Inegalitarian Acts

For various reasons I’ve been reading and re-reading Acts a lot this year. One reason is that I’m co-leading a Sunday School class through the book, slowly, chapter by chapter. This past Sunday I had Acts 15: the climactic moment in the story, the hinge of the great gentile missions of the Jewish churches in Jerusalem and Antioch.

In the process of reading and teaching Acts I’ve acquired many unfounded and decidedly unsexy opinions about it. My sense of its dating has been moving steadily earlier and earlier (like Harnack), and I enjoy mentally fiddling with authorship questions (St. Luke? St. Titus? Another?). Since I’m not a New Testament scholar, I’m freed from worrying about being found out with this or that frumpy position on these questions. Theologians are allowed to speculate, no?

In any case, teaching Acts 15 brought home to me one thing in particular in a new way: namely, just how inegalitarian it is. By this I don’t mean to refer to contemporary Christian debates about gender. I’m referring instead to structures of leadership and authority. I’ve seen this chapter used countless times as a paradigm for how a local church should practice corporate discernment, or come to a decision on some contested matter. But reading the chapter, you realize that that’s a fundamental misconstrual of the Jerusalem council.

For the council is not, nor is it about, a local matter. It’s quite explicitly about a distant matter, prompted by events and experiences hundreds of miles away. The Jerusalem church isn’t full of uncircumcised converts to The Way. Rather, Jerusalem is the origin and abiding center of The Way, housing its primatial leaders and authoritative spokesmen. The matter of gentiles and circumcision is taken from Asia Minor and Antioch through Phoenicia and Samaria to Jerusalem. And even those who bring it to Jerusalem have only a testimonial role to play; it is St. Peter, the chief apostle of the Twelve, and St. James, the head of the Jerusalem community, who declare (with the only speeches reported to us) the Spirit’s will in the dispute.

To be sure, we are told that the declaration involves the unanimous consent of the whole church (cf. v. 22); but even the most stubborn conservative will admit that the author is synthesizing and perhaps theologically airbrushing what continued, for some time, to be a question of considerable dispute among the churches—not least because they were spread far and wide, and technologies of communication meant that it took years of testimony, explanation, and persuasion to ensure that the faithful came to one mind on the matter. Note further, too, that it is not the people in general who gather for deliberation, but “the apostles and elders” (a phrase repeated no fewer than five times: vv. 2, 4, 6, 22, 23; following these mentions, the word apostolos does not appear in the remaining 13 chapters of the book, only presbyteroi—quite a fascinating lexical signal to the reader, when you think about it). Which means it is not only the formal, appointed leaders of the church who gather to discern and decide a contested question for “the” church; it is those leaders who reside in and speak from a location of recognized authority, in this case Jerusalem.

That sounds a whole lot like an ecumenical council, and not at all like a particular congregation practicing communal discernment. It’s neither local nor democratic. Some people’s voices bear authority, and others’ do not. Some are tasked with discovering the Spirit’s will, and others are not. Once the matter is decided, a document is issued, and the dispersed churches are tasked with receiving, obeying, and implementing the decision, not disputing or modifying it.

Again, isn’t this precisely what the episcopal synods of the fourth and fifth centuries, which set the template for subsequent councils, sound like? It’s not mere PR when the church fathers compare Nicaea and Constantinople and the rest to the blueprint of Acts 15. The Jerusalem gathering is the proto–ecumenical council, and thus the paradigm for all future attempts by the church’s supra-congregational hierarchy to respond to, and when necessary settle, volatile questions of major scriptural, theological, or moral import. Accordingly, the promulgations that proceed from such councils are rightly prefaced by, and received as justifiably asserting, “It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us…”

All the more so if, as the church claimed from the beginning (and, so far as I am aware, continued to claim universally and unanimously from the third century through the fifteenth), her episcopoi are appointed, or ordained, as successors to the apostles. So that, in an ecumenical council beyond the apostolic age, episcopoi and presbyteroi gather on the model of Acts 15, hear testimony, deliberate, argue, pray, interpret Scripture, and render a judgment—with authority.

Perhaps there are reasons not to think such an action desirable, possible, or otherwise worth pursuing, whether in the past or in the present (after, for example, the Great Schism or the Reformation). At a minimum, it’s difficult to deny that the pattern is in strict imitation of the Jerusalem council, or that seeing in the Jerusalem council a pattern for local congregational discernment is a poor interpretation indeed.

