Grundt work

John H December 17th, 2009

I’m currently reading (on J.R. Hermeneut’s recommendation) Julia Watkin’s Kierkegaard, a biographical introduction to Kierkegaard’s life and thought.

In the first full chapter, on Kierkegaard’s “personal and cultural background”, Dr Watkin describes the rationalist “Enlightenment Christianity” that dominated the Danish state church in the 18th and early 19th century. Kierkegaard’s family was heavily influenced by two contrasting reactions to this rationalism: pietism (particularly that of the Moravians), and a movement known as Grundtvigianism.

Grundtvigianism was named after Nikolai Grundtvig, a pastor in the state church who reacted against those seeking to base Christian theology on “historical-critical biblical exegesis”, with “professors of biblical theology as the experts in explaining Scripture”. Watkin writes:

For Grundtvig, such an emphasis on elite specialists, and especially [the] emphasis on Scripture at the expense of the community of the church, was intolerable. (p.14)

Grundtvig’s response to this rationalist elitism was to seek out “some brief definition of Christianity for the benefit of Christians unskilled in theology” (which makes me wonder what had happened to the Small Catechism in the Danish church at this point), which led him to his “matchless” or “unparalleled” discovery:

the distinction between the spoken “living word” in the sacraments and the creed, and the written word. (p.14)

Grundtvig did not deny the importance of the Scriptures or need for biblical exegesis. His concern was over a rationalistic and individualistic approach that placed the Bible at the heart of Christian faith and life, rather than “the Christian community gathered round the sacraments in the confession of Christ”. As Watkin continues:

The Christian community gathered round the sacraments in the confession of Christ, an unbroken chain of baptized individuals in community, became for Grundtvig a kind of apostolic succession bound to the sacraments instead of ministry.

The heart of the Grundtvigian view can thus be seen to be an existential experience of God in Christ as the living Word, proclaimed at baptism and communion and heard in the Church from the beginning, a living word in which Christ as the Word is present as he is in the sacraments. (pp.14f.)

So it would appear that for some years I have been a Grundtvigian without knowing it. (Perhaps someone with more knowledge of Grundtvig can tell me if that’s a good or a bad thing!) That “existential experience of God in Christ” in the sacraments and preaching of the church has become central to my understanding of how the gospel comes to us.

The Bible is of critical importance, certainly, but its importance is principally as the foundation for that ministry of the church, as the source for the living Word in proclamation and sacrament. Problems come when we detach the Bible from the church’s proclamation and community life.

Who is squeezing whom?

John H October 6th, 2009

Revd Alex Klages is at a Lutheran Church – Canada event rejoicing in one of the most incomprehensible hashtags I’ve ever seen on Twitter: #mnolcccentconf. He just posted the following message responding to a point made by one of the speakers:

The importance of squeezing a text to get all the juice out of it; interesting way of looking at exegetical task.

Yes, it is an interesting way of looking at the exegetical task. What’s interesting is how it compares with the language used by John Bunyan in his spiritual autobiography, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (phew! great title!), where he uses phrases such as the following to describe his encounters with the Scriptures:

  • “This scripture did also seem to me to trample upon all my desires, ‘It is not of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth, but of God that sheweth mercy’ (Rom. 9.16).” (para 58)
  • …these words broke in upon my mind, ‘Compel them to come in, that my house may be filled’; ‘and yet there is room’ (Luke 14.22, 23).” (para 68)
  • “…that Word came in upon me: ‘I will cleanse their blood that I have not cleansed: for the Lord dwelleth in Zion’ (Joel 3.21).” (para 76)
  • “…for that scripture lay much upon me, ‘without shedding of blood is no remission’ (Heb. 9.22).” (para 86)
  • “At which, that sentence fell in upon me, he ‘wist not that it was true which was done by the angel’.” (para 91)
  • “Now about a week or fortnight after this, I was much followed by this scripture, ‘Simon, Simon, behold Satan hath desired to have you’ (Luke 22.31).” (para 93)
  • “I had, also, once a sweet glance from that in II Cor. 5.21: ‘For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him.’” (para 113)
  • “At another time, as I sat by the fire in my house, and musing on my wretchedness, the Lord made that also a precious word unto me…” (para 116)
  • “And withal, that scripture did seize upon my soul…” (para 141)
  • “Suddenly this sentence bolted in upon me, The blood of Christ remits all guilt. At this I made a stand in my spirit; with that, this word took hold upon me, ‘The blood of Jesus Christ, his Son, cleanseth us from all sin’ (1 John 1.7).” (para 143)

You get the idea. For Bunyan, the Bible is not a passive object waiting for us to “squeeze the juice out of it”. It is truly a living Word, which acts upon us as and how the Holy Spirit pleases (see para 47).

