Category Archives: Scripture

On Going Forward

I’m going to briefly interrupt the Tour de Cassiodorus to share some thoughts that have been rattling around in my head since the election.

I start with words from quite possibly my favorite (brown-skinned, Jewish) woman leader of all time:

My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord,
my spirit rejoices in God my Savior; *
for he has looked with favor on his lowly servant.
From this day all generations will call me blessed: *
the Almighty has done great things for me,
and holy is his Name.
He has mercy on those who fear him *
in every generation.
He has shown the strength of his arm, *
he has scattered the proud in their conceit.
He has cast down the mighty from their thrones, *
and has lifted up the lowly.
He has filled the hungry with good things, *
and the rich he has sent away empty.
He has come to the help of his servant Israel, *
for he has remembered his promise of mercy,
The promise he made to our fathers, *
to Abraham and his children for ever.

This is not a call to meekness nor acceptance. This is a call to join a revolutionary movement. The revolutionary leader is God.

Perhaps the most important sermon of Jesus recorded in the Gospels is that called the Beatitudes. We have two versions of it, one in Matthew, one in Luke. If you compare the two, you’ll quickly notice that there are some slight but important differences between the two. Furthermore, you’ll notice that there are profound, striking, and important relationships between the version of Jesus’ words found in Luke and these words from his mother from the first chapter. The thoughts and concepts expressed here by Mary are deeply interrelated with who God reveals himself to be in Jesus and his vision for our world.

Liturgically, these words are part of a canticle that the Church has historically sung every single night in the Office of Vespers. I try to sing it most nights too. We don’t repeat it because we don’t have any other words to say—we say it because it is important. It reminds us in a few words of what God’s vision for the world is.

Reconciliation is a very important word to us Episcopalians. We use it a lot. One of the reasons is because it is a scriptural word that relates deeply to what we are called to do: 2 Corinthians 5:18 informs us that we have been given “the ministry of reconciliation.”

In recent days I have seen many Christians—many Episcopalians, including some bishops I know—who have called us to be ministers of reconciliation in a deeply divided nation. We must heal and reconcile.

But what is it that we are being called to reconcile? What is the ground of our reconciliation? 2 Corinthians 5:16-20 is continuing a thought that begins with Baptism. The reconciliation talk comes in at that point: “All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. So we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We beseech you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God” (2 Cor 5:18-20).

In this ministry of reconciliation we are not being called to be nice or pleasant or to smooth things over with those who disagree with us. We are called to work on the reconciliation of humanity with God, and God’s vision of the world that he created: A vision of the world laid out by Mary in her Song and ratified by Christ Jesus in his sermon.

This is a vision that puts the poor, the people at the margins, the “alien in your midst,” the ones who have lost their political protection as the central figures for our care and concern. It is not interested in catering to the rich, the proud, the haughty. If we are exhorting the Christian faithful to be healers and reconcilers, than we need to be clear that we need healing from a host of sins and to be working to reconcile the people and society around us to the vision of the world that God intends. This is the call of the Gospel on us.

If we can bring together people who disagree and be nice to them, sure—that’s great too. But that’s not the ministry of reconciliation to which Scripture or Mary call us.

On John Cassian’s Method of Reading Scripture

I’m jumping around quite a bit in the Cassiodorus books as I write them… This is a section of what I believe is going to be Chapter 3. Basically, in Chapter 3, I’m going to be diving directly into Cassiodorus’s great Psalm commentary and discussing what he thought a commentary was for, our stereotypical view of allegorical interpretation  (based largely in the High Medieval period with extra fuel on the fire a la De Lubac), and then an investigation of how Cassiodorus actually read, focusing on methods from Classical Antiquity, Augustine, and John Cassian. Here’s the Cassian bit… So, yes, it starts in the middle of a larger argument that isn;t conclude here either, but I think is sufficiently robust to stand on its own as well.


John Cassian’s Conferences are a strange and wonderful collection of conversations. The story goes that John Cassian and his friend Germanus, after spending some time in a monastery in Bethlehem, took the theological equivalent of a Gap Year trek and set off to see the sites—in the Egyptian deserts. They hiked around the wastelands of Northern Egypt, meeting and interviewing the famous hermits of the desert and gaining wisdom from them about the spiritual life. Many years later—probably in the opening decades of the fifth century—after founding two monasteries around modern day Marseilles, Cassian wrote down the conversation as the Conferences and, in so doing, created the first great work on the nuts and bolts of Christian spirituality in the West.

