On Communion

“The decisive passages in the New Testament do not say: One theology, one right, one opinion on all matters public and private, and one kind of conduct. Instead they say: one body and one Spirit, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and father of us all (Ephesians 4:4ff; 1 Corinthians 12:13; Romans 12:5); various gifts – one Spirit, various offices – one Lord, various powers – one God (1 Corinthians 12:4ff). The point is not ‘unanimity in Spirit’ [‘einigkeit in Geist’], but the ‘unity of the Spirit’ [‘einheit des Geistes’], as Luther puts it in his exposition of Ephesians 4:3; this means the objective principle sovereignly establishes unity, unites the plurality of persons into a single collective person [Gesamtperson] without obliterating either their singularity or the community of persons. Rather, unity of spirit, community of spirit, and plurality of spirit are intrinsically linked to each other through their subject matter.”
– Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Communio Sanctorum, trans. Reinhard Krauss and Nancy Lukens.

Au Revoir, Boston

We’re closing up our Cambridge staging area, and preparing to ship out from Logan “We Scorn Wifi-Using Travelers” Airport. Assuming all goes well, I’ll be back at the Evanston Base in the evening.

We had a spectacular time; I wish everyone could have gotten together to meet the Koslows, the deVillas, the Berkman and OpenCola and general Joey-and-Wendy social tribe. We wee especially tickled to spend a fair amount of time with Ethan and Rachel; a predictable convergence of interests combined with harmonious temperaments to make for animated and engaging conversation. We’re hoping to connect with them again sometime, perhaps when we visit Marlboro [Ethan’s Flickr photos put mine to shame — thank heaven there are other digital photographers out there to fill in what I fumble!]. And, sorry to have missed the other Bostonian bloggers — we love visiting with you, but Margaret and I really appreciated the extra time spent just with each other.

[Later: Back home safely, exhausted, wrung out.]

Wife and Husband

First Dance


First Dance (poor photo)

Originally uploaded by AKMA.

The evening has come and gone; the ketubah is signed, the glass smashed, the champagne toasted, the disco medley played, and the guests exhausted. These guests, anyway.

The wedding service itself blended Judaic and Filipino customs seamlessly; Rachel was terrific, and everyone did just what they were supposed to. The sermon seems to have gone pretty well, so I’ll add it in the extended entry below.

Ethan, Rachel, Margaret, and AKMA

The part everyone’s interested in, though, is did Joey play the accordion at his own wedding? The answer is, emphatically, Yes.

For Those About To Rock

Joey was great, and the dance floor filled as he roared through “Old Time Rock’n’Roll” and his classic interpretation of “Born to Be Wild” (with Wendy on vocals). The accordion so captivated the pulses of all present that even a grouchy old curmudgeon was dragged onto the parquet by some lovely blithe spirit.

Born To Be Wild

A splendid time was most assuredly had by all.

[Later: Margaret stipulates that I must note that I myself was indeed dancing — the “curmudgeon” described above — and the photographic evidence is available at the Flickr page to which I link here and above.]
Continue reading “Wife and Husband”

Step Back, Reassess

One excellent function of wedding rehearsals lies in their capacity to make visible what had lain merely implicit, and to bring to shared awareness what had not yet been come together except in the imagination of the planners. Or, more prosaically, to remind the preacher that he simply had not reckoned on how things would be going at the part of the wedding with which his name is associated.

So the preacher has gone back to the drawing board (or “the writing desk,” or “the keyboard and printer”) and refactored the homily for tonight. Luckily, the occasion will be so delightful, so wondrous that no one will be thinking hard about the homily, and a splendid time will be had by all without interference from this corner. (As soon as Joey and Wendy give their OK, I’ll post it here — if Ethan hasn’t already transcribed it on IRC).

Now I Am A Procrastinator

Today my Seabury-Orientation schedule abates a bit; I only have one event scheduled, which is a Very Good Thing because I need to finish (that’s “finish,” as in “get more than just an opening idea for”) the sermon homily one-liner for Joey and Wendy’s wedding.

Since there’s a very significant task at hand, with an unforgiving deadline, I’m actually accomplishing a number of other things instead of tackling the immediate obligation. For instance, Trevor figured out what he wanted to do with the Disseminary site, and I’ve been filling in little details or adding posts here and there. I’ve been pumping out the last chapters of the Theological Outlines project (I note with interest that Hall referes to Calvinism as a “heresy”; now, that’d stir the pot at a meeting of mixed-theology Anglican conservatives) — I think I can get the last three chapters published today.

I’ve been thinking more about the iPod Nano, since I’ve had the opportunity to heft, to admire, to explore one. I think this model may be the watershed for digital music, along the lines of what I speculated before. I mean, yes, the present version scratches too easily and costs too much for the big breakthrough, but if you let the price drift down to where it’ll be in a few months, this unit betokens the time when people will not say, “Do I want to bring along my iPod?” but “Which iPod do I want to bring? The hip-hop iPod, the gospel iPod, or the audiobook iPod?”

