Links: three reviews, three podcasts

I’ve fallen behind in my link updates, partly because of busyness, partly because the Micro.blog is so much easier for such things. But! Here are three podcasts I appeared on in the last few months, followed by a round-up of three new reviews of The Church’s Book: Theology of Scripture in Ecclesial Context.

Podcasts:

• Holy C of E, “A Catholic View of Scripture” (July 1), available on Spotify and Apple. Lot of high Anglican content here.

• The London Lyceum, “The Doctrine of Scripture” (July 10), available on Spotify and Apple. A rich conversation about Protestant approaches to and questions about Scripture.

• Speakeasy Theology, “The Scandal of Theology” (August 12), available on Apple and Substack. A long, meandering, and wonderful chat with Chris Green about Robert Jenson, wicked theologians, and original sin. To be continued.

Reviews:

• Joel B. Green, Interpretation 78:2 (2024): 174–75. Green writes that

this book serves both as a charitable and analytical reading of three distinct approaches to the use of the Bible in theology and as a formidable proposal for the importance of one’s understanding of the church for one’s interpretation of Scripture. The result is a welcome contribution to theological hermeneutics and to ongoing discussion of theological interpretation of Scripture. For those who imagine that their theological engagement with the Bible proceeds from text to doctrine, East offers an important corrective.

• Keith Stanglin, Calvin Theological Journal 59:1 (2024): 191–93. Stanglin writes: “The excursus alone, with implications that transcend Yoder’s case, is a rather full and careful account of how” to engage work produced by Christians and other writers who, while alive, perpetrated great evil against others. Stanglin concludes: “Through it all, East effectively illuminates a significant link that sometimes remains obscure in theological discourse,” namely between ecclesiology and bibliology.

• John Kern, Restoration Quarterly 66:3 (2024): 184–85. Kern writes:

Ultimately, this book is an exemplary work in contemporary systematic theology. It is historically attuned to the nuances of the figures that it treats. Even so, it evaluates their strengths and weaknesses, all while offering clear paths for bringing the best of their proposals together for a fuller vision. East never loses his constructive edge even while simply trying to get the figures right on their own terms. Even more, he does all of this while keeping his eye on the primary objective: to account for the divisions found among practitioners of [theological interpretation of Scripture]. He accomplishes this and so much more. Even tracing the lineage of these three theologians from Karl Barth’s influence would have been contribution sufficient to warrant a monograph, but East has found multiple ways to carry this conversation forward. The book is necessary reading for theologians and biblical scholars alike for the way it shows a point at once simple and deep: how one understands the church impacts how one understands the Bible as Scripture. It might not ultimately unify the differences between the different ecclesiological paradigms for bibliology, but East has helped theology in a major way by disambiguating the conflicts, showing where they truly originate.

The unspoken Name

In my experience, casual pronunciation of the divine Name is a telltale sign of an evangelical having attended a Protestant seminary. Sometimes it’s as minimal as having read Walter Brueggemann. (If he can do it, so can I!) Old Testament scholars in general can be the culprit, but far from always; of all Christians they’re usually the most familiar with Jewish writing and thought—with living Jews themselves and the ongoing practice of the synagogue—which means they tend to know better.

I decided a long time ago that I would forbear from enunciating the Name, if only out of respect for Jewish piety. There were always additional reasons, but I saw no excuse to transgress on thousands of years of Jewish and Christian devotional and liturgical reticence out of nothing more than an inflated sense of contemporary exegetical confidence.

In his latest book, Irrevocable: The Name of God and the Unity of the Christian Bible (2022), Kendall Soulen provides an additional reason for reverent non-vocalization of the Name, a reason so simple I can’t believe I’ve never encountered it before.

Start with why certain pastors and writers, usually but not exclusively evangelical, choose to vocalize the Name. First, because a name is meant to be spoken. God introduced himself by name to his people; shouldn’t we use it? Second, because the rabbinical practice of building fences around the Torah is not Christian; if gentile believers are not bound by ceremonial Law, much less rabbinic elaboration thereof, then they (we) have no reason to honor this convention while ignoring all others. Third and finally, the Bible itself does not forbid saying the Name. Absent explicit divine prohibition, we are free to do as we please (with sober reverence and pious speech, you’d think it would go without saying, but anecdotally that is far from the case—the hypothetical reconstruction “Y-a-h-w-e-h” becomes at once nickname and talisman, even as it signals the insider status and erudition of the speaker).

It’s worth mentioning a fourth reason that, thankfully, I’ve not seen in the wild: namely, that “YHWH” belongs to the old covenant; that it was God’s Name; that, therefore, this Name is of no lasting relevance to Christians, since it was replaced/superseded by either “Jesus” or “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” or both. Such a view would authorize merely historical reference to the Name, minus piety, faith, or reverence. Call this nominal Marcionism.

Here, in any case, is how Soulen responds: Nonpronunciation of YHWH is not unbiblical. Its chief practitioners are none other than the apostles. The New Testament is positively drenched in pious regard for the Name; you only have to read for a few verses before you discover a newly devised verbal mechanism to circumvent pronouncing the Name: the Power, the Blessed One, the Lord, He Who Sits On The Throne, the Living One, the Name That is Above Every Name—the list goes on and on.

And can you guess who is the principal model of piety regarding God’s Name?

It’s Jesus. He whose prayer begins, “Our Father,” turns first of all to God’s Name, asking that it be hallowed, consecrated, sanctified. Read the Sermon on the Mount. Read Jesus’s teachings on vows (in Matthew 6 and in Matthew 23). Read Jesus’s interrogation by the Sanhedrin (especially in Mark 14). Read Jesus’s “conversation” with God the Father in John 12 (the only such “back and forth” in any of the Gospels) about glorifying the Father’s Name and, later, Jesus’s high priestly prayer in John 17 regarding (again) the Father’s Name—which he, Jesus, says he received from the Father before he was sent into the world. That Name isn’t “Father”: Jesus is the Father’s Son. The Father’s Name is YHWH. Yet it is also Jesus’s own name, not only in this world but from all eternity. (Even at his birth his human name reveals it: Yeshua—YHWH is salvation.)

For all this, however, the Name is never spoken. Not by Jesus, not by the Twelve, not by the apostle to the gentiles. Always we find euphemism, circumlocution, indirection, silence.

Hence when Christians, like Jews, avoid verbalizing the holy Name of the Lord God of Israel—in prayer, in devotional reading of Scripture, in public worship—they are not following man-made, unbiblical tradition. They are following the New Testament’s own authoritative example. No document, ancient or modern, is so ruthlessly consistent in avoiding enunciating YHWH (aloud or in writing) as is the New Testament. The apostles are authoritative here as elsewhere. And they are only following Jesus’s own example.

Shouldn’t we?

Second naivete

Probably the most important element of C. S. Lewis’s conversion, at least in his telling of it, was that for a definite period of time between atheism and Christian faith he lived as a theist without any expectation of reward or afterlife. He knew from experience that one could believe in God, relate to God, obey the will of God just because; that is, just because God is God and one is not. Afterward, believing in the promises of Christ came with a certain sweetness but also a certain lightness or liberty: he did not feel compelled to believe, the way “God” and “pie in the sky” are conflated for so many people, but free to believe. The freedom lay in the gut-level knowledge that grace was grace, neither earned nor automatic.

I feel similarly about historical events reported in the Bible, especially in the Old Testament. For a definite period of time it was not important to me whether this or that discrete happening in Scripture “really” occurred, or occurred in the precise way reported, or occurred at the time and place reported. Perhaps Job or Daniel or Esther were pious fictions; perhaps the Israelites came out of Egypt but in some far less magnificent manner; perhaps David’s many origin stories were folk tales “rightly” remembered and surely worth retelling but not exactly what we would today judge to be “historically accurate.”

My faith was not threatened by these possibilities; it still is not. I am not and never have been any kind of strict inerrantist. If it turns out that, like a nineteenth-century painting of a days-long battle, stories in Scripture are not historical in the way we use that term or measure reportage today, the sum total of my response remains a shrug of the shoulders. If you tell me that Acts and Galatians’ chronologies are finally irreconcilable, I will do well if I suppress my yawn.

As I said, though, for a period of time this was my default setting: “The following ‘historical’ passage I am about to read from the canon may or may not be ‘historical’ at all.” A giant if invisible question mark floated above the text whenever I read, heard, or taught the Bible. Let’s say this ran for about a decade, from 18 to 28 years old, roughly my undergraduate, Master’s, and beginning doctoral years.

Then a funny thing happened. The default setting slowly shifted, mostly without my knowing it. I saw firsthand how the historical-critical sausage is made. I digested a good deal of it for myself. And I came to see that the confidence with which its assured results were delivered was entirely unearned.

