“Be ye sure that the LORD he is God” – The Anglican Crisis in Interpretation and the Two Testament Voice of Christian Scripture
Abstract
1. The same-sex crisis in ECUSA is a symptom of a deeper disagreement over the interpretation of Scripture. 2. Particularly challenging—though not often stated clearly—is the formal character of scripture, that is, as consisting of two testaments. 3. In the early Church something called the ‘rule of faith’ functioned to assure certain minimal theological claims were not being compromised: chief among these was that the OT functioned as Christian Scripture, because the Risen and worshiped Lord was one with the named LORD of Israel’s revealed witness. Negatively ruled out were understandings of the OT as primarily a phase of religious development. 4. Anglicans see the ‘rule of faith’ most clearly in the canticles of Morning Prayer worship, when OT Psalms (e.g., The Jubilate Deo) are glossed, ‘Glory to the Father, etc.’ 5. This Prayer Book underscoring of the Rule of Faith is necessary if the two testament voice of scripture is to be heard. 6. If it is not being heard according to a rule of faith, then we have a breakdown at a level I will call ‘tactic knowledge.’ Such a breakdown has, I believe, occurred.
I Introduction: Crisis in Interpretation
The Episcopal Church is in crisis. One can say that now and not be considered an alarmist. Indeed there is full acceptance of this fact except in the most entrenched zones of denial or hiding. The crisis manifests itself in a wide variety of ways, from membership decline, to lawsuits over property, to public brawls between churches and Bishops (the Diocese of Florida looks to an outsider in free-fall), to conflicted detachments from ECUSA and realignments elsewhere. The larger Communion and its identity, and ECUSA’s place in it, are the subject of serious reflection, evaluation, trial proposals, action and counter-action. One cannot blame the press or internet for superheating what is now a public scandal. The recently released TV show, ‘The Book of Daniel,’ would confirm for many ECUSA’s status as a virtual ‘byword among the nations.’ Perhaps things are not so bad in Texas, but that is often because people are being polite.
The crisis has also resurfaced older issues, and anyone following our new ‘blog’ environment will know these matters are discussed with varying degrees of energy and intelligence – whether women’s ordination; or catholic and protestant emphases in Anglicanism; or basic matters like the authority of scripture, 1979 Prayer Book worship, and so forth. It is fair to say that the same-sex issue, whatever else it may be in its own right, has shaken the foundations not just of the Episcopal Church as an institution, but the very identity, logic and historical claim of Anglicanism to be what it has said it is, in Christ. That the epicenter of much of the turmoil is in the United States, where freedom of choice is a kind of sacred right; and a supermarket of churches exists to choose from or start up, exacerbates the issue, as people flee to this or that purer or better church, in their mind’s eye or really.
Just exactly why we are in crisis is not easy to pin-point. The same-sex issue is what it is, but it is probably as much a symptom as a cause.
All along it has been reasonably clear that the Bible and the character of its authority are where the disagreements, broadly speaking, locate themselves – however much one might have preferred to talk about human rights, church authority, the role of human experience in theological argument, differing understandings of Communion and autonomy, and so forth. Recently various parties in the struggle appear to be willing to acknowledge that a chief, maybe the chief, disagreement is over the interpretation of scripture, and whether the Bible has something like a plain sense, in the case of same-sex behavior and in other areas.
But we need to pause and consider how we have come to this point. I have been involved in the discussion over exegesis of scripture and homosexuality long enough to know that the ground has shifted over the past two decades. That we may now agree about the centrality of the interpretation of scripture in this crisis is not something that has come about straightforwardly, and because of this the potential for confusion, ongoing conflict and final irresolution is very high.
Because my concern is not with the same-sex issue as such, but with the crisis over the interpretation of scripture more generally, let me move briskly through three phases.
