“And That’s What Happened”
September 2, 2010
I remember sitting in my Textual Criticism class where we were studying the art and method of TC – and also the history of textual reception and of families of New Testament manuscripts – and getting a rush blasting the Textus Receptus, and so also the Authorized or King James Version. ‘What a horrible text,’ we thought. And indeed the TR is a terrible text if for no other reason its incredibly limited number of base manuscripts – leaving aside entirely the issue of ‘Alexandrian’ vs ‘Byzantine’ text types. Nevertheless, the AV stood the test of time and was without rival the primary English version of Holy Scripture for centuries.
Strangely, I am beginning to long for such a dominance. Not only does the AV give us a resoundingly lovely English syntax, this translation makes for easy memorization and was one of the primary things uniting the many Christian factions; it gave us a common devotional and doxological connection. It didn’t matter if you were a liberal Lutheran or a fundamentalist Baptist, you both read and could quote the ‘same’ Bible. I still only know Psalm 23 in the old King James.
Unfortunately for us the RSV came too late. It seems that no sooner had it been created, along with the Roman Catholic imprimitur, than factional division completely took over English scripture. I know that there were always different translations out there, but again, none had the universal dominance of the AV. The RSV retained all that is best about the AV, including its beautiful syntax. We know the story though, the controversy over Isaiah and the translation of gunaikon (I think that’s right, I’m too lazy to look it up.) and the question of ‘liberalism’ etc… The RSV gave way to the NRSV gave way to the NIV gave way to the blah blah blah. I use the NRSV generally and it is, among contemporary translations, far and away my favorite, though I’m contemplating switching to the RSV for both reading and memorization. Mostly I read it because its attached to my BCP and because, most significantly, it is the version most widely used by The Episcopal Church for devotional use. It just gets a bit clunky now and again and doesn’t have the majestic beauty of the RSV and AV.
I recall just a few years back the furious competition that came of the development of the ESV and the TNIV at the same time. Obviously the ESV won and the NIV is tanking under weird pressure. (The TNIV was actually a pretty good translation.) Looking at the wonderful scholars that have been working on the new Common English Bible, I thought that it had potential…but it is from it that I took the title for my post. Any translation that would replace “and it was so” in the opening epic poetry of Genesis with “and that’s what happened” deserves to be burned. Don’t even get me started on its use of contractions and the way it approaches the Gospels, even if it gets the objective genitive correct in Romans!
But this post isn’t really to inform you of my favorite translations. In a years time I will be nearly shifted mostly to reading it in Greek. This is simply a lament. A lament that we now use translations as idealogical fodder. We can instantly size someone’s theological positions up by which translation they use (I’ve definitely done it for ESV users). What has been lost is not merely an innocence that we once had as a larger Church, simply trusting our English King James Version, but we’ve lost a unified way of relating to the Word of God. Multiple studies demonstrate that we don’t even bother to memorize Scripture any more, but “so long as you are a ‘formal equivalence’ person rather than a careless ‘dynamic equivalence’ person, you’re alright in my boat.” Along with this has been a loss (though it goes back further than modern translation wars) of a devotional approach to Scripture. Instead we incise perichopi, we expect translations to give us the ‘true meaning’ of Scripture just as we approach Scripture to give us a ‘true meaning’ of itself. This breeds the wrong opinion that Scripture is some sort of historic deposit of true facts about God, complete with ‘plain meanings.’ If we can just get that meaning, we can get that translation. But we’re all taught hermeneutics now, we all know that such a ‘meaning’ will never be forthcoming, and we also know that any translation will have its weaknesses.
But neither is unity forthcoming. I imagine that there will never again be a universal dominance by one translation. Already where once there was unity between Roman Catholics and the Mainline, now the Catholics have stuck with the RSV and we’ve ‘moved on’ to the NRSV. It’s all just so very unfortunate.
Review of John Caputo’s “What Would Jesus Deconstruct?”
August 26, 2010
Baker Academic (November 1, 2007)
0801031362
978-0801031366
160 pgs
By John Caputo
Baker
Amazon
2007 Book of the Year Award, ForeWord Magazine
*my thanks to Caitlin at Baker Academic for the review copy!
