Reflections on Robert Louis Wilken at Wheaton

This past weekend, I took a quick jaunt up to Chicagoland to hear Robert Louis Wilken give the inaugural lecture for the Center for Early Christian Studies at Wheaton College. As I’ve written before, I’m a fan of Wilken’s work. A friend of mine is a grad student in biblical exegesis at Wheaton, and we often spar over various “methods” of scriptural interpretation, that is, “critical exegesis” vs. “theological interpretation” (both of which travel under myriad other names), which I’ve also written about before. To top it off, the title of Wilken’s lecture was “Going Deeper into the Bible: The Church Fathers as Interpreters.” My friend had invited me to stay with him and his wife, so I thought it would be fun to drive up there and have a full-out theological smackdown weekend, and it did not disappoint (except that the weekend was too short). The lecture was great (though, disappointingly, no Q&A session), we had lots of good conversation, and I got to visit IVP and see our old stomping grounds of, well, two months ago.

But this is not just a “newsy” post (the kind my mom covets so much). I want to write about a dynamic I perceived that I think is emblematic of the American theological/Christian scene and evangelicals’ place in it. A bit of biography on Wilken is in order here. While not quite in his winter years, Wilken is at the tail end of a prolific and accomplished career. He is a former president of the American Academy of Religion, an institution not historically amenable to traditional and confessional forms of Christianity, and until recently even somewhat hostile to them. One of his earliest books, The Christians as the Romans Saw Them (now a classic), aims pretty hard at debunking idealized notions of the early church by sympathetically exploring the logic of Roman criticisms of Christianity. He’s taught at both Notre Dame and Fordham, both Catholic institutions, but not ones where faculty necessarily have to adhere to the strictest forms of orthodoxy. He’s spent the better part of his late career at the University of Virginia. All this is to say, as you’ve probably guessed, that Wilken has always had at least one foot firmly planted in the secular academic world. One could interpret his career in one of two ways, I think. Either, you could say, he intentionally built his intellectual and academic reputation on works that would gain respect not just in seminaries but in the secular academic realm of religious studies in order to later articulate a more positive and robust faith in works like The Spirit of Early Christian Thought, a wonderful exploration of the patristic theological heritage. Or, you could say, he actually did shift throughout his career from a more liberal to a more conservative position, marked in the middle by his conversion from his Lutheran faith to Roman Catholicism. This latter scenario is what I think is more likely.

Okay. If you’re still with me, I applaud you. For here finally is my observation. Wilken’s lecture at Wheaton consisted basically of the lineaments of patristic scriptural interpretation, buttressed by weighty examples from the likes of Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, and Augustine. Now for those familiar with these kinds of discussions, there was nothing surprising; it was pretty basic, full of all the classic mistakes that my Bible professors warned me that the church fathers make. Prooftexting! Eisegesis! Allegory! Platonism! (Though it takes some fancy interpretive footwork for them to legitimate the fact that the authors of the New Testament are guilty of all the same “heresies.”) My friend had pointed out to me beforehand his biblical exegesis professors sitting in the audience, who evidently spend a good deal of time meticulously constructing these patristic straw men in order to knock them down with a wave of their historical-critical finger. But here is where the night came to its full ironic climax, and where I realized yet again why—as caustic, dismissive, and cynical as I have often been—I so often prefer the semi-educated, nonacademic “exegesis” in the local evangelical churches I have attended over the years. Here I am, sitting at Wheaton College, a school dripping with evangelical heritage—Billy Graham was president here for goodness’ sake—arguably the center of “thinking” evangelicalism, a school that supposedly defines itself by its fidelity to a broadly confessional evangelical milieu, and I can almost hear the pedantically dismissive demurrals from the exegesis professors when Wilken tells us that Scripture is alive, and that when we read it we encounter God in the words, and that proper interpretation of Scripture is intimately connected to doctrine and to the individual’s spiritual comportment. I can almost hear them say, “But what does that have to do with the ancient Near Eastern background!” And the kicker was when Wilken said, referring to our interpretation of Scripture—and he repeated it two or three times—”It’s not in the head, it’s in the heart.” At this point, though, the biblical exegesis professors had probably already stopped listening.

Evangelicalism in the academy is in such a weird place right now. Does it really take somebody from entirely outside the scope of evangelicalism, and a papist for that matter, to tell us that our Bibles can teach us something useful for our lives? That we don’t have to have a Ph.D. in ancient Semitic languages, or even a preacher who does, to understand the text? The Bible belongs to the church, not the professors.

