While I have my own biases and agendas like anyone else, one of my goals with this blog is to avoid promoting an overly narrow ideology or being stereotypically conservative or liberal on theological issues. Two words, reflected in this site’s name, describe my approach to Scripture: (1) Critical: In college, I badly wanted reassurance that every word in the Bible was literally true; I’m not looking for that anymore. Though I wish the case were different, close study of Scripture consistently suggests that it is written by humans with different ideas (some of them contradictory) about God and Christ. (2) Committed: many people that I talk to are looking for excuses to discredit scripture so they can set aside the passages they don’t like; to my mind, that is no way to find the truth about God. The Bible has basically always been the church’s book throughout Christian history, and I am convinced that such consistency is due to God’s will. Overall, I’m writing based on a sort of two-pronged paradox: On the one hand I’m making logical arguments, so I clearly affirm human reason; but I also deeply distrust the human mind. On the other hand, I affirm that Scripture is in some sense the Word of God, but I also understand it as, in other ways, a product of human thought. Sometimes I think I’m foolish to hold to both of these commitments, but as the expression goes (though I think I’m slightly misusing it), the proof of the pudding is in the eating. I can’t entirely defend why I think this makes sense, but my experience of Scripture is that God speaks through it, and my experience of its depiction and interpretations of Jesus is that he is God Incarnate. One of the beauties of this method of reading Scripture is that the different books of the Bible are allowed to have different opinions about who God is and what God does. This is disconcerting (or even devastating) to consider at first, but in the end I’ve found it to be both beautiful and exhiliarating. Mark makes some powerful and important claims about Jesus, and John makes others, many of which are quite different. The truth, presumably, is somewhere in the intersection. Many, no doubt, will feel that this kind of interpretation (which, incidentally, is pretty common within critical biblical studies circles) denies the Truth of God’s word. I’ll respond by stating the conviction that ultimately guides all my interpretations: God can reveal Godself in whatever way God wants. But this, again, cuts both ways. We are free to kick and scream that God should have given us a set of scriptures that are utterly consistent and accurate, or that God should have given us teachings better suited to the sensibilities of our modern liberal society. But it seems God is difficult to order about. What we do have are one enormous mess of a world––largely of our own making––and a book of powerful stories and teachings which seem to me to reveal a God who is capable of lifting us above (and perhaps even correcting) the mess just mentioned. |
March 2007
| ||
| ||
In the previous post, I suggested the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5–7) as an example of a transparent text, meaning that although Jesus delivers the sermon to the other characters in the story, it’s actually intended primarily for the reader, so that we can see through the story to a message intended for us (or, originally, for Matthew’s first-century readers). I’d like to propose here that the kind of Christian reader Matthew wrote for (i.e., having the appropriate cultural background, knowledge of the Jewish scriptures, etc.), if they started at the beginning of Matthew’s Gospel and read through its first seven chapters, would most naturally experience the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount less as an historical account of Jesus’ words and more as teachings intended specifically for her and any other believer. I’ll do my best to show how the beginning of the Gospel sets up this expectation. The beginning of Matthew leads the reader to expect Jesus to be, above all, a king. Jesus is introduced in 1:1 to be the Messiah (i.e., the anointed king; compare 2:2 with 2:4) and the Son of David (from a kingly line). The Magi come from afar to worship one who is born King of the Jews (2:2), and Herod (the king of the Jews at the time) views him as a threat (2:3). And then at Jesus’ baptism, a voice from heaven announces, “This is my Son,” a phrase quite similar to Psalm 2:7, where “You are my Son” is God’s way of designating the anointed king whom God will set up in Zion (= Jerusalem, Ps 2:6) to rule over all the nations (Ps 2:8). Jesus also is presented in categories that are more reflective of Christian theology as most of us know it. Jesus, then, is one who will save his people from their sins (1:21), and he is one who will represent the presence of God with God’s people (1:23). But there is still another side to Jesus’ character that Matthew presents in his opening chapters, and we must recognize it in order to understand the rhetoric of Matthew’s story––in particular, why the Sermon on the Mount is placed where it is, and what it’s supposed to mean for the reader. When Herod starts killing children (2:16), an angel of the Lord tells Joseph to flee with his family to Egypt; after Herod dies, the family returns and settles in Nazareth (2:23). This might seem merely like a piece of the plot, but the passage quoted in explanation of the journey, “Out of Egypt I called my son,” is a reference to Hosea 11 that refers to Israel’s exodus from Egypt. Just as Israel (God’s son) left Canaan (in the days off Joseph) to go down to Egypt, and then later returned, so did Jesus. When we soon find Jesus spending forty days in the wilderness being tempted/tested (4:2), the parallel between Jesus and Israel becomes unmistakeable. The