“What Would Jesus Decontruct”: The Good New of Postmodernism for the Church” is the second in the series put out by Baker Academic entitled “The Church and Postmodern Culture” which has recently been expanded by two titles making it so far a total of five books with two more in the works. The previous book which I reviewed here and here was by series editor James K A Smith. Having read this book one would be forgiven for not thinking that Smith did work under Caputo. While Smith has become a big name in the so-called “Radical Orthodoxy” movement in theology, Caputo has stuck to his deconstructive guns and has a sizeable corpus of philosophical theology books that are unrelentingly Derridean.
On this point it is my opinion that Baker should be congratulated on allowing such a “big tent” attitude to flourish in this series. Caputo represents all that is best (and worst) in the “liberal postmodern” tradition (as described by Graham Ward in the Blackwell collection on “Modern Theologians”) of deconstructive Christianity and has significantly influenced certain ”Emergent” thinkers, most notably Peter Rollins and Tony Jones.
But anyway, to the book. This book keeps the basic shape of the previous one, Caputo spends time in each of the chapters relating certain aspects of deconstruction – mostly as Derrida envisioned it – to Christian thought. At the end of each chapter he sort of “puts it into practice” with a section on “application.” Then in the final chapter he lays out a bit more of a complete horizon of how he envisions applied Christian deconstruction can work.
* * * * * * *
The first chapter he bases off of the premise set by Charles Sheldon, who in his 1896 series of sermons turned novel “In His Steps” penned the immortal question: ”What Would Jesus Do?” Sheldon challenged his congregation to envision what it would be like if Jesus just showed up: What would he do? Just as important to Caputo is “Who would he be?” As in the book, Caputo thinks that Jesus would look like a desperately poor and “mad” man, the dreg of society and an uncomfortable church attendee.
Even in this introductory chapter Caputo begins to immerse the reader in the venacular of those pesky French thinkers; words like “The Other” and “The Event” start appearing. Caputo tells us why he thinks the question WWJD? is incomplete: We cannot merely produce what Jesus would do because we don’t know what Jesus would do. The question requires hermeneutics: “It requires an immense amount of interpretation, interpolation, and self-questioning to give it [the WWJD ?] any bite – and if it is not biting us, it has no bite – lest it be just a way of getting others to do what I want them to do but under the cover of Jesus.” 24-25.
After having introduced us to how Sheldon influenced the Social Gospel movement and elucidating the deconstructive vision of the television show “The Wire,” Caputo tells us that he thinks deconstruction is good news because, “it delivers the shock of the other to the forces of the same, the shock of the good (the “ought”) to the forces of being (“what is”)”27. Don’t worry, you start to pick up his meaning eventually.
He closes out the chapter by a brave if unsuccessful interpretive move using “The Grand Inquisitor” to relegate the Church to “Plan B.” He doesn’t see this as bad as for deconstruction, “everything is Plan B.” His primary point is that Jesus, in that famous sketch, is very much like the Jesus of deconstruction Caputo envisions. Such a Jesus is a wrench in the works, a disrupter and judge who will certainly find any self righteous dogmatic types wanting in the extreme. We may even want to do what the Cardinal does and rid ourselves of him again!
The future chapters skip along in a similar fashion. They seamlessly weave together many disparate insights from postmodern thinkers, literature, popular culture and historical figures in Christian thought. Caputo is nothing if not an energetic story teller, his narratives have a restlessness about them as indeed do many of the issues that he deals with. Deconstruction is about the gift that never arrives, the void that is never defined, the eternal iconoclasm of post-metaphysics…deconstruction cries semper reformanda!
The next to last chapter sketches the possibilities for Church life that, as Caputo sees it, open up when these deconstructive ‘poetics of the kingdom’ grasp hold of Christian disciples. He runs the risk and attempts to address what he sees as several ‘white elephants’ in the evangelical room (I’m assuming he used “white” on purpose though it would be strange given how many non-white Christians also support “traditional” stances on most of these). Caputo feels that taboos against homosexuality fail because of their abstract and totalizing understanding of ‘human nature.’ Whatever else can be said about this section, it is brave on Baker Academic’s part to give room to such a voice, a position that must absolutely be wrestled with.
