Saturday, May 25, 2013

Response to 'The Once and Future Scriptures' - Part 2

Introduction

The next windmill in my current Quixotic quest is the Reverend Dr Cathy Thomson’s essay “Scripture as a Normative Source in Theology” for no better reason that that it is Chapter 2.

Same disclaimers and qualifications as last time.

Summary

Thomson’s essay falls into two halves. In the first she explores the question of how we draw meaning from the Biblical scriptures, how we use them to direct (or justify) our behaviour and develops five principles for “ … governing the use of Scripture as normative source of theology” (page 33). In the second she takes her model and applies it to the passages in the New Testament (NT) that claim that Jesus Christ is God.

I found the first half quite illuminating. As far as the second half is concerned, I always enjoy a guided tour through the Christological passages and I nodded in agreement to Thomson’s narrative of the history of these passages. But her inferences, I believe, were wrong. Taken as a whole, the thing that troubles me the most about this essay is the contrast between Thomson’s exuberance in exploring modern communication theory in the first half, and her discombobulation in dealing with the Christological scriptures in the second. In dealing with the former, her language is peppered with certainty and confidence; in the latter she backs away from Trinitarian claims, stating that scripture only ever suggests the full divinity of Christ. That’s not how I read it. I wonder that if the NT authors were to shout their message into Thomson’s ear with a bullhorn, she would resolutely refuse to believe it was anything more than a mere suggestion.

This is the thing I find most troubling about Thomson’s essay. Read back to front, it’s an attack on Trinitarianism, backed up by Thomon’s inferences from communication theory. If this were the case, Thomson wishes to rehabilitate Arianism and Gnosticism to the Church. There are very good reasons why the Church Fathers declared these ideas anathema, and we modern Christians would be wise to listen to them.

Communication and Model Theory

In a strange nexus of developing flood models as a profession and doing Christian apologetics as a hobby, I have developed a theory that I call Model Theory. I mention it here because it aligns with much of what Thomson has to say. It goes something like this
  • A model can be a word, an intellectual concept or a toy train set.
  • The model is always less than the thing it models (the prototype). If it weren’t, it would be the prototype.
  • Given that the model is less than the prototype, the features included in the model are a narrow selection of the features of the prototype.
  • The selection process reduces the model to only those features that illustrate or address particular behaviors, questions or concerns. Good models do this well.
  • Therefore, you can’t expect a model to answer a question that it was not designed to answer.
This last point is particularly important in asking questions of the Bible. Thomson is right to remind us that the scriptures were written to address particular concerns in a particular culture and at a particular time. We risk much by importing scriptural statements into our own culture and time without understanding the ‘spirit’ in which these statements were written.

I use the word ‘spirit’ deliberately here because it is a word Thomson labors to avoid. To be fair to the academic tone of Thomson’s essay, it’s a word that will solicit a murmur of ‘amens’ in Ekklesia, but it won’t fly in Academia. Yet, that is what Thomson appears to miss. The ‘Spirit’ of the New Testament (as I read it) is something that is preoccupied with the vision of God presented to the authors in the fleshly person of Jesus. They weren’t philosophers hiding in their caves until their own ‘eureka’ moments drove them out; they were confronted with a Jesus who invaded their own humdrum existence, and then spent their time and energy trying to explain it to their friends and neighbors with models that their friends and neighbors could comprehend (e.g. the Temple).

Hence the Bible is the (canonical) Model of the revelation of God in Christ, and hence why it will not answer every question we have about it. Hence we cannot approach the Bible with the expectation that all our questions will be answered; questions such as “give me an explanation of how can the man Jesus be fully God?” Instead, we see God made fully visible in man, asking us who we think He is (Matt 16:15), and we are confronted with the fact that, whatever models we hold in our mind about what it means to be human, or God, they must be re-formed by what we see in Jesus in scripture. That is what ‘canon’ is all about.

This, I think, is what it means to have the Spirit illuminate our reading of scripture, and this is what informs us as we contextualize its message in our present circumstances – in Thomson’s parlance, how the scriptures are normative source in theology.