point is not that Jesus’ story is exactly like that of Israel, but that these certain motifs keep coming up that give the sense that Jesus is being compared with Israel. In response to the devil’s temptations in the wilderness, Jesus quotes passages from Deuteronomy that were originally instructions to Israel regarding what God wanted them to learn during their own forty (years) in the wilderness. The upshot is that where Israel failed to remain faithful, Jesus succeeds. Coming back into Galilee, Jesus resumes his role as expected king, proclaiming, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near” (4:17). The reader who has understood what came before knows that Jesus’ kingdom means far more than a new political arrangement. Not only has he come to fill the throne of his father David, but he has come to transform Israel’s relationship to its God, bringing about repentance, forgiveness, obedience, and the presence of God. The story of Israel’s exodus is not the only literary connection Matthew creates, and here is where we arrive at the key point for understanding the Sermon. Jesus’ fast of forty days and forty nights exactly matches that of Moses when he received the Ten Commandments on Sinai (Ex 34:28). It seems that Jesus is serving not only as a new Israel, but also as a new Moses. And when Jesus walks up to a mountainside and begins to teach (similar to Moses, who ascended a mountain to receive the law), the connection is complete. All this leads into the Sermon on the Mount, which the rhetoric of the narrative has prepared the reader to listen to, not as an historical account of something Jesus once said, but as the New Law given by a new Moses to a renewed Israel. Matthew is essentially retelling the story of the people of God for the new age, and Jesus’ teachings transcend the narrative in which they are located to address everyone who considers herself a disciple of Christ. Jesus’ words are both related to and different than Moses’. Moses received tablets written upon by God, but Jesus is able simply to speak from his own mouth: “You have heard . . . but I say to you” (5:21f, 27f, 33f, 38f, 43f). Also, Jesus describes his own relationship to Moses by claiming to fulfill the law that Moses gave (5:17). Although Jesus isn’t replacing the law here (as some folks would claim), he is presenting an interpretation of the law that lays claim on its hearers and readers. Immediately after the Sermon we are told that Jesus spoke to the crowds as one with authority, and I am arguing that his words hold that same authority for any reader who would be a disciple. If any doubt lingers for the reader as to the authority or application of Jesus’ words, Matthew closes the Sermon with three teachings to pound home his point: only a few will find the narrow road leading to life (7:14), the true disciples of Jesus are only the ones who do the will of the Father (7:21) and bear good fruit (7:17), and the wise person who hears the words of this sermon will put them into practice (7:24). Much as the law in Deuteronomy 28 included blessings and curses for those who obeyed or disobeyed, Matthew also includes blessings (5:3-12) and curses (7:13-27), the latter explicitly according to obedience. The point of all this is, even though Jesus surely said many of the things that are in the Sermon on the Mount, the more important point for the church should be that God put them in Scripture for us. So if we want to understand the Sermon historically, it may be more worth our time to figure out what it meant for Matthew’s readers in roughly A.D. 85 than what it meant for Jesus’ hearers in A.D. 30. |
| ||
Based on what I’ve been studying, I want to start with this post and challenge how the church often reads the Gospels. To begin with, it’s important to recognize that a story or letter can work on more than one level at the same time, and the Four Gospels are a good example. In contrast to the letters of Paul, which speak directly to their respective audiences (and thus are intended to work primarily on just one level), the gospels speak to their reading audiences through words that Jesus speaks to other characters in the story. That means Jesus’ words “work” both on the level of the other characters who hear them and on the level of the readers who read them. Some commentators call this “transparency,” meaning that we the readers see through the characters’ words to a message intended for us. I should note that this idea is quite offensive to a lot of people, because its implication is that Matthew describes Jesus as saying things that are really only meant for us, and that therefore Jesus didn’t actually say. Many people would call this inaccuracy or lying on God’s part. That feeling is justifiable. But I want to argue that the idea of the Gospel writers fudging the facts is not so offensive if we understand them according to the purpose for which they were written. To use movie terms, I think we should compare the gospels not to documentaries (which record events more or less exactly) but rather to movies (which use a combination of fact and fiction to make a point). When we watch Dead Man Walking, which tells a true story, we don’t describe its scenes as dishonest simply because they didn’t happen exactly as depicted; rather, we recognize that the story can be essentially true even if details are changed to teach particular lessons more clearly. I haven’t seen United 93, but I’m sure it includes dialogue and events that didn’t really happen; that, again, doesn’t make the story untrue. There are some historical movies or biopics that change so many facts that we’d describe them as dishonest or inadequate, but most of us would acknowledge that a writer can take some artistic license and still tell a true story. Why should we insist that