Series Preface to the Brazos (SCM) Theological Commentary on the Bible

SCM Theological Commentary on the Bible
Series Preface
by R. R. Reno

Near the beginning of his treatise against Gnostic interpretations of the Bible, Against the Heresies, Irenaeus observes that Scripture is like a great mosaic depicting a handsome king. It is as if we were owners of a villa in Gaul who had ordered a mosaic from Rome. It arrives, and the beautifully colored tiles need to be taken out of their packaging and put into proper order according to the plan of the artist. The difficulty, of course, is that Scripture provides us with the individual pieces, but the order and sequence of various elements are not obvious. The Bible does not come with instructions that would allow interpreters to simply place verses, episodes, images, and parable in order as a worker might follow a schematic drawing in assembling the pieces to depict the handsome king. the mosaic must be puzzled out. This is precisely the work of scriptural interpretation.
Origen has his own image to express the difficulty of working out the proper approach to reading the Bible. When preparing to offer a commentary on the Psalms he tells of a tradition handed down to him by his Hebrew teacher:
The Hebrews said that the whole divinely inspired Scripture may be likened, because of its obscurity, to many locked rooms in our house. By each room is placed a key, but not the one that corresponds to it, so that the keys are scattered about beside the rooms, none of them matching the room by which it is placed. it is a difficult task to find the keys and match them to the rooms that they can open. We therefore know the Scriptures that are obscure only by taking the points of departure for understanding them from another place because they have their interpretive principle scattered among them.

As is the case for Irenaeus, scriptural interpretation is not purely local. The key in Genesis may best fit the door of Isaiah, which in turn opens up the meaning of Matthew. The mosaic must be put together with an eye toward the overall plan.
Irenaeus, Origen, and the great cloud of premodern biblical interpreters assumed that puzzling out the mosaic of Scripture must be a communal project. The Bible is vast, heterogeneous, full of confusing passages and obscure words, and difficult to understand. Only a fool would imagine that he or she could work out solutions alone. The way forward must rely upon a tradition of reading that Irenaeus reports has been passed on as the rule or canon of truth that functions as a confession of faith. “Anyone,” he says, “who keeps unchangeable in himself the rule of truth received through baptism will recognize the names and says and parables of the scriptures.” Modern scholars debate the content of the rule on which Irenaeus relies and commends, not the least because the terms and formulations Irenaeus himself uses shift and slide. Nonetheless, Irenaeus assumes that there is a body of apostolic doctrine sustained by a tradition of teaching in the church. This doctrine provides the clarifying principles that guide exegetical judgment toward a coherent overall reading of Scripture as a unified witness. Doctrine, then, is the schematic drawing that will allow the reader to organize the vast heterogeneity of words, images, and stories of the Bible into a readable, coherent whole. It is the rule that guides us toward the proper matching of keys to doors.

Wittgenstein, Augustine, and the relation of mind and body.

“The text from Augustine’s Confessions with which Wittgenstein opens the Investigations registers a strong sense of how the self-transparent little soul looks out from its head, hears the adults making various noises, watches them (through its eyes) as they lumber towards some item of middle-sized dry goods, and then suddenly, on its own, makes the connection, in its own mind, between the sounds the adults emit and the objects that they touch.  Augustine pictures his infant self as already aware of its identity (what is going on inside its own mind) and of what is going on around it (outside its mind), prior to and independently of its mastering the arts of speech.  The text offers ‘a particular picture of the essence of human language’ (PI 1).  It is important to notice, however, from the outset, that the ‘words name objects’ doctrine of language which Wittgenstein at once extracts from the text is interwoven with the idea that meaning is always in the head: the last remark in the Investigations has to be allowed to illuminate the first one.  As Waismann wrote, recapitulating the idea:

 What we object to is the idea of the contents of different people’s minds as shut off from each other by insurmountable barriers, so that what is experienced is eternally private and inexpressable - the idea that we are, so to speak, imprisoned behind bars through which only words can escape, as though it were a defect in language that it consists wholly of words (Waismann, Principles, p. 248). 

 Wittgenstein thinks, we badly need the reminder.  Indeed, the only problem that he has with Augustine’s story is that what is presented as secondary and marginal to self-understanding needs to be acknowledged as fundamental.  He only wants to draw attention to what Augustine’s picture leaves in the background” (Fergus Kerr, Theology after Wittgenstein, p. 56, 57).

  

Holy Week and Easter Sermon

Passiontide and Easter Address (200

 

By way of introducing the series of readings we’re going to hear I want to talk to you about blood.

