My latest: a review of Matthew Thiessen on the Jewish Paul

I’m in the latest issue of Commonweal with a review of Matthew Thiessen’s book A Jewish Paul: The Messiah’s Herald to the Gentiles. Here’s how it opens:

Of all conversion stories, St. Paul’s is surely the most famous. As a zealous Pharisee, Saul was a tortured soul persecuting his fellow Jews for their dangerous faith in a failed Messiah. Starting in Jerusalem, this band of messianic Jews proclaimed a message that was catching like a plague. And just as with plagues inflicted on Israel in the past, God’s people needed a righteous man to rise up and put an end to it. Once disciplined, these wayward Jews would come to see the light. They would give up their nonsense about a crucified King; they would return to strict observance of God’s Law; and God’s punishment of his people would come to an end.

But on the road to Damascus, God stopped Saul in his tracks. He blinded him with heavenly light. He indicted him for his murderous ways. And he appointed him an apostle to the gentiles. Within days Saul was baptized and preaching the good news that God raised Jesus from the dead. Naturally, he gave up the Law of Moses, since Jesus had fulfilled the Torah and thereby rendered its observance optional, negligible, even obsolete. What mattered now was faith, a posture of receptivity and trust in God’s promises available not only to Saul’s fellow Jews but to non-Jews as well. Saul took this message across the Roman Empire, effectively founding the Church as we know it: predominantly gentile, faith-centered, and Law-free.

This is how Saul became Paul—how the persecuting Pharisee gave up Judaism for Christianity. Except that it isn’t, at least not in key respects.

Click here to read on.

A therapeutic church is an atheist church

Two friends of mine, Richard Beck and Jake Meador, have been beating similar drums lately, and it occurred to me today that their drums are in sync.

For some time, Richard has been writing about churches that function as though God does not exist. These churches advocate for forms of life, perspectives on the world, and political activism that often are, and certainly may be, good, but which do not in any way require God. God is an optional extra to the main thing. Needless to say, the children of these churches correctly imbibe the message, and eventually leave behind both church and God. After all, if you can have what the church is selling without either faith in God or, more important, the demands God places on your life, then it is only prudent to keep the baby but throw out the bathwater.

There’s much more to say than this, and Richard is very eloquent on the subject. Summarizing the point: The only reason to be a Christian is if (a) the God of Israel has raised Jesus the Messiah from the dead and (b) this event somehow does for you and for me what we could never do for ourselves, while being the singular answer to our most desperate needs. The only reason to be a Christian, in other words, is the gospel. And if the gospel is rendered redundant by a congregation’s life, worship, and teaching, then said congregation has put itself out of business, whether or not it knows it, whether or not it ever intended to do so. It has become, for all intents and purposes, an atheist church.

As for Jake, he has been writing recently about the therapeutic turn in the American church. A church has become therapeutic if the gospel is reduced, and reducible, to the premises and vocabulary, concepts and recommendations of therapy. A therapeutic church does not speak of sin, judgment, guilt, shame, wrath, hell, repentance, punishment, suffering, crucifixion, deliverance, salvation, Satan, demons, exorcism, and so forth. It takes most or all of these to be in need of translation or elimination: the latter, because they are outmoded or harmful to mental health; the former, because they are applicable to contemporary life but only in psychological, not spiritual, terms. A therapeutic church speaks instead, therefore, of wellness, health, toxicity, self-care, harm, safety, balance, affirmation, holding space, and being well-adjusted.

A church is not therapeutic if it endorses therapy and counseling offered by licensed professional as one among a number of potentially useful tools for people in need; any more than a church in favor of hospitals would be “medicalized” or a church promoting the arts would be “aestheticized.” The question is not whether mental health is real (it is), whether medication is sometimes worth prescribing (it is), or whether therapy can be helpful (it can be). The question is whether mental health is convertible with spiritual health. The question, that is, is whether the work of therapy is synonymous with the work of the gospel; whether the task of the counselor is one and the same as that of the pastor.

Answer: It is not.

This is where Jake’s point intersects with Richard’s. If the gospel is interchangeable with counseling, then people should stop attending church and hire counselors instead. Why not go straight to the source? Why settle for second best? If a minister is merely a so-so therapist with Jesus sprinkled on top, then parishioners can sleep in on Sundays, drop Jesus, and get professional therapy as they please, whenever they wish. I promise you, if what you’re after is twenty-first century quality therapy, neither Holy Scripture nor the Divine Liturgy is the thing for you.

Hence: a therapeutic church is an atheist church. Not because therapy is anti-gospel. Not because therapeutic churches are consciously atheistic. No, a therapeutic church is atheist because it has lost its raison d’être: it preaches a gospel without God. Which is not only an oxymoron but a wholesale inversion of the good news. The gospel is, as St. Paul puts it, “the good news of God.” And if, as he puts it elsewhere, God has not raised Jesus from the dead, we of all people are most to be pitied.

A therapeutic church has, in this way, lost its nerve. It simply does not believe what it says it believes, what it is supposed to be preaching. It does not believe that the God revealed in Jesus Christ is the best possible news on planet earth, meant for every soul under heaven. It does not believe that the problems of people today, as at all times, have their final answer and ultimate fulfillment in the Word made flesh. Or, to the extent that it does believe this, it is scared to say so, because the folks in the pews do not want to hear that. They want to be affirmed in their identities, in their desires, in their blemishes and failures and foibles. They do not want to be judged by God. They do not want to be told they need saving by God. They do not want to learn that their plight is so dire that the God who created the universe had to die for their sins on a cross. They want to be told: I’m okay, you’re okay, we’re all okay—so long as we accept our imperfections and refuse the siren songs of guilt and shame. They want, in a word, to be heard, to be seen, and to be accepted just as they are.

