Standing Under the Scriptures
April 20, 2008

Dear Fellow Voyagers,

Our readings for this week are,

Acts 7.55-60:  This is the climax of the deeply moving story of Stephen, the church’s first martyr.

John 14.1-14:  Jesus speaks this time not to opponents or outsiders but to his own disciples, concerning their (and our) fears about what is in store for them.  The reading in the service will stop at verse 6:  “I am the Way and the Truth and the Life.  No one comes to the Father except through me” (actually the first of those launching the Barmen Declaration---see below).  We will see how far we get.

Last Sunday our brief first reading (Acts 2.42-47) described the manner of life of the Church’s first converts.  As a member of the class pointed out, they gave the appearance of a semi-monastic community.  And their “communism,” their sharing of possessions, reflected their total commitment, as another class member remarked.  As such it challenges us.

Our main focus, though (and rightly so), was on the Gospel (John 10.1-10).  For this passage is of critical importance, insisting on the exclusivity of Jesus’ role.  We saw this insistence already in verse 1:  “He who does not enter the sheepfold by the gate but climbs in by another way is a thief and a robber.”  As for the identity of the thieves and robbers, and of the gate as well, this is specified in verses 7 and 8:  “I am the gate for the sheep.  All who came before me are thieves and robbers."

To understand this assertion better we needed to clarify the meaning of the “before” (pro in Greek).  We might have supposed that it has a temporal reference, to time before Jesus.  But in that case it would be a designation of John the Baptist and the prophets and even Moses, which it surely is not.  We should instead take it is as referring to whatever has been or may be given precedence over Jesus.  This would include not so much persons as humanly constructed concepts and value systems and their application to Jesus, so that he “stands under” them instead of their standing under him.  The ancient heresies---docetism, ebionism, and Gnosticism---were such attempts to assign him to human categories, thereby bringing him under control.  That John and his community encountered them in their late first-century world, and were concerned to oppose them, is evident from the Fourth Gospel’s emphasis on the true apostolic character of the witness of “the beloved disciple.”

We discussed also a modern instance of this phenomenon.  It was the attempt of the Nazis in the 1930s (which I remember) to make the church subservient to them, to promote Hitler as God’s instrument for the German people in their place and time.  Sadly the German Christians mostly went along with this.  But not all did.  Those adhering to what was known as the Confessing Church dared to stand against it.  Their chief instrument for doing so was the Barmen Declaration of June 1934, of which the principal author was Karl Barth, whose massive Church Dogmatics I am currently reading and whose insights I have spoken of from time to time.  Interestingly, two of the three verses which launch the Declaration come from the very passage we were considering (and the third from this Sunday’s Gospel, as above).

In the Church Dogmatics Barth explains that the groundwork for the Nazi ideological penetration of German Christianity had been laid long before, by the readiness of most German theologians to set humanly derived concepts, as in the rationalism stemming from the Enlightenment, alongside revelation as sources of truth.  Once this occurs, however, it is the human concepts which come to predominate, marginalizing revelation.  And having accepted this shift, the church is left without effective defenses against secular ideologies, including such as Nazism.

As for why we in our time should be concerned with what happened some 70 years ago, a dictum attributed to George Santayana, the Harvard philosopher, may justify it: Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.  A parallel to the German process may be seen as having gone on the Anglican Communion of late, not only in America but in other churches of the West.  In them we have seen humanly derived concepts, such as psychoanalysis early on and more recently social justice and simple “experience,” set beside revelation as attested in Scripture.  (Even around here one hears something about literature and films.)  We have seen also the marginalization of revelation thereby.  In themselves these concepts may seem innocuous, lacking the menace of Nazism.  But the German experience shows how they can open the way for such malignity.  Hence the importance of our class and its insistence on revelation as our point of departure.

But the exclusivity of Jesus is not wholly negative.  On the contrary it blesses us, so that “whoever enters by me will be saved and will come in and go out and find pasture… I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly” (verses 9 and 10).

I passed out copies of the Barmen Declaration last Sunday.  I am attaching it to this message.  I hope you will ponder it.  For it instances the basis on which our class proceeds.

Faithfully, Fr. Ted