What she says and what I say – Model Theory

Thomson opens with a discussion on what normativity might mean “One emerging insight is therefore that normativity is usually about the management or control of behavior(s). Within a faith community this might of course, and validly, be referred to as ‘guidance’ rather than control” (Page 27). I agree here, and would add that the NT authors would probably have had no clue about our modern concepts of control. We think of control as pressing a button on a remote and the TV changes channels. In a world before mechanization, this kind of automatic, unthinking response in humans would have seemed incomprehensible. The ancients, of course, did know about ‘command’ (see Matt 8:5-13), but for a command to work, you’ve got to tell someone what to do and they have to think about how to do it. Thomson and I probably agree that the thinking-about-it-part is fundamental, but not understood well enough in Christian circles.

“The source is the word spoken; the spirit hovering over the, as yet, uncreated deep. The source is God, or perhaps it is the point at which the sheer uncreated potential of God meets its own mysterious actualization in creation. It is seedpod at the heartbreaking and glorious moment of generation; it is the welling up of the originating spring, impossible to locate at any point in space, at any moment in time.” (page 27). Thomson waxes poetical (no problem with that, unless she intoxicated with her own insights), but seems to veer towards a gnostic perspective with her assertion that this ‘source’ is impossible to locate – Scriptures teach us that it is located in Jesus (e.g. John 1:18).

“… it is necessary to recognize (with some regret) that the written word can never be purely ‘source’ by any stretch of anyone’s imagination. This is because it is always an attempted representation of something that precedes it, whether in thought, imagination or in reality.” See Model Theory above.

“… the biblical interpretative exercise enterprise has been led into a condition both of greater freedom and greater complexity. The first is disinclined to uncover ‘truth(s)’. The second makes the assertion of truth claims increasingly more difficult.” (page 30) Thomson veers into post-modernism, but seems to anticipate an counter-post-modern reaction by adding “The postmodern theologian does not claim that Scripture contains no truth, but that the vagaries of recollection, writing, reading, and dissemination render it impossible to make absolute truth claims out of the text. On a more positive note, the contemporary theologian is likely to consider it appropriate to look to Scripture to learn about the derivation of faith historically, the apprehension of faith personally, and the mystery that seems to undergird these processes.” Do I care about what Post-Modern Theologians think? Given that Post-Modernism ultimately fractures truth into personal experiential constructs, I don’t see anything within it that compels me to comprehend or acknowledges anyone’s experiential constructs but my own.

Thomson’s hermeneutical principles are listed on Pages 33 to 34. On face value, I don’t find much to object to here. Thomson is right to recoil from the use of the Bible to justify coercive religion, but something more muscular is needed that her implied plea for us all to be nice to each other. My bigger concern is that she uses her hermeneutical principles to seed doubt in the Trinitarian understanding of the Christological Scriptures.


What she says and what I say – The Christology of the New Testament

I have transcribed the entire section of Thomson’s essay below. My main reason for doing so is my agreement to Thomson’s narrative on the history of these scriptures, which is remarkable because we sit at very different ends of the theological spectrum. When you see opponents corroborate the facts, you know you’ve got good history. However, I disagree with Thomson’s inferences and the agenda for which she uses them.

How does Thomson know that the texts were “… no less enigmatic or elusive, inconsistent or ambiguous, than we find them to be today”? Why does she even think “we” find them in this state? I find a remarkable, unambiguous consistency in these texts. Did the early Christians think like me, or her? I suggest that neither of us knows for sure, and these kinds of generalizations and categorizations about what passed through the minds of the first Christians are unhelpful speculation.

Why does Thomson back away from the high Christological claims of the New Testament? “The writers of the New … seemed to claim for him redemptive significance suggestive of qualities understood to be characteristic of the divine.”? The message of the Divinity of Jesus is not an adjunct to the message of the New Testament; it is its whole reason for being. Why couch these statements in uncertainty, with qualifiers such as “seemed to claim” or “suggest”?

What is Thomson’s point with “It is also clear that the earliest texts which could be interpreted as pointing to the divinity of Jesus were probably drawing from liturgical material that would have been in use well before the gospels were written, and centuries before the divinity of Jesus was asserted in doctrinal statements such as those produced by the Council of Nicea in 325 CE.”? On the one hand, she acknowledges that statements relating to the Divinity of Jesus were in circulation before the writing of the New Testament, and on the other she can’t join the dots between the NT and the Nicene Creed. I suggest that her difficulties would be resolved if she embraced the idea that the ideological leadership of the Christian Church has always understood that Jesus was Divine, but it’s ways of promoting and defending the idea have been expressed in different ways, according to the circumstances at the time.