Peter van Inwagen on disciplinary hubris, relevant expertise, expectations of deference, and ordinary prudence

In the early 1990s the philosopher Peter van Inwagen wrote an essay called "Critical Studies of the New Testament and the User of the New Testament." It is a long, detailed philosophical investigation of the epistemic nature, or status, of academic biblical scholarship; specifically, it asks whether ordinary Christians or readers of the Bible ought to consult such scholarship, or defer to its judgments, prior to or in the course of their readings of the Bible or accompanying theological judgments. After many pages, his answer is a firm No. Here are the final paragraphs of the essay (bolded emphases are mine):

I conclude that there is no reason for me to think that Critical Studies have established that the New Testament narratives are historically unreliable. In fact, there is no reason for me to think that they have established any important thesis about the New Testament. I might, of course, change my mind if I knew more. But how much time shall I devote to coming to know more? My own theological writings, insofar as they draw on contemporary knowledge, draw on formal logic, cos­mology, and evolutionary biology. I need to know a great deal more about these subjects than I do. How much time shall I take away from my study of them to devote to New Testament studies (as opposed to the study of the New Testament)? The answer seems to me to be: very little. I would suggest that various seminaries and divinity schools might consider devoting a portion of their curricula to these subjects (not to mention the systematic study of the Fathers!), even if this had to be done at the expense of some of the time currently devoted to Critical Studies.

 Let me close by considering a tu quoque. Is not philosophy open to many of the charges I have brought against Critical Studies? Is not philosophy argument without end? Is not what philosophers agree about just precisely nothing? Are not the methods and arguments of many philosophers (especially those who reach extreme conclusions) so bad that an outsider encountering them for the first time might well charitably conclude that he must be missing something? Must one not devote years of systematic study to philosophy before one is competent to think philosophically about whether we have free will or whether there is an objective morality or whether knowledge is possible?—and yet, is one not entitled to believe in free will and knowledge and morality even if one has never read a single page of philosophy?

Ego quoque. If you are not a philosopher, you would be crazy to go to the philosophers to find anything out—other than what it is that the philosophers say. If a philosopher tells you that you must, on methodological grounds, since he is the expert, take his word for something—that there is free will, say, or that morality is only convention—you should tell him that philosophy has not earned the right to make such demands. Philosophy is, I think, valuable. It is a good thing for the study of philosophy to be pursued, both by experts and by amateurs. But from the premise that it is a good thing for a certain field of study to be pursued by experts, the conclusion does not follow that that field of study comprises experts who can tell you things you need to attend to before you can practice a religion or join a political party or become a conscientious objector. And from the premise that it is a good thing for a certain field of study to be pursued by amateurs, the conclusion does not follow that anyone is under an obligation to become an amateur in that field.

This is very close to some of the depreciatory statements I have made about the authority of Critical Studies. Since I regard philosophy as a Good Thing, it should be clear that I do not suppose that my arguments lend any support to the conclusion that the critical study of the New Testament is not a Good Thing. Whether it is, I have no idea. I don't know enough about it to know whether it is. I have argued only that the very little I do know about Critical Studies is sufficient to establish that users of the New Testament need not—but I have said nothing against their doing so—attend very carefully to it. (God, Knowledge, and Mystery [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995], 189–190)

The choice quote here, reduced to a general maxim:

If an [expert in X] tells you that you must, on methodological grounds, since he is the expert, take his word for something, you should tell him that [X] has not earned the right to make such demands.

One cannot substitute just anything for "X," but one can substitute most things, and certainly anything outside the hardest of hard disciplines. Any and all discursive practices and realms of knowledge in which prudence is required or normative questions are involved, or in which ongoing contestation, adjudication, and dissent are prominent or at least typical, are by definition substitutable for "X." Moreover, if a legitimate expert in X attempts to mandate deference to her authority, but in this case regarding not X but Y, the attempt is patently fallacious, mendacious, confused, and absurd. One owes such an attempt and such an expert little more than an eye-roll, though laughter and mockery are warranted.

Let the reader understand.

Scripture's precedence is not chronological

Protestants, especially Evangelicals, have a bad habit of defending Scripture's precedence with respect to the present-day church community by reference to its otherness, that is, its status as a text that precedes the community in time and stands over against it as an entity of which it is not the source. This is a bad habit because some members of the church (i.e., the apostles and their co-laborers) did write Scripture—the New Testament in this case—and, moreover, textuality per se does not require ancient provenance. It is a bad habit, further, because it is an unnecessary argument.

Thinking about that bad habit put me in mind of a brief discussion late in my dissertation, discussing John Howard Yoder's theology of Scripture. There I write, "Yoder is right to argue for Scripture’s independence, or externality. This claim entails neither denial of Scripture’s human craftsmanship or ecclesial habitat (which Yoder acknowledges), nor reference to its antiquity or alien cultural origins (which Yoder does at times fall prey to), but rather recognition of its integral, inassimilable character as other than and prior to the church."

To that I append the following footnote: "Primarily in the sense of having priority (i.e., authority, precedence), but also, in part, chronological priority. Israel and its Scriptures preceded Pentecost absolutely, and the apostles and their writings precede the rest of the church for the most part. But note that neither chronological priority nor cultural alienness is a sufficient condition for true otherness or authority. The pope is other than me, but contemporaneous and perhaps culturally familiar. Those latter two features do not ipso facto nullify his (potential and potentially infallible) authority over me."

If—and it is quite a conditional, I admit—the bishop of Rome stands to the church catholic today as the apostles did to the church in their day, then neither Scripture's antiquity nor its status as a text that I did not author have no bearing on its authority for me. Better arguments are required to secure its authority and, more specifically, what Yoder calls its "independence" over against the church.