What I found especially challenging glancing through Grace Abounding looking up these references is the variety of ways in which Bunyan experiences the Word of God working upon him. Sometimes it acts almost violently, as it “breaks in on his mind”, “bolts in upon him”, “tramples on his desires”, and so on. Sometimes it has a steadier, more lingering influence: “that scripture lay much upon me”, “I was much followed by this scripture”.

At other times it almost teases him with the prospect of happiness and assurance (“a sweet glance”). And at yet other times the Word of God comes to him as a comfort: “the Lord made that also a precious word unto me…” There is a richness of experience here which is far beyond anything in my own spiritual life.

Now, the spiritual torment that Bunyan describes in Grace Abounding is not something to hold up as the model for “the ideal Christian life” (see also this post from 2006). But reading Bunyan makes me realise how easy it is for us to lose sight of the Word of God as living and active, as something which acts upon us rather than waiting passively for us to interpret it.

A religion of the Word, not of the Book

John H November 1st, 2008

A couple of weeks ago, I commented that there is a distinction between how Lutherans and other evangelicals use the term, “the word of God”, and how we understand God as speaking.

For Lutherans, the word of God is principally the proclaimed word: the word spoken aloud in the preaching of the gospel and the administration of the sacraments; whereas for most other evangelicals, the phrase “the word of God” most immediately evokes the written (or, more precisely, printed) word of the Bible.

This difference in understanding is illustrated by the Pyromaniacs’ post for Reformation Day, in which Dan Phillips argues that Luther’s fundamental message in the Reformation was not justification by faith but sola scriptura, Scripture alone.

Phillips contrasts this with the approach taken by the Roman Catholic bishop (and close associate of the pope), Salvatore Fisichella, who has called for Christians to reject the idea that ours is a “religion of the Book”. Fisichella writes:

Many believers, when asked what the phrase “Word of God” means, respond: “The Bible”. That response isn’t wrong, but it’s incomplete, or at least it reflects an incomplete perception of the richness present in the expression, and as a consequence it tends to identify Christianity as a “Religion of the Book”.

This leads to Christianity being identified with Judaism and Islam as one of three “religions of the Book”. However, Fisichella insists that:

Christianity is properly understood as a “religion of the Word”.

Fisichella continues by insisting on the need to see Scripture as “a living word”. Otherwise:

…we run the risk of humiliating the Word of God by reducing it exclusively to a written text, without the provocative capacity to give meaning to life.

The problem is that Phillips is misunderstanding (or misapplying) the concept of sola scriptura. Sola scriptura is a statement about what the church can say, not a statement about how God speaks to us; it is a limit placed on the church, not a limit placed on God. It tells us that the church cannot bind our consciences with beliefs or practices that are not derived from the Bible. It does not tell us that God only speaks by means of the written words found in the Bible.

On the contrary: as we have seen, the most important means by which God speaks to us is through the verbal proclamation of the gospel. To be sure, that proclamation must be founded on what is written in the Scriptures. Indeed, one of the main reasons for the Scriptures’ being written was to ensure the verbal proclamation would remain faithful to the original. (See, for example, 2 Peter 1:12-15.)

However, it remains true that the Luther who posted the 95 Theses is the same Luther who (as we saw in my earlier post) observed that Jesus did not “command his disciples to go into the world and write books”, but rather to “proclaim the gospel to the whole creation”.

And that sounds closer to Bishop Fisichella’s understanding of the “word of God” than to Dan Phillips’.

“Scripture alone” – but Scripture is never alone

John H October 23rd, 2008

Michael Spencer recently hosted an open thread on his blog on the question of How Much Can The Bible Do “Alone?”, that is, without someone there to teach or explain it.

Jaroslav Pelikan (see previous posts 1 | 2) comments on this issue as follows:

Occasionally, certain devout believers have even pushed this power of the written Word of God and inspired Scripture to the point of attributing their conversion directly to it.