There is a reason people are going to churches looking for that, why churches are increasingly offering it to them. It’s near to the gospel. But the overlap is incomplete. God is not a therapist, and his principal goal in Christ is not to ensure a high degree of mental health in the context of a larger successful venture in upper-middle class professional/family life. God, rather, is in the business of holiness. And as Stanley Hauerwas has observed, vanishingly few of the saints would qualify as “well-adjusted.” The risen Lord without warning struck Paul blind and subsequently informed Ananias, “I will show him how much he must suffer for my name” (Acts 9:16). Has anyone read a Pauline epistle and thought, Now this is a picture of stable mental health? The flame of holiness knows no bounds; it leaves burns and scars painful to the touch; it scorches the mind no less than the body:

And to keep me from being too elated by the abundance of revelations, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan, to harass me, to keep me from being too elated. Three times I besought the Lord about this, that it should leave me; but he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” I will all the more gladly boast of my weaknesses, that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities; for when I am weak, then I am strong. (2 Cor 12:7-10)

I cannot say whether the author of these words was entirely well. But he was an apostle, and then a martyr, and now a saint. To say the same thing another way, his life was and remains unintelligible if the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is a fiction. No God, no Paul. The same should be said (should be sayable) of every church and every Christian in the world—at least by aspiration, at least in terms of what they say about themselves, whatever the extent to which they succeed or fail to meet the goal.

The more, however, a congregation becomes therapeutic, in its language, its liturgy, its morals, its common life, the more God recedes from the picture. God becomes secondary, then tertiary, then ornamental, then metaphorical, then finally superfluous. The old-timers keep God on mostly out of muscle memory, but the younger generations know the score. They don’t quit church and stop believing in God because of a lack of catechesis, as if they weren’t listening on Sundays. They were listening all right. The catechesis didn’t fail; it worked, only too well. The twenty- and thirty-somethings were preached right out of the gospel—albeit with the best of intentions and a smile on every minister and usher’s face. They smiled right back, and headed for the exit sign.

On “Christian masculinity”

Christian talk about what it means to be a man begins and ends with the man Jesus Christ. The church looks to Jesus the Nazarene first in everything, and this topic is no exception. The church does not begin elsewhere, either in Scripture or in tradition or in history or in literature or in contemporary culture. The church begins with the gospel of Jesus, always.

The gospel tells us of the Word made flesh, the man who was and is God incarnate. Jesus contains the fullness of wisdom and knowledge concerning all things, but it is not as though we have to try hard to see the relevance of Jesus to questions about masculinity. We aren’t asking about the capital gains tax or whether plants have souls. The man Jesus shows Christian men what it means to “be a man”—which is an implication of, though not the same as, the claim that Jesus, qua human, shows Christians what it means to be human—and he does so together with the great cloud of witnesses that surround him like so many echoes and images of the one archetypal anthropos. So in answering this question we look first to Jesus but also to his exemplary followers: apostles, saints, martyrs, doctors; Paul and Peter, Francis and Ignatius, Maximus and Cyprian, Basil and Gregory, et al.

What do we see when we look at these men, looking at Christ?

Here is what we don’t see. We don’t see worldly power. We don’t see physical potency. We don’t see wives. We don’t see children. We don’t see virility. We don’t see households. We don’t see possessions or estates or acclaim or family names passed on by sons, generation to generation. We don’t see dominion, rule, or lordship—not of the pagan kind, anyway. We don’t see violence. We don’t see what our culture understands as “manliness,” whether that word calls forth adulation or repudiation.

Here’s what we see instead.

We see dispossession. We see abstinence. We see defenselessness. We see, in worldly terms, powerlessness. We see loss, pain, rejection, and suffering. We see poverty, obedience, and celibacy. We see the end of a family name, the selling or giving away of inherited wealth. We see passivity: being mocked, being scourged, being handed over, being arrested, being tortured, being killed. We see public shame in public death.

These are the marks of the Messiah and, just so, the marks of his holy ones. They do not look like “masculinity” by any common definition I have encountered. Inasmuch as they relate to such a concept, they appear to be nothing so much as its refusal or inversion.

This is why I find myself so confused and repulsed by popular writing about “Christian masculinity.” I don’t reject all of its premises. Many parts of our culture today have made “being a man” a kind of pathology, at the very same time that young men, and men in general, are in dire straits. Our young men—society’s, to be sure, but I have in mind the boys in our churches—absolutely need our attention, our care, our instruction, our help. They need a vision of the good life straight from God. They need a word from Christ that meets them where they are. I am trying to do that with my own sons and with the young men in my classroom. It’s a group effort, and it’s all hands on deck. Let’s work up solutions to this crisis!

Yet invariably when I click on a link or open up a book on the subject, what I find is either pure paganism or a strange alchemy of biblical and cultural ideas about capital-m Manliness. Always such Manliness finds its highest expression in notions like physical strength, protection, procreation, provision, husbandhood, fatherhood, forging a household, entrepreneurship, forms of exercise, diet, hobbies like hunting, and military service. None of these things (with one or two possible exceptions) are bad in themselves. But they have next to nothing to do with a Christian understanding of manhood.

Again, fix your eyes on Jesus. Did Jesus marry? No. Did Jesus father children? No. Did Jesus protect others? No. Did Jesus defend himself? No. Did Jesus own possessions? Not really. Did Jesus build or maintain a household? No. Was he physically or socially impressive? Not by the standards of his day or ours.

Okay, granted, Jesus is the Son of God. What about a mere human man like Paul? Every single answer is the same. And unlike Jesus Paul is explicit that he wishes other believers were like him: sexless, childless, itinerant, and willing to suffer every hardship, including penury and mockery, for the sake of Christ crucified. When the world looks at Jesus and Paul, they see foolishness. The church believes this foolishness is the wisdom of God, but in earthly terms, it is foolishness nonetheless. Paul spends half his letters defending himself against the very sort of accusations the Manliness crowd would throw at him today: What a fool! Unimpressive! Chronically ill, physically disabled, dependent on others, a poor public speaker—who is this man? Why should we listen to him? There are certainly others (call them super apostles) who would make a better impression, not least on pagan neighbors who have reasonable expectations about manly church leadership.

