What’s Wrong with Theology: A Short Case Study

Earlier today, browsing the Amazon page for Augustine’s Essential Sermons, I came across this passage from the “Product Description”:

The eleven volumes of Augustine’s popular sermons (Sermones ad populum) . . . showcase Augustine the brilliant speaker and engaging preacher of the Word and have proven an indispensable resource for contemporary scholarship. . . . [Edmund] Hill’s translation and extensive notes have received many accolades by scholars, but professors have clamored for a one-volume anthology in paperback form that would be affordable to students and that could be used as required texts in teaching undergraduates, graduate students and seminarians. . . . Students and preachers alike will discover Augustine’s masterful interpretation of the Word of God and creative skills in engaging the people of God.

What’s wrong with this description? More importantly, who is missing? These sermons are “an indispensable resource for contemporary scholarship,” and the translations have received “many accolades by scholars,” and this one-volume anthology will be useful for “undergraduates, graduate students and seminarians.” But where is the layperson? There’s a reason they ain’t titled Sermones ad professorum. They were preached in a church to laypeople, and now they are tragically of interest primarily to scholars and students training to become scholars. The devoted layperson has been left out of the picture altogether. Language like this is a symptom of a disease — the co-opting of theology by the academy from its place in service to the church.

Augustine himself would have been unhappy with our bifurcation of theology and spirituality, or their institutional parallels, academy and church. Consider:

Factum audivimus: mysterium requiramus.
(We have heard the fact, let us seek the mystery.)

One of the maddening things about my “Christian spirituality” classes in grad school was the constant separation students fretted over between “head” and “heart.” This may have been a legitimate problem, but the way they articulated it made it sound like the problem was somehow too much theology. Wrong! A bifurcation of “head” and “heart” is the result of faulty theology, not too much. Something we could learn by reading more Augustine.

(A bracing post-Enlightenment tonic for this ailment is Andrew Louth’s marvelous book Discerning the Mystery: An Essay on the Nature of Theology, which Eighth Day Books has put back in print.)

(crossposted at Nonnus.)

Brand New Human

I guess it would be kind of odd if my blog continued to hum along like life at my home hadn’t been turned upside down in the past week. Although the vast majority of readers here already know, I thought I’d announce Jess’s and my latest purchase at the local Walmart.

Lillian Christine Reimer
born 8:53 pm, June 9, 2009
8 lbs. 3 oz.

Patrick Deneen Tells Us How to Live

I just read a longish essay on Front Porch Republic by Patrick Deneen, titled What Is to Be Done? Although the entire thing is worth reading (as is most everything by Deneen), this marvelous quote near the end is where he really delivers the goods. Idealistic? Maybe, but read the entire essay, and you’ll get a better sense of where he’s coming from.

Small changes might have large effects over time. Demands in changes to zoning laws, requiring more mixed use space – commercial, residential, educational, religious and otherwise – would begin to re-integrate the various central activities of human life. Demotion of the automobile is a major desideratum, and here a great coalition between the environmental Left and traditionalist Right is there for the picking. Libertarians, Catholics and traditionalists can make common cause in demanding more economic and legislative subsidiarity, although libertarians must chasten their dogmatic individualism and understand that the best restraint upon large-scale centralized institutions are not individuals, but communities. There is no “free market” – it is the fantasy of ideological purists – but there are markets that leave us more free as members of communities and relatively more immune from large-scale centralized institutions (public or private) than others. People might be persuaded to call for a different finger to be put on the legislative scales: not the one that now gives advantage to large-scale organizations, but a different finger that gives advantage to smaller companies, family-businesses, local enterprises whose bottom-line is not the benefit of absentee shareholders, but the life and fabric of good communities. Liberatarians are right that onerous regulation is to be rejected, but not because it represents an imposition upon profitability, but rather because it is desired by both big government and big business as an obstacle to entry of smaller players. Perhaps something so inventive as a dual regulatory system could be conceived, in which smaller businesses bear a lighter burden. Incentives to smallness and localism should become the norm and default, and not the current set of incentives that favor the creation of entities that are “too big to fail.” Anyone who believes that the past year demonstrates our greater “freedom” needs to have their pulse checked.

Possibly the Best Photo Ever Taken

The Road Trailer

The trailer for The Road is out. It looks like the film will be as difficult to watch as the book was to read. In a good, way of course, but my oh my, I am afraid. I am very afraid. I don’t mean that to sound trite, like in an exhilarated, adrenaline-rush type of fear, or the “fear” evoked by gratuitously violent or psychologically manipulative horror movies (though I do note that I am to a degree succumbing to the shameless emotional manipulation that is at the core of the genre of “movie trailer”), but rather I am afraid in a way that is vivified by a story of love and terror stripped almost to its essence.