Incidentally, I find the use of CE instead of AD intensely annoying in Christian publications. If Christ were God, then this is the Year of Our Lord. Diluting it to “Common Era” might mollify the humanists, but I am not a humanist and I fail to see why I should toe their line.

Why does Thomson say “There is ambiguity in all of these texts, which makes it difficult to ‘ground’ biblically any Chistological claim of divinity.”? I suggest that the root of Thomson’s difficulties is her persistence in squaring these Christological scriptures up against her Model of what Divinity is. If her Model is faulty, and its faults are apparent in her failure to get the right answers to her questions from it, then it’s her Model that needs to change.

Thomson finds more difficulties in the titles, or descriptions used by Jesus and those around him, particularly “Christ” and “Son of Man”. She would benefit from some Model Theory here; these titles are themselves models that convey part, but not all, of what Jesus is. True, “Christ” simply means “anointed one” and it is roughly equivalent to “authorized representative”. Also “Son of Man” is simply equivalent to “human being”. When applied to the Christ of Scripture, however, these models may be expanded to “one who is authorized by God to implement the policies and practices and modus operandi of the Kingdom of Heaven” and “one who has inherited all that it means to be truly human and thus has the right to represent all human beings to the heavenly realm”. To the extent that Thomson criticizes a narrow interpretation of these terms, I agree. However, she falls on her own sword by reducing, not enlarging, how these models are applied to Jesus Christ, the Son of Man.

Thomson revisits the conflict between Arius and Athanasius (here is my brief account). She avoids taking sides in this essay (leading me to think that she’s a tyre-kicking fence-sitter in this regard), but oddly, she appeals to Nietzsche for the final word on the matter. “The ignominious ‘will to power’ later articulated by the philosopher Nietzsche displayed the full force of its ire in a history of exclusion and belittlement meted out by both sides.” (page 40). I suggest that had Arius been less dogmatic and egotistical in his claims, the machinations of the fourth century might have been mitigated and Neitzsche might not have been so offended by them.

What is the basis for Thomson’s clarity, and why does she contest it in “Clearly a series of early liturgical affirmations at once uplifting and ambiguous, and a set of different titles for Jesus that were inconsistent, and again ambiguous, could hardly by themselves lead to the formation of the well-worked metaphysical formulae that took on the status of Christological doctrine in the fourth century.” I suggest that the creeds resulting from Nicea are better understood as a narrative on the Christological texts – they are Models that are designed to address a question that Thomson believes is unanswered, the relationship between Jesus and the Father.

“It is also indisputable that the formation of these definitive doctrines about the person of Christ were as much dependent on the philosophical milieu of the day within which an Aristotelian system of metaphysics (characterized by concepts of essence/substance) was dominant.” (page 40) So, the creeds used the words and models available at the time to respond to an appreciable challenge to the Christian Gospel. We should use whatever words or models are available to us to do the same. The answer, I suggest, is not to discard the Nicean formulations because they are tainted by Aristotelean language, but to understand those concepts in order to uncover the meaning intended by their authors.
“The discussion also demonstrates that in the development of early Christology Scripture has not provided an unambiguous or self-referential system.” (Page 41) Or so Thomson would like us to think.

Finally, Thomson fails to differentiate between description and explanation. Where it is concerned with the Divine, the Bible has much of the former and little of the latter. I think this in itself is illuminating; if we had a God that we could fully explain (that could be fully represented in our conceptual models), he would be less than us, and hence he could not be God. Further, we might reflect on why God made it so. I beleive it is because we creatures were created to behold Him. We might be able to communicate some of that vision in words, but we will never be able to fully explain it.