Translating and transmitting a spirituality born of experience in the desert, rooted in the teachings of Origen, Cassian’s writings were invaluable to the emerging monastic movement in the West. Benedict praises him, and advises his monks to read Cassian (RB 73.5). As monastic reformations periodically swept through the Church in the course of the Middle Ages, John Cassian’s books in general and the Conferences in particular are cited again and again with approval.

John Cassian’s fourteenth conference portrays a conversation between Cassian, Germanus, and an old man known as Abba Nesteros which is focused on the topic of spiritual knowledge. As they delve into the topic, Abba Nesteros begins talking about the ways to interpret and understand the Scriptures. First, he separates spirituality in general into two parts. The words that he uses are the “practical” and the “theoretical,” but it’s better to say that one part is the active external part while the other is the internal meditative part. That is, the central task of the active/practical part is the control of the body and mind—built on a foundation of fasting and self-mortification—whereby one focuses on sinning less. Once that has task has been fully engaged and some progress has been made will the turn to the interior life bear fruit. This is where he gets to the Scriptures.

Abba Nesteros explains that the study of Scripture is divided into two main parts: “historical interpretation and spiritual understanding.” In making this division, he lays down the two major modes of interpreting that writers of the early medieval period will prefer. He splits the spiritual interpretations into three subcategories: tropology, allegory, and anagogy. After identifying these, he explains them a bit. The historical sense is not just about the past but includes what we would consider the literal meaning of the text. In particular, the Abba says that history pertains both to things that happened in the past and to visible things. Hence, an interpretation relating to natural science would be an historical reading in the sense of the phrase “natural history.” Allegory is the mystery that is prefigured by the historical/literal events. Said another way, allegory is the means “by which the things that the historical interpretation conceals are laid bare by a spiritual understanding and explanation.” Anagogy “mounts from spiritual mysteries to certain more sublime and sacred heavenly secrets.” This is restated a little better to clarify that it is the means “by which words are directed to the invisible and what lies in the future.” Tropology, at least, is more clear: “moral explanation pertaining to correction of life and to practical instruction.” More helpful than his definitions, though is his example where he demonstrates what these four look like in practice:

The four figures that have been mentioned converge in such a way that, if we want, one and the same Jerusalem can be understood in a fourfold manner. According to history it is the city of the Jews. According to allegory it is the church of Christ. According to anagogy it is that heavenly city of God ‘which is the mother of us all.’ According to tropology it is the soul of the human being, which under this name is frequently reproached or praised by the Lord.

While a theoretical distinction is made between these four senses, as far as early medieval writers are concerned, there are two broad sense: the historical and the spiritual. Only rarely will an early medieval author specify what kind of spiritual interpretation they are using and, in practice, the categories are very fluid. Indeed the fact that only three kinds of spiritual understanding are described seems to have more to do with scriptural prooftexts than actual practice. Abba Nesteros cites two different biblical texts, one which refers to three things, Proverbs 22:20 (”…have I not written for you [three] sayings of admonition and knowledge…”), and one that refers to four, 1 Corinthians 14:6 (”…if I come to you speaking in tongues, how will I benefit you unless I speak to you in some revelation or knowledge or prophecy or teaching…”). In each case, you get the sense that the numbers recorded in Scripture are driving the enumeration of elements rather than the methods themselves. In practice, there are many more modes of spiritual interpretation than three, and not all of them are clearly defined or delineated. We will come back to this point a little later as we discuss how we actually see spiritual interpretation happening in Cassiodorus and other authors.

Modern readers—and especially biblical scholars looking for the history of the discipline—tend to focus in on this section of this conference. However, this is just one part of a larger argument, and it deserves to be put into the proper context. Again, this whole conference begins with the idea that first step of proper interpretatin is the purification of the body, mind, and spirit. The undisciplined who persists in their sin simply cannot read the Scriptures rightly—they don’t yet have the right frame of mind to read what is found there. As a result, after talking interpretive method, Abba Nesteros returns to hammer this point again:

Maintaining the diligence in reading that I think you have, then, make every effort to get a complete grasp of practical—that is, ethical—discipline as soon as possible. For without this the theoretical purity that we have spoken of cannot be acquired. The only people who attain to it, possessing it as a reward after the expenditure of much toil and labor, are those who have found perfection not in the words of other teachers but in the virtuousness of their own acts.

This is a key point and leads to an emphasis on doing rather than teaching. Scripture must be put into practice; any one who wishes to teach it must first demonstrate with their actions their deep grasp of its teachings. Knowing with the mind is not enough; no one should presume to teach Scripture until its truths have been—literally—embodied in their habits and actions. Abba Nesteros explains that this is essential for two reasons. First, because you cannot presume to teach what you do not know and knowledge only comes by putting it in action. Second, because putting the teaching of Scripture into action is itself a sign of the converting presence of the Holy Spirit—the true guide to right reading and interpretation: “For it is one thing to speak with ease and beauty and another to enter deeply into heavenly sayings and to contemplate profound and hidden mysteries with the most pure eye of the heart, because certainly neither human teaching nor worldly learning but only purity of mind will possess this, through the enlightenment of the Holy Spirit.”