(Phase One) Initially it was argued that biblical texts could be re-evaluated, and said to be saying something that no one had heard them say quite rightly before. Sodomwas about inhospitality, not homosexuality; chapter one of Romans was about specific, exotic kinds of homosexual misconduct in late antiquity; and so forth. This approach was bolstered by a general confidence in historical-critical methods, and how they promised to show us original contexts which would then override a manifest consensus in the prior history of interpretation.[i]
(Phase Two) Then it was conceded—often by proponents of a change in sexual teaching—that the texts did in fact say what they had previously been heard to say, in a great many cases and in spite of a robust application of historical-critical acids.[ii]And so it was conceded that the Bible really was consistently negative about same-sex behavior. Now it would need to be argued that what the Bible gave us was a kind of rough guide on how to make decisions.[iii] Biblical people had to exercise judgments, and they went about this with certain flexible systems which allowed them to negotiate religious principles with changing times. Usually the Council of Jerusalem (in Acts 15) was used as the NT example of such flexibility,[iv] but more ambitious minds thought they could track this kind of religious process-thinking across both Old and New Testaments.[v] Still, I stay with this phase of interpretation for a moment to note a trend: when one begins to think that the Bible offers examples of how people go about making decisions, generally speaking, one will probably already have decided that it does this better at later moments than earlier ones. Things progress and get better (presumably because of trial and error over time). This phase of interpretation is actually only a staging point for where we now find ourselves.
(Phase Three) The present view seems to be that the Bible does not help us with same-sex behavior in our day, because what we have in our day was unknown in biblical times. The notion of developmental change and wisdom appropriate to assess it requires some kind of religious justification, and what we usually find here is an appeal to the Holy Spirit’s ongoing work and enlightenment, in our special day. When I hear the Presiding Bishop talk on this issue, this is what I hear him saying. What has happened through these three overlapping phases is that the Bible has been turned into a book of religious development, from one testament to the next. Once this happens, it is easy, and I would say necessary, for the arguments to end where they now do. Let me try to describe the impasse.
On the one side, people argue that the Bible cannot speak a word directly into our day, on the issue of same-sex behavior, because it cannot be expected to know something that lies developmentally outside its own two-testament range of religious progressing. This also allows those with such an interpretive (hermeneutical) view to maintain a residual hunch that the biblical texts in question have multiple meanings, or that their meaning is contested and cannot be delivered plainly, because serial deployments of historical-critical readings, with varying results, have confused the issue and made the very notion of a ‘plain sense’ nostalgic or illusory. That is, the idea of developing religious wisdom goes hand in hand with an acceptance that texts from past contexts can only with real difficulty have any kind of meaning for the present full-stop.(The Bible becomes ‘stories’ or ‘resources,’ at best, and its language is evocative or imaginative; it has no legislative (halakhic), exhortative, constraining, or strictly referential sense.) This is why proponents for change in a teaching which runs against the entire history of the Bible’s reception, in Church and Synagogue, have still said that what is at issue is the interpretation of scripture, even if reluctantly. What they mean is: there is sufficient confusion about what any text means, that what we can only be sure of is what people report to be true in their present experience (or at least the ones whose voices we are listening to). Progressivism has thrived for its own sake and because the Bible no longer has anything like a plain sense to which appeal can be made. It is instead an example of the very same internal progressivism and disagreement said to be true of our own age. The Bible looks like us. That is our interpretive conclusion.
On the other side, people want to say that the Bible has authority, and a plain sense, and that what others see as homophobia or traditionalism, is for them a crisis having to do with the Bible becoming a kind of ‘wax nose’ capable of any interpretation. It is not so much that same-sex behavior is a particularly loathsome sin, or those claiming a Gay lifestyle special sinners – one could conclude that we in the West have been culturally desensitized to all manner of sexual conduct to such an extent that the very notion of sexual sin is almost antique, or quaint. No, what the other side feels threatened by is the Bible’s possible inability to speak in any clear or straightforward way at all. What for one side is freedom of the spirit or attention to a ‘cultural injustice’ is for the other an example of a ‘plain sense’ hearing of scripture being taken away altogether. It is crucial to catch the concern here: If the Bible’s consistently negative word about homosexual conduct is wrong, or outdated, who will then decide in what other ways the Bible is or is not to be trusted or cannot comprehend our day and its struggles, under God? Appeal to scripture’s plain sense is borne of the conviction that the Bible can have something to say without other forces needing to regulate that or introduce a special hermeneutics from outside the text so we can know when and where it can speak.[vi] The other side feels that the Bible is being forfeited in the specific area of sufficiency and trustworthiness, and that no cause, however well intentioned, can have that as an acceptable fallout.