But that’s just why Jesus chose Paul: “for he is a chosen instrument of mine to carry my name before the gentiles and kings and the sons of Israel; for I will show him how much he must suffer for the sake of my name” (Acts 9:15-16). As Paul confirms:

on my own behalf I will not boast, except of my weaknesses. Though if I wish to boast, I shall not be a fool, for I shall be speaking the truth. But I refrain from it, so that no one may think more of me than he sees in me or hears from me. And to keep me from being too elated by the abundance of revelations, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan, to harass me, to keep me from being too elated. Three times I besought the Lord about this, that it should leave me; but he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” I will all the more gladly boast of my weaknesses, that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities; for when I am weak, then I am strong. (2 Cor 12:5-10)

Worldly weakness is Christian strength. Human impotence is divine power. Suffering and death are signs of the Lord’s favor.

Earlier this year one author wrote:

A man embodying healthy masculinity knows who he is. He is physically healthy and strong. He is pursuing and developing his skills and capabilities to make him more competent and able to take action. He has a sense of agency, drive, and desire to make his mark on the world.

The indispensable Eve Tushnet replied on Twitter:

a man embodying healthy masculinity knows Whom he loves. he receives the stigmata regularly. he is pursuing and developing his prayer life to make him better prepared to suffer. he has a sense of obedience, humility, and desire to take the last place.

Eve is right. The paradigm of a faithful male human being is Jesus of Nazareth, and he doesn’t measure up to the earthly standards of masculine glory. Read The Iliad and see if you can find intimations of Jesus or Paul there. You won’t. The men of Achaea and Troy win glory and honor through killing other men, begetting other men, taking other men’s women, and plundering other men’s wealth. Neither Jesus nor his apostles does any of these things. Conjure up an image of them, as well as other male saints. They do not have the praise of men. They sire no sons, “win” no prizes (whether in gold or in flesh). The world accords them no honor. The contrast is extreme: They are instead punctured and penetrated, humbled and humiliated. The nails leave scars; the lungs expire; the blood spills; the skin is flayed; the head is lopped off. Jesus dies naked on a tree, to show pilgrims to Jerusalem who’s boss. All while peasant Peter, traitor and coward, weeps alone, away from the action.

These are the men who define what it means to be a Christian man; and they have countless imitators and exemplars who have persisted in their stubborn witness to Jesus’s way down through the centuries. To be sure, it is permitted to Christian men to marry, to have children, to own possessions. But this is the lesser way. The greater way is found in the monastery, where vows of obedience, poverty, and celibacy offer a taste, in this life, of the life of the world to come; a glimpse, in this earthly flesh, of the kingdom of heaven, come and coming in Christ. For in heaven there will be no marrying or giving in marriage; there will be no procreation; there will be no walls or armies or violence, for there will be no need for them. The Lord will provide all that we need. That life, the heavenly life to which we are all destined, is not the calling of all believers on earth, here and now, while we continue our sojourn from Eden to new creation; but it is available to all, and the vocation of some. In them—in those who renounce money and family along with their very autonomy—we see, not a pitiable lower estate, but the highest form of human flourishing this side of glory. What they have now, in part, we all will have then, in full. They are therefore, at present, the church’s models of the good life; accordingly, when they are men, they are models of masculinity. In them we see the Christ life made manifest among us. In them we see just what it means to taste and see that the Lord is good. For all they have is him. To have the Lord alone is by definition to have everything one needs. To have the Lord is to know him, and this knowledge is intimate, even conjugal. The monastic soul, figured feminine by sacred tradition, is betrothed to Christ the bridegroom; she has made room for him to enter, longing eagerly for the kiss of his mouth. In sweet union with him, in utter dependence on him, in total transparency to his will and his action, she is made complete. She is happy, at rest at last.

In a word, the monk of whose soul we speak has finally become what he was made to be: a man of God.

Jewish leaders in Acts

For various reasons I’ve been reading and re-reading Acts these last few months, and something jumped out at me for the first time. I believe I’m right in the following observation, though I welcome correction; I ran it by one Acts scholar I know, and she didn’t think I was wrong.

Here’s what I noticed: In the book of Acts, there is not a single gentile leader of the church, anywhere, in any city, with what you might call (like a drama or film) “a speaking part.” Put differently, in the book of Acts, the only named, “speaking role” leaders of the church are Jews—whether apostles, deacons, prophets, missionaries, evangelists, teachers, elders, or other.

Sight unseen, you might not have expected that. You might have expected St. Luke to want to display an integrated leadership, at some point in the narrative, or some sort of “hand off” in this or that gentile-dominant city or region. And to be sure, we ought to take for granted that in Ephesus or Corinth or Philippi, when St. Paul departs and/or when elders are appointed or referred to, some among them, perhaps most or all, are gentiles. But Luke apparently goes out of his way not to say more than this, certainly not to spotlight a top-billing gentile church leader.

In my view, this decision sheds light on, or is another way of thinking about, the absence of St. Titus in the book. The rest of Paul’s close companions whom he names in his letters are likewise named by Luke and provided backstories or thumbnail-sketch biographies. Yet Titus is nowhere to be seen. Doubtless there are many possible reasons for this, much dependent on disputed theories regarding who wrote Acts, when, and with what level of knowledge (intimate or distant) about Paul and his delegates.