Humility and the other virtues, then, are the central prerequisites to reading Scripture well. From that point, Abba Nesteros describes the proper practice of engaging Scripture. While he had talked about technical matters of interpretation in the earlier part of the dialogue, he now turns to what this looks like in day-to-day experience:

Then, once all worldly cares and preoccupations have been cast out, you must strive in every respect to give yourself assiduously and even constantly to sacred reading. Do this until continual meditation fills your mind and as it were forms it in its likeness, making it a kind of ark of the covenant . . . All of these are guarded by two cherubim—that is, by the fullness of historical and spiritual knowledge, for the cherubim are interpreted as the breadth of knowledge. . . . Hence the successive books of Holy Scripture must be diligently committed to memory and ceaselessly reviewed. This continual meditation will bestow on us double fruit. First, inasmuch as the mind’s attention in occupied with reading and with preparing to read, it cannot be taken captive in the entrapments of harmful thoughts. Then, the things that we have not been able to understand because our mind was busy at the time, things that we have gone through repeatedly and are laboring to memorize, we shall see more clearly afterward when we are free from every seductive deed and sight, and especially when we are silently meditating at night. Thus, while we are at rest and as it were immersed in the stupor of sleep, there will be revealed an understanding of hidden meanings that we did not grasp even slightly when we were awake. But as our mind is increasingly renewed by this study, the face of Scripture will also begin to be renewed, and the beauty of a more sacred understanding will somehow grow with the person who is making progress.

In this set of statements, Abba Nesteros speaking to us through John Cassian reveals the incredible profoundity that we encounter again and again in the wisdom of the Desert Fathers and Mothers: they have a remarkable grasp of the habits of the mind, displayed here in the discussion of the processing power of the subconscious mind, that seems amazingly modern—yet is centuries old. In the spiritual laboratory of the desert, these hermits and anchorites observed and taught about the power of habit and the functions of the conscious and subconscious mind in ways that would not be replicated again until the rise of psychology in the twentieth century.

The pattern, then, is clear: memorize and rehearse. Soak the soul in Scripture, and Scripture itself would transform the soul to be more like Scripture. In so doing, the soul’s perception of Scripture will be transformed and freed to perceive more and deeper meanings within Scripture.

 

Lectionary commentary podcasts?

For whatever reason, my wife and I were discussing lectionary-based podcasts over the weekend. Naturally, my St Bede Psalmcast is a podcast connected to the Revised Common Lectionary, but clearly isn’t an exposition of the readings in any sort of depth; I touch on the “main” readings only so far as I need to to talk about the psalm.

Here’s the question that came up when we were talking, though: what sort of podcast resources are out there for Episcopal preachers?

The only one that she listens to is the Working Preacher podcast. It has a Lutheran perspective and comes from Luther Seminary. We have a soft-spot for this one because one of the hosts, Dr. Karoline Lewis, was one of my colleagues in my PhD program (and was one of the TAs in my first New Testament course in seminary!)

What else is out there? What do you listen to—or would you listen to if it existed?

Christological Controversy and the Psalms

I’ve been doing a lot of work on my books on Cassiodorus and the psalms. So far, most of my effort has gone into the first volume. The first volume is a more-or-less straightforward historical and exegetical description of what Cassiodorus does when he reads the psalms and transmits the patristic tradition to his readers. The second volume is the “where do we go from here?” book that tries to explain what the Cassiodoran perspective (and the perspective of the rest of the Church Fathers) has to do with us and our spirituality. Here’s a snippet from the second book. To set this in context a little, I’m writing these books in a non-linear fashion, that is, they’re outlined, but I’m not starting with chapter 1 of the first and writing to the end, then starting chapter 1 of the second and so on. Rather, since I know the big picture, I’m writing chunks and fitting them into place, and will smooth over the cracks later in the process.

This was a chunk that popped into my head last night as we were driving home from NYC after dropping the older daughter off at Joffrey for a week of ballet camp.

For readers familiar with my discussions of Trinitarian theology, some of this stuff will likely seem familiar. However, it’s still important especially in relation to the psalms.


