A Sea-Change

On a blog called "Hesed we Emet" (that's hebrew for 'mercy and truth') by John Anderson at Duke University—A Blog on the Hebrew Bible, the Book of Genesis, and the Life of a Ph.D. Candidate— there's an interview with Duke U Professor Richard B Hays, author of a number of very important books about the Old Testament in the New. In the course of the interview, he says this:

Much of your work has focused upon the use of the Old Testament in the New. Why do you think this is an important aspect of NT studies? What remains to be done in your view in this area? What questions or issues remain unexplored or have not been answered satisfactorily?

It’s an important issue because nearly all of the NT writers are pervasively engaged with the reception and reinterpretation of Israel’s Scripture! You can’t understand what these authors were talking about if you don’t understand that they lived and moved in the symbolic world of the texts that Christians later came to call the OT. I’m working on a book on the ways that the Evangelists read the OT.... I am constantly amazed by all the interconnections that emerge when we read the NT texts with an eye to their scriptural antecedents and allusions. So I’m not sure I know what needs to be done next. Every time I teach a graduate seminar on this topic, my students come up with fresh insights that are very exciting. It’s important to emphasize that I’m not simply talking about questions of sources and influences. If there is a major unfinished agenda, it has to do with thinking more deeply about the semantic effects of a canonical intertextuality in which the OT is re-read in light of the New and vice-versa to produce fresh and unexpected configurations of meaning. (See the theoretical essays on this topic in Reading the Bible Intertextually, co-edited by Stefan Alkier, Leroy Huizenga, and me [Baylor University Press, 2009].) This also involves studying more deeply the way in which Christian tradition, especially early patristic interpreters, understood these intertextual relations. My own training as a NT scholar was impoverished by a lack of emphasis on patristic readings, and I’m now constantly involved in educating myself about these matters.

I think something very powerful is happening not only in the world of biblical studies, but in western culture generally, and it's very good. Let me take a detour, and then explain:

It can't be said that the Orthodox have been too much in favor of modern critical biblical studies at all. With his usual inimitable candor, Fr Hopko says somewhere in Speaking the Truth in Love that most of what passes for biblical scholarship among us is whatever was "generally accepted practice" in the last generation. That's what our much self-vaunted "conservatism" means!— otherwise, we're rather afraid of critical scholarship and don't trust it. A gander at the Orthodox blogosphere should serve to convince any who doubt what i say. "Tradition!"

Well, there's something to be said for that, especially when considering some high-profile (i.e., highly marketed) nonsense such as the Jesus Seminar or Elaine Pagels (go ahead, click the link, by all means). Still, there's nothing quite like working through all the layers of cross-reference and allusion that lurk in nearly any verse in St Paul or Mark or whomever, and coming finally to something like the big perspective that those writers assume and want you to see. Or even just tracing a theme thoroughly through the Bible, as i discovered when i first began to take an interest in biblical studies. I could see that these activities led only to valuable insights, not to loss of faith. So I have always believed that most scholars are primarily interested in getting at the truth, and that the truth would sooner or later emerge in biblical studies, even if some scholars seemed to be on the wrong path. It's not surprising, in any case, as in any other science, that some researchers have taken wrong turns and spent serious years exploring dead ends. At least we know now that those were dead ends, and why! And— let's not kid ourselves— given the utter depravity that "Christianity" had largely become by the Age of Revolution— and given that people didn't have any other viewpoint to which they could ascend and from which they could judge, the twists and turns that people had to take are not surprising. After all, one could not begin with "revealed truth", when the very nature of "revealed truth" was in question. We had only our own suspicions. But it was not wrong to ask, What does it mean that Noah was told to take the animals "two of each kind" (Gn 6.19-20) and then, five verses later, "seven of each kind" (7.2-3), and then again, "two of each kind" (7.15-16). Or even to ask, Can this be "history"? One had no choice but to begin with questions, not answers. But it was never true that the desire to learn the truth would necessarily lead away from faith. (though i suppose i should hasten to add that what i mean by faith is not what a lot of people mean by faith— as if christianity were about "believing" things "quia absurdum" ("just because they're absurd"), etc.)— although I fear that for many, it is.

So ok, now back to the main point: As i say, i think something interesting is under way, and i have always felt that we would get to this day sooner or later. And Hays just confirmed it.

Once we work through our naive assumption that the biblical texts refer to "history" pure and simple, we find we end up with a Text, as was obvious all along, though we just didn't appreciate it. The Text itself is what's interesting, not what was before or behind it, and not as some kind of launching pad for all kinds of later constructs, from "patristic interpretation" to Scholasticism to Lutheranism to Demythologization— only the Text itself, with its own patterns and structures, expressions and meanings, statements and withdrawals. Recognizing, finally, that Mark has just such an elegant seven-part structure which is totally literary and therefore also totally artificial— finally frees us to get Mark's point, which is very powerful, but which we'd miss entirely if we remained stuck in either a fundamentalist "historicism" or in "redaction criticism", Traditionsgeschichte and the rest. And it was only that we had missed, or rather had not yet seen, or rather no longer saw— the literary character of the Text, that made the field of biblical studies seem so destructive and off-base at times.

