical Theology Song of Songs Spirituality Theological Hermeneutics

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

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.

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Hermeneutics Historical Theology Song of Songs Theological Hermeneutics Theology

Gregory the Great: On Scripture (Song of Songs)

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.

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Spirituality Theological Hermeneutics Theology

Always Reforming?

Good post from Jamie Smith on the uses and misuses of the slogan “semper reformanda“:

There are strains of the Reformed tradition which like to emphasize that they are “always reforming,” invoking the Latin semper reformanda as a motto. But if one analyzes when and how this is invoked, one will notice something very slippery: that under the banner of “reforming” what we get is really just an agenda for “updating” the faith. And such an “updating” project is far from what was envisioned by the Reformers.

Indeed, such “updating” is more like the mid-century stream of aggiornamento advocated by Catholic theologians who were trying to get the church to “go modern”–to “update” the faith by conforming it to the new regnant standards of what counted as rational, true and just. But such a project of “updating” is ultimately correlationist (as I use the term in Introducing Radical Orthodoxy): it locates the standards for what we ought to believe outside the faith–in the supposedly neutral, objective findings of economics or sociology or evolutionary psychology. This puts Christian faith back on its heels, in a stance of deference to the canons of extra-Scriptural authorities.

But such “updating” is not reform; or, to put it more starkly, to be “always updating” is not the equivalent of semper reformanda. To be sure, Christian faith pushes us to value careful attention to empirical realities and thus requires us to grapple with our unfolding knowledge of our material and social world. Without question. In equal measure, the church, in order to be faithful, is called to be always reforming, not sitting on its laurels as if it has arrived at the truth. Since such a pursuit is an eternal vocation, it would seem odd to think we’ve arrived.

However, the call to be always reforming is not simply a matter of “updating” the faith according to current trends and fads; nor is it even a matter of “correlating” the faith with the supposedly secure findings of other authorities. To be “always reforming” is to be engaged in the hard work of being a tradition, which includes the difficult labor of arguing about what constitutes a faithful extension of the tradition (I have something like Alasdair MacIntyre’s account of “tradition” in mind here). This difficult work of reform differs from “updating” because it retains the center of gravity in the tradition (which, of course, includes and prioritizes the “founding document” of the tradition–in this case, Scripture).

This is merely a sketch to watch the “codes” at work when “always reforming” is invoked, and to urge a kind of semantic caution that under the banner of “reforming” language what we often get is a progressivism that is animated by a chronological snobbery which is a far cry from the task of reform, let alone the Reformers.