Baylor University is hosting a Radical Orthodoxy Colloquium on November 13-15. All lectures begin at 2:30 (Tues-Thurs) and include the following speakers: Conor Cunningham (Univ. of Nottingham), Aaron Patrick Riches (Univ. of Nottingham), John F. Montag SJ (St. Louis Univ.). For more information, contact [email protected].
If any of you are planning to attend the Patristic, Medieval, and Renaissance Studies Conference this Fri-Sun in Philadelphia, please drop by and say hello. I will be presenting my paper on Augustine and Gadamer on Friday afternoon. The featured speakers are Denys Turner (Yale University) and David Burrell (University of Notre Dame).
“Karl Barth turned to the book of Romans in the hope of hearing the Word of God and in the hope of finding a new starting-point, and principle, for theology. Instead of interpreting the Bible as an expression of human religious experience, as was typical of theological liberalism, Barth turned to scripture not so much to discover God but to be discovered by God. Whereas ‘religion’ concerns humanity’s search for God, the message of Christianity was, for Barth, that God ‘found the way to us’. God is not an ‘object’ of human reflection but an active subject. Theology’s task therefore is not to formulate human thoughts about God but to explicate God’s thoughts about us. The challenge for Barth was to affirm the reality and activity of God while at the same time forestalling its becoming an object of human historical or rational investigation. If God is God, he must remain free to make himself known. [...] Historical critics, he says, are not critical enough; they do not penetrate as far as the text’s distinctive and unique subject-matter. They do not perceive ‘what there is’ or ‘what stands’ in the Bible. The meaning of the words in the biblical text can only be determined in relation to the Sache of which they speak. To read for the human author’s intention fails to do justice to the freedom of God’s Word speaking in scripture. Schleiermacher, in suggesting that the Bible was an expression of human experience, got the subject-matter exactly the wrong way round. Barth’s aim, in his own words, was to bring the reader ‘face to face with the subject-matter of the Scriptures.’[1]The subject-matter of scripture is not merely history, a system of morality, or religious piety but the God of the gospel: the message of what God was and is doing in Jesus Christ for the sake of a fallen world. This is a crucial point, for it is the driving assumption and material insight behind Barth’s biblical hermeneutics. The subject-matter of theology is not merely historical but eschatological: the ‘world of the text’ (Ricoeur) is the ‘world of God’. The Bible is about the breaking-in of God’s world (the ‘kingdom of God’; ‘real history’) into the world order (‘so-called history’) in order to judge the world and renew it. However, though God enters the world he continues to remain God; he is in the world but not of it. By the very nature of the case, then, this subject-matter is not under human control. God’s self revelation is not a matter of ‘clear and distinct ideas’, but of God-in-communicative action. ‘Real history’ – the time and space of God’s making himself known – is beyond the reach of the historian. The Sache of the Bible is not an object at our disposal. Interpreters are not merely ‘spectators’ of God’s Word but, in God’s grace, participants that may be caught up into the subject-matter (viz., the fellowship creating triune economy).”
(Kevin J. Vanhoozer, “Discourse on Matter: Hermeneutics and the ‘Miracle’ of Understanding,” pp. 11-13).