Suppose, though, that Luke does know of Titus—and, further, that Titus is neither the same person as Timothy (a fascinating if extremely implausible theory put forward by Richard Fellows) nor the author of Acts (a far more intriguing and plausible hypothesis, though equally speculative, proposed by Felix Asiedu). Why might Luke then not have mentioned him? One answer is that Luke was at pains to show that the early church, in its first three decades of life, was a wholly Jewish-led and Jewish-derived phenomenon. Its origins lay in Jerusalem; it was about the Jewish Messiah; it was a fulfillment of Jewish prophecy; and its leaders were were Torah-observant Jews with names like Simeon, Jonah, Jacob (son of Zebedee), Jacob (the Lord’s brother), Joseph (called Bar-nava), and Saul. Further, those leaders from the diaspora with Greek names like Stephen, Philip, Silas, and Apollos were, to a man, Jews, and Luke is keen to ensure we know it. The limit case is Timothy, son of a gentile father and Jewish mother, whom Paul circumcises in 16:3 without any show of hesitation.

To be clear, the claim isn’t that no gentiles speak up in Acts. Many do. Some believe. Many do not believe, especially governors and kings. The claim, rather, is that Luke makes the glaring decision not to include one gentile “co-leader” or “co-laborer” alongside Paul in his missionary journeys. This gospel, Luke wants us to see, is the good news of Israel’s God, led by Israel’s sons, taken to the nations on Israel’s terms. Do not suppose that God has abandoned his people. As Paul would say, by no means.

In short, from the opening of volume 1 (the Gospel) to the end of volume 2 (the Acts) Luke is careful to render a narrative in which the advent of God’s Son and the outpouring of God’s Spirit are unquestionably the work of the one God, the God of Abraham, in fulfillment of his promises to Abraham’s children. Whatever one might say about the gospel, Luke has removed one potential criticism. Perhaps the move is apologetic: yes, the churches become majority-gentile all too quickly; yes, this presents questions and perhaps problems; but that doesn’t call into the question the nature or the origins of the church and her gospel. Those are found in the Jewish people, in their history and scriptures, as evidenced—clearly—by the leaders of the church’s first generation.

P.S. Having said all this, Asiedu’s proposal, that Titus is the author of Acts, takes on new resonance in light of the above observations. If Titus were the author, then (on one hand) his scrupulousness about which church leaders to feature is even more pronounced, while (on the other hand) he has not so much “erased” himself from the narrative as made himself invisible, through the “we” passages. So that readers of every kind are seeing this altogether Jewish story of the gospel of Israel’s Messiah taken to the gentile nations through the eyes of “Titus the Greek,” even as he makes himself “present” to the proceedings through the strategic use of the first-person plural, without ever actually telling us who he is or that one of the “we” in the room is himself a gentile co-worker in the Pauline mission. All speculative, granted. But it’s fun to speculate in any case.

Pseudo-Scorsese

It’s come to my attention that there are discrepancies in the filmography of American director Martin Scorsese. To be precise, certain films attributed to him evidently qualify as pseudirectoria (pseudokinemagraphia? pseudeikonzon?)—that is, instances of unnamed others claiming his name as director of a cinematic artifact, although the evidence suggests otherwise.

Consider three films, released across more than two decades’ time: The Age of Innocence (1993), Kundun (1997), and Silence (2016). Their subject matter, respectively: a historical romantic drama set in the 1870s among the upper class; the life of the Dalai Lama, set in Tibet in the middle of the twentieth century; and the plight of Catholic converts and their missionary priests in seventeenth century Japan.

Are we really supposed to believe that the director responsible for these films is the same man behind the camera—during the same time span!—for Goodfellas (1990), Casino (1995), and The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)? Not to mention Mean Streets (1973), Taxi Driver (1976), and Raging Bull (1980)? It beggars belief.

The visual grammar; the composition and editing; the characters, time periods, settings, and cultures; the dialogue; the feel—it’s all off. Someone else has been posing as Martin Scorsese in plain sight. Any honest comparison between the two groups of films will render the same result; any protest to the contrary is clearly a matter of special pleading.

The upshot: We have a Pseudo-Scorsese on our hands. The time has come to weigh the evidence and thence to sort the “official” or “received” Scorsese oeuvre into those films that are “authentic” or “undisputed” and those that are “inauthentic” or “disputed.” Historical and artistic integrity demands no less.

God’s love for Israel for its own sake

Any theological account of God’s relationship with Israel will have to approach it as a relationship that exists for its own sake. God loves Israel like a parent loves a child or like a husband loves a wife. Israel is not a means to a larger end but a love with its own intrinsic end. This is the way the Biblical narrative characterizes the relationship between God and Israel—in the Torah, in the prophets, and in Paul. Moreover, it is a relationship to which God commits Godself everlastingly. This forms the basis for Paul’s assertion of an eschatological universal Jewish salvation—they are beloved for the sake of the promises made to their ancestors.

This love is not exclusive. The Abrahamic blessing already implies that while Israel is not elected for the nations, its election will benefit the nations. They are blessed for Israel’s sake. God’s love for Abraham spills over to those around him. Paul offers a further interpretation of what this looks like: The Gentiles are to be included in Israel’s covenant, grafted onto Israel’s root and folded into Abraham’s family. To them now also belong “the adoption, the glory, the covenants.” The God who made promises to Israel is the one “from and through and to whom are all things” (Rom. 11:36). Nonetheless, this growing universalism of the narrative does not imply a waning particularism. It is Israel’s God to whom the nations are drawn; Israel’s root onto which they are grafted; Israel’s covenant in which they share. From being pagan polytheists they become monotheists. From being believers in violent or dualistic cosmogonies they embrace the Jewish idea of a good creation through a simple divine word. The ways they look at the world as the handiwork of the one God, the ways they reshape their ethics, the ways in which they conduct their liturgies are all shaped decisively by Jewish sources. They look forward to the glorious rule of a Jewish Messiah who will seat them with Abraham at a Jewish meal that they anticipate in every one of their worship services: the Messianic meal, the Eucharist. In short, they do something that Paul never had to do when he became a follower of Jesus: They convert. The eschaton is not a celebration of inclusive pluralism; it is the celebration of inclusion in Abraham’s family.