Moving on to abortion, Caputo considers it sometimes to be the “lesser of two evils.” Here, as with his notes on violence – supposedly opposing violence utterly but advocating some totally irrational “post-Constantinian” just war doctrine – Caputo fails completely to follow through on his own deconstructive picture where the sting of unsettledness must disrupt all our categories. He ought to have opted for the unsettling idea that the abstract and universal category of “justice,” thought of monolithically and in terms of “success,”should itself be transgressed, not allowing it to “arrive” if it comes at the cost of the injustice of war.
There are at least two other substantial weaknesses to Captuo’s work as a whole. First, his narrative interlocutors are far too simplistic and reductionist, which makes it very easy for him to tease them, but also to take his arguments seriously. Especially common are his “right wing friends.” Don’t get me wrong, I am most likely just as critical of the deep and unhealthy connection between conservative evangelicalism and American conservative politics, but Caputo’s picture of these friends of his are all too cheaply constructed. Indeed, it is Caputo’s own hope in liberal politics that move him to align himself with military intrusions for the sake of “justice.”
Finally, and I don’t want to overstate our differences in terms of the priority of ‘justice’ which we agree is at the core of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, but a certain footnote reveals what is the center of Caputo’s project.
“Deconstruction can wear many hats and travel under many names. Calling it the “hermeneutics of the kingdom of God” is what happens when it sets up shop in biblical religion.” (p.140,n10)
It appears then that deconstruction is the true name of Caputo’s gospel. One that demythologizes the incarnation, death and resurrection of Jesus (since that would be profoundly metaphysical) and opts for the universality of an ethico-religous discourse that, since it can “set up shop” pretty much anywhere, is strangely similar to certain universal logoi.
This is still a very helpful book for understanding certain veins of “postmodern” christian theological and philosophical reflection, most notably deconstruction, and broadens the scope of the Church and Postmodern Culture Series.
Charismatic Apologetics in St. Athanasius
August 19, 2010
A passage to which I imagine I will return for more reflection struck me as interesting on a few levels.
“What we have said is, indeed, no small proof of the destruction of death and of the fact that the cross of the Lord is the monument to His victory. But the resurrection of the body to immortality, which results henceforward from the work of Christ, the common Savior and true Life of all, is more effectively proved by facts than by words to those whose mental vision is sound. For, if, as we have shown, death was destroyed and everybody tramples on it because of Christ, how much more did He Himself first trample and destroy it in His own body! Death having been slain by Him, then, what other issue could there be than the resurrection of His body and its open demonstration as the monument of His victory? How could the destruction of death have been manifested at all, had not the Lord’s body been raised? But if anyone finds even this insufficient, let him find proof of what has been said in present facts.
Dead men cannot take effective action; their power of influence on others lasts only till the grave. Deeds and actions that energize others belong only to the living. Well, then, look at the facts in this case. The Savior is working mightily among men, every day He is invisibly persuading numbers of people all over the world, both within and beyond the Greek-speaking world, to accept His faith and be obedient to His teaching. Can anyone, in face of this, still doubt that He has risen and lives, or rather that He is Himself the Life? Does a dead man prick the consciences of men, so that they throw all the traditions of their fathers to the winds and bow down before the teaching of Christ?
If He is no longer active in the world, as He must needs be if He is dead, how is it that He makes the living to cease from their activities, the adulterer from his adultery, the murderer from murdering, the unjust from avarice, while the profane and godless man becomes religious? If He did not rise, but is still dead, how is it that He routs and persecutes and overthrows the false gods, whom unbelievers think to be alive, and the evil spirits whom they worship? For where Christ is named, idolatry is destroyed and the fraud of evil spirits is exposed; indeed, no such spirit can endure that Name, but takes to flight on sound of it. This is the work of One Who lives, not of one dead; and, more than that, it is the work of God. It would be absurd to say that the evil spirits whom He drives out and the idols which He destroys are alive, but that He Who drives out and destroys, and Whom they themselves acknowledge to be Son of God, is dead.”
There’s a lot to unpack here and I don’t have time to do it but I want to draw attention to how St. Athanasius sees “proof” of Christ’s resurrection in his charismatic work; converting people from paganism; converting their habits and lives; casting out demons, et. al.
“My Father is still working, and I am working” indeed!