Notes
By Tim Enloe
Father Roch continues his historiographical reflections by building on his general principles the conclusion that the “we have found a rationale in the very nature of historiography for going beyond mere history and attempting to inquire into the meaning of the ‘Jesus event.’”[1] Indeed, transcending the limitations of reconstructions of the “mere” historical record “is required by the history of Jesus itself: unless we accept the perspective of faith, the Christ event presents a historical anomaly-the appearance in our world of something so disconcertingly new that it explodes all the prefabricated categories of historiography.”[2]
What is this “perspective of faith,” then? First, the New Testament documents “were those in which the Church recognized an authentic apostolic witness to Christ.” The Church “was aware” of the inspiration of these documents, and that they had been written not just after Jesus’ death “but from the even more illuminating perspective of his definitive, risen state.” Second, the insight of the resurrected Jesus “sheds light on every event and word in his life. His history, then, is not merely human history, but the history of God himself: God has expressed himself definitively in and through the life, death, and resurrection of the man Jesus, and has reconciled the world to himself through him.” Third, this means that “every event in the history of Jesus is filled with God’s mystery, and contains inexhaustible riches.”[3]
The Gospels are not detailed, connected biographies or collections of data for the sake of the data themselves: “Their purpose is to record the events and the teachings of Jesus insofar as they have meaning for the Church to which the evangelist addresses his Gospel.”[4] Here Father Roch displays an assumption that most Protestants would find exceedingly problematic: biblical errancy. He says that the Church knew of “the many divergences and contradictions between the Gospels” but that she “resisted all attempts at harmonization. “She preferred the four-Gospel canon to Marcion’s only Gospel (a truncated version of Luke), to Tatian’s Diatessaron and other gospel harmonies.”[5]
The reason for this is that the Church preferred “the riches and variety of the apostolic traditions” over “a unified version of the deeds and teachings of Jesus.” She wanted to preserve “the fullness of the traditions as they had developed through various channels in various milieus, over against any attempt to produce a single, seemingly more consistent story of Jesus.”[6] In other words, “The catechists and evangelists of the apostolic Church show an amazing combination of fidelity and creative freedom; fidelity to the memory of events and words pertaining to Jesus and creative freedom in shaping the Jesus traditions in order to bring out the meaning for a particular audience of what Jesus actually did and said.”[7]
In the Protestant context, this sort of historical approach to Scripture is usually excoriated (often with the slur “Liberal”) and thought to be completely destructive of faith. For, how can you trust that the Bible is the inspired Word of a God who is always Truthful and is in total control of everything if He cannot preserve His Word from being infected by error? As the common Evangelical argument goes, if one part of the Bible is erroneous, might not all of it be?
I believe, however, that it is important not to simply react to this affirmation by Father Roch of actual contradictions in the New Testament records, for as Father Roch’s own continued discussion shows, he is able to retain full confidence in the records and the divine, and fully truthful character of Scripture. It is a different order of confidence than one finds in typical Protestant circles, but that seems to be because Father Roch has a rock solid belief in what he takes to be implications of the Incarnation:
Far from being troubled by the many historical uncertainties arising from this ancient literary genre, the theologian should rather see in this state of affairs a necessary consequence of the Incarnation. He will admit that many events in the history of Jesus will forever remain unknown. Many other facts can only be assessed as a matter of plausible conjecture with higher or lower degrees of historical probability. If God truly became man, he must have accepted all the consequences of the historical condition-which includes living in a particular time, place and culture. It would hardly be consistent for him to do violence to the way in which his own history was told and recorded in that culture by the people of that age. He did not arbitrarily change their way of thinking and writing by giving them a crash course on modern historiography, so that they could write a textbook about him that would satisfy the curiosity of today’s historians.[8]
Notes
[4] Ibid., 21, emphasis his.
[5] Ibid., 21.
[6] Ibid., emphasis his.
[7] Ibid., 22.
[8] Ibid., 23.
By Tim Enloe
Father Kereszty (hereafter “Father Roch”), outlines his general historiographical method for analyzing the historical Jesus as follows.[1]
Father Roch observes that “The presupposition that a good historian is able to grasp and present the purely objective data of history without mixing with them any interpretation has turned out to be an illusion. What historians often present as objective facts are in reality the result of a long process of research in which the subjective perception, selection, description, and organization of the objective data by the historian play an essential role…The so called ‘historical facts,’ then, are always a combination of what actually happened and of the historian’s interpretation.” This does not necessarily render a given historical account false or distorted, but it does render all of them limited approximations.[2]
Citing Paul Ricoeur’s statement that “The object of human history is the human subject itself,”[3] Father Roch proposes that human words and actions are “sign[s] of the human person who is inaccesible in himself” and thus require interpretation. And “True interpretation requires and attitude of being tuned in to a certain person of the past, of being ‘congenial’ to him; one must be or become a ‘kindred spirit who can decipher the meaning, the motives, and goals of this person’s activity from the ‘raw data’ of his history.”[4]
Interestingly, historical reconstructions cannot proceed properly on a uniformitarian principle. Persons are free agents, and their free acts leave unique imprints on the world that cannot be reduced to general categories or analogous occurrences. “The task of the historian, then, is not only to find general patterns that approximate an individual act or utterance, but also to try to understand them in their reference to that unique person who performed the act and spoke the words.”[5]
However, free acts are not the whole story, either. Father Roch had previously defined “purely objective data” as “historical circumstances and events which are either completely inexpressive of human subjectivity (for instance, an earthquake or flood) or any circumstance or event which has not yet been grasped on the level of subjectivity (for instance, a marriage considered as an entry in a marriage register.”[6] In order to find the object of history, which is the human subject, the historian must consider “the whole web of intertwining and conflicting causes, personal and impersonal forces which have, in various ways, contributed to the historical event in question.”[7]
Last, “The attempt to understand a whole event in all its causes, effects, and implications, in its relationship to the whole of human history, inescapably posits the question of meaning.” Here subjectivity is writ large, for different historians often conceive of entirely different questions to ask of the data, and sometimes the “reasonable” questions which one asks of the data are simply “nonsense” to another. Father Roch’s example here is the French Revolution. Some historians approach the data asking whether the Revolution was a positive or negative step in human history. But this very question reveals a bias-the bias of assuming there is such a thing as “progress in history.” Another historian, say, a nihilistic one, might entirely reject the question and instead posit that the Revolution was just one more indicator of the fundamentally absurdity of the human condition.[8]
This brings the historian to the limits of his discipline and forces him to enter the domain of the philosophy and / or theology of history.