This Pauline account of God’s loving commitment to Israel and the grafting of the Gentiles onto the Jewish root aligns with the vision of Colossians and Ephesians of the patterned gathering of all things into Christ: beginning with Israel, the covenant with Abraham, and from there continuing with the Gentiles – those who once were far off, “aliens from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise” (Eph. 2:12)—being gathered into this covenant as well. This vision is, I argue, a supralapsarian vision: According to these letters, the gathering activity of Christ is not a response to sin but the goal of creation. Likewise, the covenant with Israel, as the first step of this gathering work, is supralapsarian. Paul’s account of Israel in Romans squares with this interpretation: a people established by God’s loving election not for the sake of a sin problem but for its own sake and loved eschatologically, long after sin’s reign has ended.

 —Edwin Chr. van Driel, Rethinking Paul: Protestant Theology and Pauline Exegesis (Cambridge University Press, 2021), 310-312

Subjunctive scholarship

If you read enough biblical scholarship, you come to realize that one of the guild’s endemic features—for at least a century, probably two—is an overweening confidence in its claims. Such claims usually partake of a rhetoric of calm certainty; all too often what are contestable judgments based on slim evidence are instead asserted as facts, or at least as bearing a supreme likelihood of being true. These judgments in turn become the basis for still further judgments, or proposals, that are themselves even flimsier in terms of probability or breadth of justifying reasons. So far as I can tell, this style of scholarship is of a piece with the broader approach not only of history but also the social sciences.

I’m not here to bury these disciplines. Rather, I want to suggest what I wish biblical scholars would do in their work. Better put, how I wish they would approach their subject matter and write about it. A certain sensibility and style. Call it the subjunctive mode.

I can think of at least two ways the subjunctive mode of scholarship would work. One would be marked by variations on this phrase:

In what follows I will write as if it were the case that X, though I am by no means certain or even confident that this hypothesis is true…

Note well that this style would neither eliminate strong or interesting rhetoric in the outworking of theories nor require constant and repetitive qualifications of such theories. It would only make clear—with no ifs, ands, or buts—that one or more premises of the work are arguable, indeed so arguable that it would be laughable to presume them to be self-evidently true to any reasonable person. Such a proviso would also signal the self-awareness on the part of the scholar that seemingly commonsensical consensus scholarly judgments inevitably come under fire in and by subsequent generations of scholars. What is taken for granted today is up for grabs tomorrow. No reason to act as though that isn’t the case. Moreover, to remember as well as acknowledge it surely increases humility and fallibilism in one’s own epistemic habits.

Here’s a second way the subjunctive mode could work in scholarly writing:

In this essay/book I will follow lines of speculative reflection regarding a set of issues about which we lack anything close to sufficient evidence to support confident claims; accordingly, my ideas and proposals will follow a certain pattern: “If it is the case that X, then Y might reasonably follow,” allowing that I can make no dispositive arguments in favor of X, and that any number of alternatives to X are plausible; for that reason I will also trace some of those plausible alternatives and see what they might lead.”

Among theologians, Paul Griffiths is a model of this approach. In his book Decreation, for instance, he regularly offers forks in the road to the reader, before following one, then the other, to wherever it leads. He makes no commitment to either being true, or at least obviously true. He simply suggests that both are plausible, and makes arguments for what would be the case if either were true—admitting, too, that it may well be the case that neither is true.

I most often find myself wishing biblical scholars did this (and they do, though in my experience only in the tiniest of historical and textual details) when reading their work on the dating of New Testament texts. I am utterly uninterested in a scholar spinning 10,000 theories on the single basis—sorry, “fact”—that no Gospel was written before AD 70, or that St. James’s epistle wasn’t written before the extant letters of St. Paul, or that the latter’s so-called disputed letters couldn’t possibly have been written by him, or that Luke–Acts unquestionably belongs to the turn of the second century, or that the beloved disciple wasn’t an eyewitness of Jesus’s comings and goings in Jerusalem, or that Mary obviously gave birth to brothers and sisters of Jesus. What I see in this kind of rhetoric is, on one hand, a confounding absence of curiosity; and, on the other, a wholly unwarranted confidence in the to-any-reasonable-person-or-serious-scholar certainty of one’s presuppositions. But those presuppositions, precisely as premises, are conclusions to arguments, and those arguments comprise probabilistic judgments of contestable processes of reasoning built on slim evidence, incommensurate and inadjudicable methodological frameworks, and finally subjective acts of interpretation that depend heavily for their value on intellectual virtues like honesty, modesty, courage, and prudence. In a word, they are defeasible, even when they are defensible.

Better to say: “So far as it seems to me, the evidence suggests that St. Mark’s Gospel was written in the late 60s, and partakes of knowledge of the assault on Jerusalem and its temple. Having said that, there are reasons to suppose otherwise. So in what follows the main thrust of my proposals will presume the former dating, but where appropriate, I will suggest what might be the case if I am wrong—as I no doubt I am, if not in this then in another matter.”

I remember, for example, reading a brilliant Pauline scholar asserting as an incontestable fact that the disputed letters are pseudonymous and that Romans is the last of his “authentic” letters to have been written. I don’t mind that assertion, modestly argued and supported with evidence and reasons. But what I wanted next was this: “And if I am wrong about that—if Philippians is dated AD 62, or if Ephesians is a circular letter delegated by St. Paul to St. Timothy to write in his name, or if Paul was released in 62 and later dictated his second epistle to Timothy from another Roman imprisonment circa 66—then that would alter my account of Pauline thought in the following ways…” I mean, why not admit that one might be wrong in one’s highly speculative hypothetical reconstructions of 2,000-year old texts and events? Why not trace alternative routes?