Cassiodorus spends quite lot of time finding theological concepts in the psalms, particularly things relating to Trinitarian theology and Chalcedonian Christology. Indeed, modern readers may find it odd the amount of time that he spends harping on these issues. Our first thought may be to wonder why he would work so hard to find find doctrine in the Scriptures—why go to this effort? One reason is because he would not have seen “doctrine” as being something separate and distinct from “biblical interpretation.” For those used to the modern university or the way that seminaries divide up subjects, there is a great gulf between the study of the Scriptures and instruction in theology or doctrine. In the world of the Church Fathers, however, the two topics were intimately related to one another: doctrine flowed from Scripture and doctrine was identified in Scripture even if the connections being drawn seem strained to us.

Trinitarian and christological theology shows up so frequently in Cassiodorus’s psalm commentary for a couple of reasons. One of the great controversies of his time revolved around the way that God the Father and God the Son related to one another and what kind of being Jesus was. While an ecumenical council held at Chalcedon had defined the orthodox Church’s understanding of the matter, the rival Arian position was still quite common within and—more importantly—outside of the empire. The main difference here was whether Jesus was God or whether Jesus was a creature. The position of Chalcedon insisted that Jesus was both fully God and, at the same time, fully human. The Arian position argued that while Jesus was the first and greatest of all of God’s creations, he was just that—a creature (albeit a really important creature!). To sort out why this matters and why it matters for the psalms, we need to dip into this debate for a minute, going through the theological to the real heart of the matter—the pastoral difference.

For too many people, theology is a bad word. It conjures up notions of doctrines and rules, and tortured intellectual arguments about things that no one can really ultimately prove on this side of heaven. Theology is seen as something abstract and speculative. But it shouldn’t be… Good theology, important theology, matters because it has practical implications: it helps us understand how we correctly live out our lives. Real theology is connected to real life. Trinitarian theology in particular gets a bad rap, usually because it is taught as a system of ideas without reference or recourse to why and how it matters for us.

Here’s a key point around which you need to orient everything about Trinitarian theology and its various christological controversies: The doctrine of the Trinity and the Natures of Christ didn’t grow out of theological speculation. That is, a bunch of old guys didn’t sit themselves down together and just make this stuff up (and that is one of dominant images we have thanks to Dan Brown novels and other misinformed media…). Indeed, if people had sat down and thought all of this up it would make a whole lot more sense and be much easier to understand! Rather—and this is the key—Trinitarian theology grew out of the attempt to wrap words around Christian spiritual experience. The first followers of Jesus, as proper Jewish believers and God-fearing Gentile converts, would have known the Sh’ma, the Jewish creed, and recited it three times a day: “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one” (Deut 6:4). So they knew there was only one God, the God they knew revealed in the Scriptures as the God of Israel, the Creator of heaven and earth. However, based on their experiences of resurrection power, they believed that Jesus was somehow God too. Furthermore, their charismatic experiences of the Spirit’s inspiration led them to confess that the Holy Spirit was also tied up in this God thing as well! If, as Scripture said, there was only one God, how could they explain what they were feeling and experiencing? The theology, then, grew out of the attempt to wrap words around this experiential phenomenon in a way that people could agree on.

Generally speaking, the approach that gained favor is the one that lived best, that is, directed people to lead their lives in the manner most consistent with Scripture and the example of Jesus, was the definition that came out of the four great councils of the Church and that favored holding up the mystery of God’s inter-relation rather than settling for a more philosophically plausible approach. Thus, they upheld the idea that God is one Being that is made up of three distinct but inter-related and equal Persons and that Jesus is, at the same time, fully human and fully divine. Most of the various Trinitarian and Christological errors arise when somebody comes up with a scheme to try and make this formula make more sense.

So why does any of this matter? Why would the Chalcedonian solution make more sense and live better than the Arian answer? The reason is simply this: Does God—the grand omnipotent Creator of the Universe—know what it feels like to be you? The Arian position says “no.” This position which makes Jesus the oldest and greatest of God’s creations draws a line of divinity between Jesus and God. The best that God has to go on, then, is to imagine what it would be like to us. The Chalcedonian formula on the other hand—that Jesus is fully God and simultaneously fully human—answers: “yes.” God does know what it means and feels like to be human. He knows it from the inside. He knows exactly what you are going through when you feel happy or sad or betrayed or angry—because he’s felt it too. In the person of Jesus, God has felt every human emotion and lived through a great swathe of human experiences including (let’s not forget) being betrayed, imprisoned, and executed. God doesn’t have to imagine anything here: he’s felt it. God knows what it feels like to die. And, furthermore, God knows exactly what it feels like to lose a child.

This is what gets lost in the Arian formulation: the intimate knowledge of just what it’s like to be us and to really know from the inside what it is to be one of us.