Two things. First, Wilken knew what he was doing. He knew his audience, and while it was a thoroughly academic delivery, not short on the language of the church fathers, when it came down to it, he could have dwelled at length on phrases such as fides quaerens intellectum (“faith seeking understanding”), but he didn’t. He said, “it’s not in the head, it’s in the heart,” a distinctly evangelical locution.

Second, it didn’t fall entirely on deaf ears, as I have made it appear. This was, after all, the inaugural lecture for the Center for Early Christian Studies, whose mere existence is a late indicator of a shift in the world of evangelicals’ relationship to Scripture and their opening up to the intellectual and cultural ferment of the first six or seven centuries of the church (though I would like to see us open up to the tradition as a whole; there’s still about, oh, a thousand years we all skip between the end of the patristic age and the Reformation). I slaved over the Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture at InterVarsity Press for the last two and a half years, for pete’s sake. But I was there with my modern biblical exegete friend (who, I must say, is not entirely unsympathetic to my views), and taking it all in through his eyes and the eyes of his professors, one of whom we overheard after the lecture declaiming in smug tones to a gaggle of students that if Wilken wanted to go on speculating about whatever he thought the text meant, why then, by all means, it’s a free country (or some such dreck). I don’t think the biblical exegesis profs at Wheaton are talking much to their historical and systematic theology colleagues, the latter of whom are even writing books about this stuff. Which is a shame really. My friend put a few questions to Wilken after the lecture, some about what biblical exegesis profs think about this kind of stuff, and Wilken was a tad prickly about the whole thing, and even tersely advised my friend to stay away from biblical studies! I would say Wilken was dismissive, but I got the impression that he had tried many times to have discussions with those ensconced in the world of biblical studies, and had finally decided to wash his hands of them. And while I used to say that there was an equal amount of mud slinging from one side to the other, I have come to think that it tends to be a bit one sided, especially among evangelical academics. Theologians who want to interpret Scripture “theologically” generally don’t dismiss historical-critical endeavors but try to put it in its place, while those in biblical studies tend to dismiss theological interpretation as wrongheaded.

And here at the end I reiterate the weird thing about the academic evangelical moment. While more and more evangelical biblical scholars are embracing the spiraled heights of critical exegesis, theological interpretation, that is, interpretation according to the church’s tradition, is all the rage in the larger academy. And then these evangelical scholars accuse them of faulty interpretation! Pot, meet kettle.

Lewis Ayres Summarizes Pro-Nicene Theology in Two Sentences

Wrap your mind around this, or rather let this wrap itself around your mind.

Learning to speak of Father, Son, and Spirit as inseparably operating while still affirming that any one of the divine persons is not the other two, and that each possesses the fullness of the Godhead, does not so much lead us to an easy imagining of their diversity and unity as it defers our comprehension and draws our minds to the constantly failing (even as constantly growing) character of our interpretation of what is held in faith. The development of such attention to the mysteries of divine triunity is, ideally, the shaping of an ongoing process of analogical judgement, a process in which we learn to display a balance between admitting human inability to comprehend the divine and appropriately exploring the providentially ordered resources of the language of faith (Lewis Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy [Oxford, 2004], 297).

Now that’s theology!

Evangelicals, Globalization, and Papal Encyclicals

Take it from me, sitting in the belly of the beast, when Evangelicals ask you for a “serious dialogue” about “new models of global governance,” reach for your gun.  Or your rosary.

Cabel Stegall, here, commenting on sixty-eight evangelicals’ response to Pope Benedict XVI’s encyclical Caritas in Veritate.

N.B. I don’t reproduce this simply to hate on evangelicals; it’s just that sometimes I grow weary of my tribe’s penchant for middle-ground—and hence often middling—positions in public discourse (so often frustratingly and even self-referentially on display here), especially in relation to globalism. Why is it so scary to be radical? I suppose there are two reasons: first, our emphasis on evangelism leads us to “be a light” to the broadest number of people—i.e., fewer extremes, fewer alienated potential believers—and second, our penance (or is it just embarrassment?) for our (now-crumbling) association with the Republican Party since Reagan. I mean this in the least snarky and most objectively observant way possible.