But having said all this, have we really got our finger on the nature of the disagreement? To say that the Bible has a plain sense is not to say that, as with the Koran, it delivers this like a dispensing machine, one verse after another, until all the verses run out.
Here we are forced to return to a fact noted by progressives, and that is that the Bible has internal movement. Put simply, unlike the Koran, Christian Scripture has two testaments. How it speaks the word of God must contend with a difference built into its formal character, as God speaks to Israel (and through them to the nations) and then to the world in Christ Jesus. It is my conviction that our present crisis has to do with the way Scripture makes its specifically two-testament voice heard. This crisis is as much theological as exegetical or hermeneutical. We ought not be surprised that once that Bible was understood to be developing internally, and that progression was a kind of ‘religious universal’ transferable to our own time and place, it would be very difficult to understand how a two-testament voice from God himself might properly be apprehended. For at the heart of the internal movement of a two-testament scripture is a collateral conviction: that God is One, and unchanging. Or, to use the language of prayer book worship: ‘As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end.’ This summary insists that the two testaments speak of the same God in Christ, though in different dispensations and in different figural directions.
Every serious interpreter in the history of the Bible’s reception has kept this mystery at the very center of every act of interpretation. If the pressure for each text to speak particularly and eternally is released, or compromised, the consequences for our use of the Bible more generally are enormous. Under the acids of historicism and western progressivism, a two-testament delivery of God’s word and character has been replaced with a different kind of economic account of God, in which (1) the work of the Holy Spirit is now said to be going on in a way fully detachable (and unsurprisingly and energetically so) from scripture’s prior testimony; and in which (2) the Old Testament cannot be said to speak of God as He is or of God in Christ, but only of a developmental phase of religion en route to a New Testament religion and then a more enlightened Holy Spirit religion.
It is beyond the scope of this paper, but when Calvin or Luther or Aquinas read the third chapter of Habakkuk, they take the ‘plain sense’ descriptions of God found there as fully normative accounts of all manner of theological truth, concerning God’s power, hiddenness, ways in creation, in Israel, in Christ, and in the world of their present living and moving; and in this they follow along lines of interpretation in which such normative use of the Old Testament to speak about God is self-evident (the debates they are aware of have to do with whether Habakkuk 3 is about God’s actions in Christ, prophetically announced, or God’s acts in Israel; even here this ‘God of Habakkuk’ is incomprehensible except as the triune God). Indeed, what the Old Testament does in this explicitly doctrinal area is seen by them as a far more detailed and expansive account of God and his ways than anything that can be found in the NT; and this is so, so far as they are concerned, because the NT assumes exactly the same perspective on this as they do. It has no fresh doctrines of God but sees the fulfillment of what has been revealed to Israel in the Son, and all space between Israel’s LORD and the Lord is collapsed into God’s eternity.[vii]
What is at stake in these self-evidences are two basic creedal confessions, (1) that the Holy Spirit ‘spake by the prophets,’ that is, reliably and sufficiently from Israel’s particular prophetic vocation among the nation,[viii] and (2) that Christ died and rose again ‘in accordance with the scriptures,’ that is, congruent with the Old Testament’s own plain delivery of God and his ways, in reality and in promise.[ix]
II “Be ye sure that the LORD He is God”
It is now time to turn to (1) how these creedal statements existed at the earliest moments in the life of the church, prior to the formation of the NT canon, in the rule of faith; and (2) how something like a ‘rule of faith’ must again be recovered if we are to have any hope of letting scripture do its fullest two-testament work. A ‘rule of faith’ has been reinforced in our own specific Anglican worship tradition. Yet without a clear reaffirmation of this basic rule in our public praying (our lex orandi) our public believing (lex credendi) will quickly go out of order, as is now happening in our present crisis.
I am well into the time allotted and so it is appropriate to be more specific about where I think our crisis has its starting point, if in fact we agree that the interpretation of scripture is where the disagreements are to be located (as ECUSA seems increasingly willing to do).