Lowered confidence—from dogmatic pronouncements to measured statements of relative probability based on the available evidence (often minimal to begin with)—does not mean biblical criticism should be ignored, much less that it’s all wrong. But what it does mean, or at least has meant for me, is that it need not be treated with submission, docility, deference, or fear. The study of Scripture, whether secular or spiritual, is a humanistic enterprise. It involves interpretation, wisdom, good judgment, good humor, humility, and dispassionate assessment. Very nearly every one of the questions it poses admits of numerous good-faith answers, just as very nearly every one of its considered conclusions admits of good-faith disputation. It is healthy when it tolerates and nurtures dissent, unhealthy when majority positions calcify into dogmas that define the well-policed borders of “serious” scholarship. The one thing to hang your hat on in this field is that something “everybody knows” today will be contested, qualified, replaced, or surpassed in the next generation.

With the following result: The question mark has, for me, dissolved into thin air. I now read the Pastorals as Saint Paul’s without a troubled scholarly conscience; I read Acts as penned in the early 60s by Saint Luke; I read Daniel and Esther and Ruth as historical characters; the same goes for the patriarchs and Moses and Aaron and Miriam and Joshua. It all happened, just as the text says it did. Not because I’m ignorant of research that suggests otherwise; not because I’m a fundamentalist who needs it to be so, lest my faith’s house of cards tumble to the ground. No, it’s because I know what it’s like to be a Christian who supposed otherwise, whose faith was as untroubled then as it is now. I’ve weighed the evidence and found it, for the most part, wanting. Wanting, that is, in terms of compelling my and all others’ uncritical obedience to purported academic consensus. (Reports of consensus being always greatly exaggerated in any case.) I could be wrong. But I’m not worried about it.

Most of all, I couldn’t care less what some expert in the field thinks about my so-called naivete. If he wags his finger at me and cites the latest peer-reviewed journal, I’ll just roll my eyes. This time I won’t be able to stifle the yawn his pronouncements so dearly deserve.

My latest: the rise of digital lectors, in CT

My April 18 Christianity Today column was called “Biblical Literacy in a Postliterate Age.” Last week, on May 8, CT published my follow-up, titled “Digital Lectors for a Postliterate Age.”

I’d always intended a sequel, and later this summer I may write a final column to complete a loose trilogy of reflections on Scripture, literacy, and technology in the church. This latest one covers a range of creative responses to postliterate believers, seekers, and drifters, from the Bible Project to Father Mike’s The Bible in a Year podcast to Jonathan Pageau and the Symbolic World to Alastair Roberts and many others. I call them “digital lectors,” readers and expositors of Scripture for a digital—which is to say, a postliterate—age.

In between the two columns, there were a couple noteworthy interactions with my claims about the state of biblical literacy (and literacy in general) in the church. The first was a conversation on the Holy Post podcast between Skye Jethani and Kaitlyn Schiess; you can find it on video here, starting around minute 33. The second was a response from Jessica Hooten Wilson (whom I quote in the piece), in a piece on her Substack called “The Post-literate Church.” Both engagements are friendly, thoughtful, critical, and worth your time. I’m grateful to all of them for their reflections.

My latest: biblical literacy in a postliterate age, for CT

My latest column for Christianity Today is called “Biblical Literacy in a Postliterate Age.” Here’s how it opens:

Christians are readers. We are “people of the book.” We own personal Bibles, translated into our mother tongues, and read them daily. Picture “quiet time” and you’ll see a table, a cup of coffee, and a Bible spread open to dog-eared, highlighted, annotated pages. For Christians, daily Bible reading is the minimum standard for the life of faith. What kind of Christian, some of us may think, doesn’t meet this low bar?

This vision of our faith resonates for many. It certainly describes the way I was raised. As a snapshot of a slice of the church at a certain time in history—20th-century American evangelicals—it checks out. But as a timeless vision of what it means to follow Christ, it falls short, and it does so in a way that will seriously impinge on our ability to make disciples in an increasingly postliterate culture, a culture in which most people still understand the bare mechanics of reading but overwhelmingly consume audio and visual media instead.

This is a theme I’ve reflected on before here on the blog. Eventually I engage with recent writing on Gen Z literacy among college students by folks like Adam Kotsko, Jean Twenge, and Alan Jacobs. And I try to be tentative and non-despairing in the final turn. See what you think.

My latest: on Marilynne Robinson’s Reading Genesis in LARB

This morning The Los Angeles Review of Books published my review of Marilynne Robinson’s new book, Reading Genesis. Here are the opening two paragraphs:

MARILYNNE ROBINSON HAS always been a theologian at heart. It’s merely convention that theology today is one among dozens of specialized academic subdisciplines. If that’s what theology is, Robinson doesn’t write like it—and thank God for that. Theology’s mother tongue is prayer and confession, the language of the liturgy, but these aren’t genres so much as modes that transform disparate genres into vehicles of divine discourse. Like Jacob’s Ladder, the traffic runs both ways.

It just so happens that Robinson’s theology has taken shape in essays, novels, and prose so patient and unpatronizing that it’s embarrassing how long one sometimes takes to catch the point. She has been doing this for almost half a century. She has won all the awards, sold all the books, chatted with presidents, and garnered every laurel and medal. She has nothing to prove. And so, having just turned 80, she has chosen to mark the occasion by publishing a commentary on Genesis, the first book of the Torah.

Click here to rest the rest. (See also Francis Spufford’s review and Ezra Klein’s interview with Robinson.)

My latest: a review of Mark Noll in The Christian Century

In the new issue of The Christian Century I have a review of Mark Noll’s latest book, America’s Book: The Rise and Decline of a Bible Civilization, 1794–1911. Superlatives fail, as they usually do with Noll’s work. The book is more than a “mere” history, though. It has an argument to make. Here’s how I begin to lay it out:

The United States was, from the start, founded and widely understood as a repudiation of and alternative to European Christendom. Whatever the proper relationship between church and state, the federal government would have no established religion—would not, that is, tax citizens in sponsorship of a formal ecclesiastical body. On this arrangement, most nascent Americans agreed. What then would, or should, the implications be for Christian faith and doctrine in the public square? How could Christian society endure without the legal and political trappings of Christendom?

Answer: through the Bible. Not the Bible and; not the Bible as mediated by. The Bible alone. America would be the first of its kind: a “Bible civilization.” That is to say, a constitutional republic of coequal citizens whose common, voluntary trust in the truth and authority of Christian scripture would simultaneously (1) put the lie to the “necessity” of coercive religious regimes, (2) provide the moral character required for a liberal democracy to flourish, and (3) fulfill the promise of the Protestant Reformation. Sola scriptura thus became the unwritten law of the land. Regardless of one’s confession or tradition, the sufficiency of the Bible for all aspects of life—the canon as the cornerstone for religion, ethics, and politics alike—was axiomatic. For more than a century, it functioned as a given in public argument. Only rarely did it call for an argument itself.

Keep reading for more, including a disagreement with Noll regarding how to interpret prior generations’ disputes over how to read the Bible, in this case about chattel slavery.

Biblical critical theory

This morning Comment published my long review essay of Christopher Watkin’s new book Biblical Critical Theory. Here’s a bit about him and the book from the review:

Watkin is a scholar of modern and postmodern French and German philosophy. He has written a number of studies on major contemporary theorists like Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, and Serres. He earned his doctorate at Cambridge and teaches in Melbourne. This is not his first book for a popular audience, but it is certainly his biggest and boldest. Running more than six hundred pages and spanning the entire biblical narrative, the book closely follows the Augustinian blueprint. Watkin wrote the work he sought but couldn’t find in the library stacks: a biblical critical theory, in careful conversation with and counterpoint to the variety of secular critical theories on offer. Each of the scholars I mentioned above (MacIntyre et al.) is catholic in one form or another. Watkin saw this gap in the literature: an evangelical Protestant meta-response to (post)modernity. So he took up the task himself.

As I explain in detail in the review, I don’t think the book succeeds. Read on to find out why.

It’s always a pleasure to write for Comment. Thanks to Brian Dijkema and Jeff Reimer for ever-reliable editorial wisdom, and to unnamed friends who made the argument stronger in the drafting stage.

You can’t die for a question

I had some friends from quite different backgrounds do a bit of interrogation yesterday, following my post about biblicist versus catholic Christianity. Interrogation of me, that is. As is my wont, I sermonize and then qualify, or at least explain. Yesterday was the sermon. Today is the asterisk.

1. What I wrote has to do with a persistent conundrum I find myself utterly unable to solve. I cannot grasp either of two types of Christianity. The first lingers most in yesterday’s post. It is a form of the faith that never, ever grows; never, ever settles; never, ever stabilizes; never, ever knows. Its peculiar habit, rather, is always and perpetually to pull up stakes and go back to the beginning; to return to Go; to start from scratch; to question everything and, almost on purpose, to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Am I exaggerating? I’m not! Primitivist biblicism, rooted in nuda scriptura, affirms on principle that every tradition and all Christians, from the apostles to the present, not only may have gotten this or that wrong but did in fact get just about everything wrong. And this affirmation inexorably eats itself. For what the biblicist proposed yesterday is bound to be wrong tomorrow—that is, discovered by some other enterprising biblicist to belong to the catalogue of errors that is Christian history.

