... Because in the mystery of the Word made flesh, thou hast caused a new light to shine in our hearts, to give the knowledge of thy glory in the face of thy Son, Jesus Christ our Lord. (Proper Preface for Epiphany: BCP p. 346)
Yesterday I finished reading the first volume of “Jesus of Nazareth” by Benedict XVI, and this morning began a second reading of it. The book is filled with insights, and is all the more valuable to me because of my esteem for its author. His premise: in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, we encounter God. Further, the person of Jesus and his teachings are faithfully presented in the Scriptures.
Among living theologians and expositors, there is no one whom I trust more implicitly than Benedict. One reason for my esteem is his considerable distance from the liberal theology characteristic of the Episcopal Church and other mainline Protestant denominations, and found to a lesser degree among Roman Catholics.
Let me be clear: I do not take issue with liberal social action, such as the Catholic Worker movement, which (at least in this state) has been involved with the thoroughly worthwhile “Occupy” protests against Wall Street and what they represent. But I take issue with the sort of Biblical interpretation represented by the “Jesus seminar” and taught in most of the mainline seminaries.
C. S. Lewis wrote an essay entitled “Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism,” where the salient points are laid out. He writes:
A theology [in the Church of England] which denies the historicity of nearly everything in the Gospels to which Christian life and affections and thought have been fastened for nearly two millennia—if offered to the uneducated man can produce only one or other of two effects. It will make him a Roman Catholic or an atheist. What you offer him he will not recognize as Christianity.
Lewis devotes several pages to examples of his statement that “whatever these men may be as Biblical critics, I distrust them as critics. They seem to me to lack literary judgment, to be imperceptive about the very quality of the texts they are reading.” He concludes this thought by saying: “These men ask me to believe they can read between the lines of the old texts; the evidence is their obvious inability to read (in any sense worth discussing) the lines themselves. They claim to see fern-seed and can't see an elephant ten yards away in broad daylight.”
He continues with a second point: “All theology of the liberal type involves at some point—and often involves throughout—the claim that the real behavior and purpose and teaching of Christ came very rapidly to be misunderstood and misrepresented by His followers, and has been recovered or exhumed only by modern scholars.”
A third point: “I find in these theologians a constant use of the principle that the miraculous does not occur.”
And a fourth point, which he considers the most important: “All this sort of criticism attempts to reconstruct the genesis of the texts it studies... the whole Sitz in Leben of the text. This is done with immense erudition and great ingenuity. And at first sight it is very convincing... [But] I have watched reviewers reconstructing the genesis of my own books in just this way.” He cites examples from his writings, giving also the example of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, and how literary critics confidently linked the Ring with the atom bomb. “Yet in fact, the chronology of the book's composition makes the theory impossible.” He continues:
The 'assured results of modern scholarship' as to the way in which an old book was written, are 'assured', we may conclude, only because the men who knew the facts are dead and can't blow the gaff. The huge essays in my own field which reconstruct the history of Piers Plowman or The Faerie Queene are most unlikely to be anything but sheer illusion... The Biblical critics, whatever reconstructions they devise, can never be crudely proved wrong. St. Mark is dead. When they meet St. Peter there will be more pressing matters to discuss.
Lewis concludes with a statement that I fear was prophetic: “Missionary to the priests of one's own church is an embarrassing role; though I have a horrid feeling that if such mission work is not soon undertaken the future history of the Church of England is likely to be short.”
It is difficult for a layman to take such a position. I have not been to seminary, and have studied neither higher criticism nor modern theology, nor do I intend to ever do so. What right do I have to an opinion? I take heart in siding with someone like C. S. Lewis, but he also was an “ordinary layman” of the Church, as I think he called himself somewhere.
But Benedict XVI is not an “ordinary layman.” His example gives me hope that I might not be altogether wrong in my skepticism of modern liberal theology. Further, he provides the answer I need to steer me away from my lingering fundamentalism, a “middle path,” as it were. In the Foreward to this book, he writes:
[In the 1950's and after] The gap between the “historical Jesus” and the “Christ of faith” grew wider and the two visibly fell apart... [producing] the impression that we have very little certain knowledge of Jesus and that only at a later stage did faith in his divinity shape the image we have of him. This impression has by now penetrated deeply into the minds of the Christian people at large. This is a dramatic situation for faith, because its point of reference is being placed in doubt: Intimate friendship with Jesus, on which everything depends, is in danger of clutching at thin air (p. xi, xii)
Unlike the fundamentalists, who recognize the fallacy of the modern critical methods and turn away from them entirely, Benedict asserts their value, within limits:
[T]he historical-critical method... is and remains an indispensable dimension of exegetical work. For it is of the very essence of biblical faith to be about real historical events... So if history, if facticity in this sense, is an essential dimension of Christian faith, then faith must expose itself to the historical method—indeed, faith demands this.... But we need to add two points. This method is a fundamental dimension of exegesis, but it does not exhaust the interpretative task for someone who sees the biblical writings as a single corpus of Holy Scripture inspired by God....