The classic example of this is St Augustine, who describes how he was finally converted when he opened the Bible and happened to read: “Let us behave with decency as befits the day: no drunken orgies, no debauchery or vice, no quarrels or jealousies!”. Pelikan also points to the work of the British and Foreign Bible Society and the Gideons in distributing Bibles, at least partly for the purpose of bringing people to faith through reading the printed Word.

However, as Pelikan continues:

…if we probe the historical evidence, we will often find a human voice hovering somewhere in the vicinity of the written or printed page.

Hence Augustine was prompted to pick up the Scriptures by hearing a child’s voice calling out, “Pick it up and read it!”, and:

…the Bibles and tracts of the Bible societies were often distributed by the hand of a living and speaking human being, not just by mail or in a tract rack.

And as Pelikan points out:

No book of the Tanakh [i.e. the Old Testament] or the New Testament is addressed explicitly to unbelievers, though they are certainly present prominently in both.

Hence:

…for every paragraph in a letter or every chapter in a spiritual autobiography detailing someone’s conversion through reading the Book, there are hundreds in which it is the voice of a parent, friend or stranger – perhaps sometimes even a teacher or preacher – that was the force which did the challenging and summoning and inviting.

The message that voice conveyed was, with or without quotation marks, the message of the Book, or at any rate it almost always claimed to be just that. And the bearer of the message had usually read the Book or had even memorised large portions of it. But the agency issuing the invitation and distributing the Book was not a library or a classroom but a community of faith and of worship.

So the words of St Paul continue to hold true as the general rule: “faith comes from what is heard” (Romans 10:17).

It often strikes me that most accounts of conversions through the written Word alone, as with most accounts of conversions by “direct” means supposedly without the Word’s involvement (e.g. accounts of visions), come down to how the people frame and interpret and describe their own experiences. Those who experience conversions of this nature will almost always have had some prior contact with the proclaimed Word and the community of faith, even if the individual’s account of their conversion focuses on those aspects that took place apart from that Word and community.

That’s not at all to dismiss people’s experiences; just to say that people may have “had the experience but missed [or mistaken] the meaning”.

Proclamation vs printing

John H October 19th, 2008

I’ve just started reading what turned out to be Jaroslav Pelikan’s final book, Whose Bible Is It?: A history of Scripture throughout the ages.

While this is a history of the Bible – i.e. the written Word – Prof. Pelikan begins his book by emphasising the priority of the spoken Word. As he points out, the Bible begins by telling us that “In the beginning … God said, ‘Let there be light’”, and eighty chapters of divine speech pass by before we first find God writing something.

Even where – as with Jeremiah – we find prophets writing the Word of God themselves, the spoken Word always comes first (“Write in a book all the words that I have spoken to you”, Jeremiah 30:2). What’s more:

[T]he prophet writes the words in the book precisely for the purpose of their being spoken words again at some future time.

The same is true of the New Testament, and Pelikan cites Luther in support of this:

As Martin Luther once observed, nowhere in the New Testament does Jesus command his disciples to go into the world and write books, not even the Gospels and the other books of the New Testament. Rather, as the New Testament itself is at pains to attest, “he said to them: ‘Go to every part of the world, and proclaim the gospel to the whole creation.’”

Indeed, Pelikan points out that Luther preferred to restrict the term “Scripture” to the Old Testament, with a better term for the New Testament being “proclamation” or “message”.

This then leads to an important linguistic distinction between how Lutherans and other evangelicals use the term, “the Word of God”. As I’ve commented before elsewhere, when non-Lutheran evangelicals say “the Word”, they tend to have the Bible in mind. However, when Lutherans say “the Word”, we tend to have preaching and the sacraments in mind: that is, the proclaimed Word rather than the printed Word.

Indeed, with my recent “join the conversation” post in mind, I’d encourage non-Lutheran evangelicals to give greater weight to this “Lutheran” understanding of the Word of God as a verbal proclamation. Individual Bible reading is a good thing, but something that could only become normative for Christians in an era of cheap printed Bibles and mass literacy. What’s more, it tends to lead to an individualistic reading of Scripture, in which the question is: “What is God saying to me as I read this?”

However, when we associate “the Word of God” principally with the Word that is proclaimed in the public reading of Scripture, in preaching and in the sacraments, then this leads us to see the Bible as being the means by which the Word once spoken by the prophets and apostles can be spoken again to the people of God today. This in turn encourages a communal interpretation of Scripture in which the question is: “What is God saying to us as we hear this?”

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