At the same time, this ouroborotic style of Christianity affirms a second principle: namely, the total sufficiency and perfect perspicuity of the canon. Come again? Didn’t we just say that everyone who’s ever read it got it wrong, until you/me? Indeed. Not only this, but the excavationist-reader of the clear-and-sufficient text somehow misses the fact that he is himself doing the very thing he chides the tradition for doing: namely, interpreting what requires no interpretation. The one thing we may be sure of is that his successor, following the example of his predecessor with perfect consistency, will fault him for his interpretation, while offering an alternative interpretation.

This whole dialectic makes me crazy. As evidenced by yesterday’s vim and vigor.

2. Let me put it this way. I understand that there are both people and traditions that embody this dialectic, that don’t see anything wrong with it. What I can’t understand is pastors and scholars wanting to produce such a viewpoint as a desirable consequence of ecclesial and academic formation. My goal as a teacher is to educate my students out of this way of thinking. Why would we want to educate them into it?

I will withhold comment on whether Protestantism as such is unavoidably ouroborotic. At the very least, we may say that the ouroborotic impulse is contained within it. Reformation breeds reformation; revolution begets revolution. Semper reformanda unmasks error after error, century after century, until you find yourself with the apostles, reforming them, too. And the prophets. And Jesus himself. And the texts that give you him. And the traditions underlying those texts. And the hypothetical traditions underlying those.

And all of a sudden, you find there’s nothing left.

Again, I’m not indicting Protestants per se. But there is an instinct here, a pressure, a logic that unfolds itself. And there are evangelical traditions that actively nurture it in their people. I’ve seen it my whole life. It’s not good, y’all! I, the ordinary believer, come to see myself, not as a recipient of Christian faith, but as its co-constructor, even its builder. It’s up to me:

Brad the Believer!
Can he build it?
Yes he can!
Can he fix it?
Yes he can!

And how do I do it? By reading the Bible, alone with myself, at best with a few others—albeit with final say reserved for me.

The faith here becomes a matter of arguing my way to a conclusion, rather than yielding, surrendering, and submitting to a teaching. Cartesian Christianity is DIY faith. It cannot sustain itself. It’s built for collapse. (The call is coming from inside the house.)

3. The second type of Christianity to which I alluded above, which was less visible in the post yesterday, is not so much a species of biblicism as its repudiation. In the past I’ve called it post-biblicism biblicism, though it doesn’t always entail further biblicism. A friend commented that what we need is an account of progressive biblicism, though that’s not what I have in mind either. What I have in mind is, I suppose, what I’ll call know-nothing Christianity. A Christianity of nothing but doubts. A faith reducible to questions.

I take it as given that I’m not talking about asking questions or having doubts, much less mysticism or apophatic spirituality. (Go read Denys Turner. All theology is apophatic, rightly understood.) No, I’m talking about a Christianity that has lost the confidence of the martyrs, the boldness of the apostles, the devotion of the saints.

Put it this way. When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die. But you can’t die for a question. Christianity is a religion of proclamation. It preaches a message. It announces tidings. It does not say, “Jesus might have been raised from the dead.” It says, “Jesus is risen.” You or I may well have intrusive mights in our struggles with faith. But the church is not a community of might and maybe. The church is a community of is, because she is a people of resurrection. What began in an empty tomb, she confesses, will be consummated before the whole world at the risen Lord’s return.

That’s something to die for. And therefore to live for. I can neither die nor live for a question mark. The church speaks with periods and exclamation points. She errs—her pastors miss the mark—when the faith is reduced to nothing but ellipses and questions.

4. It’s true that I exaggerated the catholic style of magisterial Protestantism. I also may have made it sound as though Christianity never changes; that whatever Christians have always said and done, they are bound always to say and do in the future, till kingdom come. (Though I think if you re-read what I wrote, I couched enough to give the Prots some wiggle room.)

In any case: granted. Preacher’s gonna preach. But here’s what I was getting at.

Christianity simply cannot be lived if, at any moment, any and every doctrine and belief, no matter how central or venerable, lies under constant threat of revision and removal. All the more so if the potential revision and removal are actions open to any baptized believer. Ouroborotic faith comes to seem a sort of vulgar Kantianism (or is it that Kant is vulgar Lutheranism?): heteronomy must give way to autonomy, lest the faith not be authentic, real, mine. The word from without becomes a word from within. The word of the gospel transmutes into a word I make, am responsible for making. I am a law unto myself; I am the gospel unto myself.

Who can live this way? Who can give themselves to a community for a lifetime based on a message (a book, a doctrine, an ethics) subject to continuous active reappraisal? and reappraisal precisely from below? The faith becomes a kind of democracy: a democracy of the living alone, to the exclusion of the dead. And just like any democracy, what’s voted on today will be up for debate tomorrow.

In a word: If Christianity is nothing but what we make of it—an ongoing, unfinished construction project in which nothing is fixed and everything, in principle, is subject to renovation and even demolition—then we are of all men most miserable.

To be sure, the skeptic and the atheist will see this statement as a précis of their unbelief. What beggars my belief is that, apparently, there are self-identified Christians who not only affirm it, but actively induce it in the young, in college students, in laypeople. I cannot fathom such a view.

5. A final thought. I am a student, in different ways, of two very different theologians: Robert Jenson and Kathryn Tanner. Much of what I’ve outlined here goes against what both of them teach regarding the church and tradition; or at least it seems to. Let me say something about that.

I am thinking of the opening two chapters of Jenson’s Systematics and of the whole normative case Tanner makes in Theories of Culture. In the latter, Tanner takes issue with both correlationists (to her “left”) and postliberals (to her “right”) regarding what “culture” is, how the church inhabits and engages it, and the honest picture that results for Christian tradition. There is a strong constructivist undercurrent in the book that would push back against what I’ve written here.

As for Jenson, he argues that the church is a community defined by a message. Tradition is the handing-on of the message, both in real time (from one person/community to another) and across time (from one generation to another). It is not a bug that causes the gospel to “change” in the process of being handed on. It’s a feature. We see this transmission-cum-translation project already in the New Testament. And it necessarily continues so long as the church is around, handing on the gospel anew.

Why? Because new questions arise, in the course of the church’s mission, questions that have not always been answered in advance. Sometimes it isn’t questions at all, but cultural translation itself. How should the gospel be incarnated here, in this place? Among gentiles, not Jews? Among rulers, not peasants? Among Ethiopians, not Greeks? Among polytheists, not monotheists? Among atheists, not polytheists? Among polygamists, not monogamists? Among liberals, not conservatives? Among capitalists, not socialists? Among democrats, not monarchists? In an age of CRISPR and cloning, not factories and the cotton gin? In a time when women are no longer homemakers only, but landowners, degree-holders, and professionals? When men are in offices and online and not only in fields and mines?

The gospel, Jenson says, doesn’t change in these settings. But how the church says the gospel, in and to such settings, does change. How could it not? We don’t speak the gospel in the same words as the apostles, or else we’d be speaking Aramaic and Greek; we’d be talking about idol meat and temple prostitutes and incense to Caesar and Artemis the Great. Now, we do talk about such things. But not as matters of living interest to our hearers. As, rather, samples of faithful gospel speech from the apostles, samples that call for our imitation, extension, and application. We say the selfsame gospel anew in diverse contexts, based on the apostolic example, in imitation of their model. As Barth says in the Church Dogmatics, theology is not a matter of repeating what the apostles and prophets said, but of saying what must be said here and now on the basis of what they said there and then.

In this way, “evangelical” tradition is simultaneously unchanging, fixed, stable and fluid, organic, growing. It’s why, as a friend once said after reading Theories of Culture, the church possesses a teaching office. Magisterial authority of some sort is necessary in a missionary community defined by a historical message expressed in written documents. Someone’s got to do the interpreting, not least when questions arise that the apostles neither answered nor even foresaw.

Hence my roping the magisterial Protestants into the “catholic” version of Christianity. Try as they might, they cannot deny that the doctrine of the Trinity formulated and codified by Nicaea and Constantinople is dogma for the church. It is irreversible, irrevocable, and therefore irreformable. Semper reformanda does not apply here. (And if not here, then not elsewhere, too.) Not because the Bible is crystal clear on the subject. Not because trinitarian doctrine is laid out in so many words on the sacred page. Not because no reasonable person could read the Bible differently.

No: It is because the church’s ancient teachers, faced with the question of Christ and the Spirit, read the Bible in this way, and staked the future of the faith on it; and because we, their children in the faith, receive their decision as the Spirit’s own. It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us… It is thus neither your job nor mine to second guess it, to search the Bible to confirm that Saint Athanasius et al did, in fact, get the Trinity right. It’s our job to accept it; to confess it; to believe it. Any other suggestion misunderstands my, our, relationship to the church and to her tradition.

6. A final-final thought; a conclusion to my conclusion.

In my graduate studies I came to be deeply impressed by the underdetermined character of Scripture. The text can reasonably be read by equally reasonable people in equally reasonable ways. “Underdetermined” is Stephen Fowl’s word. It doesn’t mean indeterminate. But neither does it mean determinate. Christian Smith calls the result “PIP”: pervasive interpretive pluralism. Smith is right. His point is downstream from the hermeneutical, though, which is downstream in turn from the theological and ecclesiological point.