John Calvin Is 500 Years Old Today

Like many people, I used to assume Calvin was as dusty, dry, and doctrinaire as he was made out to be by his detractors and supporters alike. That is until, you know, I actually read him. I was instead delighted to find his mind afire with the love of God, his prose lively, his theology dynamic and stimulating, and his spirituality marvelously devotional. (Indeed he never would have separated the latter two.) After Karl Barth read John Calvin, he described him this way:

Calvin is a cataract, a primeval forest, a demonic power, something directly down from the Himalayas, absolutely Chinese, strange, mythological; I lack completely the means, the suction cups, even to assimilate this phenomenon, not to speak of presenting it adequately…. I could gladly and profitably set myself down and spend all the rest of my life just with Calvin.

A demonic power. In a good way.

A lot of people lay much of the responsibility for the Enlightenment at the feet of the Reformers, especially Calvin and Luther (and this is not a compliment). I think, rather, that there is a better case to be made for them as the last medievals (and that is a compliment). Happy five hundredth, Old Master.

I like this portrait of Calvin because it displays his humanity better than many of the other portraits out there, which instead portray a dark arch-predestinarian looking sternly but glumly out on the world. IVP recently published a pretty decent, and extremely readable, biography of Calvin that attempts to depict him not as the fiery, despotic Genevan theocrat handing down death sentences from on high but as a human being, fiery and controversial, yes, but also thoughtful, vulnerable, and sometimes even fragile, an exile in almost constant forced peregrination, a pilgrim in complete submission to God’s will, and I think it largely succeeds. Check it out.

And check out this clever Wattersonian drawing of Calvin and Hobbes’s actual namesakes (John and Thomas, respectively) that I found here. I love it!

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.

Two (Kind of Three) Books: David Bentley Hart and Mendelsohn’s Cavafy

Forget one-dollar copies of used Richard Ford novels. This is when the book-buying moratorium really gets difficult.

First, coming out on April 21 from Yale University Press is Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and its Fashionable Enemies by David Bentley Hart. This will surely be the most eloquent and fiery rebuttal to the new atheists. But don’t let that dissuade you, should you be a skeptic; Hart is sure to respond with historical and theological rigor, not with empty rhetoric. Rusty Reno gives a kind of off-the-cuff pseudo-review here, which provides a good overview.

Second (and third), out today from Knopf is Daniel Mendelsohn’s much-anticipated two-volume translation of the Collected Poems and The Unfinished Poems of the Alexandrian Greek poet C. P. Cavafy. Never heard of Cavafy? Well now you have. And consider this an invitation to initiate yourself. Below is Mendelsohn’s translation, reproduced from Knopf’s website, of Cavafy’s poem “Ithaca.” (And here is an essay on Cavafy that Mendelsohn wrote for the New York Review of Books last November, which is a good introduction to Cavafy’s work; the same issue also published Mendelsohn’s translation of Cavafy’s wonderful poem, also available online, “Myres: Alexandria in 340 AD,” which I would also reproduce if it didn’t make this already-too-long post way longer.)

Ithaca

As you set out on the way to Ithaca
hope that the road is a long one,
filled with adventures, filled with discoveries.
The Laestrygonians and the Cyclopes,
Poseidon in his anger: do not fear them,
you won’t find such things on your way
so long as your thoughts remain lofty, and a choice
emotion touches your spirit and your body.
The Laestrygonians and the Cyclopes,
savage Poseidon; you won’t encounter them
unless you stow them away inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up before you.

Hope that the road is a long one.
Many may the summer mornings be
when—with what pleasure, with what joy—
you first put in to harbors new to your eyes;
may you stop at Phoenician trading posts
and there acquire the finest wares:
mother-of-pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
and heady perfumes of every kind:
as many heady perfumes as you can.
Many Egyptian cities may you visit
that you may learn, and go on learning, from their sages.

Always in your mind keep Ithaca.
To arrive there is your destiny.
But do not hurry your trip in any way.
Better that it last for many years;
that you drop anchor at the island an old man,
rich with all you’ve gotten on the way,
not expecting Ithaca to make you rich.

Ithaca gave you the beautiful journey;
without her you wouldn’t have set upon the road.
But now she has nothing left to give you.

And if you find her poor, Ithaca didn’t deceive you.
As wise as you will have become, with so much experience,
you will understand, by then, these Ithacas; what they mean.