Now, I came of age in the eighties and early nineties, and every time I go through this theological logic, I hear a Joan Osborne song floating through my head… The lyrics go, in part, like this:

“What if God was one of us?
Just a slob like one of us
Just a stranger on the bus
Tryin’ to make his way home?

Just tryin’ to make his way home
Like back up to heaven all alone
Nobody callin’ on the phone
‘Cept for the Pope maybe in Rome”

Here’s the thing—whether she knew it or not, Joan (and the songwriter, Eric Bazilian) created the perfect song to explain the heart of Chalcedonian orthodoxy against the Arian position! Because the Chalcedonian definition believes that they’re right on: God does know what it feels like to be one of us! The theology that they reject—of a distant sterile God divorced from the nitty-gritty of human experience—is simultaneously the doctrine that Cassiodorus, the Church Fathers, and the church councils rejected as well.

Now, at this point, it must feel like we’ve gone pretty far afield from the psalms. But that’s actually not the case at all—we’re just looping around to them from the back side. Instead, the upholding of the Chalcedonian definition is at the heart of how Cassiodorus and the Fathers read and understand the psalms. Remember what Athanasius wrote about the whole expanse of human emotion being revealed in the psalms? This is where we see it: if we read the psalms in and through the mouth of Jesus, this is where we hear and feel the whole span of human emotion uttered from divine lips, where we see God incarnate expressing everything from the pain to the joy we feel. This is God at home in the feelings we know.

The pastoral implication, then, of Trinitarian theology and this means of reading the psalms is the assurance that God knows exactly what it feels like to be us and that, in the psalms, we hear his own divine expression of what it feels like to be human.

Fun with Logos

I just got a hold of Logos 6… As I mentioned briefly at the end of the last podcast, I’ve been using Logos software to do biblical work since my last couple years of college which are now 20 years ago (!). Back then, it was one of the few software packages to actually offer Greek and Hebrew texts. Clearly, that’s still a huge bonus for me.

In seminary we used to have a reading group where some of the senior MDivs, some of the graduate students and a couple of professors would get together over lunch and read through Genesis in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. It was a fascinating exercise to see how the translation choices were made in the Septuagint and the Vulgate; frequently you could see where the Latin text was definitely being done with one eye on the Hebrew, the other on the Greek. With Logos, this was an easy thing to do—I’d just call up three panes and link them together and they’d move as I scrolled. Too when I was having difficulty parsing the Hebrew, a discrete mouse-over would help me out… (My Hebrew has always been the weakest of the three!)

I haven’t used it as much over the years, since so much of my work has taken me in medieval directions, but returning again to Logos I’m very impressed by the feature set. Basically, I see this system as two tools in one.

First, it is a fully featured biblical analysis tool. I’ve got my key biblical texts in the original languages and in my favorite translations (ancient and modern). Basic search and concordance functions are built in, and they’ve added a large array of tools and guides to make word study, grammatical help, and other forms of textual analysis easier. There’s plenty of interlinear support in the Greek and Hebrew for those who use that. (There isn’t currently interlinear support for the Vulgate, but I understand that may be in the works…)

Second, it is a library system in that it can give you access to a wide variety of secondary sources—commentaries, sermons, doctrinal works, patristic texts, classical texts, etc. There are a lot of these. Do keep a careful eye out here. The easiest way to make a lot of material available electronically is to use texts that have fallen out of copyright and are now in the public domain. This is a tactic that I saw across the religious software market back in the late ’90s and early ’00s when several players decided to get into the game. They would include lots of Bibles and lots of devotional texts, but they tended to be 19th century translations or materials frequently incorporating dubious theology. Too, much of the biblical reference material was sadly out of date.

Now—I have a couple of gigabytes of public domain PDFs on my hard drive, most relating to either medieval or early Anglican liturgical and doctrinal material. Just because a text is old doesn’t mean it’s not worth using (obviously!!). However, I know what the good stuff is, and how I intend to use it. Logos also clued in to this! They now offer denominationally based packages that are curated by people in those various traditions, and who have a sense of what is useful for people in those traditions rather than stuffing the box with material that is theologically at odds with it just because they can. Thus, I’ve got the Anglican package. I’m happy to say, there’s quite a bit of overlap between the material I’ve already collected on PDFs, and what I now have access to in Logos plus a whole pile of material I wouldn’t have otherwise acquired. The advantage of having the material within this system is that, unlike most PDFs, I can search it and locate things easier than before.