I’ve tried to unpack and to argue that point in my two books: The Doctrine of Scripture and The Church’s Book. Together they’re just short of 250,000 words. I wouldn’t force that much reading (of anyone, certainly not of me!) on anybody. Nor can I summarize here what I lay out there. I simply mean to draw attention to a fundamental premise that animates all of my thinking about the Bible and thus about the church, tradition, and dogma. That premise is a rejection of a strong account of biblical perspicuity. On its face, the Bible can be read many ways; rare is any of these ways obvious, even to the baptized. If I’m right, then either the Bible can never finally be understood with confidence (a position I reject, though I have learned much from scholars who believe this) or we ordinary Christians stand under that which has been authorized by Christ, through his Spirit, to teach the Bible’s word with confidence, indeed with divine assurance. Call the authority in question the church, tradition, ecumenical councils, bishops, magisterium—whatever—but it’s necessary for the Christian life. It’s necessary for Christianity to work. And not only necessary. But instituted by Christ himself, for our benefit. For our life among the nations. For our faith, seeking understanding as it always is. For our discipleship.

We are called to live and die for Christ. The church gives us Christ. She does not give us a question. She gives us a person. In her we find him. If we can’t trust her, we can’t have him—much less die for him. They’re a package deal. Accept both or neither. But you can’t have one without the other.

The great Christian divide

There are two kinds of Christian, by which I mean, there are two ways of being Christian nourished by two types of Christian tradition. Each is defined by its stance or posture toward the Bible and the resulting formation of ordinary believers.

You could think of many names for both. Most are biased, polemical, prejudicial. It’s hard to give a neutral name to something you believe is either absolutely right or dead wrong.

Call the first one biblicist. Sometimes this view comes wrapped in the label of sola scriptura, but nuda scriptura seems more apt. Biblicism forms its adherents to believe, at least tacitly but usually consciously, three major things.

First, nothing but the Bible’s clear, explicit teaching is authority for the church. What is not laid out verbatim, in so many words, cannot be decisive for Christian faith and morals. Second, the Bible’s clear, explicit teaching is best read without the mediation, guidance, or interposition of extra-biblical teaching. Whether you call this latter teaching “sacred tradition” or “church doctrine” or something else, it is bound to obstruct, distort, and/or mislead the reader of Scripture. Third and finally, the Bible’s clear, explicit teaching is meant to be read, understood, and put together by individual believers. The Bible, that is, should be read “alone” in more than one sense: unaccompanied by tradition or by other people. What is tradition, after all, except other people? (Sartre tells the biblicist what other people are.) More to the point, you are not supposed to be relying on or placing your trust in something or someone other than God, and God has said all that needs saying in the Bible. Biblicism isn’t per se anti-church—though it fails mightily in avoiding being anti-authority—but its ecclesiology is individualist at bottom. The Christian is a spiritual Descartes: alone in a room with a Bible, because alone in life with God. God’s relationship to each is immediate, except as mediated by faith, the presence of the Spirit, and the living word of the scriptures.

This is why, in biblicist settings, no doctrine—none whatsoever—is ever safe from challenge. If the biblicist is Descartes in practice, the ideal-type is Luther’s Here I stand, I can do no other. Every Christian and church in history may have taught and believed X, but if someone in the room believes the Bible teaches not-X, then that belief gets a hearing. Not only gets one, but is encouraged to have one. Is encouraged, spiritually and imaginatively, to suppose that Christianity is the sort of thing that an individual believer, thousands of years after the fact, might discover, or re-discover, for the first time. Christianity as such does not preexist me, the Christian. The Bible alone does.

“What the church believes” and “what tradition teaches” and “what Christians have always held” are therefore category errors on such a view. It’s not just that doctrine and tradition are secondary to Scripture. They don’t have a seat at the table. They lack any and all standing, no matter how ancient, venerable, unanimous, or important. This is simply taken for granted by the biblicist. Occasionally, when the premise must be defended, a laundry list of historic errors on the part of the church is trotted out as dispositive proof. It’s half-hearted at best, though. The biblicist premise isn’t primarily negative. It’s positive. It’s rooted in claims about what the Bible is, what it is for, and how it should be read. Those are the foundation of biblicism, not the consequent denials and prohibitions.

The second, contrary view I’ll call catholic. It encompasses far more than the Roman church. It includes also the Orthodox, global Anglicanism, and most magisterial Protestants. For the catholic position, church doctrine is of momentous significance. If X has been believed always, everywhere, and by everyone, then at a minimum X is presumed by the church to be true, and is taught as such. Sometimes X arises to the level of formal irreversibility (being, that is, beyond reform); more often it is functionally irrevocable. Either way, there is a set of teachings that are nonnegotiable for Christian faith. They aren’t up for debate. If you dispute them, you aren’t a Christian; if you accept them, you are a Christian. This is not because the faith is exclusive (though, rightly understood, it is). It is because Christianity preexists you. It isn’t plastic, ever-newly malleable to each generation that arises. If it were, Christianity wouldn’t be anything at all; wouldn’t stand for anything at all; wouldn’t be worth joining in the first place. It’s worth joining because it’s solid, stable, reliable: a something-or-other.

I don’t join the local basketball league hoping to convert it to pickleball. That’s what pickleball leagues are for. Although at least switching from one sport to another would be intelligible. More often, the objection to Christianity’s immutability assumes the only good sports league would be one that changed constantly, randomly, and according to no rhyme or reason. Such an objection does not actually like sports. Or rather, it likes one sport only: Calvinball. And every league should be Calvinball or be shut down. Mutatis mutandis for world religions and Christianity.

I don’t mean to suggest that Christianity, in its actual historical expressions, is unchanging. It’s not. Tradition, if it isn’t dead, is living. Tradition means not only preservation and conservation but adaptation, even mutation. All granted. I merely mean that, on the catholic view, Christianity does not await existence until you or I come along to build it from scratch from the blueprints of the Bible. It’s already there, before I’m born. I join it as it is or I don’t. I don’t get to make it in my image. If I do—that is, if I try—I’m doing it wrong. I’ve failed to understand the very thing I want to become a part of. And I’ve changed it beyond recognition in the process.

The catholic understanding of the Bible isn’t a denial or qualification of the Bible’s authority. On the contrary. There is no Christianity apart from the word of God. But the same Spirit that inspired the scriptures indwells God’s people. God has delegated authority to God’s people. I, the individual believer, do not presume to know—much less to decide—what Christianity is based on my private reading of the Bible. I defer to the church. The church tells me what Christianity is. The church tells me what to believe, because the church gives me the faith once for all delivered to the saints. In a catholic context, “this is what the church teaches” is a statement both (a) intelligible and (b) decisive, even as it is not (c) competitive with “this is what the Bible teaches.” For what the first means is: “this is what the church teaches the Bible teaches.” Who would imagine himself competent to discover what the Bible teaches on his own? What individual believer possesses the wherewithal, the holiness, the wisdom, the hermeneutical chops to sit down with the Bible and, all by her lonesome, figure it out? I’ve not yet met one myself.

This, it seems to me, is the great Christian divide. Not between Catholics and Protestants. Not between conservatives and liberals. Not between Western and global. But between biblicist and catholic. I can do business with catholic Christians, whatever our differences or disagreements. Whereas I increasingly find myself adrift with biblicists. I don’t mean I doubt their faith, their integrity, their commitment to Christ. I mean we find each other unintelligible. Each thinks the other is talking gibberish. It becomes clear that we lack shared first principles. The biblicist’s working premise and mine are opposed, and this make understanding difficult, not to mention collaboration or agreement. We are speaking different languages. And each of us supposes our language to be Christianese. Yet one of us is right and one of us is wrong. I doubt we can get very far without figuring that out. Until then, we’re doing little more than spinning our wheels.

A double review of my books in The Christian Century

A few days ago a co-authored review of both my books on the Bible—The Doctrine of Scripture (2021) and The Church’s Book (2022)—appeared in The Christian Century. It was written by Zen Hess and Chris Palmer. The title is “We Do Not Read Alone.” Here’s a taste, from about a third of the way through:

East writes with engaging confidence as he moves through the writings of Webster, Jenson, and Yoder. It is no small contribution to offer charitable and careful interpretations of these three men’s doctrines of scripture. But East goes beyond the descriptive. The Church’s Book begins to lay the groundwork for an account of what scripture is. He gestures toward this in the final two chapters of The Church’s Book and turns to it more fully in The Doctrine of Scripture.

The latter book feels like it’s written to a more immediate audience: his students. East teaches at Abilene Christian University, in the heartland of American evangelicalism. If you live in Texas, like we do, it’s not hard to imagine him strolling through coffee shops filled with young Christians, their note-scribbled Bibles open, wondering how their underlined words will reveal God’s presence to them. East, we imagine, invites these students to deepen their reading practices and to move from the individual toward the communal, showing how scripture can be more fully understood within the economy of salvation and the historic faith of all God’s people. East’s basic word to his students is this: scripture needs the church as much as the church needs scripture.