God could not allow the authors of the gospels to do the same? Many people simply say, “Well, God wouldn’t do that.” But what if God did? Is it our job to describe what God is allowed to put in Scripture? To give an example of Matthew’s transparency, the Sermon on the Mount may be addressed to Jesus’ disciples on the level of the story, but the way Matthew sets up his story implies that really, the sermon is intended for us, the readers. Well, actually it’s intended for Matthew’s first-century audience, but we share with them a certain distance from the historical life of Jesus that creates a commonality in our reading experience. (I deal with the Sermon on the Mount in this post.) A natural tendency among Christians has been to treat the Gospels primarily as history (i.e., like a documentary), since they clearly do recount historical events carried out by real people. Taken to its extreme, this understanding has led to some counter-intuitive interpretations; for instance, some Church of Christ folks have claimed that Christians are not to pray the Lord’s Prayer because Jesus taught it to his disciples (as Jews) before the kingdom had come. These interpreters, understanding the cross (or perhaps Pentecost; I can’t remember which) to have been the event where Jesus’ kingdom did indeed arrive, feel that the Prayer is no longer appropriate for believers today. We can read it and appreciate it as instruction to Jesus’ disiples at the time, but we are not to recite it today. This is certainly a possible reading, but it seems odd for Matthew to have passed along a beautiful, memorable prayer if he specifically did not intend it for Christian use. In any event, I would argue that we should make our decisions about questions like this based on Matthew’s text as a whole, and so I want to look at how Matthew tells his story and what it suggests for how we should read his story. Specifically, I think there are good reasons to see at least some of the words of Jesus in Matthew as being addressed less to the disciples in the story and more to the readers of Matthew’s gospel. If so, how do we determine which words are meant for whom? How exactly does Matthew’s transparency work? One key point of interpretation for any narrative involves the impact that the story has on the reader. While some might take the Gospels as documentary history, careful reading reveals four powerful pieces of rhetoric. In much the same way as a movie such as Dead Poets Society (see my earlier post), they not only tell a story but also try to persuade their readers of their point of view on Jesus, the church, the End Times, and any number of other points. In future posts, I’ll take up specific passages and trace how Matthew seems to use his story rhetorically to persuade and instruct the reader rather than give strict modern history. In the meantime, some questions:
|
|
New Creation: It Sounds Good to MePosted by Scott Haile under music, Torah, creation, intertextuality | [11] Comments | |
For all the negative points I made about the Epistle of Barnabas, it does offer a beautiful portrait of redemption as the reenacting of God’s creation of humanity. Paul had written, “If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation. Look! The old has passed away, the new has come.” Barnabas simply restated that using the language of Genesis, and if his wording was a bit convoluted, nevertheless the image was powerful. The image is also timeless, as evidenced by a pair of songs Gary Miller wrote for Acappella in the late 1990’s. For those who don’t know me, the Chrisitan music group Acappella is the reason I know next to nothing about popular music from the eighties and nineties. In high school I had no fewer than 35 albums from their organization’s various groups (including Acappella, AVB, the Vocal Union, Keith Lancaster, Sweet Deliverance, His Image, and New Life Quartet), and it is no exaggeration to say that back then I could sing 300 of their songs from start to finish––and for many of them, I could sing most of the harmony parts. I’ve been to at least 10 of their concerts in 5 different states, and I’ve performed songs of theirs at church and school events with four different groups of friends spanning high school and college. (I have a feeling that Matt, Cody, and Micah all have an idea of what I’m talking about.) These two songs have their campy moments (the first one, no kidding, includes the lines “Let freedom ring!” and “Let children sing!”), but in both of them Miller does a beautiful job of using the creation story from Genesis, as Barnabas used it, to describe the work of Christ. The first song speaks broadly, describing the fall of humanity and the change of the world order brought about by Christ:
The second song is more personal, beginning with God’s promise to Abraham and going on to proclaim God’s will as the starting point for believers’ lives and decisions, by virtue of the new beginning which God creates within people:
The first song, of course, transforms the line “Let there be light” (Gen 1:3) into “Let there be love.” The second song is more subtle (though just barely), using the reference to the dark as well as the words empty and void, to point to the unformed earth of Gen 1:2 as a metaphor for a person’s life before they are recreated by God. I don’t have a lot of reflections to add, except to say that I find these lyrics both beautiful and powerful. They’re another example (as I noted before of contemporary song lyrics) of how intertextuality can help theology become art. I’m also kind of interested in the thoughts of any other Acappella junkies. Anyone want to compete for bragging rights about Acappella album collections, concert attendance, or whatever? If you were a fan when you were young, are there any albums of theirs you still listen to? |