My thesis is probably not going to sound popular, and it is not in any way clever or ‘refined’ (as Calvin negatively used the word). Still, I believe my proposal is actually the radical obverse of the claim that the Holy Spirit teaches new truths outside the range of scripture’s literal and spiritual sense. Our crisis has to do with the failure to know how to use the Old Testament theologically, and doctrinally. Our crisis has to do with not knowing how to deal in a balanced and appropriate way with the dual voice of Christian Scripture, New and Old Testaments both. Without an anchor in the doctrinal universe of the Old Testament’s declarations about God, we will drift, and invariably find ourselves, whether on the right or left of the theological spectrum, in the difficult and progressivist waters of the kind the Episcopal Church now finds itself in. At issue, to repeat, is the specific formal character of Christian Scripture as having two testaments, each declaring Christ, but also and modeling his Church, in different figural directions.
There is a correlate of this thesis, and it is that basic convictions about the way the Bible—and especially the Old Testament—speaks of the triune God are not sophisticated or theologically complicated ones. Rather, they emerge in the rhythms of worship; in baptismal confession and incorporation; in the specific selection and ordering of scripture in lectionary presentation; and especially in the ordered statements of Prayer Book praying. You do not need to attend seminary to know them or experience them! These form the worshiping equivalent of what Polanyi has in recent days called ‘tacit knowledge.’ It is this kind of tacit, deep and integral, knowing that has fallen out in our present situation. The rhythms of worshipping confession will make threshold claims, and unless one passes through the right kind of threshold, one will end up in rooms that cannot finally all exist in the same structure of knowing and living and praying and hoping. To adopt another metaphor: One can sail brilliantly, with fine speed and enormous skill, and keep as close to the bearings on the GPS as humanly possible, but when the waypoints are wrongly entered, one will get lost and energetically so.
I can illustrate my point with reference to a doctoral exam I examined recently on Adolph Schlatter. Schlatter lived at the turn of the 20th century and taught New Testament and Theology, Church History and Metaphysics; he was a keen churchman, and much loved pastor. The shadow cast by Harnack was long enough to keep him on his mettle and the young Bultmann had not yet made his mark, though his challenges would soon occupy formal theology. Schlatter was known for his work on God’s action in the world. He is a New Testament scholar who worked closely in the Old Testament and especially Genesis 1-3. Nowhere does Schlatter work to establish the philosophical warrant for his using the Old Testament doctrinally, to account for how God might be said to act in time and space. There is a natural movement between Old and New Testaments and into the doctrines of Christian believing and living. Schlatter takes it as a given—at the level of metaphysics—that in order to know who God is and how he acts, in ‘creation, preservation, and in all the blessings of this life’ one reads as closely as possible the sentences about this activity as the Old Testament sets them forth. One feels nothing of the later environment of the history of religions; or of theories of development in authorship of the Pentateuch or in comparative Near Eastern studies of creation accounts. And yet there is nothing of the air of creationism or defensive apologetics either, and in this he is rightly regarded a sophisticated forerunner of Karl Barth. There is just the exhilarating task of letting scripture—OT and NT—have its theological say, tracking as closely as possible the way in which it says that according to its own idiom.
I found myself asking: how can Schlatter do this? And why has it been my instinct as a teacher of the Old Testament to believe it has the capacity to speak of God as God is, and not as a God en route to some subsequent recalibration or development? Why has it become almost impossible for one to speak of the ‘ontological trinity’ in the Old Testament? Or, of the eternal word Jesus Christ bound up within the words, and sentences and paragraphs of the Old Testaments? And why would I sense the absence of this as a great loss, and so read a Barth or a Schlatter and discover in them something of the same tacit knowledge, of God’s word and self, which animated the earlier history of biblical interpretation, in figures as diverse as Origen, Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin and Luther?
I believe the answer lies in the way a kind of Prayer Book worship I was exposed to in my upbringing as an Episcopalian functioned to reinforce what was in the early church called the rule of faith. This same kind of exposure could account for why Schlatter was able to use the Bible the way he was, and also remain committed to preaching, pastoral care and the no doubt messy counsels of German Protestant church life and mission, before the onslaught of two world wars.