[1910; 1911]

Roman Criticisms of Early Christianity: More Right Than They Ever Would Have Wanted To Be

I’m reading Robert Louis Wilken’s book The Christians as the Romans Saw Them right now. It’s a fascinating account of “secular” criticisms of Christianity in the first four to five centuries of its development. You often hear  about how Romans thought the Christians were “atheists” or “cannibals”; well Wilken actually delivers the goods. He explores the assumptions and cultural mores that were behind these sorts of accusations, giving them the background and perspective that made them rational criticisms from a Roman perspective. Wilken develops his narrative by focusing on individual personalities such as Pliny, Celsus, and Porphyry who mentioned Christianity in their correspondences and writings. This gives the narrative a concrete focus, and Wilken’s writing is concise, vivid, and nontechnical. An excellent and fascinating read.

It’s interesting and illuminating to get a picture of Christianity from the perspective of its observers, and Wilken does an excellent job of remaining sympathetic to the  Greeks and Romans he is describing. The following quotation is from the chapter on Celsus’s criticism of Christianity. What makes it so intriguing is that the passage is describing—from Celsus’s perspective—the Christian beliefs and practices that Celsus (who Wilken describes as a “conservative intellectual”) found threatening to Roman society. It was, in a way, a prescient observation; despite his fears, he was right. Christian belief and practice would, in the end, undermine the pagan beliefs and connected cultural infrastructure that the Romans held so dear. (It’s also a good example, for the most part, of what an ideal picture of the church might be today.)

The Christian movement was revolutionary [this word, from Celsus's perspective, is pejorative] not because it had the men and resources to mount a war against the laws of the Roman Empire, but because it created a social group that promoted its own laws and its on patterns of behavior. The life and teachings of Jesus led to the formation of a new community of people called “the church.” Christianity had begun to look like a separate people or nation, but without its own land or traditions to legitimate its unusual customs. Like the Jews, Christians held profane what the Romans held sacred, and permitted what others thought reprehensible. But in contrast to the Jews, Christians had introduced a new feature into their cult—namely, the worship of a man, Jesus—and in giving adoration to Jesus, they had turned men and women away from true devotion to God.

A Book I Slaved Over Has Won an Award

The Dictionary of the Old Testament: Wisdom, Poetry and Writings has won the ECPA Christian Book Award in the category of Bible Reference and Study.

Of course this book wasn’t by brainchild or anything, but I did spend many hours with my nose hovering over the nine-hundred-some pages, so it’s at least gratifying to know it wasn’t disqualified on account of an egregiously large amount of typos!

One other point of cynical observation, which I hope doesn’t make me sound ungrateful: I always give a wry smile at what these awards reveal about the quirks and idiosyncrasies of the Christian-evangelical publishing industry. There is a category, as noted above, for “Bible Reference and Study,” another for “Christian Life” (a John Piper book won this year), another for “Inspiration and Gift,” another for “Fiction,” even a category simply called “Bible.” There is, however, no category for theology. What does this say about us? That we don’t publish enough theology to warrant a category for it? Or, more likely, do we think that if we have  categories for “Bible” and “Bible Reference and Study” then a category for theology is intrinsically unnecessary? In other words, do we simply conflate the categories of theology and Bible reference? That is, to read and understand the Bible is ipso facto to do theology? That would be nice, but if it were that simple we surely wouldn’t have the doctrine of the two natures of Christ, or even of the Trinity. Not that these aren’t scriptural doctines, but it takes (or at least, in the historical development of doctrine,  it took) an alarmingly large amount of philosophical reasoning and speculation, and huge amounts of controversy, to get from the earliest Christian confessions of Jesus as Lord to the Nicene Creed, for example. I’m just sayin’.

We Interrupt This Blast of Nonposts to Bring You A Testy Conservative Rant

I know better than to base my opinion on editorials with summaries that say things like, “the pope deserves no credence when he distorts scientific findings about the value of condoms in slowing the spread of the AIDS virus” (from where else), so when I saw those very words in my daily headlines email I did what I usually do when major (liberal) media outlets cover the latest supposedly inflammatory words from the current (conservative) pope: Ignore. And then I assume that somebody will provide me with the context or perspective lacking in the sputtering, apoplectic screed with which I was originally confronted.

It turns out this time around that that “somebody” was the Harvard School of Public Health, specifically Edward C. Green, a senior research fellow there.