 

Blood has always been regarded with a kind of reverence or awe.  The smell, the colour, what it signifies, have held all cultures in some way from the beginning.

 

It repulses some people and makes them become vegetarians.  Some children panic when they see it flow.  Others faint.

 

It enthralls others with its beauty.  We forget sometimes what it means when we throw our store bought steak onto the grill…

 

The Bible says that the life of the creature is in its blood.  In the Old Testament we are shown the significance of blood quite clearly.  The first sin resulted in blood (there were creatures killed so that Adam and Eve could cover their nakedness after they sinned).  

 

The blood and pain of child birth and human reproduction.

 

The second sin involved blood more directly.  Cain murders his brother Abel.  God asks Cain what he has done, “The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground.  And now you are cursed from the ground, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand”.

 

The blood and the ground.  It is like Abel’s life was swallowed up by the ground as his blood drained into it.

 

The human race and all our history can be understood in terms of blood.  Blood spilt.  Blood shed.  The fight, the violence, the rage.  The injustice, the oppression.  The courage, the hope, and people with faith so strong that they would willingly give their life-blood for what they believe in.  

 

From the beginning to the end.  It’s blood blood blood.  

 

The Bible is clear, that we don’t kill the animals on this earth for meat out of any divine right.  We kill by divine permission.  All the blood of every creature ultimately belongs to God.  We kill to eat.  The blood that is shed actively harkens back to the first shed blood, the consequence, and towards the Great Sacrifice.

 

All of it is sacrificial.  We kill now because we have to kill in order to eat meat.  We cannot help but have blood on our hands.

 

The blood of sacrifice in the Old Testament was to solidify this connection.  For every action that we commit that destroys our soul, our life, the image of God in us, an innocent creature has to die.  The blood, then becomes an extension of our own self destruction.  The animal dies in our place.  But all of that was not in any way to be a solution.  Only a pointer towards ultimate redemption.

 

Other religions as well spill blood in desperate hope and desire to resolve cosmic curses and the collective guilt of evil and violence.

 

We sinned.  We killed ourselves.  We corrupted our life blood, in both a physical and a spiritual sense.  So now we die, both physically and spiritually.  

 

The Bible is unavoidably stark in what it says about this.  Without the shedding of blood, there can be no forgiveness.  Life for life.  Sin and evil don’t just evaporate into nothingness.  It all needs to be resolved.  Without the shedding of blood, there can be no forgiveness.

 

And there isn’t enough blood in all the world, in all the created universe, to undo the mess we have made.

 

Or is there?

 

The Triumphal entry into Jerusalem, is nothing less than the procession of an extraordinary sacrifice moving towards the shedding of blood.

 

The Institution of the Lord’s Supper is nothing less than providing humanity with a way to perpetually benefit from the one eternal blood shedding.  The blood shedding to ultimately end all blood shedding.  It’s not just “remembering” in a merely mental sense.  It is an act of bringing into the present what has happened once for all eternity.  If this wasn’t the case, more and more blood shedding would still be necessary.  With this promise, however, we are saved from ourselves and are given a new destiny.

 

The Crucifixion and Death is the blood shedding to end all blood shedding.  It is precisely so because of the nature of the blood that is shed.  It isn’t merely human blood.  It was the blood of the God-Man Jesus.  His blood is different in that because it was one with God it has the infinite capacity to save.  All past, present, future sins and blood shed is resolved through it.  All of it ultimately points to Jesus, suspended between heaven and earth, bleeding for the whole created universe.

 

Jesus is the only person who has ever lived that claimed to be able to resolve this violence and sin within his own self.  No other religion claims to resolve humanity’s predicament in this way.  But for those that reject it, there is still blood to pay.  There is still the mimetic desire to pour out violence that remains unresolved.  Violence outpoured within and without.

 

Jesus died to take that surge of energy, hurt and hate upon himself so that it could all stop.  The killing, spiritual and physical, can all stop.

 

His resurrection, his disciples witnessed and we believe their testimony, proves that he could actually accomplish what he promised.  And so the blood becomes communion wine, and the communion wine is the blood.

 

The curse is overturned into a blessing. The hate is burned up in the fire of God’s love.

 

Death is swallowed up by the victory of an endless, holy life.

 

As the old spiritual hymn says, “what can wash away my sin?  Nothing but the blood of Jesus…”.  Washed clean we can have freedom in this life, and freedom in the next.

 

If we reject what he offers us we have to continue shedding our own life blood.  And eventually that will run out.

Medieval Philosophy, Barbarians and cultural change.