The rule of faith made certain threshold claims about the character of God in that time before the formation of a second testament of scripture, one whose name and authoritative character as a ‘New Testament’ drew for its inspiration the sole scriptural witness handed to disciples of Jesus Christ from the bosom of Israel, what would in time be called the Old Testament. The rule of faith, whatever else it may have been and however we understand its actual usage, insisted that the Risen Lord of Christian worship, Jesus Christ, was one with the named LORD of the scriptures. This Lord and creator had given his name, the name above every name, to Jesus, so that at his name, every knee would bow, to the glory of the Father.[x] The triune God was the LORD of Israel in reality and in promise both. In turn, this confession assured that one now knew how to read these scriptures, as setting forth Christ in a wide variety of ways: not just in prophetic promise pointing beyond itself, but also primarily inside its world, as a type and a figure, alongside the new covenant church itself, prefigured, in judgment and in blessing, in Israel herself.[xi] For no other reason than this would it have been felt apt to speak of Christian ministers as new covenant priests with a High Priest Jesus Christ, or of promises related to the name of Israel’s God among the nations now having to do with naming in Christian baptism, and so forth.[xii]
It would be possible to enlarge on this theme, but the basic point should be secure. My own conviction is that precisely these threshold assumptions about God, established by the rule of faith, have their liturgical reinforcement in the Prayer Book worship of Anglicanism, and have governed my own theological instincts at levels as difficult to detect as what I sensed in Schlatter. When in the worship of Morning Prayer one says or sings a canticle, as the Jubilate Deo or the Venite, these fancy Latin names never disguised the fact that we were citing specific words from an Old Testament Psalm and by so doing were introducing ourselves at the very start of worship, at the threshold of our attending to our lives before God, to the only God with whom we had to do in Jesus Christ. The rule of faith was never anything more or less that the doxological affirmation with which these Old Testament psalms were concluded: ‘Glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be.’ Here we encountered, in succinct form, the logic behind prayers of this same ordered worship, addressed to the Father, in the Son, by the power of the Holy Spirit. No one was being called upon here other than the one Lord of the Old Testament’s scriptural declaration, understood, from the standpoint of our inclusion in Jesus Christ, as the LORD, the Father, the Son, and Holy Spirit.
Again the logic of this tacit knowing can be unfolded with reference to the Jubilate Deo’s command: ‘Be ye sure that the Lord he is God.’ Three very brief things are being said here in one very compressed sentence. The psalm verse is an exhortation: we are enjoined to be sure of something, because its security is not naturally to be assumed and cannot naturally be known through through experience (or what some Anglicans now claim is meant by an independent faculty called ‘reason.’). Second, we are enjoined to be sure that God is not just anything, or everything, or several possible things: we are to be sure that God is the named LORD of Israel, maker of heaven and earth. If it were naturally so, then we would find instead a tautology, ‘be sure that God is God’ (that is, empty of any referential claim concerning the personal, and named, promising and Living God of the Old Covenant who in New Covenant adopted as sons and daughters those now calling on his name). And finally, the psalm is addressed to us outside the covenants with Israel, yet from the voice of Israel’s Psalmist, in former days of the church’s life understood to be David, Israel, and Christ and his Body: ‘O be joyful in the LORD all ye lands.’ The knowledge of God is the source of joy, and the place where this God can be known is in his ways withIsrael, and through them, with ‘all ye lands’ and with all creation itself.
My remarks would be wrongly taken to imply this or that advocacy project in respect of the Book of Common Prayer, Morning Prayer, and its place in Anglicanism. Nevertheless, it is worth asking why this kind of ‘rule of faith governing claim’ appears so hard to detect at work, as we seek to understand serious disagreements over scripture’s two-testament word in our own battered church’s life.