[The second point:] Because it is a historical method, it presupposes the uniformity of the context within which the events of history unfold. It must therefore treat the biblical words it investigates as human words....
[But] the Christological hermeneutic, which sees Jesus Christ as the key to the whole and learns from him how to understand the Bible as a unity, presupposes a prior act of faith. It cannot be the conclusion of a purely historical method. But this act of faith is based upon reason—historical reason—and so makes it possible to see the internal unity of Scripture. By the same token, it enables us to understand anew the individual elements that have shaped it, without robbing them of their historical originality. (p. xv – xix)
Unlike the liberals, Benedict perceives limits to the historical-critical approach. One sees this most clearly when he turns to the “Son of Man” sayings (p. 322 ff), and the “huge debate [about them] in modern exegesis” wherein “critical scholarship does not regard any of these sayings about the coming Son of Man as the genuine words of Jesus.” This touches on the second point made by Lewis in his essay, concerning the conviction that the Gospels misrepresent the “genuine words of Jesus,” which can only be recovered by meticulous modern scholarship.
Another example, from his discussion of the “Kingdom of God” which was proclaimed by Jesus (p. 46 ff): Benedict traces the development of this concept from Harnack and Bultmann through Moltmann and on up to the current “secularist reinterpretation of the idea of the Kingdom” (p. 53)
“Kingdom,” on this interpretation, is simply the name for a world governed by peace, justice, and the conservation of creation. It means no more than this... This is supposedly the real task of religions: to work together for the coming of the “Kingdom.” They are of course perfectly free to preserve their traditions... but they must bring their different identities to bear on the common task of building the “Kingdom,” a world, in other words, where peace, justice, and respect for creation are the dominant values.
It looks as if now, at long last, Jesus' words have gained some practical content.... On closer examination, though, it seems suspicious. Who is to say what justice is? What serves justice in particular situations? How to we create peace? On closer inspection, this whole project proves to be utopian dreaming without any real content, except insofar as its exponents tacitly presuppose some partisan doctrine as the content that all are required to accept. (p. 53-54)
Laying aside these issues, which are but a minor aspect of the book (though important for me), Benedict writes as “an expression of [his] personal search 'for the face of the Lord' (cf. Ps. 27:8)” (p. xxiii). He begins with Moses, with whom the Lord spoke “face to face” as with a friend (Ex. 33:11), and the promise that a prophet like Moses would someday arise. But at the end of Deuteronomy, it says: “And there has not arisen a prophet since in Israel like Moses.” This dilemma is resolved only in Jesus:
What was true of Moses only in fragmentary form has now been fully revealed in the person of Jesus: He lives before the face of God, not just as a friend, but as a Son.... The question that every reader of the New Testament must ask—where Jesus' teaching came from, how his appearance in history is to be explained—can really only be answered from this perspective.... Jesus' teaching is not the product of human learning, of whatever kind. It originates from immediate contact with the Father, from “face-to-face” dialogue—from the vision of the one who rests close to the Father's heart. (p. 6-7).
“Show us the Father,” said Phillip. Jesus answered: “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father.” (John 14:8). In Jesus, we indeed see the Father. The promise of Deuteronomy is fulfilled; a greater than Moses is here, and not only does he speak with the Father “face to face, as with a friend,” but so do those whom he has called and made his own, the sheep of his pasture. By praying “through Jesus Christ our Lord,” we join him in speaking with God, with “Our Father, who art in heaven.” So long as this life lasts, our vision of the Face of God remains imperfect (cf. II Corinthians 3:11-18), and we must continue to pray as we do this day, in the Collect for Epiphany:
O God, who by the leading of a star didst manifest thy only-begotten Son to the peoples of the earth: Lead us, who know thee now by faith, to thy presence, where we may behold thy glory face to face; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
But it will not ever be so:
And he shewed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb. In the midst of the street of it, and on either side of the river, was there the tree of life, which bare twelve manner of fruits, and yielded her fruit every month: and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. And there shall be no more curse: but the throne of God and of the Lamb shall be in it; and his servants shall serve him:
And they shall see his face.
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