Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! I pray that you are having as good of a holiday season as I’ve had! This has been a busy season, with lots of family time, church services, and trying to finish up to-do lists.
Scripture
Isaiah 61:1-3, Jesus, and Brevard Childs
I recently performed a funeral for a lovely member of St. Paul's. She was a devout Anglican who had her funeral all planned out when she passed. She specifically requested one of the readings to be Isaiah 61:1-3:
The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me to bring good tidings to the afflicted; he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to those who are bound; to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor, and the day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all who mourn; to grant to those who mourn in Zion--to give them a garland instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, the mantle of praise instead of a faint spirit; that they may be called oaks of righteousness, the planing of the Lord, that he may be glorified."
So naturally, I researched the reading like I always do before preaching and found this quotation from Old Testament scholar Brevard Childs discussing how to read this passage:
In sum, I would concur that the final shape of the Isaianic corpus is such that a resonance between the eschatological Messiah and the suffering servant was soon heard by the Christian church as a legitimate reader response to its scriptures in linking servant and Messiah. However, to read back a “servant/Messiah” figure into chapter 61 is to blur the Old Testament’s own witness by a retrojection of a later, fully developed Christian theology, not yet developed in the book of Isaiah (Isaiah: A Commentary 505).
On the one hand, I appreciate what Childs is trying to do: read the text in its own integrity. This is an important tenant in Childs' biblical theology. In his short book Biblical Theology: A Proposal, Childs argues that the Old Testament cannot be reduced purely to a “horizontal” level (that is, its relationship to the New), it must recover a sense in which it is “vertical” and “continues to bear its own witness within the context of the Christian Bible" (52-3). This means that Christian allegorical readings are not permittable, at least not to the extent to which the Church Fathers attempted it because it marked a “refusal to hear the Old Testament’s witness, and to change its semantic level in order to bring it into conformity with the New Testament" (54).
On the other hand, I think we see here a bankrupt metaphysical assumption that undergirds so much of biblical studies, even among commentators who are Christians. If the fundamental claims of Christianity are true, there can be no contradiction between a Christocentric reading and the "actual reading." A good reading of Scripture is one that sees Christ as its substance. The presuppositions of pre-Reformation interpreters were robustly pneumatological; the divine authorship and ongoing work of the Holy Spirit meant that the meaning of Scripture was multifaceted, taking into account the life experiences and positionality of later interpreters, enabling exegetes to encounter the text in a fresh way. This is not to say the canonical approach is frivolous and lacks a way forward. Emulating the hermeneutic of Paul and the Early Church which valued the text’s sacramental inherence, thereby transcending the application gap would capitalize on the initial progress made by Childs’ proposal while avoiding the pitfalls. The Christian reader cannot divorce themselves from the core conviction that Scripture is one of the means by which God speaks to his Church and, therefore, a Christian hermeneutic must grapple with the archetype by which the various types embedded within the Scripture “live and move and have their being.”
This is the model we are given in the New Testament. The Navarre Bible provides a helpful summary, "the Old Testament can be rightly understood only in the light of the New—as the risen Christ showed the apostles when he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures (cf. Lk 24:45), an understanding which the Holy Spirit perfected on the day of Pentecost (cf. Acts 2:4)" (St. Luke 63).
We are taught how to read Isaiah 61 by our Lord himself in Luke 4:18-19 when he announces the fulfillment of the prophet's words in the synagogue. The passage speaks about Christ because Christ is the subject of all Scripture. Only he can proclaim liberty to the captives, open the prison to those who are bound, and who ushers in the year of the Lord's favor.
Tradition
From Cell to Wine Cellar Podcast: 002: Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo (1.11-25)
Forgive me for being a little light on the tradition section. Given the holiday, I should have known things would be more hectic than I thought! However,
Reason
Archbishop Rowan Williams, “Faith on Modern Areopagus,” The JP2 Lectures
This was a compelling talk given by Archbishop Rowan Williams. His goal is to seek common ground, applying the Gospel using an approach that emphasizes contextualization a la St. Paul in Acts 17. His starting point, interestingly, is the language of human rights. It is certainly in vogue to be critical of rights language (Milbank, O'Donovan, and other Radical Orthodox). Williams seems uncomfortable with the way many moderns deploy rights language but he sees an opening: rather than writing off rights rhetoric as some have done, he takes the opportunity to exploit the opening rhetoric about rights provides. This occurs by utilizing rights to unflinchingly insist on the inherent dignity of the human person, in a way that pre-exists action. In other words, the other's moral standing cannot be earned. This forces us to reimagine various social relations. What does the penal process looking like if we seriously take prisoner's dignity into account? How might our view of down syndrome persons in the womb change when we discard the barbaric idea that one's moral status is earned? A Christian subversion of rights discourse means that we refuse to assess the other's "fittingness" and instead grant the other a standing like my own and, thereby, perform justice to who is in front of us. The inconsistency that exists when it comes to rights rhetoric, historically and in our current situation, can be accounted for by Rene Girard's account of social life in terms of scapegoating. The crucifixion shows us the toxicity of scapegoating and Christian anthropology declares what is hidden.