Several questions about the secure place of a rule of faith in our present life come to mind. (1) Can Jesus make any kind of independent NT sense, unless we think about his work in relation to the holiness, righteousness, promise and judgment rooted in the claims about God found in the scriptures of his promising? (2) Can we understand anything of the claims of the NT about the law given through Moses without correlating Jesus himself with the provision of that law itself, over which he claims an authority grounded in his eternal life with the Father? (3) Can we understand anything about the church’s supposed correlate-ability with the triune life of God (as is popular in certain Anglican circles; The Virginia Report), unless we are clearer about how that life is grasped through the whole scriptural witness, on the one hand, and how the church never exists outside the judgments of a sovereign God who is Lord both in election and in adoption in Christ as sons and daughters? And finally, (4) Can our minds recover the ability to hear Israel’s scriptures as an Old Testament lesson in a lectionary schema, without it becoming either a booster rocket which falls into the sea (as it delivers a payload unfortunately still dependent upon it for first-order theological claims)[xiii]; or, as an example of important religious lessons from the history of past efforts to be religious in the best possible sense, if that? These questions are but a sample of what the rule of faith sought to clarify.
Because I teach Old Testament it would easy to conclude that my concerns would be met, if indeed one was so minded, if the scriptures of Israel were appropriately honored in this second sense, that is, as really important religious lessons of the very best kind – with some significant exceptions that a NT Geiger counter of some sort will help us identity and root out.
Yet here we run straight into the kinds of concerns with which I began my remarks. For once one begins thinking along these lines, that is, of using the New’s allegedly ‘new religion’ to sort out the ‘religion of a first testament,’ instead of seeking to hear God’s word of triune address in both testaments, appropriate to their character as ‘prophet and apostle;’ it is then an almost effortless transition to believing both Old and New Testaments are themselves only the provisional proving ground for religious virtues said to be en route to a Holy Spirit’s fresh declaration of unprecedented ‘new truth’ in our day. This would seem to me to be the logic of much of the new thinking holding the levers of power today in the ECUSA.
Conclusion
The Old Testament is Christian Scripture, and naming it in this way, instead of Hebrew Bible or ‘Great Past Religious Lessons with Exceptions,’ indicates that God’s word and self declare themselves to the church by formal means of a two-testament record. How this happens is where we appropriately speak of the Holy Spirit’s fresh and quickening work: in the church’s disciplines of prayerful close reading, theological reflection, preaching, and pastoral care. There is no shortcut for this to be followed by those claiming to be Bible believers, on one side, or those who want the Bible to find some kind of negotiable place alongside varieties of what are imprecisely called Anglican ‘authorities,’ or legs on a stool of dubious vintage, unknown in the history of earlier biblical interpretation, Anglican or otherwise.
To return then to the context of crisis with which I began; and specifically the challenge presented by the ECUSA’s decision to consecrate a Gay Bishop and seriously to consider the development of rites for same-sex blessing, within the context of a much wider acceptance of sexual intimacy between members of the same sex.
The regnant position on scripture, when it touches on this issue specifically, appears to be: Jesus says nothing about it, Paul says something about something else, and the Holy Spirit is leading us into a new truth about a new thing nowhere discussed on the terms we mean it in the New Testament. This particular understanding also judges the Old Testament a kind of partial or outdated word (a lens onto a religion to which it points as its chief function as religious literature) which is in a developmentally immature or even harmful phase, and which will receive a kind of ‘course correction,’ impartial though it be, in the New Testament.
I have written elsewhere on the problem of turning the Old Testament into a book which describes a phase in the history of religion, and which evacuates its status as canon and scripture, and it is only possible to summarize here.[xiv] When the NT refers to the OT it does not have in mind a phase in the history of religion. When it does do something along these lines, it will seek to distinguish such a thing from the Old Testament as scripture. So, it speaks of the ‘traditions of men’ or the ‘you have heard it said’ or other such religious departures, according to Jesus, distinguishable from the ‘it is written’ or the otherwise direct testimony of the plain sense of Moses and the prophets, according to which Jesus’ death and resurrection, and active earthly teaching and living, are coordinated.[xv] Jesus Christ is the Old Testament’s true interpreter only because the Old Testament is everywhere, finally, about him (Luke 24). Only the eternal son of God can see the true heart and intention of the Old Testament’s abiding word, because the Old Testament is a word delivered by him from all eternity.