“It remains, then, a historical fact that “barbarian” peoples made themselves at home in a house they had not themselves built.  And this fact makes more comprehensible an otherwise troublesome discord which from the very beginning–especially at the beginning–characterized medieval philosophy.  Hegel, in spite of the summary haste of his survey, made a very penetrating remark concerning this: “The chief element in the Middle Ages is this division, this duality: two nations, two languages.  We see peoples who had previously ruled, who had previously rounded off their own world, their own language, their arts and sciences; and we see the new nations settling down upon this alien foundation.  Thus these new nations began with a serious cleavage within themselves.  Thus Hegel explains the aspect of scholasticism which so alientated him, the “total confusion of dry reason in the gnarledness of the Nordic-Germanic nature.”  Upon that Germanic nature, he continues, “the infinite truth of the spirit weighed like a ponderous stone whose tremendous pressure it could only feel but not digest” during those centuries.  It is false, and demonstrably false, that the “stone” could not be digested.  But on the other hand it is true that the incorporation of something not sprung from native soil, the acquisition of both a foreign vocabulary and a different mode of thinking, the assimilation of a tremendous body of existing thought–that all that was in fact the problem  which confronted medieval philosophy at its beginnings, and which it had to master.  In the very act of mastering it, medieval philosophy acquired its own character” (Josef Pieper, Scholasticism, p. 21-22).

Village News article (March ‘08)

In a previous parish I was bringing communion to a seniors’ care home that had in it many people in the later stages of Alzheimer’s or old age dementia.  It was a regular reminder that in some situations it doesn’t matter how good and enthusiastic of a communicator you are, sometimes you simply won’t be able to get through to people.  In this care home I went through the communion service and made a particular effort to speak to those who seemed to be awake and listening.  When it came to giving everyone the bread and the wine I received help from an unexpected source.  In this particular parish (I wasn’t priest-in-charge) we had communion wine that was extraordinarily bad.  It tasted a bit like what I imagined cooking sherry to taste like.  As I brought the wine to the elderly people gathered, two of them who had been unresponsive lurched forward and grimaced as they tasted it.  It was the only response I had had from them the entire time.  Of course I used this to further illustrate why we needed to get a different brand of communion wine.  But this instance was also a lesson that sometimes it takes something tough in order to wake us up.  Super strong coffee and loud alarm clocks are a couple of other examples that spring to mind.

Village News article (February ‘08)

I was having a hard time sleeping last night, so I switched on the BBC World Service and listened to a programme on the rising debt crisis.  Not surprisingly, it didn’t particularly help sooth my racing mind, and I awoke this morning thoroughly exhausted.  I went into school for the first time after Christmas and read in one of the national papers that the Church of England is providing training so that clergy can give financial planning and debt advice.  That got a sardonic chuckle out of me.  Line ups of people at the vicarage asking me for financial advice?  I doubt it.

Christ the Shepherd and Philosopher

“The figure of Christ is interpreted on ancient sarcophagi principally by two images: the philosopher and the shepherd. Philosophy at that time was not generally seen as a difficult academic discipline, as it is today. Rather, the philosopher was someone who knew how to teach the essential art: the art of being authentically human—the art of living and dying. To be sure, it had long since been realized that many of the people who went around pretending to be philosophers, teachers of life, were just charlatans who made money through their words, while having nothing to say about real life. All the more, then, the true philosopher who really did know how to point out the path of life was highly sought after. Towards the end of the third century, on the sarcophagus of a child in Rome, we find for the first time, in the context of the resurrection of Lazarus, the figure of Christ as the true philosopher, holding the Gospel in one hand and the philosopher’s travelling staff in the other. With his staff, he conquers death; the Gospel brings the truth that itinerant philosophers had searched for in vain. In this image, which then became a common feature of sarcophagus art for a long time, we see clearly what both educated and simple people found in Christ: he tells us who man truly is and what a man must do in order to be truly human. He shows us the way, and this way is the truth. He himself is both the way and the truth, and therefore he is also the life which all of us are seeking. He also shows us the way beyond death; only someone able to do this is a true teacher of life. The same thing becomes visible in the image of the shepherd. As in the representation of the philosopher, so too through the figure of the shepherd the early Church could identify with existing models of Roman art. There the shepherd was generally an expression of the dream of a tranquil and simple life, for which the people, amid the confusion of the big cities, felt a certain longing. Now the image was read as part of a new scenario which gave it a deeper content: “The Lord is my shepherd: I shall not want … Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil, because you are with me …” (Ps 23 [22]:1, 4). The true shepherd is one who knows even the path that passes through the valley of death; one who walks with me even on the path of final solitude, where no one can accompany me, guiding me through: he himself has walked this path, he has descended into the kingdom of death, he has conquered death, and he has returned to accompany us now and to give us the certainty that, together with him, we can find a way through. The realization that there is One who even in death accompanies me, and with his “rod and his staff comforts me”, so that “I fear no evil” (cf. Ps 23 [22]:4)—this was the new “hope” that arose over the life of believers.” - Pope Benedict XVI, Spe Salvi, 6.