What's happening within the field of biblical studies is a rediscovery of the Text as such, and this has another name as well: the "New Perspective". Though plenty of "evangelicals" are fighting the implications, three things have been emerging in the field, which no one can really ignore:

The first is the Jewishness of Jesus, Paul, the Evangelists, and the New Testament— as we learn to appreciate this, we realize more and more deeply that the New Testament addresses its own milieu in its own language, and that its categories are those of the Old Testament, not those of some abstract, post-Kantian Bultmannian existentialism, for example.

Next, and a result of the rediscovery of the Jewishness of the New Testament (and of the Old, for that matter) is that the deeply narrative character of the Bible and of its parts, right down to the level of words, is emerging into view as well. That is, we are once again beginning to see that the Bible is first of all a story, not a sourcebook of abstract dogmas and moral rules. And that it invites us to be part of that story, that is, to bring our stories into relation to its story, which is the story of Adam and Abraham and David and Ezra, and finally of Jesus and Paul and the fathers of the Church. Particularly for what is called "mission", by the way, stories are much more workable than "systems" of salvation, whether Lutheran or Scholastic or Orthodox.

And finally, as a result of this double recognition of Jewishness and story, we are also coming to appreciate the profoundly political meaning of the Old and New Testaments— not by the mechanical and ideological appropriation of biblical prooftexts by some modern agenda of our own, but in terms of their own locatedness in a real world with real economic, political, and religious forces and a real empire. In other words, we're getting a sense again of how the Kingdom of God challenged and subverted (and hence challenges and subverts) the Kingdom of Caesar. This is bound to have a strong impact on society as people awaken to from the high-surveillance nightmare of facades and sales pitches that our fair republic(s) have become under the globalization of Capital.

Which is all why I got excited about Hays' comment above.

With only slight exaggeration, we can say that the Orthodox Church has completely forgotten the Bible, and is the most ignorant of all churches concerning it— even though we are the "original christianity" that wrote the New Testament in the first place. Like everyone else, despite our (again) much self-vaunted "creation theology", many of us especially in the Greek communion are waiting to "go to heaven" just like everyone else; we might individually care about rainforests, but we don't have a strong sense of creation as sacramental, even if we are the Church that above all others bears the biblical meaning of sacramentality into the world.

Also, those who came to Orthodoxy later in life often avoid the Bible because when they read it, they find themselves stuck in fundamentalist interpretations which they have by no means gotten completely free of, for lack of a really workable alternative paradigm. We are much more likely to work through Theophylact of Bulgaria's commentaries than the actual pathways of the Text itself— much less the abysmally conventional "Life Application Study Bible". Well, again, understandable, in a market where those are the only alternatives apart from the Left Behind Series, it's no surprise that St Theophylact sells.

But comes now one of the crowned heads of modern scholarship saying that on the basis of the exciting discovery of "canonical intertextuality", in which "the OT is re-read in light of the New and vice-versa", there is a need for "studying more deeply the way in which Christian tradition, especially early patristic interpreters, understood these intertextual relations". And he even claims that a New Testament scholar— that is, not a scholar of early Christian history or a scholar of of Christian dogma, but a New Testament scholar— is "impoverished" by ignorance of patristic readings of the Bible— so much impoverished, in fact, that he himself— even one of the best— must now say, "I’m now constantly involved in educating myself about these matters."

The Orthodox Church has forgotten the scriptures, and prefers to read only the fathers (if not popular 'lives of saints' etc, of very mixed quality). The churches that study the scriptures have preferred to read only modern commentaries (of mixed quality themselves), and have forgotten Orthodoxy and the fathers. But now that the scriptures are coming at last into view in terms of their own cultural location, narrative character, and even political-social dimension, people are starting to feel a need to trace their way up a path that will lead, inevitably, to the Seven Councils and the classic dogmas, and to Orthodoxy.

So hopefully, we Orthodox will now begin to develop a taste again for Scripture. Indeed, I have friends who have become Orthodox after reading NT Wright, and they continue to find him exciting. The Bible tells you why the dogmas say what they say.

And I myself find at last that i have something to talk about excitedly with evangelicals— and to talk collaboratively, not polemically. Haven't you noticed that educated people generally speak of Orthodoxy respectfully— although to be sure, still with a lot of misunderstanding and ignorance and fantasy. But none the less, there's a sense that important connections exist within Tradition, that need to be recovered.

I don't mean this as a triumphalist piece— particularly because i think we have a long, long way to go and a lot of work to do. But it was clear that a major sea-change was underway in the 60s, when ethnic food became popular in america. The Other. It's all about the Other. The Bible is Other, we are Other, Africa is Other. It's no longer all just about ourselves!

Yay!