They’re not wrong. It almost feels like they’ve been following me around, or interviewing my students. It’s eerie.

Go read the whole thing. It is generous, gracious, perceptive, and thoughtful. (Is this what being reviewed is always like?) I’m gratified and grateful. Thanks to the authors and to the editors at the magazine.

A test for exegesis

A simple test for any proposed reading of Scripture, but especially for those put forth by biblical scholars:

Is God understood as (presupposed to be) a living agent…
(a) within the world described by the text, whatever its genre? or
(b) both within the world of the text and behind, in, and through the text itself?

In other words, is God a character in the text? an author of the text? or both?

What I find, in far too much Christian scholarship on the Bible, is option (a). God is taken seriously as a character, an agent, a force, a presence, an actor, a protagonist—within the narrative or poetry or whatever pericope or canonical book. Apparently, for many Christian biblical scholars, that is what it means to read “theologically.” The modifier “theological” denotes a “more than humanist” or “non–methodological atheist” hermeneutic; God is not presumed to be a superstition best elided in interpretation. This principle might extend to the present, so that the God at work in the world of the text is taken to be at work in the world of the reader.

But a crucial premise has been overlooked or denied. To read in the way thus delineated is to read the Bible “like any other book,” as if its form and content, its status, were no different in kind from any other work of literature. But why, then, should you or I or the scholar give it our attention, indeed a unique attention incomparable to any other book? The answer is simple: Because, as the church confesses, what the Bible mediates or bears to us is “the word of the Lord.” The Lord God of Israel stands behind the words of the text that attest him. They are inspired by him; he is, in the phrase of St. Thomas Aquinas, their “principal author.”

If that is true—and its truth is a matter of faith, not demonstration—then it must, and invariably will, affect how one reads the text. Nor is there anything unscholarly about this. Method is apt to subject matter. The subject matter of Christian exegesis of canonical Holy Scripture is the living word of the living God to his living people: the speech of Christ to his body and bride, in the present tense.

Christian scholars should read it as such. Bracketing the text’s inspiration or divine authorship is a dodge. A reading that limits God to intratextual agent while ignoring God’s role as extratextual author is not yet theological in the fullest sense.

Exegetes, take note.

New article published: “Is Scripture a Gift?”

As of this morning, I have a new article published in the journal Religions. It’s called “Is Scripture a Gift? Reflections on the Divine-Ecclesial Provision of the Canon.” Here’s the abstract:

This article investigates whether the canon of Christian Holy Scripture is properly understood as a gift and, if so, what theological implications this might entail. Following the introduction, the article has three main sections. The first section proposes an expanded grammar by which to describe the production and reception of the canon in and by the church, under the superintending sovereignty of the divine will and action. The second section offers a guide to recent inquiry into “the gift” in the fields of philosophy and theology, particularly those theories that might prove useful for applying the concept of “gift” to Scripture. The third section unfolds a normative account of the Christian canon as a gift of the triune God to his people and through his people, thus making sense of the long-standing liturgical practice of responding to the reading of the sacred page in the public assembly with a cry of thanks to God.

The article arose out of research I conducted as part of the “Gratitude to God” project at Biola University, which was funded by the Templeton Foundation. The article is only one part of a whole special issue dedicated to the question of gratitude to God. Most of the other articles are either social-scientific or philosophical; contributors include Christopher Kaczor, Kent Dunnington, and Matthew Lee Anderson, among others.

As part of the same “G2G” project, I also wrote a popular essay for Comment published this past January titled “Grace Upon Grace.” It distills some of the broad contours of a theological conception of grace or “the gift” with respect to the total grammar of Christian doctrine, whereas the article homes in on a particular locus: namely, whether “the gift” applies to the canon and, if so, how and with what theological implications.

It was a pleasure spending more than two years reading up on the literature—theological, philosophical, historical, economic, literary, and biblical—on gift, gratitude, grace, and exchange. It was always on the edge of my interests but never at the center of them. I didn’t come close to a comprehensive investigation. But I learned enough to realize how fascinating the subject is, and I’m glad I did.

A few other odds and ends:

• I already spotted a typo, for what it’s worth: page 21, endnote 45: “field yield” should be “first yield.” (UPDATE: I found a few more, alerted the editors, and they fixed them all.)

• The article is—how should I put it?—long. As in: 19,000 words, if you include endnotes and the list of works cited. It’s a very small book, in other words. Take a deep breath before plunging in.

• This article completes, not a series, but at least an ad hoc sequence of articles on the doctrine and interpretation of Scripture. I’ve been waiting for it to come out so that I could gather together links to all of them in one place, along with links to books, reviews, and occasional writings. All together I imagine they amount to 400,000 words on this single locus, give or take 50,000. And that’s not even to mention the Big Book I hope to publish on the subject in a decade or so. At this point, though, I’ll admit I feel somewhat spent. I’ll gladly take a little break from writing about this doctrine. That word count is high enough as it is; nobody needs more from me on the topic for the moment.

• Religions has a practice more common to the soft and hard sciences (as far as I understand it), that is, of publishing the comments of blind peer reviews; here’s the page for all of them, along with my replies.

• Three of the reviewers’ comments came in all at once; all had good things to say, and approved publication without need for revision. So I made final revisions, submitted it, and we were good to go. Then a fourth reviewer’s comments came in belatedly, and s/he judged the article in need of some more work. Both the editor of the special issue and the journal’s editors decided that the three “yay” votes qualified the article to be worthy of publication, hence its coming out today. But I wanted to flag this reviewer’s comments (a) because this is my first time with “open” reviewer comments and (b) because the comments in question are rich, substantive, and worthy of further reflection. Indeed, granted all the work that went into the article as it stands, I don’t doubt that incorporating this feedback into another version of it would have improved it even more; and if I end up doing any further work on the topic of Scripture and the gift, I will doggedly pursue the lines of inquiry raised by this reviewer, since they demand more attention that I was able to grant them. For that reason, whoever the comments’ author is, he or she has my thanks.

Trusting the Bible

I have a dear friend I’ve known most of my life who came to me recently with a question. The friend in question is a lifelong Christian; he loves Jesus, attends church, is a faithful person. He doesn’t struggle with “doubt” per se. It’s not the spooky stuff in Christian teaching that bothers him; God exists, Jesus rose from the dead, we’re sinners in need of grace, angels and demons are real—whatever: all a given.

No, what trips up my friend is the Bible. But again, a particular sort of obstacle. Not the Bible per se. He finds the Gospels utterly trustworthy: they give us Jesus, the real Jesus, the Jesus who lived two thousand years ago and who is alive and active today. Their accounts of him are accurate and we’re right to turn to them to hear his voice, learn his way, follow his example and teaching.

The rest of the Bible? Not so much. Or at least: TBD. Sure, the rest of the New Testament gives us much of importance. But just because it’s “apostolic,” does that necessarily mean it bears divine authority? that it’s infallible? that it’s inerrant? Might it call for a bit of picking and choosing, or sifting the wheat from the chaff?

All the more so, my friends avers, regarding the Old Testament. Does it contain wisdom and beauty and powerful stories? No doubt. Is it “revealed,” though? Not so sure. Is it all true? Meh. Is it “the word of God” himself? Nah.

At least, that’s his disposition, his instinctual posture toward the Old and New Testaments excepting the Gospels and granting the basic truth of (e.g.) the Apostles’ Creed. Knowing that this combination of beliefs—the reliability of the Gospels (and of the gospel) alongside the relative unreliability, or basic human fallibility, of the rest of the canon—is not exactly the traditional Christian position, he came to me with the question: Why should he place his trust in the Bible-full-stop? Why should a Christian like him who loves and follows Jesus confess that the Law and the Prophets and the Psalms and the Epistles are all alike “the word of the Lord”? Why, for instance, care about “getting the text right” when the text is Genesis 1–3? Why not just say it’s a lovely story full of rich insights without going further and committing oneself to believing it to be true in the sense of divinely inspired truth?

That’s the question. I think it’s a very good one. And I bet it, or something like it, is a lot more common in our churches than we might suppose. So I’d like to try to answer it as best I can below, leaving aside whatever is immaterial to the substance of the particular question in view.

I can think of six overall reasons to believe the Bible as such is God’s word, three regarding the Old Testament and three regarding the New.

1. The first and best reason for trusting the Old Testament as God’s word is that Jesus did so. This reason doesn’t apply to people who don’t already believe in Jesus, but if you already know Jesus and trust him, then that trust should follow Jesus’s own judgment that the scriptures of Israel are holy, reliable, and a revelatory vehicle of God’s will, character, and commands. Pick any Gospel at random, and you can’t go three paragraphs without finding Jesus somehow at the center of a question surrounding the interpretation of the Old Testament. Moreover, as children are rightly taught early in their time in Sunday school, Jesus’s manner of battling the temptations of Satan consists of nothing but the quotation of Torah. This is God himself in the flesh, facing down a rebellious angel who supposes he can force God’s hand with petty offers of power and fame, and what God does is put the words of Moses on his own lips. That’s because Moses’s words are his words; Jesus stands behind Moses. Quoting Moses is quoting himself, as it were, finding the right occasion for those words’ truest meaning and supremely fitting application. A holy mystery!