Extract from Thomson's Essay on the Christological Scriptures, pages 35 to 40

In order to validate these principles, one presupposition must be in place. This is that Scripture is not a self-regulating system characterized by inner consistency, or self-interpretative possibility. Even at times in the history of Christianity when the interpretative freedoms claimed above were not imagined, theologians always looked outside of the text to make sense of the import of the text. And the texts themselves were considered no less enigmatic or elusive, inconsistent or ambiguous, than we find them to be today. If we examine some of the textual material central to the Christological discourses within the early Church, this becomes clear.

It is demonstrable that Church teaching about the person of Christ did not emerge in an uncomplicated way out of the biblical study of the early Church. Scripture suggested that Jesus was a devout follower of the God of Judaism, but not only that. The writers of the New Testament through the telling of stories about his life, and though theological treatises such as those contained in the letters of Paul seemed to claim for him redemptive significance suggestive of qualities understood to be characteristic of the divine.

This biblical process however was not a neat chronological one within which can be traced a gradual evolution of ideas starting with the identity of Jesus as God’s Son, and ending up with doctrinal statements about his divinity. Nor is there a chronological movement from narrative elements describing Jesus’ life to proclamatory material making sense of the narratives. It is clear that the gospels contain confessional elements reflecting the faith of the communities out of which they emerged. It is also clear that the earliest texts which could be interpreted as pointing to the divinity of Jesus were probably drawing from liturgical material that would have been in use well before the gospels were written, and centuries before the divinity of Jesus was asserted in doctrinal statements such as those produced by the Council of Nicea in 325 CE.

Examples of liturgical texts of this sort follow. The first is the Psalm cited in Heb 1:8-9, which recognizes Jesus as the Son of God and suggests a special status for him:
But of the Son, he (God) says:
‘Your throne O God is [or, God is your throne] for ever and ever,
And the righteous scepter is the scepter of your kingdom.
You have loved righteousness and hated wickedness
Therefore God, your God, has anointed you
With the oil of gladness beyond your companions.’
Jesus’ status as son of God the Father is further reinforced in the hymn in John 1:14
‘And the Word became flesh
And lived among us
And we have seen his glory
The glory as of a Father’s only son,
Full of grace and truth’
In the baptismal formula of Matt 28:19, Jesus is represented as co-equal with God. This is evident long before there is any doctrine associating him with the metaphysics of ‘substance’ relating to notions of divinity, or suggestive of a Trinitarian concept of the godhead; ‘Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.'

Another text thought to have originated as liturgical material is Col 1:15-20
‘He is the image of the invisible God
The first born of all creation
For in him all things in heaven and on earth were created
Things visible and invisible
Whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers
All things have been created through him and for him
He himself is before all things
And in him all things hold together
He is the head of the body
The church
He is the beginning
The first born from the dead
So that he might come to have first place in everything.
For in him the fullness of God was pleased to dwell
And through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things
Whether on earth or in heaven
By making peace through the blood of his cross.
In terms of determining the nature of Christ the first two of these tests are intriguing but ambiguous, attributing ‘sonship’ to Jesus, but not necessarily divinity. The third is suggestive of a Jesus co-equal with the Father and the Spirit, which may be read to imply divinity, but could be understood in the sense of a son and spirit derived from/by God, but sharing divinity. The Colossians text displays a heightened rhetoric which describes Jesus as having every possible divine attribute; he is the image of God, Creator of the World, head of the ekkelesia, occupying first place in everything, in whom God was pleased to dwell, but he is not portrayed explicitly as divine. There is ambiguity in all of these texts, which makes it difficult to ‘ground’ biblically any Chistological claim of divinity.

More ambiguity surrounds the names that were used of Jesus and by Jesus of himself as the New Testament documents bear witness. Jesus was the Messiah, in Greek Christos, or “the Christ’. This means, literally, “the anointed one”. The promised Messiah was the one who could come to release Israel from oppression and rule them in peace as their king. In the gospels, Peter recognized Jesus as the Messiah (as well as Son); ‘You are the Messiah, the Son of the Living God” (Matt 16:16). Martha also recognized this identity of Jesus: “Yes Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one who was expected to come into the world” (John 11:27). Yet Jesus never used this terminology when referring to himself. In the Markan account of Jesus’ trial however when the high priest asks of him, “Are you the Messiah?” Jesus enigmantically says, “I am,” and then goes on to employ a different title again – the “Son of Man”, which requires its own explication.