A Humorous Anecdote, Plus A Short and Hopefully Not too Preachy Observation About Television, Or, How to Be Counter-Cultural and Completely Baffle People at the Same Time

At work this afternoon, I received the following in an email from Jess:

An AT&T salesman just came to our door:
Salesman: Are you currently with AT&T, ma’am?
Jess: Yes.
Salesman: Phone, TV, Internet?
Jess: Yes. Well, phone and internet. We don’t have TV.
Salesman: Oh. So who do you have your TV service with?
Jess: No one. We don’t have TV at all.
Salesman: You don’t…no TV? No Basic? Did you get the converter box? *looks of bewilderment, astonishment, what-century-are-you-living-in*
Jess: Nope, we don’t watch TV.
Salesman: Well, I’m gonna get you TV.
Jess: I don’t want TV.
Salesman: You don’t wa…?! *shakes head, leaves*

Way to go, my love! The only thing I would have done differently is hand him a copy of Amusing Ourselves to Death, by Neil Postman.

This brought to mind another experience/observation I had/made the other day. I saw an advertisement for a Lexus with televisions built into the back of the driver’s seat and passenger’s seat. I have also noticed as of late the near ubiquity of televisions in supermarkets. So now we can watch television at home (usually in almost every room in the house), watch television in the car, and watch television at the supermarket while we shop. Even if we need to stop for gas, there are more and more televisions at the pump.

There is a word for this, I think. It is called addiction.

Hello, My Lovelies

Thes first two volumes—We Believe in One God and We Believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, edited by Gerald Bray and John McGuckin respectively—of the Ancient Christian Doctrine series (five volumes total) just landed on my desk, fresh from the printer.

Here’s copy from the website, explaining the series:

This exciting five-volume series follows up on the acclaimed Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture to provide patristic commentary on the Nicene Creed. The series renders primary Greek, Latin, Coptic and Syriac source material from the church fathers in lucid English translation (some here for the first time) and gives readers unparalleled insight into the history and substance of what the early church believed. Including biographical sketches, a timeline of ancient Christian sources, indexes, bibliographies and keys to original language sources as well as the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed in Greek, Latin and English (ICET version), this series illuminates key theological essentials in the light of classic and consensual Christian faith and makes an excellent resource for preaching and teaching.

The first volume of another exciting series, Ancient Christian Texts, also recently arrived from the printer: Gerald Bray’s translation of Ambrosiaster’s commentaries on Romans and First and Second Corinthians.

Soon to follow are translations of Origen’s homilies on Numbers, and Cyril of Alexandria’s massive commentary on the Gospel of John. These are just the highlights of around thirteen volumes (you can read the whole list at the link to the series page above), many of which are appearing in English for the first time.

Stream Wilco’s New Album

That’s the cover of the new Wilco album, Wilco (The Album). I’m not kidding. That’s the name of the album. It’s coming out on June 30. But you my friends can stream the entire album right here. I am listening to it right now. The title of the opening track is “Wilco (The Song).” Again, not kidding.

(UPDATE: I think that’s Feist on the fourth or fifth track.)

(UPDATE: Confirmation: it is Feist. I seem to be a little behind on this one.)

(UPDATE: Done listening. That was awesome.)

The Torn Curtain in Matthew 27

This morning in our adult education hour we were discussing the resurrection narrative in Matthew. Naturally to discuss resurrection it’s important to go back over the crucifixion narrative. We were specifically talking about Matthew 27:51, the moment just after Jesus dies: “At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom.” Our teacher (a professor of New Testament at Wheaton College) said that although this is usually taken as implying that people now have direct access to God, he didn’t think so. Rather, he said, the torn curtain indicated that God’s presence had left the temple. We pushed him on this, and he gave three reasons why he thinks this is the case (with some of my extrapolations along the way).

First, the former reading (that the torn curtain represents unmediated access to God), is anti-Jewish in a way that is otherwise foreign to Matthew’s Gosepl. In other words, it implies that God wasn’t active in Jewish religion prior to Christ. Christ fulfilled Israel’s hopes as the Messiah; he didn’t introduce something totally new. It still represents judgment (see third point below) but not in a way that wouldn’t have made sense to Jews, for whom Matthew was writing. Furthermore, mediation is always necessary on some level—even if all you mean by that is that now Christ is our mediator. This would have represented a reinterpretation of the role of Israel’s messiah, but not a clean break. I would add that this makes sense in that the action of Yahweh is now associated with Christ and his people (i.e., the church) and not with temple ritual.

Second, the idea doesn’t fit with Christ’s directionality in the Synoptic tradition (i.e., Matthew, Mark, and Luke). That is, Jesus is presented as coming out or coming into—he comes into the world; he comes out of the tomb. The former reading presents God as passive, but the Synoptics present God as active. Even if you give it a trinitarian gloss, Jesus comes from the Father. He is eternally begotten of the Father.

Third, In the Old Testament and other Jewish literature, murder and sin typically result in God’s abondonment of the temple. Two examples: the exilic literature presents the destruction of the temple as a result of God’s abandonment of his people due to their recalcitrant idolatry. The temple was destroyed in the sixth century B.C. because God had withdrawan his presence from the temple in judgment. Josephus does the same thing when the Romans destroy the temple again in A.D. 70. According to him the zealots had acted wrongly, and God had withdrawn his presence from the temple, allowing it to be destroyed. The  highly apocalyptic imagery of Matthew 27:51-53 (earthquakes, the torn curtain, Old Testament saints rising from the dead and walking around) seems to reinforce this as a passage of judgment rather than of God’s opening up to his people. Of course, it still represents an opening up, just in a different way.

Che Colbert

You can buy it here.