Why not, in short, write scholarship in the subjunctive mode?

The Book of Strange New Things, 1

I just finished Michel Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things, and I’ve got Thoughts. I didn’t hate it, but I didn’t love it either. I think I might expand on a couple reasons in future posts. But the first thing I have to say about the book is this.

The lead character is simply not believable.

Here are things that are true of him:

1. He is a Christian.

2. He is a British evangelical.

3. He is an adult convert.

4. He is an ex-addict, sober alcoholic, and onetime homeless person.

5. He is happily married.

6. He is a pastor.

7. He and his wife are partners in ministry.

8. Their ministry is extremely evangelistic; the sort that moves heaven and earth to reach a single soul.

9. Their church is very “low.”

10. Their church and ministry are Bible- and sermon-centric (liturgy and sacrament are, if I recall correctly, never mentioned).

11. Their evangelistic efforts include, for example, hand-crafted tracts and pamphlets for far-away “unreached” people groups.

12. They both agree, upon discovery of intelligent life on a distant planet, that it is God’s will for him, the husband-pastor, to journey light-years away to bring the gospel to this alien species.

13. Also, they both share misgivings about, bordering on dislike for, St. Paul.

14. Also, he, the husband-pastor, takes for granted that the Pastoral Epistles were written by St. Paul to St. Timothy in the year AD 68.

15. Also, he rejects with vehemence the doctrine of the resurrection of the body.

The story is set in the near future; though the year is never specified, it is probably meant to be sometime in the next 50-150 years.

Numbers 1 through 12 are perfectly believable. Number 14 would be consonant with them. Number 13 would be an odd fit; the reader would be right to expect more than a passing explanation (which she would not receive). But number 15 brings the whole edifice crumbling down.

Let me instance very nearly the only reference to bodily resurrection in all 500 pages of the novel:

Jesus Lover Five [an alien believer] had fallen silent. Peter couldn’t tell if she was persuaded, reassured, sulking or what. What had she meant, anyway? Was Kurtzberg [the alien congregation’s former missionary-pastor from Earth] one of those Lutheran-flavored fundamentalists who believed that dead Christians would one day be resurrected into their old bodies—magically freshened up and incorruptible, with no capacity to feel pain, hunger or pleasure—and go on to use those bodies for the rest of eternity? Peter had no time for that doctrine himself. Death was decay, decay was decay, only the spirit endured.

The author, Faber, is unfailingly unpatronizing in his own (alien) inhabitation of an evangelical missionary’s mind and thoughts, even his piety. But this false note is telling. Like a fart in a fugue, it afflicts the whole. And the fact that it comes halfway through the novel, with neither preparation nor elaboration, tells us that the author cannot hear the dissonance, does not smell the stench.

Bible-centric low-church hyper-evangelistic born-again missionary-pastors are, without exception, Pauline in flavor and faith, and above all they are adamant believers in the resurrection of the body: first Jesus’s, then believers’. There are no exceptions to this rule. They do not pick and choose books of the New Testament with which they disagree or in which they casually disbelieve. To begin to do such a thing, to begin to make exceptions, is to cease to be a Bible-centric low-church hyper-evangelistic born-again missionary-pastor, one willing to move heaven and earth to win a single soul, to place a New Testament in the hands of a single unbeliever.

Perhaps I exaggerate. Perhaps Faber is himself such a person (though, from what I can tell, he most certainly is not), or perhaps he knows such a person. But such a person in unique on this planet. To make such a unique person the protagonist of a novel, one must know, and show that one knows, that he is indeed so unique; and, thereupon, to sketch what led to his being thus unique. That Faber does not offer that sketch suggests to me, his reader, that he lacks this knowledge. Lacking it, the novel’s central character does not hold together. Which means the novel does not hold together.

Ahab, slave to the dread tyrant Sin: Melville's dramatic exegesis of Romans 7

Near the finale of Moby-Dick, in the closing moments of the last chapter before the great chase for the white whale begins, gloomy Ahab has one final heartfelt conversation with Starbuck, his earnest and home-loving first mate. At the very moment when the climactic encounter is nigh, Ahab looks to pull back. And Starbuck is eager to help him do so. They converse on the deck, Ahab unsure of himself and Starbuck pleading with him, wooing him, conjuring the decision against the fatal hunt that he so hopes Ahab is capable of making. And just when Starbuck thinks he has his quarry, something inexplicable and wholly mysterious changes in Ahab. Here is Melville:

But Ahab's glance was averted; like a blighted fruit tree he shook, and cast his last, cindered apple to the soil.

"What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural lovings and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time; recklessly making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural heart, I durst not so much as dare? Is it Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm? But if the great sun move not of himself; but is as an errand-boy in heaven; nor one single star can revolve, but by some invisible power; how then can this one small heart beat; this one small brain think thoughts; unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does that living, and not I. By heaven, man, we are turned round and round in this world, like yonder windlass, and Fate is the handspike. And all the time, lo! that smiling sky, and this unsounded sea! Look! see yon Albicore! who put it into him to chase and fang that flying-fish? Where do murderers go, man! Who's to doom, when the judge himself is dragged to the bar? But it is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky; and the air smells now, as if it blew from a far-away meadow; they have been making hay somewhere under the slopes of the Andes, Starbuck, and the mowers are sleeping among the new-mown hay. Sleeping? Aye, toil we how we may, we all sleep at last on the field. Sleep? Aye, and rust amid greenness; as last year's scythes flung down, and left in the half-cut swaths—Starbuck!"

