Abided Knowing

I just read Scott Prather’s article in American Theological Inquiry entitled: “The Body and Human Identity in Postmodernity and Orthodoxy”.  It’s really a condensed read on somaticism’s reach into theology.  The article is roughly divided into three parts that I would call 1) why reductions and ‘isms’ won’t give Christian theology the impetus needed to work out somatic issues, 2) why orthodoxy can give us guidance on the body as a relative yet not subjective being, and 3) how our relativity to the Body of Christ is our body’s natural estate.

The first part appears to me to be obligatory for the author.  The second and third parts are a nice peer into the work of Eastern Orthodoxy of late and parsed statements about how we can view anthropology without flinging ourselves into the pure subjectivisms described in part one.  Here’s a nice quote from part 2:

“To be human is to be made “in the image of God,” a body made from “the dust of the earth” enlivened by and united with God through the soul. In this tradition, the soul is itself not a disembodied “part” of the human being, but embodied aspects of the person which reflect and tend towards the image of God (the logos of the Father) including intellect, will, and desire.”

The euangelion here is that the whole journal is free online at: atijournal.org.

We have finally gotten around to making the announcement to our families and the church. So now I can publicly admit that we’re all moving to St. Andrews in January for me to begin my Ph.D. studies under the supervision of Prof. Alan Torrance (nephew of T.F. Torrance, who happened to be good friends with Michael Polanyi).

All the excitement has worn off, so now I am just very busy fixing up the house for sale and terrified about the prospects of failure.

If you want to read my dissertation proposal, it is here.

This is an extended quote from Nietzsche’s Late Notebooks (p 116, the italics reflect Nietzsche’s underlining in his hand written notebooks):

What advantages did the Christian moral hypothesis offer?

1. It endowed man with an absolute value, in contrast to his smallness and contingency in the flux of becoming and passing away.

2. It served the advocates of God by conceding to the world, despite suffering and evil, the character of perfection, including that ‘freedom’ - evil seemed full of meaning.

3. It posited that man knows about absolute values, thus giving him adequate knowledge precisely of what is most important.

It shielded man from despising himself as man, from taking sides against life, from despairing of knowledge: it was a means of preservation - in sum, morality was the great antidote to practical and theoretical nihilism.

I take it for granted that points 1 & 2 can both be correct and uncontroversially used to argue for or against Christian morality. However, point 3 is quite remarkable, for I tend to agree with Nietzsche here and see this as a current sin of the Church. My only concern would be that man can know absolute value versus knowing about absolute value. It we take him to mean the Christian morality can equip us with a kind of knowledge that is absolute, then I’m not sure what biblical warrant or situation we will be able to find in support of this.

The great deceit of certainty extends into our sense of the moral and the Body of Christ must be clear as to what our epistemology is like. What sense does it make to say that we can know some moral in an absolute way when every law of morality has to be transgressed in order to maintain its coherence (sans the worship of God)? As I often point out, the command to ‘not murder’ is given by a God who just murder thousands of children and Egyptian soldiers and is planning the systematic slaughter of the people of Canaan. Further, this God gives that commandment through the hands and prayers of a man who is established an enraged murderer himself. What absolute value do we gain from such a narrative and its embedded codes?

If the goal is to walk away from canon with a knowledge of absolute values transferred to your mind, then Nietzsche’s words here ought to cut you to the bone. That kind of knowledge can only act as an illusory antidote to nihilism. But I will suggest that our retort to Nietzsche is to argue against abuse of absolutism in favor of an epistemology that does allow us to know what is moral, but not contain or domesticate that morality. In the end, our morality is based in the worship of Yahweh, His Son through the Spirit given to us. That is, after all, the intent of the first commandment. All attempts at absolutizing morality will rightly fall under Nietzsche’s admonition here.

Dr. Michael Bird (the oft mistaken Rick Astley impersonator of Highland Theological College & the blog EUANGELION) posted the following questions to leading Reformed theologians.  The answers appear to require a book-length well-reasoned argument.  But the questions cut right to the core of Biblical Theology and really, any kind of Jewish or Christian theology.  Here they are:

1. What is the “Reformed Orthodox” view of using extra-biblical sources in exegesis? What led you to this answer and what (if anything) makes your answer prescriptive?

2. Why is Genesis 1-3 similar to the Enuma Elish? On what do you base your answer?

3. Did the Apostle Paul believe in the inerrancy of the autographa? Why are Paul’s citation of Scripture often different from the wording and meaning in the original Hebrew Bible and even the Septuagint (to give one example: Isa. 59.20 cited in Rom. 11.26-27)?

4. Did the historical person of Enoch prophesy about the coming of the Lord (Jude 14-15)? Why does Jude cite this extra-canonical source (an Enochic tradition?), without differentiating it from the Hebrew Scriptures that he also quotes in his short epistle?

And as G.I. Joe says, “Knowing is half the battle.” I suppose killing is the other half (which ironically never happened on G.I. Joe).

I heard back from the only program to which I applied. I have been ‘offered a place to study for a Ph.D. under the supervision of… .” Apparently, my proposal and the 100 quid I stuffed into the application worked well enough. I also had to pay quite a high price for those letters of reference (this is sarcasm lest anyone mistake it). Needless to say, we are extremely happy, after all, it just feels good not to be rejected again. Also, this program and supervisor is an infinitely better fit for me with a much more prestigious university. When I was reading rejection letters last year, I wouldn’t have ever summoned the notion that it was possible for things to work out like this.

Anyway, this is the is just the fun part: knowing that I’m accepted. The coming parts are where all the work is at.

I  am learning the hard reality of what it means to identify with God before I identify with whatever God has called me to do. It’s summed in a deceptively smart phrase from Psalm 37:

Be still before the Lord and wait patiently for him.

I won’t preach this, but the blatant value of such a disposition is painfully gained (at least for people of my disposition).

Michael Bird citing Markus Bockmuehl citing C.K. Barrett citing Edward Hoskyns.  If you don’t already read Euangelion, you probably should.  Michael Bird gives a daily mix of reading summaries, insider NT info, and journal TOC’s.  It’s a great glimpse at some happenings in NT studies. 

Hoskyns apparently says this of his endeavor in NT criticism: 

“You look down your critical miscroscope at the New testament text with a view to describing the religious life of the first-century Christians, and you find that God is looking back at you through the microscope and declaring you to be a sinner” (Bockmuehl, Seeing the Word, 147).