It is only partially helpful to point out that the New Testament can be read in a very different way than just described when it comes to same sex blessing and approval in the ECUSA: that is, as setting forth a Jesus who is by no means silent on sexual conduct or a Paul who indeed means what he has been traditionally held to mean when it comes to who is sexual conduct in the new covenant community. This is because the Old Testament is not just a book which finds its logic only by a subsequent religious adoption and modification of it, as the NT is said to comment upon it. In certain key ways its doctrinal word is assumed to be final and is only confirmed and deferred to by the second scriptural witness. The Old Testament sets forth a nest of declarations about sexual life under God which cannot be reduced to a list of individual biblical verses in some narrow sense, or of some religious virtues said to be animating the consciousness of Jesus, in his own alleged religious experience and commendation. The Old Testament does not function as a religious resource for Jesus or the NT, but as a word whose finality is embraced and sharply focused, by the Son of God himself, now before the entirety of creation in an eschatological climax.
The kind of sexual living and thriving Christians have traditionally confessed and taught is explicitly reliant on a network of assumptions available in the Old Testament. These have to do with creation, election, covenant love, Israel as bride, God’s forbearance, forgiveness, and blessing inside that covenant. These assumptions are riveted to the character of God as revealed in his life with Israel and as ‘the maker of heaven and earth.’ It ought to come as no surprise that once this constitutive role of the scriptures of the Old Testament is reduced to a phase of religion, or said only to find warrant as the New Testament itself materially uses it; so where it is claimed to be silent (and this controversially so) one is left in a state of confusion and crisis, such as now is plaguing us.
It would require serious reflection about whether the kind of tacit knowledge underscored by the doxological affirmation of the plain sense of the Old Testament, ‘glory be the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be,’ has now become so reduced in our public worship as to demand sustained reinstatement and underscoring. What does it mean to say ‘Lord have mercy’ in our Eucharistic worship without hearing the Decalogue or an otherwise clear declaration as to just who this LORD is before whom we petition mercy, and why; and also why we might wish to incline our hearts to keep his law, and how we might indeed do that, in Christ? And what does it mean to hear in our lectionary an Old Testament lesson in figural and constitutive relationship with the Gospel lesson, but which is all too often left without even a sentence of comment, or some even brief explanation as to its place in the economy of God’s ways with Israeland the church, in Christ?
My point in this talk has not been to urge a long (in our day, probably historicistic) investment in sermons on Joel or Leviticus – though it might bear reflection why the major theologians in the catholic tradition would not have thought sustained Christian commentary on Old Testament books so odd and personally provided excellent resources in commentary, song and meditation. I have only sought to understand why the ECUSA is in a crisis, and just how that crisis indeed turns on the interpretation of scripture.
It is my conviction that at the heart of the problem is a model of approaching the Bible in which the two testaments of Christian Scripture have been reduced to phases in the history of religion, one improving upon the other, and then finally, a new religious phase improving on them both and giving us a new word to guide our sexual lives under God. When this model also finds no course correction at the level of our worshipping life the fallout will be, and indeed is now, severe. That is why we have a crisis, and why simply listening to one another is not likely to bring about resolution. For tragically it appears we do not in any basic way agree how God makes His voice heard and His self known, through the two testament voice of Christian Scripture. Such a fundamental disagreement about the source of authority, from prophets and apostles, offers little hope of any final and lasting resolution.
And it may be that this recognition is now dawning on all sides in our present struggle. Perhaps it would be good if we came to terms with where it begins, and that is not with ill will or lack of charity (only), but with our fundamental understanding of the character and authority of Christian scripture. If such disagreements were clarified, we would at least better understand why we are in such a crisis, and why it is not to do with sexual conduct as such, but with basic theological convictions about scripture functioning often at the level of tacit knowledge. Something tacit has now gone missing.