2. The second reason for trusting the Old Testament as God’s word is that it speaks of Jesus before his advent. One way of describing this is to say that Israel’s scriptures “predict” the coming of Jesus. That’s a perfectly fine way to talk about it, but it lends itself to oversimplification. The Old Testament isn’t merely a collection of oracles, each of which finds one-to-one correspondence with something that happens later in Jesus’s career. Rather, its correspondence is much greater, more encompassing, and therefore more interesting than that. Jesus, as the Gospels and other apostolic writings proclaim, “fulfills” the Law and the Prophets and the Psalms. They “speak” of him, sometimes with astonishing clarity, sometimes with mysterious hiddenness. But they speak of him nonetheless—Jesus himself says so: “If you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote of me. But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe my words?” (John 5:46-47). Or consider the time following his Resurrection, when Jesus appeared to the apostles and said, “O foolish men, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and enter into his glory?” (Luke 24:25-26). Then the Gospel goes on: “And beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself” (v. 27). And a little later, just before ascending to heaven:

“These are my words which I spoke to you, while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the law of Moses and the prophets and the psalms must be fulfilled.” Then he opened their minds to understand the scriptures, and said to them, “Thus it is written, that the Messiah should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be preached in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things.” (vv. 44-48)

Jesus, in short, was a Jewish rabbi who believed what all Jewish rabbis have always believed about the scriptures. This belief was and remains a nonnegotiable given for anyone who would come to follow Jesus or put faith in his name. This doesn’t mean such belief is easy, simple, or straightforward. But given Jesus’s own trust in the scriptures, and his teaching that those scriptures have much to tell us about him—miraculously, ahead of his coming, by the work of the Spirit in the minds, hearts, and words of the scriptures’ authors and editors—it follows that Christians have good reason to call the Old Testament the word of God for the people of God.

3. The third reason for trusting the Old Testament as God’s word follows from the first two: namely, that the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is none other than the God of Israel revealed in the Law, the Prophets, and the Psalms. The God of Jesus is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of Sarah, Hagar, Rebekah, Rachel, and Leah, the God of Joseph and Moses, Aaron and Miriam, Joshua and Rahab, Hannah and Samuel, Ruth and David, Solomon and Josiah, Ezra and Nehemiah, Amos and Hosea, Isaiah and Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Daniel—and the rest. (Go read Hebrews 11: Jesus’s God is their God, the God of the cloud of witnesses, because Jesus is the One to whom they looked and in whom they placed their faith, ahead of time.) In other words, if you want to know who the God is whom Jesus called Father, go read the book of Exodus. Read the Psalms. Read the Song of Songs. Read Jonah. That’s him. That’s the one. No one else. And that’s part of the point: there is no other God except this God. As the Shema says, “Hear, O Israel: The Lord your God, the Lord is one” (Deut 6:4). Consider this encounter in the twelfth chapter of St. Mark’s Gospel:

And one of the scribes came up and heard them disputing with one another, and seeing that he answered them well, asked him, “Which commandment is the first of all?” Jesus answered, “The first is, ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.” And the scribe said to him, “You are right, Teacher; you have truly said that he is one, and there is no other but he; and to love him with all the heart, and with all the understanding, and with all the strength, and to love one’s neighbor as oneself, is much more than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices.” And when Jesus saw that he answered wisely, he said to him, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.” (vv. 28-34)

There is even more than this, however. It isn’t just that the Father of Jesus is one and the same as the God of Israel whom we find in the pages of the Old Testament—though that is true. It’s that the God we meet in Jesus is himself the Lord of Israel. That is to say, the God who is incarnate in and as the man Jesus is YHWH: He who called Abraham, the One who appeared to Moses in the burning bush, the Almighty who delivered Israel from slavery—in fact, the Creator of heaven and earth. “The Word became flesh” means that to see Jesus is to see the God of Sinai; to embrace Jesus is to embrace the very One Jacob wrestled with by the Jabbok River. The face of Jesus, in a word, is the face of God, the one true God manifested to Israel. This gives greater depth and meaning to the claim that the Old Testament speaks about Jesus. It certainly does, since it speaks about God, and this God became incarnate in Jesus.

So much for the Old Testament. What about the New?

4. The first reason for trusting the New Testament as God’s word is that it is apostolic. Why should that matter? Weren’t the apostles only human like you and me? To be sure. But they were also more than that. The apostles were personally chosen by Jesus himself to be his emissaries in the world. To be an apostle is to have been commissioned by the risen Jesus for the lifelong work of bearing testimony to the good news about him to whoever might listen. In the final words Jesus spoke to the apostles before his Ascension (words recorded by St. Luke, the same author as the third Gospel):

It is not for you to know times or seasons which the Father has fixed by his own authority. But you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the end of the earth. (Acts 1:7-8)

The apostles are the reason any of us know or believe the gospel in the first place. No apostle, no gospel; no gospel, no faith; no faith, no church. And without faith or church, neither you nor I, as believers, exist. We have Jesus because of the apostles and only because of the apostles. Christian faith is mediated faith. Mediation is baked in from the beginning; it’s a feature, not a bug. We know Christ through others: first of all the apostles, then through their successors, then through all of Christ’s many sisters and brothers, including the parents or mentors or ministers or teachers who gave him to us—all, it goes without saying, by the sovereign work of the Holy Spirit.

For the purposes of our question, it is crucial to see that the Bible is part of this chain of mediation; in particular, the writings of the New Testament. In these writings we hear the voice of the apostles down through the ages, giving us once again their testimony concerning Jesus, risen from the dead. They knew him on earth. They saw him alive on the third day. They, and they alone, have the power and the authority to tell us the truth concerning him. All we have to do—all that falls to us to do—is either to trust their witness or to reject it. There’s no third option. We can’t take it piecemeal. It’s an all or nothing affair. That goes for the letters of St. Paul as much as the four Gospels. Every one of the 27 documents of the New Testament is “apostolic”: it contains and communicates the teaching of the apostles as the founders of the Christian community, apart from whom it would not exist and, consequently, none of us would know of the good news of Jesus. Most of the apostles eventually gave their lives for Jesus. Their credibility is airtight. We have all the reason in the world to trust them.

5. The second reason for trusting the New Testament as God’s word is that it is all of a piece. Jesus did not write the Gospels. His followers did. We are right to trust their testimony, but that testimony is not different in kind from other types of apostolic testimony, such as Acts, the Epistles, and the book of Revelation. All of them speak of Jesus, and all of them are apostolic in character. When the preacher of the sermon we call “Hebrews” tells us that Jesus is a priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek, such a claim calls for our assent in the very same way as when the biographer we call “Saint Matthew” tells us that Jesus was born of Mary, a virgin betrothed to Joseph. The latter is not only a historical claim; it is theological, for it is supported in part by reference to the prophet Isaiah, just as Hebrews relies on Psalm 110 and Genesis 14. (Indeed, one useful way to approach the innovative way the apostolic writings reinterpret the Old Testament is as an extension of Jesus’s own exegetical practice: the disciples learned it first from him; it doesn’t originate with them alone.)

In short, believing Hebrews’ words about Jesus and believing Matthew’s words about Jesus are one and the same kind of action for Christians. There’s no reason to opt for one but not the other. Even biography is never mere reportage. It involves interpretation, selection of material, sequence of presentation, and so on. The gospel is mediated, as we’ve seen, which means it requires trust. To trust Jesus means trusting the testimony about Jesus given by his followers, which means finally trusting the whole New Testament, and not only part of it, in conjunction also with the prophetic (Mosaic and Davidic) testimony contained in the Old Testament.

Recall, furthermore, that I’m not adducing the best possible arguments for a nonbeliever to put her trust in the Bible. I’m offering reasons for someone who already believes that Jesus is risen from the dead and reigning from heaven as Lord to see why the Bible as a whole, and not only the Gospels, is reliable and true, is divinely inspired, and therefore is to be received and confessed as the word of the Lord to his people. Here’s one more.

6. The third reason for trusting the New Testament as God’s word is that the church does. What do I mean by this? Simply this: Christianity precedes us. We don’t make it up ourselves. We certainly don’t build it from scratch. It’s not a DIY project. It’s just there, waiting for us before we come on the scene. It possesses something truly precious, or so it claims. That something is the good news of Jesus. As I’ve argued above, the church has the good news to share with others because she received it first from the apostles. The church continues to preserve and proclaim this message, keeping faith with the apostles, by means of the New Testament (along with the Old). It is the texts of the New Testament that ground, govern, and norm the church’s teaching about the gospel. Were it not for the New Testament, we would have no means of ensuring we were still getting Jesus right, all these centuries later. They function not only as a source for our beliefs and practices but also as a judge or measure of them. They keep us on the straight and narrow. Without them, we’d be lost.