Melville is playing out for us here, in dramatic form, the similar soliloquy of St. Paul in chapter 7 of his epistle to the Romans:

I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good. So then it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me. For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me.  So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. (vv. 15-21)

The "old man" weighed down by the flesh, Adam in his chains, lies in the squalor of bondage to sin—not just his own sins, but Sin, a sort of emergent personified power, a tyrant who reigns over the fallen children of Adam. Such a one is by definition unfree, and therefore utterly unfree even to choose the good, and therefore absolutely incapable of saving himself. Even with the wise route laid out before him, he cannot act. He needs a savior and more than a savior: a rival king to trample down Sin's false kingdom, and together with him to put to Death to death.

So argues Matthew Croasmun in his book The Emergence of Sin: The Cosmic Tyrant in Romans. (See further Wesley Hill's stimulating reflections on the book.) Ahab exemplifies Croasmun's thesis.

But because Melville is Melville, he's up to even more. Notice the brief, seemingly throwaway prefatory line of poetic simile: "But Ahab's glance was averted; like a blighted fruit tree he shook, and cast his last, cindered apple to the soil." Melville knows he's depicting the old man; he knows he writes of Adam. That is why he places us in a garden with a spoiled tree with its spoiled fruit "cast"—fallen—to the "soil"—adamah. And it is why, finally, he begins with the gaze: "Ahab's glance was averted." As St. Augustine writes in Book XIV of City of God, the sin of Adam was not per se the eating of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; evil acts come from an evil will. (Augustine quotes Jesus from the Sermon on the Mount to note that evil fruit could only come—metaphorically—from an evil tree—the will of the first man.) Whence Adam's evil will, then? There is no trite answer, no easy explanation. In chapter 13 Augustine spells out the logic (italics all mine):

Our first parents fell into open disobedience because already they were secretly corrupted; for the evil act had never been done had not an evil will preceded it. And what is the origin of our evil will but pride? For "pride is the beginning of sin" (Sirach 10:13). And what is pride but the craving for undue exaltation? And this is undue exaltation, when the soul abandons Him to whom it ought to cleave as its end, and becomes a kind of end to itself. This happens when it becomes its own satisfaction. And it does so when it falls away from that unchangeable good which ought to satisfy it more than itself. This falling away is spontaneous; for if the will had remained steadfast in the love of that higher and changeless good by which it was illumined to intelligence and kindled into love, it would not have turned away to find satisfaction in itself, and so become frigid and benighted; the woman would not have believed the serpent spoke the truth, nor would the man have preferred the request of his wife to the command of God, nor have supposed that it was a venial transgression to cleave to the partner of his life even in a partnership of sin. The wicked deed, then—that is to say, the transgression of eating the forbidden fruit—was committed by persons who were already wicked.

Evil acts have their source in an evil will, and a will becomes evil when it becomes uncoupled from its true end and finds its end in itself. To become one's own end is to fall away from the true and eternal Good that alone satisfies the longings of the soul. "This falling away is spontaneous": there is no narrative, no logic, no inner rationale much less necessity, that can account for it. It just happens. The image Augustine uses for this spontaneous falling is "turning away," depicted as a kind of anti-repentance. Adam turns his eyes from God, his final End and supreme Good, to lesser things. Doing so just is The Fall.

And that is just what Melville his his Adam, Ahab, do in response to Starbuck's eminently reasonable efforts to persuade: "But Ahab's glance was averted." By what? To what? Why? We aren't told. It's spontaneous; there is no explanation to be sought because there is no explanation to be had. Ahab's turn is a surd like all sin is a surd. It has no reason, for it is no-reason, not-reason incarnate. His desire has overwhelmed his sense; his craving has overtaken his will; he himself has become his own end, and answering the command of another, from without, he rushes to his fate "against all natural lovings and longings," no matter the cost, his own life and the life of his men be damned.

Damned, indeed. Ahab is Adam without a second Adam. There is no savior in his story, even if Starbuck stands in for one as a kind of messenger or angel. Ahab, that archetypal self-made American man, is finally not the captain of his own ship. The captain of the Pequod is rather that "cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor" in whose service Ahab places himself when he baptizes the barb meant for the white whale: "Ego non baptizo te in nomine patris, sed in nomine diaboli."

The devil is Ahab's lord, as he is fallen Adam's master. He reigns in their death-bound lives through their bent and broken wills by the tyrannical power of Sin. Absent intervention, Adam's fate is Ahab's: to be drowned eternally in the depths of the sea, bound by the lines of his own consecrated weaponry to the impervious hide of Leviathan: the very object to which his gaze turned, the means of his helpless demise.

New essay published in The Los Angeles Review of Books: "Enter Paul"

I have a new essay published this morning over in The Los Angeles Review of Books, titled "Enter Paul," on Paula Fredriksen's two latest books, Paul: The Pagans' Apostle and When Christians Were Jews: The First Generation (both from Yale University Press). Here's a sample:

"Put it this way: an itinerant rabbi from the Galilee — the backwaters of Palestine — leads a popular movement among the Jews, one that comes to an ignominious end when he is executed for sedition by the Roman authorities. Some of his followers form a small community in Jerusalem, proclaiming that not only was this rabbi and prophet the longed-for Messiah of Israel, but he is alive, in glory with God, vested with impregnable power and heavenly authority. These messianic Jews share goods in common and worship daily at the temple, praying and waiting eagerly for Jesus’s imminent return, when he will drive out the pagan occupiers and restore his people’s fortunes.

"Pause the frame there. Nothing about this picture offers even a hint that this same community — one defined by exclusive loyalty to Jesus, Israel’s Messiah and Lord — will, centuries hence, find itself filling the Roman Empire, legalized and endorsed by that same empire, dominated by gentiles, not Jews, and led by men like Aurelius Augustinus Hipponensis.