Anglican Identities: Archbishop of Canterbury Michael Ramsey
August 14, 2010
After his retirement, ++Ramsey spent much of his time at Nashotah House Seminary. At the time there was a nearby home for the mentally handicapped. One day a resident of that home ‘escaped’ and police were looking for him. Also on that day, Michael Ramsey was taking a walk in his full purple cassock. Seeing a very hairy man in a long purple ‘dress’ the police stopped him on his walk and asked who he was. ++Ramsey replied, “Why I’m the Archbishop of Canterbury!”
I just wanted to throw that story in there. It doesn’t really serve a larger purpose in this post.
It has often been noted that most who have taken the name Cantaur have been less than the greatest minds of the Anglican Church, but somehow the last century has produced three ABCs about whom has been said, “He is the most theologically astute ABC since St. Anselm himself.” I cannot judge such sayings, but at the very least, Michael Ramsey stands alongside William Temple and Rowan Williams as a creative and original theologian in his own right.
At this point I’ve not read as much Ramsey as I should like to. But even what I have is enough to excite me to read more. His classic theological work is The Gospel and the Catholic Church; a book written very early in his academic career and one that has apparently had a mixed reception. Ramsey was writing this in an Anglican school system very much dedicated to the liberalism of its time yet also when Barth was starting to be read and the “Biblical Theology” movement was coming into its own. It is remarkable the sheer amount of theology that is crammed into this thing. From the first chapter Ramsey is quick to remove any sense of worldly ‘purpose’ from his ecclesiology; the Church is made and has its life only in the life death and resurrection of Christ. It doesn’t play chaplain to the State, neither is it there to spread progressive values.
But this is also a mysterious participatory life. Here Ramsey is well ahead of his time for a Protestant. It may have been his deep appreciation of the Eastern Orthodox and/or his refusal to ‘rationalize’ how the New Testament talks about Gods life in the Church, whatever influenced Ramsey, he envisioned the Church as in the process of theosis.
But this forms only the beginning to this work. From there Ramsey attempts to explicate church order and unity, the episcopacy and apostolic succession in light of this Passion as opposed to locating it in the predetermined discussions as they have been developed. For him ‘Christian authority consists not in propositions about God [or, presumably the Church], but in God’s own redemptive action.” This is a section I should like to work on in the future: teasing out how the structure of the Church ought to be reflective of its life given by God in Christ. This section of the work is among the most novel and creative.
The next part of the book consists in a series of three essays of historical theology exploring the “Church of the Fathers,” including both the Greek and Latin fathers; “Developments in Catholicism,” in which he critiques the Roman Catholic Church for what he sees as certain discontinuities; and “The Reformers and the Church.” Ramsey was very much a sensitive reader of the Reformers and though himself often (and correctly) identified by others as “Anglo-catholic,” he was passionate that the Gospel and it alone stood at the heart of the Church.
In the next to last chapter Ramsey talks about the “Ecclesia Anglicana” and (typically) locates it both in the Reformation but also, on account of it’s historic order, within the intents of the Catholic Church. He here has a great little section on F.D. Maurice.
In a concluding note Ramsey returns again as he did throughout to the topic of Christian reunion, which for him cannot occur except as the Gospel is more and more ingested into the Church.
This work easily sums up the reason I feel so at home in Anglicanism. As with any church, in practice we are mixed, but at its best Anglican theological reflection usually follows this exact order: You must begin in the Scriptures; however authoritative and valuable the developments of history, Scripture (as it testifies to Christ) forms the heart of how we think of ourselves; then you move to the Church Fathers who still (providentially?) form a paradigm for integrating spirituality and philosophy into an holistic theology; but both the medieval church and the Reformation church have a rightful place even if both must be integrated with a tad bit more attentiveness; and it is only after this that we ought to begin to talk about the ‘Anglican Church’ and identity. The mixing of the universal and the particular are perhaps one of the reasons that Anglicans have not historically excelled in systematics but rather in devotional theology.
But that’s mere speculation. Whatever the case, by this book as well as his Anglican Spirit and An Era in Anglican Theology From Gore to Temple: The Development of Anglican Theology from ‘Lux Mundi’ and the Second World War 1889-1939, the 100th Archbishop of Canterbury has taught me how to feel at home in the Episcopal Church even when sometimes I still feel like a baby Anglican.
