Standing Under the Scriptures
December 21, 2008

Dear Fellow Voyagers,

Our readings for this Sunday are:

Romans 16.25-27: The conclusion of Paul’s letter to the Romans makes the depth of his own faith apparent.

Luke 1.26-38: This is the transaction between the Virgin Mary and the angel Gabriel concerning Jesus’ birth. In it she is obedient to his word, as in our readings we seek to be obedient to Scripture.

As I said in last Sunday’s class, I will be driving to North Carolina this Wednesday, to return on Saturday (in time for next Sunday). Thus this weekly notice will be early and a bit truncated.

But I want to say something about important issues that arose in our discussion. Even before that I would cite a procedural principle of ours, not only to inform those who have joined us recently but also to remind old timers, including myself. A class to be successful needs to operate under a discipline. Our basic discipline is indicated already by our title, Standing Under the Scriptures. This means that so far as the class discussions go we take the Scriptures as they stand, allowing them to speak to us in their own terms rather than attempting to speak to them out of our particular concepts and values. In no way does this preclude the application to them of our critical faculties. On the contrary, we need to employ all the intellectual resources available to us---the original Greek and Hebrew texts, the findings of biblical scholarship---to get at their meaning. But it does imply that meaning is to found in them (exegesis) rather than read into them (eisegesis). I would add that scriptural obedience does not come just out of some doctrinaire approach. Instead its validity is seen in that in it we find our peace and our joy. Paradoxical as it may sound, our only true freedom is freedom to obey the Lord, whose will is revealed to us in Scripture.

This principle has application to our first reading for last Sunday, Isaiah 61.1-11. A point we noted but perhaps did not pay sufficient attention to is that in Luke’s Gospel (4.18,19) Jesus read from the opening verses as the inauguration of his ministry in the synagogue in Nazareth.

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 broken-hearted,
to proclaim liberty to the captives and the opening of prison to those who are bound....

Thereby Jesus himself attested to their revelatory power, which gives them an ontological significance (meaning relating to the very structure of being). Accordingly we are not at liberty to set them aside. We encountered a difficulty, nevertheless, in that in the return from the Exile in Babylon, which was evidently their original reference, these glowing prospects were not particularly realized. Post-exilic Israel had rather a hard slog. The difficulty nevertheless resolved itself when we took them as referring not just to return from exile but ultimately to the new dispensation inaugurated by Jesus, in his earthly ministry and above all in his death on the cross and his resurrection: the kingdom of heaven. John the Baptist heralded this new dispensation, and John was the subject of our Gospel reading (John 1.6-8, 19-28).

We noted therein how the priests and Levites sent out by the religious establishment to check on John had difficulty in making sense of him (and of course even more difficulty in making sense of Jesus). They tried to fit him into their existing categories---Messiah, Elijah, the prophet---but he resisted all of them. Indeed, only by allowing the categories that they clung to to be loosened could they have comprehended the coming of the new phenomenon, Jesus, whom John heralded. John reflects this when he says, “… among you stands one whom you do not know” (vs. 26). The foregoing brings to mind the great difficulty, indeed the shattering, that we undergo when we come up against something that we have not encountered before. My own memorable experience of this was on landing in Yokohama on a troopship early 1946 to take part in the Occupation. Japan was utterly devastated. Some 90 percent of the Tokyo-Yokohama complex had been destroyed by fire-bombing. Hardly anything was working. Only occasional vehicles were to be seen, and these were powered not by gasoline but by bulky devises mounted in back and hopefully generating fumes from charcoal. Moreover, it seemed impossible that the country’s infrastructure and economy could ever be made to work again. My only existing category even remotely fitting this situation was that of New York City with its unkempt dusty streets at the height of the Great Depression.

Nevertheless if, instead of resisting it desperately, we will allow such shaking of our foundations (Jeremiah 4.23-26) to come in on us, the Lord can bring about in us new and more adequate categories, the reintegration of our perceptions. And he will do this if we open ourselves to him and to his Word as contained in Scripture. In this is to be seen the pattern of the basic reality of Christian faith, namely death to worldly affections and resurrection in the power of God.

Faithfully, Fr. Ted

P.S. In class I spoke of circulating the paper on supersessionism in Hebrews that I heard Richard Hays present in Cambridge at the end of October. This was so you could see a current and accessible example of scholarship by “one of the world’s leading authorities on the New Testament,” as Markus Bockmuehl, Oxford’s Professor of Biblical and Early Christian studies said in introducing Hays---instead of the poor scraps that you get from me. Supersessionism, by the way, refers to the outright replacement, rather than just the fulfilling, of Judaism by Christianity.

The paper's full title is “Here We Have No Lasting City: New Covenantalism in Hebrews.” My own comments would be that in bringing out how Hebrews, despite superficial appearances, is not supersessionist, the paper contributes to the resolving of a dilemma that has long hung over Christianity. As for the notion developed on the latter part of the paper, namely that Hebrews is “a self-consuming artifact,” I would have to think more about that.

Finally, since this paper was sent to me on a personal basis, I would ask that you not circulate it further, at least not without checking with me, so that I may check in turn with Richard.

I would be glad of any thoughts that you may have.