"How did this happen? Why did it happen? To answer, we need to leave Augustine behind and follow Fredriksen into the world of the eastern Mediterranean in the first century of the common era, specifically Jewish life under the thumb of the Roman Empire."

Read the rest.

On Paul, apocalyptic theology, and the rest of the New Testament

I'm nearing the end of a full academic year teaching the New Testament to freshmen. Many of my students are new to the Bible, or at least to reading the Bible. I taught the Gospels in the fall, focusing primarily on Mark, and this spring I've taught the rest of the New Testament, without skipping any books.

Usually, the way the spring course works is revealed by its traditional title: Acts to Revelation. Both sequentially and substantively, the class is defined by the history Luke tells of the church's mission after the ascension of Jesus, which crystalizes around Paul's work among the gentiles; this, naturally, is followed by an extensive reading of Paul's letters, beginning with Romans. Then the catholic epistles and Revelation invariably find themselves scrunched together at the end.

On a lark, I decided to try to de-center Paul from the course structure, and to see what would happen. Here's how I've taught the course:

Acts (2 weeks)
James, 1–2 Peter, Jude, 1–3 John (2 weeks)
Hebrews (2 weeks)
Revelation (2 weeks)
[Spring Break]
1–2 Thessalonians, Philippians (2 weeks)
1–2 Corinthians (1 week)
Galatians & Romans (2 weeks)
Colossians, Ephesians, Philemon, Pastorals (2 weeks)

As you can see, my students don't even read a letter from Paul until the second half of the course; and they don't read Galatians or Romans until Week 12—in the final quarter of the semester.

I was prepared for this plan to backfire in a serious way, not least with so many students (all of whom are majoring in something other than the Bible) unfamiliar with the basic stories, persons, terms, and concepts of the New Testament. As it happens, the result has been better than I could have imagined. What my students have been exposed to—at least from my vantage point as the teacher—is a picture of the profound cultural, geographical, and theological diversity of the apostolic church in its first three generations of life. They have been asked to think about Peter's leadership in the early church; about the teaching of James Adelphotheos, in Acts and in the epistle that bears his name; about the gospel according to Hebrews; about the vision of Jesus and the church found in the Apocalypse; and so on. We spent a full six weeks basically not thinking about gentiles, concerned instead with specifically Jewish Christianity, its faith, its relationship to Israel's scriptures, its understanding of the Messiah, etc.

Put differently: My students didn't hear the phrase "justification by faith" until after they had read 19 other books in the New Testament: all four Gospels, everything Paul didn't write, and a few letters that he did. They weren't introduced to the Jesus of the Gospels plus Pauline Christianity. They were introduced, over the course of a year, to 27 different texts bearing witness to a dizzying display of distinct (though—a topic for another blog post—impressively complementary and unified) modes of approaching, understanding, and presenting the story and meaning of the good news about Jesus. It's true that 13 of those 27 texts bear Paul's name—though they are far from the majority of the New Testament in terms of overall length—and it's true that some of those 13 texts have been very important in the history of Christianity in the West. But they aren't the sum total of the gospel, either historically or theologically. And there is a way of teaching the New Testament that permits, even encourages, a certain selection of Pauline literature to dominate: to serve as a filter on everything else, as the master hermeneutic for the figure of Jesus, the early church, and the definition of the euangelion. My experiment has proven to me, at least, that that is neither necessary nor beneficial.

Which brings me to the topic of apocalyptic theology.

I read a fair bit of apocalyptic theology during my Master's work, and some of it made quite an impression on me. And I just got Phil Ziegler's book in the mail yesterday, which I am very much looking forward to reading. I have the highest respect not just for Ziegler but for all his compatriots in the apocalyptic vanguard.

As I read the introduction, however, it raised the following question. What do the apocalyptic folks do with those parts of the New Testament—in my view, a clear majority—that are not apocalyptic? Or at least, are not apocalyptic in the way that Romans and Galatians are? More to the point, is there a worked-out bibliological claim that positively asserts and defends the thesis that (a) the non-apocalyptic portions of the New Testament ought, normatively, to be read through apocalyptic Paulinism, and (b) those non-apocalyptic portions are, in some profound way, inadequate to the gospel?

I'm aware that there are vaguely supersessionistic, semi-Marcionite, and/or anti-Catholic modes of biblical scholarship and hyper-Protestantism that more or less explicitly cut out "the later catholic epistles" along with Hebrews, the Gospel of Matthew, Luke-Acts, and huge swaths of the Old Testament. I'm going to assume that the people I have in mind steer clear of those (alternately dangerous and silly) theological dead-ends.

But granting that assumption, does there exist a sustained, theologically robust answer to this set of questions? One that makes sense of, or constitutes, a doctrine of Scripture that isn't a pick-and-choose canon-within-the-canon, much less an arbitrary Paul's-the-only-one-who-really-truly-got-it-right?

If you know of resources, essays, books, etc., or if you yourself have an answer, holler. I'm all ears.

Ronald Knox on how to think of Paul's epistles

"So let's try and think of the Epistle, always, as a personal letter sent to us from St. Paul, or one of the other apostles, who is a long way away, but still very much interested in us. Take that Epistle this morning—there's nothing there, I think, St. Paul wouldn't be wanting to say, isn't wanting to say, to you or me. 'We have been praying for you, ' he says, 'unceasingly'; of course he has; the saints in Heaven go on praying all the time, and they pray for all Christian people. He has been praying that you and I may have a closer knowledge of God's will; that you and I may live as God's servants, waiting continually on his pleasure; that you and I may be inspired with full strength, to be patient and to endure; isn't that nice of him? We feel inclined to say "Hurrah!" at the end of it; only we don't say it; we just think "Hurrah!" when the server says Deo Gratias."

—Ronald Knox, The Mass in Slow Motion (Aeterna Press, 2014 [1948]), 26