As a student of the history of interpretation, though, what I’m really enjoying is the integration between the biblical tools and the denominational material. When I’m in the biblical text, one of the options is the “Passage Guide” which will—by means of cross-references—pull up references to how that passage was used in other texts within your library. When it comes to looking at how patristic and medieval authors used a given text, this feature is invaluable! It’ll pop up a results box identifying specific sermon or commentary references where various writers quoted or alluded to the text being studied. Hence, if you want to look at how a given text was used across a field—say, the Latin Fathers or the monastic tradition—this tool makes it much faster and easier to identify who, what, and where.

The other thing I want to say about it at the moment is that the cross-platform functionality is great; the app version I have on my Kindle and phone syncs with what I have on my desktop. For instance, I’ve been working through VgPs 17 this morning, and when I pull up the app on my Kindle and switch it to the Vulgate, it pulls up VgPs 17:14 which is just where I stopped on my desktop!

(There do seem to be some bugs to work out on the Kindle version, though… My current pain is that I’ve downloaded Cassiodorus’s psalm commentary onto the Kindle, but every time I try to open it the app crashes. Not sure what’s going on there.)

Too, many of the same biblical language features available on the desktop are operative on the Kindle meaning that I can do the same sort of word studies/concordance work when I’m hanging out at ballet on chauffeur duty for the elder daughter.

Since I just got it, I’m still playing with it and am figuring out what all it can do and how to set it up best to help me with my research and writing. What I can say right off, is that I can see some immediate applications for its toolset to improve both the psalmcast and the Cassiodorus book that the psalmcast is supporting. I’m seeing that there are some “community” features that could be interesting in terms of collaborative study; I don’t have much of a sense of these yet, but there could be some interesting directions there too!

The Historical Background of Ezra and Nehemiah

If you’ve been following along in the Daily Office, our first readings at Morning Prayer have been coming from the historical books of Ezra and Nehemiah. Now—if your Ancient Near Eastern history is a little sketchy (and there’s no shame in admitting that), I ran across a great refresher over the weekend.

One of my favorite podcasts (along with The Collect Call, of course!) is Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History. His latest episode is the beginning of a series that tackles the Persian Wars and, in particular, the famous Battle of Thermopylae. However, Dan always provides an abundant amount of context to help you understand what was really at stake and how the various players got to where they were. The first episode in the King of Kings series is a great refresher (or first time around) on the major ANE players, and gives an entertaining (and quite accurate as far as I can tell) account of how the Babylonians, Assyrians, Elamites, and Persians fit together, including some helpful references to how and where these peoples show up in the Old Testament.

If you’re looking for a big-picture sweep of what was going on in the time of the Major Prophets through Ezra-Nehemiah, I heartily recommend it!

On the Identity of the Ungodly

As I was praying Morning Prayer, I was briefly distracted going through the psalms because I couldn’t remember for the life of me what Cassiodorus and Augustine had said about Psalm 10. Psalm 11 was no issue—actually, I’ve got a post lurking in my brain dealing with the opening lines of Psalm 11—but 10 was a blank until I finally figured out what was ging on…

Here’s the start of Psalm 10 as I read it from the ’79 BCP:

  Why do you stand so far off, O LORD, *
and hide yourself in time of trouble?
  The wicked arrogantly persecute the poor, *
but they are trapped in the schemes they have devised.
  The wicked boast of their heart’s desire; *
the covetous curse and revile the LORD.
  The wicked are so proud that they care not for God; *
their only thought is, “God does not matter.”
  Their ways are devious at all times; your judgments are far above out of their sight; *
they defy all their enemies.
  They say in their heart, “I shall not be shaken; *
no harm shall happen to me ever.”
  Their mouth is full of cursing, deceit, and oppression; *
under their tongue are mischief and wrong….

Now—here is the start of Psalm 10 as found in the psalter of the ’28 BCP:

   WHY standest thou so far off, O LORD, *
and hidest thy face in the needful time of trouble?
   The ungodly, for his own lust, doth persecute the poor: *
let them be taken in the crafty wiliness that they have imagined.
   For the ungodly hath made boast of his own heart’s desire, *
and speaketh good of the covetous, whom the LORD abhorreth.
   The ungodly is so proud, that he careth not for God, *
neither is God in all his thoughts.
   His ways are alway grievous; *
thy judgments are far above out of his sight, and therefore defieth he all his enemies.
   For he hath said in his heart, Tush, I shall never be cast down, *
there shall no harm happen unto me.
   His mouth is full of cursing, deceit, and fraud; *
under his tongue is ungodliness and vanity….

See the difference? It’s the difference between the plural and the singular.

For the Church Fathers, Psalm 10 was not really Psalm 10, but the second part of Psalm 9. Following the Septuagint (the 2nd century BC Greek translation), the Vulgate retained the acrostic structure lurking in the Hebrew and kept the two parts together; the Hebrew manuscripts and our English versions following the Hebrew separated them into two different psalms.