Notes
[2] Ibid., 15, emphasis his.[3] Ricoeur, “Objectivity and Subjectivity in History,”: History and Truth [Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1965], pg. 40.
[4] Kereszty, 16, emphasis his.
[5] Ibid., 16-17, emphasis his.
[6] Ibid., 16-17, emphasis his.
[7] Ibid, 16, fn. 25.
[8] Ibid., 18.
This is the first of a three-part series by Tim Enloe. Tim is the husband of Heidi and father of Elbereth Laurelin. His interests include Ancient and Medieval history, literature, ecclesio-political theory, and creative writing. He is currently pursuing a M.A. in Humanities at the University of Dallas.
***
A second reading assigned in my Christology class is Roch A. Kereszty’s Jesus Christ: Fundamentals of Christology.[1] This is turning out to be quite a thought-provoking book, not least of which because Father Kereszty (O. Cist.) accepts a number of principles of biblical and historical criticism which would instantly set off just about every Evangelical seminarian’s “error” alarms-and yet, he retains a fully committed faith in the integrity of the biblical and ecclesiastical witness to the truth of Christ’s claims.
Among the principles which many Evangelicals would instantly reject are (1) a thoroughgoing anti-Modern understanding of what “historical facts” are and how historians encounter them,[2] (2) a refusal to try to harmonize the Gospels,[3] but instead an acceptance that they contain actual contradictions, (3) a rejection of “a naive fundamentalist realism” regarding the post-resurrection appearances of the Lord,[4] and (4) a form of theistic evolution.[5]
And yet, I repeat, Father Roch retains a fully committed faith in the integrity of the biblical and ecclesiastical witness to the truth of Christ’s claims. On the first page of the book, Father Roch states,
Theology, and in particular, Christology, is not a mere mental construct based on a number of dogmatic definitions (even less on consensus statements of biblical scholars) but intellectual reflection on the reality of the crucified and risen Christ who lives in His Church…
Likewise, after surveying and rejecting the various Liberal “Quests for the Historical Jesus,” Father Roch reports “I accept as normative this full apostolic witness to Christ, as it is embodied in the whole New Testament…”[6] Furthermore, even when the most rigorous of historical-critical methods are applied to the Scriptures,
the historical facts we can recover about Jesus present us with a puzzle that resists all conventional explanations. We are unable to squeeze him into the straitjacket of the general categories of the history of religions. Jesus is not simply an itinerant rabbi, a charismatic wonder worker, or a prophet. The uniqueness of his teaching and the events that immediately followed his death call for an interpretation which history in and of itself cannot provide.
These and other remarks throughout his early methodological discussions reveal a concern for relating faith and reason in a way that does not downplay or damage either. Father Roch seems to see the biblical materials as “preparations for faith.” There is no “universally verifiable” historical case for the truth claims of Jesus Christ, but there is a hope for salvation that is rooted deeply in history and which, although it can only be fully appreciated occulata fide (“with eyes made perceptive through faith”)[7] nevertheless leaves all skeptical reconstructions of “the historical Jesus” in the dust.
Notes
[2] Ibid., pp. 15-19.
[3] Ibid., pg. 21.
[4] Ibid., pg. 65. Father Roch even states, contrary to many Fundamentalist and Evangelical apologetic arguments, that “it would be ludicrous to ask if the piece of baked fish that Christ ate in the Lukan appearance scene [24:42-43] was actually digested by him.” [pg. 66].
[5] Ibid., pp. 70-71.
[6] Ibid., pg. 21.
[7] Ibid., pg. 67.