It is for this reason that the church has always placed the scriptures at the center of her life, in her worship above all. Within that worship the full diversity of scriptural voices is always read—an OT text, a Psalm, an Epistle—but the heart or climax of the reading in the liturgy always comes from one of the Gospels. For these tell explicitly of Jesus and feature his very words. It is as if the “red letter Bibles” of recent American vintage were inscribed for centuries in the liturgical practice of catholic tradition: all rise, the priest processes with the holy Gospel to the center of the assembly, and both before and after the reading, all cross their minds, lips, and hearts, in order to hear the living Jesus speak in their midst by the words of his servants.

I am saying all this in order to complete the circuit we began earlier, regarding trust. We cannot trust Jesus without also simultaneously trusting his apostles; this trust in turn entails trusting the Bible, on one hand, and the church, on the other. For the church is the body and bride of Christ, and her task from Pentecost to Parousia is to maintain and to announce the gospel of Jesus. She does this by constant, daily recourse to the scriptures of Israel and the writings of the apostles. From them she hears the truth about God, God’s Son, and God’s Spirit; she learns of his ways and will and works in the world; she assents to what he would have her do, as she undertakes the great mission given her by Jesus between his Resurrection and Ascension. It follows that for us, for ordinary believers, to trust him is to trust her, for without her we would not have him; and vice versa, we would not have her were it not for him, for he and he alone is the founder, head, and Lord of the church, which is his body and the temple of his Holy Spirit on earth. It is she from whom we received faith in Jesus; she who baptized us in his name; she who feeds us his flesh and blood. And it is she who directs our eyes and ears to his living word in Holy Scripture. Having trusted him, we ought to trust her; having trusted her to give us him, we ought to trust her again that we will find him there, in the sacred pages of the canon.

In sum: The church believes the Bible is the word of God. If it’s good enough for her, it’s good enough for me. And, I hope, good enough for a faithful friend and member of the church, eager to learn from her what to believe about God’s word.

I’m in Theopolis with Alastair Roberts

Peter Leithart was kind enough to host a little conversation about my new book over at Theopolis: a long first round by Alastair Roberts, followed by my reply, and concluded by Alastair’s reply to my reply. Alastair is his usual gracious, perceptive self, and it’s an honor to have his keen eye range over my work. Thanks to him and to Peter. Enjoy the conversation.

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.

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.

Sermon length

A friend mentioned that there was recently (is currently?) a vigorous conversation on Twitter about the ideal, or proper, or fitting, sermon length. Since I’m off Twitter I barely have access to people’s most recent two or three tweets; I definitely can’t go perusing anyone’s account for extended back-and-forth replies and RTs. But the mention piqued my interest.

I could have sworn I’d written about this—and I have, briefly, in this long essay on preaching—but it turns out what I was thinking of was the webinar I did back in April for pastors and preachers. Starting around the 28-minute mark I share a personal anecdote and then some remarks on the question of how long a sermon should be.

But since it’s not in print, let me say something here. To start, consider what I wrote in that 2019 essay:

Method [as in, homiletical method] is a matter of prudence, native talent, gifts of the Spirit, audience, context, training, and many more largely uncontrollable variables. A faithful sermon can be 20, 40, or 60 minutes long (or more); it can be done from memory, with a basic outline, or with a manuscript; it can involve gestures and movements and animation or minimal intonation and emotion; it can encompass the whole spectrum of human passions and virtues; there is no platonic ideal of Faithful Proclamation. (Nor, by the way, is there The Biblical Model of it.) Method depends; don’t be a slave to method; don’t be a disciple of methodologists.

This remains right. Sermon length is entirely a prudential question. And the factors involved have everything to do with the preacher in question, the congregation, the occasion, and the larger social, cultural, and ecclesial context. It’s true that a sermon is not a “lesson” (as I also say in the essay). Worship is a setting not for doctrina but for kerygma. But who says kerygma should be brief? That expectation, in my experience, is rooted in presuppositions about brief attention spans, poor listening skills, and logistical convenience. The implication is not that a sermon shouldn’t be on the shorter side. A “longer” (but it’s hard to use comparative language here, since we have no “average” sermon length by which to measure) sermon has to justify its length by the very same criteria. The point is that there is no platonic ideal. The length of a sermon is not one of the substantive features by which we may judge it. A 10-minute sermon could be faithful; a 2-hour sermon could be equally faithful. And both could be unfaithful. I’ve been in rural African contexts where sermons and “words from the Lord” lasted, in themselves and in sequence, hours on end. American frontier revival preaching was similar. Were/are they too long? It depends! We’d have to hear the sermons in question.

For these reasons I’m skeptical of generic advice on this front, that is, generic at the national or even denominational level. There are certainly principles that should inform a sermon’s length: clarity, substance, exegesis, saturation in the rhetoric of the scriptures, a commitment to announce the gospel (and not some personal advice or cultural commentary), a prayerful intention to be an instrument of the living Christ to his people, etc.

But here’s one anecdote that makes me wary of any broad push to keep sermons “shorter” (not just “standard” 18-22 minutes but even less than that). There’s a church here in town that draws many college students to it whose sermons are 45-60 minutes each week. Some peers wonder how that can be possible. I outline a theory in the webinar linked above. The theory is this.

Twentysomethings who make the decision to come to church today, even in west Texas, are doing something they simply do not have to do. No one’s making them. They’re coming because they believe it’s important or, at least, because they imagine it might be important. They’re already committed or open to becoming committed. At the same time, as I’ve written elsewhere, they’re illiterate—biblically and literally. They don’t read, and they certainly don’t read the Bible. How then are they supposed to be inducted, invited, drawn into the life and story and protagonists and plots and subplots and diction and style and majesty of the holy scriptures? This local congregation’s answer, one I’m inclined to endorse, is: through preaching. Note that the preaching is still proclamation; it hasn’t yet become teaching. But it’s doing what itinerant and revival preaching did centuries ago in a similarly illiterate age: namely, providing a means of access to and a rhetorical formation in both the letter and the spirit of the Bible. Precisely in the middle of the liturgy, as it should be.

Yes, don’t use long sermons as an excuse for poor preaching. Yes, don’t make sermons load-bearing for all the church’s pastoral work. Yes, don’t so hog the liturgical attention that the Eucharist—the climax of worship!—is sidelined, minimized, or forgotten. Yes, avoid the TED Talk–ification of preaching. Yes, yes, yes and amen to all this and more.

The upshot, though, is not that sermons ought to be shorter. The upshot is that the question of sermon length is downstream of the genuinely important questions. The length will follow from answering these. Once they’re answered, and answered well, the length will take care of itself.

If not inerrancy or tradition … then what?

Earlier this year I wrote a couple of posts about what I call Post-Biblicism Biblicism, or PBB, a phenomenon I’ve observed among professors in theological higher ed. Briefly described, PBB is the view that (a) the Bible is the church’s sole source and authority (to the exclusion of creeds, dogmas, sacred tradition, formal confessions, etc.) and (b) the Bible is at once historically, morally, and theologically flawed, such that it is not entirely trustworthy as a book (sometimes so much so that to call it “God’s word” full stop would be a “fundamentalist” mistake). Yet persons who hold this view not only (c) remain Christian in (d) low-church, evangelical, or non-denominational ecclesial traditions, but (e) spend their entire lives studying, teaching, and attempting to “accurately” interpret every jot and tittle of the biblical text.

You can go read the original posts for my confusion about and critique of this phenomenon. It seems obvious to me that one of those five aspects has to give way for the sake of any kind of personal or theological coherence. Mostly I experience PBB as a source of befuddlement.

Recently a friend made an observation about a similar trend, only this time from the perspective of the pews. And I think he’s right. This phenomenon, moreover, is more than befuddling. It’s troubling, saddening, and urgent in its pastoral need.

Suppose you’re a normie biblicist Christian. You partake of what scholars call a “first naïveté” in relation to the Bible. It’s an open book. It’s crystal clear. Any sincere literate person could sit down with the Bible and understand it for himself. And either (a) all Christian communities do thus correctly understand it, at least in terms of the basics, or (b) your community (your denomination, your congregation) has got the goods—i.e., the proper understanding of the Bible’s essential teaching about God, Christ, the gospel, etc. Let’s call this general posture Perspicuous Inerrant Biblicism, or PIB for short.

Now let’s say your PIB-ness gets complicated, by honest means. Either (a) you come to believe that the Bible isn’t so clear as you once thought. Not that it’s unclear per se; but you realize that you, the individual layman, are not in a position to answer some of the most pressing—and contested—moral and theological questions about which Christians turn to the Bible for answers. Or (b) you come to believe that inerrancy, understood as factual-error-free, documentary-style verbatim historical reportage, isn’t plausible as an account of what the Bible is or how it works. In short, having lobbed off the P and the I, the B goes with them: no more biblicism for you.