Williams then shifts his discussion to the significance of language and its role in intelligence and self-understanding. To speak is to recognize our place as socially enmeshed. There is no "me" without "thous" and "its" to which I can relate. Language, then, presupposes a shared world. This is the basis for a prescription to interactive pluralism: a society in which subcommunities argue about the vision and direction of the larger culture without the state enforcing those norms but carving out space for the discussion. This helps us heed the warning provided by Catholic Terry Eagleton that the project of civilization can easily become idolatrous.
To conclude his talk, Williams taps the Christian imagination to envision a world where our interdependence doesn't have to be premised on deleterious social arrangements. The Creator's identification with us via the Incarnation frees us from the scapegoating paradigm. The Archbishop invokes Etty Hillesum, a Jewish victim of the holocaust, as an example. She saw herself as a mediator of God to the world who, by love, declares that God is even present here. While rights language is often invoked to elevate the self above the other (examples might include anti-mask or anti-vaccine rhetoric, the pro-choice movement, etc.), for the Christian it means representing God by standing aside, giving up an interest dominated life, and recognizing that our own growth is dependent on our neighbors. This vision, he reminds us, is not brought about by argument but by the lives of saints in the Body of Christ.
I found this talk incredibly compelling. I find myself generally drawn towards the critiques of rights language endemic to the Radical Orthodox movement. Yet, at a certain point, the deconstruction of said rhetoric must be turned into the construction of something positive. Wrapped up in Williams’ engagement are critiques of the way in which rights are often invoked but Williams' case, much like St. Paul's in Acts 17, is much more subversive and, therefore, much more persuasive. By entirely discarding rights language, one can unwittingly flirt with fascism (example: much of the integralist movement ). If more Christian thinkers embraced Williams' account of rights, it would allow the Church to speak prophetically to the larger culture while also avoiding the excessive individualism inculcated by the modern use of rights stemming from the Enlightenment. On that note, this is one area I felt the Archbishop's argument was somewhat lacking: an accounting for the genealogy of rights rhetoric and a more explicit contrast between Christian and secular approaches, though the distinction certainly loomed implicitly throughout most of the talk. We should be thankful for leaders like Rowan Williams who are still capable of thoughtful engagement by acting as modern-day Pauls in the Areopagus.
My 2020 Book Journey - The Top 25
25. Mass and the Sacraments by John Laux
24. The Ten Commandments by Peter Leithart
23. Christ and Calamity: Grace and Gratitude in the Darkest Valley by Harold L. Senkbeil
22. Literary Theory: An Introduction by Terry Eagleton
21. The Lord's Prayer by Wesley Hill
20. The Theology of Benedict XVI: A Protestant Appreciation edited by Tim Perry
We had Dr. Perry on The Sacramentalists to discuss this book.
18. The Cure of Souls by William Webb
17. Losing Susan by Victor Lee Austin
15. The Growth of Medieval Tradition by Jaroslav Pelikan
14. The Index of Self-Destructive Acts by Christopher Beha
13. Friendship: The Heart of Being Human by Victor Lee Austin
12. Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis
11. Reading Revelation Responsibly by Michael Gorman
10. God is Love by Benedict XVI
9. Discourses on the Communion at Fridays by Soren Kierkegaard
8. The Diary of a Country Priest by Georges Bernanos
7. Participating in Christ: Explorations in Paul's Theology and Spirituality by Michael Gorman
6. The God of Faith and Reason: Foundations of Christian Theology by Robert Sokolowski
5. Fratelli Tutti: On Fraternity and Social Friendship by Pope Francis
2. Scripture in the Tradition by Henri de Lubac
1. Discerning the Mystery by Andrew Louth
What were your favorite reads this year?