Other important works of his include: (please leave comments with others)
The Glory of God and the Transfiguration of Christ
A great starting point with secondary literature is Glory Descending: Michael Ramsey and His Writings and Glory!. Owen Chadwick also composed this biography.
One could consider this a contribution to our mini-series on Anglican identity as well as for ‘Big Tent Christianity.’ Among the many contributions do be sure to check out our friend David Henson’s here.
It might seem odd to some who know me that I would write a post about ‘Big Tent Christianity’ because I don’t really much care for it. To be more specific, I don’t think that a ‘Big Tent’ is something that we should celebrate and rejoice in for its own sake. The ‘diversity’ in the Church does not extend to Christian division nor the incoherence of Christian speech across groups. More often than not, a ‘Big Tent’ approach downplays the fact that the plethora of Christian groups and denominations are more the fruit of impatience with each other and the refusal to love (that is, ‘heresy’) than fruit of the Spirit. We should be more apt to repent for our division and work for stronger unity in both doctrine and practice than act as if there is no division; because how is there real division under a large covering?
This sounds doubly frightening I imagine coming from an Anglican. Surely we like to sell ourselves as a broad church? ’We are the ‘Via Media’ of which Hooker spoke, able to leap evangelical and catholic doctrine in a single bound.’ It is to Hooker that I wish to dedicate this reflection. Specifically a famous sermon of his wherein he affirms what was incredibly controversial at the time: That Roman Catholics ‘could be saved.’ Ironically, as Rowan Williams points out in his little book, Anglican Identities (Cambridge, Cowley 2003), ‘he believe this, … for what are in fact sound Protestant [doctrinal] reasons.’ (24)
By doing this I hope to open an idea for reflection:
- It is often assumed that doctrine must be somewhat downplayed for ‘Big Tent Christianity’ to work. This strangely cuts off many from the Tent for whom doctrine is non-negotiable. I’d like to suggest that this tent can be filled up even with these ‘conservatives’ – which is what we want right? – by appeal to Protestant doctrinal distinctives as explicated by Richard Hooker, the inclusive Anglican par excellence, in his famous sermon ‘A Learned Discourse of Justification, Works, and how the Foundation of Faith is Overthrown.‘
For Hooker, ‘ Many are the partakers of the error which are not of the heresy of the church of Rome.’ (London, Oxford/Clarendon, M.DCCC.LXV., vol. II, 613) As Hooker sees it, most Christians neither understand nor actively believe the sophisticated explanations of Christian faith and even such things as they do believe they do not realize how some of those might in fact be erroneous. He thinks this because we are born into situations over which we do not have control. ’people follow the conduct of their guides, and observe as they did, exactly that which was prescribed them.’ (613) But the ‘foundation’ of faith is Christ alone and faith in him, not the whole of all we do or do not assent to, and this faith will be enough to sustain the Christian through judgment.
‘They be not all faithless that are either weak in assenting to the truth or stiff in maintaining things any way opposite to the truth of Christian doctrine. But as many as hold the foundation which is precious, though they hold it but weakly, and as it were by a slender thread, although they frame many base and unsuitable things upon it, things that cannot abide the trial of the fire; yet shall they pass the fiery trial and be saved, which indeed have builded themselves upon the rock, which is the foundation of the Church.’ - pp. 614-615
This is not at all novel, it is what we all learned as ‘Justification by Faith.’ But it is key for my point that Hooker draws the boundaries of the Church wide on account of sustained reflection on ‘doctrine,’ on the consequences of Scripture, rather than on the idea of Elizabethan comprehensiveness or an Anglian Via Media. Hooker is no help for those seeking to make of Anglicanism a wide church who are not also willing to flesh out the reasons why Hooker believed as he did.
Here, then, in Hooker, we find possible resources for ‘Big Tent Christianity’ which counter-intuitively came by way of doctrine. In fact I am a ‘Big Tent’ Christian. I am because I am confident that I myself do not have the capacity to be free from believing terribly ‘wrong’ things about God. My capacity for self-deception is vast and my openness to God’s grace is limited. I am because I am nobody’s judge. I am because we as a Church are dependent on the prior acts of a faithful God rather than our own attempts to maintain coherence.