Augustine starts off his interpretation of Psalm 9 with a twofold indentification. The psalm starts in the “voice of the Lord” and therefore the “enemy” referred to in VgPs 9:4 (inimicum meum) is identified as Satan particularly since Augustine connects “retrorsum” with the “get behind me” of Jesus in Matt 16. But Augustine also says, “If, however, we prefer to understand the phrase, my enemy, more generally as a sinner or pagan, that will not be out of line” before concluding that the phrase “is more fittingly understood as spoken in relation to the devil.”

(Jerome, in his very brief Homily 4 on the Psalms, also brings the devil into it, noting VgPs9:29 thus: “Notice what the psalm says about the devil, he lurks in ambush with the rich. It is almost impossible for the rich man to be rich without robbing the poor.”)

 

At verse 19 and 20 (the end of our Psalm 9) Augustine brings in the Antichrist as the one who will be set over the heathen as “lawgiver” (a term not in our version/translation; here’s the Douay-Rheims for comparison). The Antichrist is that “lawgiver” and Augustine brings in the Antichrist a few more times as he considers the “ungodly” in the rest of the psalm.

Cassiodorus takes the hints that Augustine drops and develops the second part of the psalm as a prophetic narrative concerning the Antichrist and the unfolding of the last days. In his reading, the “ungodly” is not a singular noun collectively pointing to bad people but is pretty clearly the Antichrist. Within the psalm, then, Cassiodorus finds a fairly detailed account of the rise of the Antichrist and his actions against the poor and righteous which he bolsters by tying verbal details from the psalm into other passages across both the Old and New Testaments.

(At the same time, though, Cassiodrus insists on a historical reading at the start of the psalm, and, while Augustine brings in the devil at verse 4, Cassiodorus goes in a *completely* different direction: “Though David had many enemies, here we appropriately think only of Saul.”)

So—singular and plural terms in the psalms (or other Scriptures) can lead us in very different directions. The Hebrew, Greek, and Latin use the singular term (impius)  which leads the Fathers down one particular road. Yes, impious can be a collective noun, and Augustine reads it like that at points, but the use of the singular also moves them in the direction of a singular figure. Even though the BCP retains “wicked” as a collective, the use of plural verbs and then plural pronouns would never lead us in that direction.

What’s my point, then, to touch off a screed against inclusive language? No. Simply to make the observation that textual details matter. Certain textual features enable, suggest, or recommend reading in certain ways and close off other lines of interpretation. The shifting of grammatical number (from singular to plural) alters the way that we encounter the psalms. Psalm 1 and Psalm 10 are central examples. The Church Fathers identified the singularly evil person in Psalm 10 as the Antichrist; similarly, they saw the singularly blessed man in Psalm 1 as Christ.

We don’t.

On the End of Scripture

Imagine the balls it takes to write a book on Scripture interpretation, then to basically say that there comes a point when you don’t need the Bible any more…

I’ve been re-read the work of that rank revisionist—Augustine of Hippo—who says just that at the end of Book 1 of On Christian Teaching. It’s a passage that gives me pause every time I read it, and I’ve thought about it quite a bit (off and on) over the last few years. Here’s the text:

 43. And thus a man who is resting upon faith, hope and love, and who keeps a firm hold upon these, does not need the Scriptures except for the purpose of instructing others. Accordingly, many live without copies of the Scriptures, even in solitude, on the strength of these three graces. So that in their case, I think, the saying is already fulfilled: Whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away [1 Corinthians 13:8]. Yet by means of these instruments (as they may be called), so great an edifice of faith and love has been built up in them, that, holding to what is perfect, they do not seek for what is only in part perfect— of course, I mean, so far as is possible in this life; for, in comparison with the future life, the life of no just and holy man is perfect here. Therefore the apostle says: Now abides faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity: [1 Corinthians 13:13] because, when a man shall have reached the eternal world, while the other two graces will fail, love will remain greater and more assured. De Doc. Chr. I.39.43

Now, for Augustine a full and intimate association with Scripture is necessary as these three virtues are being developed. Indeed, I don’t think he can conceive of a person learning them correctly without lots of time and effort spent with Scripture. Despite that, I find this fascinating. This is full and complete possession of the Mind of Christ—when the virtues are strong enough that a person’s instincts and inclinations will be on point whether they’re referring to the book or not.

Broadly, I think he’s tapping into a Pauline spirit here. Paul gives rules and lists but is always at his strongest when he’s talking virtue. As such, I always give more credence to a virtue-based argument coming out of Paul than a rule-based argument…

Reading Matthew with Monks: Physical Edition!