This sarcophagus is found in the Vatican Museum.

Village News article (December/January ‘07/’08)

The commercialization of Christmas is an easy target for any “Vicar’s Letter” this time of year.  It is common to hear vicar’s banging-on about how Christmas is loosing its original emphasis.  It serves a two-fold purpose.  It gives the vicar something to talk about that is in the collective consciousness, and it gives the vicar an opportunity to reinforce the cultural stereotype that vicars are cranky and out of touch.  There are a lot of people that don’t particularly care about “the meaning of Christmas,” and they think that it is about time people (not just vicars) lighten up a bit about how they choose to celebrate holidays and what they spend their money on.

However, statistics do seem to reveal a collective discomfort about the direction our society is going in.  When you pool all the data, and collect all the interviews, it is hard not to be left with the impression that we are, in fact, loosing our way as a society.  The way the Christmas season seems to magnify personal loneliness and alienation, and encourage excessive behaviour that demands a prolonged period of detoxification in the New Year does seem to relate to this overall loss of direction.

The question among politicians, educators, religious leaders and so on isn’t “whether we have lost our way” (everyone seems to assume this) but rather, “How do we pull ourselves together?”  The battle lines are drawn up, politically and religiously, around questions of solution.  As wealth, entertainment, and free time increase, there seems to be an increase in our collective sadness.  It seems as though wealth, entertainment, and free time are things to be handled with care.

This is an Advent and Christmas letter though, so I want to draw things together a little bit and be direct.  We don’t live in the first and only culture to have lost its way.  What is happening now has happened before (though in different ways) in Britain, and in other cultures.  The Wise Men from the east, for instance, probably looked around their society and thought the same thing.  More importantly, they looked into their own hearts and recognized that they were lost.  They set out and followed the star.  If they told anyone about their journey (and there is no question it was a long one) their plan would probably have been met with perplexed and blank stares.  But their sense of direction, for their journey and for their lives, was set, and so off they went.

Soloviev: The meaning of Dostoevsky’s “Beauty will save the world”

“Dostoevsky not only preached, but, to a certain degree also demonstrated in his own activity this reunification of concerns common to humanity–at least of the highest among these concerns–in one Christian idea. Being a religious person, he was at the same time a free thinker and a powerful artist. These three aspects , these three higher concerns were not differentiated in him and did not exclude one another, but entered indivisibly into all his activity. In his convictions he never separated truth from good and beauty; in his artistic creativity he never placed beauty apart from the good and the true. And he was right, because these three live only in their unity. The good, taken separately from truth and beauty, is only an indistinct feeling, a powerless upwelling; truth taken abstractly is an empty word; and beauty without truth and the good is an idol. For Dostoevsky, these were three inseparable forms of one absolute Idea. The infinity of the human soul–having been revealed in Christ and capable of fitting into itself all the boundlessness of divinity–is at one and the same time both the greatest good, the highest truth, and the most perfect beauty. Truth is good, perceived by the human mind; beauty is the same good and the same truth, corporeally embodied in solid living form. And its full embodiment–the end, the goal, and the perfection–already exists in everything, and this is why Dostoevsky said that beauty will save the world” (Vladimir Soloviev, The Heart of Reality, trans V. Wozniuk, p. 16).

Soloviev: The meaning of Raskolnikov in Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment”

“The major character is a representative of the view that any powerful man is a master to himself, and everything is permitted to him. In the name of his personal superiority, in the name of the fact that he is a force, he deems that he has the right to commit murder, and he actually does so. but suddenly a matter that he considered only a violation of a meaningless law and a daring challenge to social prejudice turns out to be for his personal conscience somehow much greater–a sin, a violation of intrinsic moral truth. A violation of the external law receives legitimate retribution outwardly in exile and hard labor; but the inner sin of pride, of self-deification, separating a powerful man from humanity and leading him to murder, can be atoned only be an inward moral act of self-abnegation. Boundless self-assurance must vanish before a faith in that which is greater than self; and self-made justification must become humble before God’s supreme truth, living in those very simple and weak people upon whom the powerful man gaze as upon worthless insects” (Soloviev, The Heart of Reality, Trans V. Wozniuk, p. 10).