Jesus also never referred to himself as God’s Son, and always answered ambiguously when others called him this. However a passage from Matthew’s Gospel does seem to suggest the thought of himself as God’s Son; “All things have been delivered to me by my Father; and no one knows the Son except the Father , and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him” (Matt 11:27). Also interesting is Jesus’ use of the title “Abba” which points to a sense that Jesus had that he was ‘son of God’ in a special, if undefined, way.

The acknowledgement that “Jesus is Lord” (kyrios) is one of the earliest Christian confessions of faith. It had powerful theological associations, because it was used “to translate the Tetragrammatron, the four Hebrew characters (YHWH) used to represent the sacred name of God in the Hebrew Scriptures.” The most significant occurrence of the use of the word “Lord” to designate Jesus is found in Phil 2:9-11, a passage which is very early – probably pre-Pauline – yet which has a developed sense of possibility that Jesus might have divine attributes.
Therefore God also highly exalted him
And gave him the name that is above every name
So that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend
In heaven and on earth and under the earth
And every tongue should confess
That Jesus Christ is Lord
To the glory of God the Father
Here the early Christian writer takes a Hebrew Bible declaration (Isa 45:23) that every knee will bow to the Lord God, and transfers it to the Lord Jesus Christ, which again suggests the divinity of Jesus without claiming it explicitly.

The term “Son of Man” is possibly the most difficult of the titles of Jesus to interpret, because the scholarship that examines it is not conclusive. Apart from a few exceptions, Jesus is the one who uses this title in the New Testament: seventy times in the Synoptic Gospels and twelve in the Gospel of John. In two palces the titles are used by others (Acts 7:56; John 12:34). Jesus never claims to be “Son of Man”, but there are times when the gospels seem to portray him as referring to himself when he uses it (Matt 8:20; Mark 8:31). On the other hand the term “Son of Man” in common usage in Jesus’ day often implied simply the sense of “I”. It is possible that Jesus used this title in this rather mundane way, and the early church invested it with apocalyptic meaning.

Theologians of the early Church – searching within the above range of vital liturgical New Testament texts suggestive of Jesus’ divinity – might themselves be convicted of that claim, but their theological task was not assisted by the essential inconsistency and ambiguity of the texts themselves. And the history of the first few centuries of the Christian Church tells us that despite the plethora of such reverential texts, the issue of whether or not Jesus was divine was hugely controversial. Arian [sic] and his followers disputed the divinity of Jesus; Athanasius averred it. These men were contemporaries, respected leaders of the Church, and theologians of the same city of Alexandria. They were familiar with the same philosophical thought-forms and they use the same Scriptures to form the basis of their theological views. Demonstrably, then, the truth of Jesus’ divinity was not derived from scriptural material in an uncomplicated manner, as though it lay, a clear theological concept, a glittering jewel, merely to be mined, extracted, from the text. It was deliberated upon, thought about and prayed (and fought) over for centuries. The ignominious ‘will to power’ later articulated by the philosopher Nietzsche displayed the full force of its ire in a history of exclusion and belittlement meted out by both sides.

If the Scriptures serve as a normative source for theology, it is clear that they have not been applied exclusively in doctrinal development. Clearly a series of early liturgical affirmations at once uplifting and ambiguous, and a set of different titles for Jesus that were inconsistent, and again ambiguous, could hardly by themselves lead to the formation of the well-worked metaphysical formulae that took on the status of Christological doctrine in the fourth century. This is, namely, that Jesus was “one in essence/substance” (consubstantial/homoousios) with the Father, and not “of similar substance” (homoiousious). And that Jesus was one person with two natures, human and divine so that a distinction within Christ was placed squarely on the level of nature while the unity resided fully in the sphere of the person. Clearly this Christology emerged out of more than a dispassionate appraisal of the relevant scriptural texts. The process involved interpretation of the text that would have engaged what I have referred to above as “matrices of meaning and perceived possibility” as these existed for individual theologians and their immediate faith communities. It is also indisputable that the formation of these definitive doctrines about the person of Christ were as much dependent on the philosophical milieu of the day within which an Aristotelian system of metaphysics (characterized by concepts of essence/substance) was dominant.

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