When M, the girls and I got back from the Boston Marathon late last night, there was a slip indicating that a package was waiting for me at my neighbor’s house. After taking the girls to school this morning, I went by and collected it. And here’s what it contained:

IMG_20150422_121307_kindlephoto-711982728

Fifteen copies of my first full-length single-authored book!

As a few of you may remember, I originally started this blog ten years ago to provide an outlet for both thoughts and distractions while working away at my dissertation. That process finished in 2009 with my defense, and then officially with my graduation in 2011. Now, that work is being made public in (hopefully) a more accessible form than than the dissertation in this handsome publication from Liturgical Press.

I’m ecstatic that this work is finally here, and the fact that it is exists is, naturally, the result of a lot of patience and prodding from both my wonderful wife and also my incredible dissertation director who was kind enough to write the Foreword for the book.

I’ll have more to say about it later, most likely, but I’ll leave you here with the Table of Contents:

  • Introduction (Introductions to Hermeneutics, Reading Cultures, and Ælfric)
  • Chapter 1: How Monastic Living Shaped Reading
  • Chapter 2: How Monastic Praying Shaped Reading
  • Chapter 3: The Temptation and the Beatitudes (Ælfric’s sermons on Matt 4 and 5 put into context and placed in conversation with modern commentators)
  • Chapter 4: Two Healings and the Parable of the Wise and Foolish Maidens (Ælfric’s sermons on Matt 8 and 25 put into context and placed in conversation with modern commentators)
  • Conclusion: Bringing Early Medieval Voices into the Conversation
  • Chapter 4:

It had been showing in a “pre-order” state on its page on Amazon; now it says “Temporarily out of stock.” In any case, it exists now in physical form!

IMG_20150422_121425_kindlephoto-711159151

On Borg

I saw the news last night that Dr. Marcus Borg has died. May light perpetual shine upon him.

I have not actually read many of his books despite that fact that he generally falls into my New Testament (NT) specialty. I have heard him summarized, and have read those who argue with him and with whom he argued. This year I will make it a point to read more of his works.

At this point, my feelings toward him are rather ambiguous. I know that he is widely read within the Episcopal Church, and that he has helped many progressive Christians and Episcopalians to be able to read the Bible again. He presents a perspective and an entre into the Bible that allows it to be read critically and rationally over and against fundamentalistic reading strategies. That he has helped people pick up and return to the Scriptures is a good thing.

However, I have noticed distinctive interpretive trends in most of the people I know who cite him with approval. Modern biblical scholarship of the 20th century (and the latter half of the 19th) focused on Bible as history. Thus, the questions biblical scholars brought and solutions they offered were around sketching the history of the early Christian movement and in the development of its ideas as reflected in the various writings of the New Testament texts.  What I have heard of Borg and what I have read in those I consider his fellow travellers—Crossan, Funk, the Jesus Seminar crowd—is that they apply a hermeneutic of suspicion while they use the NT as a historical data mine. They’re certainly within their rights and privileges as NT scholars to do so; I think they go overboard and their results are skewed because they misconstrue the nature of their data-set.

When this approach passes out of scholarship into the lay realm it takes the form of this sort of narrative:  Jesus was a revolutionary (peasant or otherwise) and was both co-opted and misunderstood by the early church. Thus, to understand him and his message properly, the claims of the early church should be downplayed (or dismissed). Furthermore, potential seams or disagreements within the writings of the NT and in the apocryphal literature are extrapolated into full-blown incarnate communities. The narrative of the formation of the canon of the NT and the emergence of the early church into public view in the 4th century, therefore, is of a supressive and repressive faction that becomes “orthodoxy” by getting rid of all other claimants (particularly the more diverse sorts!). In some variants of this narrative, Constantine is invoked as the one who declares Jesus divine in a complete departure from the peasant revolutionary who kicked off the original Jesus movement.

When this narrative is imported into congregations as theology, the result is a semi- to fully-Arian christology (one that considers Jesus as an exemplary person and teacher, but not a divine being) and a generally anti-orthodox approach that sees the early church and its councils as repressive agents of Empire.

A central problem is that, in our churches, this narrative and its resulting theology is seen as the only alternative to fundamentalism.

And it’s not.

I’m not a fundamentalist; I don’t read the Bible like a fundamentalist. I read it as a poetry of God’s presence and, in doing so, I read it in the company of the early church. I don’t read the Bible as a dead historical site to be excavated for its ideas, but as a living city that invites us to both imagine and live the world that God imagines.

So—I need to read some more Borg. I realize that I tend to respond to something of a caricature of his thought; I’d like to be able to be more fair to him and to be able to speak to what he does say rather than what I hear others report him to have said.