Anglican Identities
August 10, 2010
So often in much contemporary Anglican disagreement, one hears that one or another position or action is “not Anglican;” as if there is a predetermined and widely understood notion of what is Anglican and what is not. More often than not these Anglican ‘identities’ are warmed over secondary reflection on how Anglicanism is ‘inclusive – “We don’t have a confession” – or ‘Protestant’ – “remember the Articles of Religion?” or whatever. Rarely have I found such cheap appeals convincing, and drawing from historical wells for invective has always produced less-than-complete pictures of our Christian past.
In his helpful little book, The Anglican Spirit, Michael Ramsey explains that there has seemed to be a general inability for Anglicanism to maintain anything like a coherent identity since WWII. He points to several different reasons, among them the rise of optimistic ecumenism and the ‘Biblical Theology’ movement. We see that this has carried on and accelerated up to the present debates surrounding authority, autonomy and theological revision.
On the one hand, it can become quite (for lack of a better word) ‘idolatrous’ to put an abstract ‘Anglican’ identity before the Gospel, yet so long as an appropriate perspective is kept, just as it makes perfect sense to talk about ‘Ignation spirituality’ within the Catholic Church as a distinctive vein, it makes sense to speak of Anglicanism as a worthy part of the larger Tradition and as something valuable enough to retain.
But ‘identity’ is always something being constructed from memory, reflection and imagination. It arises organically from going over the sources that feed us. To figure out what such an identity might look like, it is better to go back and read the Tractarians, Hooker, Herbert rather than latch on to something like ‘comprehensiveness’ and try to fill it with meaning.
‘Identity making’ is in the end worthless since as the Church we receive our identity always from God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and not from the efforts of our own devising. Nevertheless God has so made it that our lives are mediated by the stuff of this world, and so distinctive ‘cultures’ are not perversions of a transcendent universal standing over and above our existence, as if transfiguration had nothing to do with the ‘stuff’ of the world, but parts of a whole.
So we are going to offer a meager addition to this reflection. Each of us is going to compose a short post about an Anglican thinker who has affected us significantly in hopes of renewing interest in our primary sources. And soon we are going to add a new page, open to constant expansion, where we hope to list contemporary Anglican thinkers; where they teach and maybe some of what they’ve written; all in hopes that in attention to the particular we might understand more of the universal, and might get a better feel for how God is working among us today.
Around the Interwebs
August 6, 2010
- David CL Driedger has two posts up introducing a recent collection, The Gift of Difference: Radical Orthodoxy, Radical Reformation. Sounds glorious by the way he de-scribes it.
- Pastor Carol Howard Merritt writes about an encounter she had a party recently:
“I was at a party, holding my plastic cup of beer and talking to a stranger in a crowded house. She was in thirties, like I was. “So, what do you do?” she asked. “Where to do you work?”
I smiled because this part of the conversation can become really interesting. I’m a five-foot tall woman, who’s part of a generation that considers itself “spiritual but not religious,” so people don’t usually expect my answer: “I’m a pastor.”
“Oh my God,” she responded. “I never knew why anyone would go to church. But last year, my mom got sick. She’s divorced, and I’m living hundreds of miles away from her, so I didn’t know what we were going to do. And her church totally took care of her. They brought her meals. They drove her to the doctor. They called me when anything out of the ordinary happened.”
“Yeah. That’s what the good churches do.”
“Really?” She looked completely confused as she continued, “I had no idea. You should really advertise that.”
I don’t care much for the whole re-naming-liberal-protestantism-”progressive Christianity”-and-see-if-no one-notices thing, but I really like most people who self-identify as such and among them, Pastor Merritt, who advocates strongly for rejuvinating the Mainline and putting trust in the younger creative pastors.
- The Other Journal has a bit up about the “Righteous Rich in the OT” by Christopher J.H. Wright and I thought it very suggestive for political theology despite the fact that “list exegesis” is from the devil himself.
- Apparently there’s a site where you can download a ton of low-fi arrangements of classic tunes by some spectacular indie artists…for FREE!
- Ben Meyers tells things from multiple perspectives.
- David Congdon reviews an Arcade Fire concert in which Spoon opened. He captures why Arcade Fire is among the greatest bands of the ’00′s
reed
Tony Hunt
jstambaugh
Shawn Wamsley