Appendix: OT, Rule of Faith, NT, Christian Scripture and Church
Three reigning misconceptions, based upon faulty scriptural and church historical premises, with incalculable fallout
There is no scripture until the church creates such
the flaw here is not the usual one entailing a Reformation debate over sola scriptura or disputes over the relationship between church/tradition and scripture (these are important topics in their own right)
rather, what is in error here is imprecision or an improper understanding of the character of the Scriptures as inherently a dual witness of prophets (OT) and apostles (NT)
the OT canon is sufficiently stable that it is an antecedent witness, not only to the Church but to Jesus Christ; so there is no church without scripture in the sense of the scriptures of Israelexisting both prior to NT and a two-testament Canon of Christian Scripture
when the creed says that Jesus Christ died and rose again ‘in accordance with the scriptures’ the antecedent character of the scriptures of Israel is stipulated
to state it more ambitiously, one might want to speak about a proper dialectical or reciprocal understanding of the relationship between Church and NT scriptures, or between Church and an emerging collection of apostolic writings
but this discussion ought not confuse the fact that the OT scriptures preceded the church; that this precedence required careful examination was due to the authority of the Church’s Risen Lord, and the need to correlate Easter faith and the memory of Jesus’ own bearing toward the scriptural witness from the bosom of Israel, with the maintained conviction, especially strong among Gentiles outside that household, that the God of Israel, the LORD, and the Lord of the Church, Jesus Christ, were one (see Philippians 2);
Creedal confessions follow in a straight-forward, sequential way, from the Canonical Scriptures
we have already touched on this above
here it is important to observe that creeds emerge in the life of the Church as the formation of the NT canon is still a developing matter
A false kind of sequentiality assumes that creeds are the third in a line of canonical developments, from OT to NT to Church confession, when in reality, creeds exist in the lived life of the Church, and stipulate not just matters of belief, based upon or independent of, a scriptural witness (depending on one’s view of this), but how the scriptures—first OT and then NT and then both together—are to be heard and received, from faith to faith;
That is, creeds stipulate the ontological identity of the LORD with Christ (‘my Lord and my God’)
It is for this reason that recourse is made in apostolic writings to what is termed a ‘rule of faith’
The rule of faith—whatever else it is—is a guide to reading the scriptures of Israel, in the light of apostolic teaching, as the Church’s received authority
The rule of faith is a doxological, threshold, affirmation that the LORD of the Old Testament and Jesus Christ are one, and that the Holy Spirit ‘spake by the prophets’
The post-apostolic Church is to be understood as self-evidently more connected to the NT than the OT, and so Christian Scripture leans from Old to New
on this understanding, the post-apostolic church sees the relationship between OT and NT as one chiefly of religious development
on this understanding, the concern for establishing ontological identity, in the time of the formation of the NT, between the LORD of heaven and earth and Jesus his eternal Word, becomes secondary to an understanding of religious development;
and so the OT ceases to be heard as a witness to the Father of Jesus Christ; or to Christ as central to its claims about God; or to the Holy Spirit in a dispensation before the NT
The Church finds its theological and its ecclesial rootage in a second testament which carries over and adapts what went before in the first;
The Church has a relationship to the NT which improves upon an earlier witness
This developmental understanding of Church and the two testaments of Scripture is what lies underneath the crisis of and widespread confusion over use of the Church’s Scriptures in our present neuralgic times
[i] Note here the probably unexpected transformation of the principle of sola scriptura in Enlightment hands.
[ii] Balch volume.
[iii] Lindbeck refers to this mode of reading scripture as experiential-expressive, and the early title of Luke Johnson’s work points in this direction, Decision Making in the Church (Fortress Press).
[iv] See my discussion in Figured Out (Westminster John Knox, 2001).
[v] Stephen Fowl’s work (Engaging Scripture) is relevant here, as is Ellen Davis’s chapter in Reading Scripture.
[vi] See my brief discussion of the ‘virtuous reader’ in Figured Out.
[vii] See G Bray’s account of ontology in the Church Fathers, in the recent SAHS volume.
[viii] See C Helmer’s penetrating analysis of Luther’s appeal to this creedal confession in his disputes with ‘enthusiasts’ on the one side, and Roman catholic insistence that the Spirit works only in the post-easter declarations of the church, on the other. There is an obvious timeliness in this debate.
[ix] See my essay in Word Without End.
[x] Yeago, Pro Ecclesia; Seitz, Word Without End; Bauckham, God Crucified.
[xi] Radner, Theological Exegesis; Seitz, Figured Out.
[xii] Bauckham’s essay on James and the Council of Jerusalem.
[xiii] In the spirit of the letters to Timothy and the Petrine epistles.
[xiv] ‘Scripture Becomes Religion: Two Testaments and the Failure of One Tradition History,’ Figured Out.
[xv] See E Ellis, The Old Testament in the Early Church.