It seems to me there are only three or four routes to go from here. One is to lose your faith: if it’s PIB or bust, then you’ve just read your way out of Christianity. Another is to DIY it: Christianity becomes whatever you say it is, because the meaning of your unclear-cum-imperfect Bible is up for grabs, and no one else is in a position to say you’re wrong. A third route is to glom onto a charismatic, entrepreneurial, but ultimately arbitrary pastor or personal figure who presents a version of Christian faith that you find appealing. (Now is this person, even if sincere, also DIY-ing it? Yes. So options two and three are variations on the same approach.)

The fourth and final option is to turn to the church. On this view, the church is both mater et magistra: mother and teacher of all the baptized. She, in the person of her ordained leaders, is authorized by Christ to speak on his behalf, vested with his authority. She it is who has passed on the gospel from the apostles to you, down through the centuries. She it is who has kept inviolate the faith once for all delivered to the saints. She it is who stands as mediator between you and the apostolic preaching of the good news. Indeed, she it is who stands as mediator between you and Christ. (She is, after all, his body and bride.) And when, not if, you or anyone else has questions about the faith or about the teaching of Scripture, she is there to answer them.

The term for this role is magisterium, or the teaching office of the church. To turn or submit to this fourth option, beyond biblicism, is to recognize that the church has the authority, by the power and guidance of the Spirit of Christ, to speak decisively and definitively on matters of faith and morals, particularly when these concern disputed interpretations of Scripture and/or pressing questions of the day. This understanding of ecclesial authority was axiomatic for the church before the sixteenth century, and since then then has remained the majority view of the global church.

Leave to the side whether it is true. Here is the point I want to make.

Is there any serious option for someone who no longer affirms Perspicuous Inerrant Biblicism, but who nevertheless wants to remain a morally and intellectually serious Christian, other than this last, fourth route—i.e., submitting to sacred tradition and entrusting oneself to the Spirit-derived and Spirit-led authority of the historic magisterial church?

I don’t see how there is. Because if biblicism isn’t true, and/or strict inerrancy isn’t true, and/or strong perspicuity isn’t true—and remember, we’re merely stipulating these as possibilities—then either Christianity isn’t true, or Christianity can be whatever you want it to be, or Christianity is already something solid, defined, and given, and where you find it is in the authoritative church of magisterial catholic tradition.

I’m trying to be as ecumenical as possible here; at the very least, not only Rome but Constantinople and (I think) Canterbury could affirm the account so far. Perhaps others. In any case, I’m looking in the other direction.

I know countless books, together with countless friends, neighbors, pastors, and family members who’ve read said books, that suppose what I’ve outlined here so far is untrue. That is, they not only recognize but actively engender the loss of ordinary believers’ first naïveté in relation to the Bible. They want to rid lay Christians of their commitments to inerrancy and perspicuity. And yet, for reasons I cannot discern, they appear to continue to be bound by a sort of persistent or lingering biblicism—even though they have explicitly kicked out the legs of the biblicist stool. For biblicism doesn’t work if the Bible is not radically perspicuous and absolutely inerrant. Yet these writers offer their books for the edification of the faithful, only (apparently) to be surprised when their readers understand them perfectly well, and accordingly leave the faith.

Christians, in order to be Christians, have to put their trust in something. And that “something” must include what is intermediate and not only what is immediate. Obviously our ultimate hope and faith are in God alone. But we only have God through the work of mediation, and thus through concrete mediators. PIB-ers insist on that mediator being the Bible alone. Absent that extreme form of sola scriptura, the church is the only other candidate for such trust. That is, on this latter view, the baptized trust that the community to which they belong is the divinely appointed and preserved vehicle of the truth of Jesus Christ, kept and carried through the vicissitudes of history by the Holy Spirit. That is where the gospel is found, together with the scriptures, the sacraments, the saints, and all the rest.

I see no alternative. Further, apart from these two paths I see no way forward for the transmission of the faith across the generations. Either a biblicist church faithfully communicates a biblicist faith to its members and children (and it’s straightforward to see how laypeople might participate in that process); or a magisterial church faithfully communicates the teaching of sacred tradition to its members and children (and it’s likewise plain to see how such a process might work). But how is a typical Christian adult supposed to train up his children in the faith if his church simultaneously rejects sacred tradition and repudiates Perspicuous Inerrant Biblicism? He lacks tradition to hand down, and he lacks the-Bible-alone to hand down. He’s also hip to the fact that the-Bible-alone just isn’t going to get the job done for him, because he’s brim-full of vertiginous confusion regarding how to interpret the Bible in the first place—in other words, he needs someone to answer his questions. But his pastor is just one more dude; he claims no special authority. And normal-adult-Christian-parent here knows that even if he likes Pastor 1’s answer, Pastor 2 at the church next door will give a substantially different answer. So, again, he’s left to his own devices. What’s he supposed to do?

He knows one thing at least. Those pop-evangelical books hawking post-biblicism biblicism aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on. Whichever way is right, they’re not it.

Creatura verbi divini

On the Mere Fi podcast earlier this week, both Derek and Alastair pressed me on the question of whether the church is “the creature of God’s Word.” The theological worry here is that if one affirms, with catholic tradition, that the church creates the canon, then the proper order between the two has been inverted, since the people of God is the creatura verbi divini, not the other way around. How, after all, could it be otherwise?

You can listen to my answer on the pod. My reply was simple, though I can’t speak to how well I articulated it there. Here, at least, is what I would say in expanded form.

The word of God creates the church; but the church creates the canon. This is not a contradiction because, even though Holy Scripture mediates and thus is the word of the living God to his people, the canon of texts that Scripture comprises is wholly (though not only) human, historical, and just so a product of the church. Moreover, the canon as such does not exist at the church’s founding, traditionally identified with Pentecost. No apostolic writing is extant at that moment. Apostolic writings begin to be written a decade or two following; they are not completed for at least a half century hence (maybe more); and the canon or formal collection or list of apostolic writings received as authoritative divine Scripture on the part of the church does not exist in any official way for some centuries. And even once the canon is explicit, unanimity and universality of its acceptance take even more centuries to arrive. (If one agrees with the Protestant reformers regarding the excision from the canon of such deuterocanonical books as the Wisdom of Solomon and Tobit, then in point of fact the canon takes a full fifteen centuries to come into its final, public form.)

In my view, magisterial Protestant doctrines of Scripture elide this crucial distinction in their claim that the church is created by the word of God and, thus, that Scripture creates the church. The word of God does indeed found the church, both (1) in the primary sense that the risen incarnate Logos from heaven pours out the Spirit of the Father on his apostles and (2) in the secondary sense that the apostles’ proclamation of the word of the gospel convicts and converts sinners to Christ wherever they travel, bearing witness to the good news. This is the running theme of the book of Acts. Nevertheless it remains the case that, within the very narrative of Acts, no canon of Scripture exists. Recall that St. Luke does not record the writing of any canonical text! Those texts he does record, such as the letter of St. James and the Jerusalem council to gentile believers, are not found elsewhere in the canon, but only here, as reported speech.

In our conversation, Alastair pressed a different point, an important one with which I agree but which, I think, I understand differently than he does. He observed that what doctrines of Scripture often overlook is the manifold and altogether material ways in which the production and dissemination of graphai influenced and shaped the early messianic assemblies dotting the shoreline of the Mediterranean basin. Apart from and prior to any theological redescription, that is, we can see just how letter-centric and letter-formed the early Christian communities were, evident in the extraordinary literary production of St. Paul alone. Letters (and homilies, and histories, and apocalypses, and …) are written, copied, distributed, shared, read aloud in worship, studied by the saints, transmitted and republished, so on and so forth, and this diverse and fascinating process is up and running, at the absolute latest, by the end of the second decade of the church’s existence.

As I say, I agree wholeheartedly with this observation. And it certainly bears on our theological and not only our historical understanding of the church’s origins. But, so far as I can tell, it doesn’t bear on the specific point raised by the question of whether the canon creates the church or vice versa.

That is to say: Granting the existence and influence of Pauline and other literatures in the first century of the church’s life (and on, indefinitely, into the future), this phenomenon seems to me to confirm rather than to contradict or even to complicate my original answer offered above. Yes, God’s word founds the church, both from heaven and through the spoken and, later, written words of the apostles. But from this undeniable fact we may not draw the conclusion that the canon—or even the apostolic writings eventually canonized—“create” the church, and for the same reasons. The canon does not exist in the time of the apostles. And although, intermittently and somewhat haphazardly, written apostolic documents begin circulating in the second half of the first century AD, these are far from universally shared by ekklesiai around the known world. There are churches in Africa and India and Spain and elsewhere that simply lack all or most of the apostolic writings later canonized until the second and even sometimes into the third or fourth centuries. The church simply cannot be said to be a creature of the canon or even of the apostolic texts subsequently included in the canon. The church predates both by decades, even centuries. Certain churches do receive and benefit from certain texts authored or commissioned by apostles. But for some time they are in the minority, and even they (i.e., the churches in question) preexisted their reception of any apostolic text whatsoever. Not that they preexisted apostolic teaching—but then, this question concerns graphai, not oral doctrina.

I hope this clarification is responsive to both Derek’s and Alastair’s questions and concerns. I hope especially that it is cogent. I look forward to hearing from them or others regarding where I might be wrong.