But let’s go back to the original editorial. The little summary sentence, it turns out, is an elision and conflation of the first two sentences, the first of which reads, “Pope Benedict XVI has every right to express his opposition to the use of condoms on moral grounds, in accordance with the official stance of the Roman Catholic Church.” (How magnanimous. Here’s my headline in response: “New York Times Gives Pope Permission to Exercise Role as Infallible Magisterium of Roman Catholic Church.”) Then the second sentence reads, “But he deserves no credence when he distorts scientific findings about the value of condoms in slowing the spread of the AIDS virus.” Distorts? Really? Duplicity and willful deception are pretty strong accusations to lay at the feet of one of the world’s most influential moral voices, and a careful and pedigreed scholar to boot. But when somebody not only questions but assumes to be false a central piece of ideological dogma, its defendants naturally can get pretty antsy. To be fair, at almost the end of the editorial, the authors concede, “The best way to avoid transmission of the virus is to abstain from sexual intercourse or have a long-term mutually monogamous relationship with an uninfected person.” But this is in the middle of an otherwise unceasing torrent defending condom usage as the best way to prevent AIDS.

And then this.

Edward C. Green—a self-professed liberal mind you—steps up to the podium and defends the pope! Here’s a chunk of what he has to say:

Yet, in truth, current empirical evidence supports him.

We liberals who work in the fields of global HIV/AIDS and family planning take terrible professional risks if we side with the pope on a divisive topic such as this. The condom has become a symbol of freedom and — along with contraception — female emancipation, so those who question condom orthodoxy are accused of being against these causes. My comments are only about the question of condoms working to stem the spread of AIDS in Africa’s generalized epidemics — nowhere else.

In 2003, Norman Hearst and Sanny Chen of the University of California conducted a condom effectiveness study for the United Nations’ AIDS program and found no evidence of condoms working as a primary HIV-prevention measure in Africa. UNAIDS quietly disowned the study. (The authors eventually managed to publish their findings in the quarterly Studies in Family Planning.) Since then, major articles in other peer-reviewed journals such as the Lancet, Science and BMJ have confirmed that condoms have not worked as a primary intervention in the population-wide epidemics of Africa. In a 2008 article in Science called “Reassessing HIV Prevention” 10 AIDS experts concluded that “consistent condom use has not reached a sufficiently high level, even after many years of widespread and often aggressive promotion, to produce a measurable slowing of new infections in the generalized epidemics of Sub-Saharan Africa.”

Amazingly enough pope Benedict doesn’t just make stuff up as he goes along! This is something I thought the New York Times would have figured out by now.

Now I know that this is a contentious and complex issue, and I don’t hinge my arguments solely on the latest scientific study (and what this excerpt points out is that clearly many pundits on the other side of the issue don’t either, though they would like to believe they do), which is why this whole argument seldom goes anywhere, because it tends to be cast as progressive, empirical science vs. outmoded moralism. And so it goes.

Peter Leithart’s Irenaean Theology of Fasting

If you want to know what fasting is all about, boys and girls, read this article, posted today at First Things’ On the Square blog. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Leithart places the whole idea of feasting and fasting in the context of Christ’s recapitulation of Adamic humanity. The Adam-Christ parallel is originally Pauline, was systematized by Irenaeus in the second century, and bore much fruit throughout the entire patristic era. According to Leithart’s application of this model, Jesus Fasted where Adam feasted, and in so doing succeeded where Adam failed. Here is an exemplary quote:

Jesus is the Last Adam because He keeps the fast. He enters a world that is no longer a garden, but a howling waste, and in that wilderness Satan tempts Him to break the fast, to be an Adam: “You’re hungry; eat this now. You deserve the accolades of the crowds; you can have it now if you jump off the temple. You want all authority in heaven and on earth, but your Father won’t give that to you unless you suffer an excruciating, shameful death; you can have it all now, no cross or self-denial required. It’s yours, and you only need to do a bit of bowing. Life, glory, power, everything you want, everything you deserve—you can have it all now.”

Jesus refused, and refused, and then refused again, and in so doing broke the power of Adamic sin. Jesus kept the fast; he waited, labored, suffered, died, and then opened his hand to receive all the life, glory, honor, authority, and dominion that his Father had to give Him. He kept the fast and as a result was admitted to the fullness of the kingdom’s feast—because by that time both it and he were ready. And by resisting the devil, Jesus sets the pattern of true fasting and reveals a Lenten way of life.

Leithart sees ramifications of this “Lenten way of life” for politics, economics, and sexuality. This is great stuff. Check out the whole thing.