And once we get to that point, all sorts of consequences follow. I’d spell out some of them, except I have to work on the sermon. . . .

Reciprocity

Jeneane cordially picked up my suggestion from yesterday and prolonged International David Weinberger Day with her supportive linkage — it’s the least I can do, to point out that this is also International Blog like a PR Writer Week.

This coming weekend will, of course, be a national holiday in the Philippines, Canada, and the USA as Joey and Wendy get married, and the week after is Halley’s Healthy Heart Week.

Keep your calendars open; someone else will surely step up after that.

International David Weinberger Day

Today Pippa and I heard David Weinberger’s commentary on All Things Considered (she came running downstairs and said, “Dad, David Weinberger was just on the radio!” I, thankfully, had already been listening) (no link yet). And he was renewed for another year of fellowhood at the Berkman Center (along with David Isenberg). Then, too, he’s releasing a new issue of his online newsletter with no recycled content. Tasty, minty fresh, and provocative — a trifecta of Weinbergerian wisdom!

Letter From The Gulf Coast

One of my friends from a long time ago made her way down to the coast of Mississippi, and she wrote me last night with the following report from David Knight’s base of operations:

I got back home yesterday evening after spending a week at the Episcopal Disaster Relief Center at Coast Episcopal School in Long Beach/Pass Christian. I only got to speak a sentence or two to David Knight. I just hope that you will continue to tell people in your blog about the phenomenal thing that is happening there.

The medical team from Duke Hospital was seeing hundreds of people a day, including some minor surgeries — in a gymnasium with parts of three walls blown out. Dozens of volunteers were sleeping on cots and air mattresses in classrooms while other classrooms were set up as distribution centers for food, clothing, and supplies. Priests and volunteers are coming in from all over the country; trucks full of donations are arriving almost more quickly than volunteers can unload them. Within a week the grounds of the school are going to be completely transformed into a “relief city” with tents and trailers for the clinic and relief distribution while the gym is being repaired and equipped to become a “feeding station” to provide hot meals for three months or more. I have never been prouder of my diocese as it steps in to do what needs to be done and I have never been prouder of my fellow Mississippians. Never have I seen race be less of an issue as I have in the last week. The refrain I heard over and over again was “we’ll get through this.” Tired, dazed people who have lost much, if not everything, they owned are treating one another with respect and kindness and gently ironic but not cynical good humor. I have seen the power of the church at its best and I am deeply humbled by the experience. The Spirit is most truly working at Coast Episcopal.

I am not surprised to hear such good things about work in which my friend David is involved, and I’m joyous to hear that Holly could lend her efforts to the work of protecting and sustaining our storm-tossed neighbors. Please continue to support the ministries down in Mississippi and Louisiana — as the initial wave of generosity recedes, our determination to share becomes all the more important.

On Hermeneutics and Disagreement, Part Four

Most of what I’ve said so far has emphasized problems in interpretation, impediments to the Spirit and to harmony; in this last session, I’d like to emphasize the ways we can move toward agreement and articulate reassons for endorsing particular interpretations.

Much of what I will suggest here touches on topics that we’ve discussed before, in different ways. I’ve emphasized, several times, the importance of being able to give reasons for one’s interpretive claims. Here we’ll describe different sorts of these good reasons.

Some good reasons derive from basics about communication. That’s one reason the literal sense (in its full, rich, texture) plays a paramount role. Theories that involve elaborate substitution-codes and conspiratorial deception fail a test of basic communication; they’re tremendously improbable, from the perspective I commend to you (I prescind from ruling them out absolutely, since I may always be wrong — but so far as I can tell, they lack even a shadow of the tremendous compensatory rationale that would be requisite to balance out their comprehensive non-literality). For us to make a persuasive text about how best to interpret a biblical text, we ought to be able to make a case that our claim fits a plausible reading of the Hebrew or Greek itself; the stronger that case, the better.

Some good reasons derive from the unique authority that Scripture holds within the Christian tradition. For instance, I short-changed you when I alluded to Augustine before — when he says, “What more liberal and more fruitful provision could God have made in regard to the Sacred Scriptures than that the same words might be understood in several senses?” he actually appends a codicil: “the same words might be understood in several senses, all of which are sanctioned by the concurring testimony of other passages equally divine.” This coheres with Augustine’s well-known comfort with interpretive plurality earlier in de Doctrina, where he says, “If. . . [someone] draws a meaning from them that may be used for the building up of love, even though he does not happen upon the precise meaning which the author whom he reads intended to express in that place, his error is not pernicious. . .” (I.36.40). Augustine reasons that wherever one runs into confusion about what a passage means, one should look to the concurring testimony of other passages (III.28.39), much as Aquinas points out that “. . .nothing necessary to faith is contained under the spiritual sense which is not elsewhere put forward by the Scripture in its literal sense” (Summa I q. 1 a. 10, invoking both the concurrent testimony of Scripture and the literal sense!).

The Anglican tradition includes some specific hermeneutical advice as well. Article XX instructs that “it is not lawful for the Church to ordain anything contrary to God’s Word written, neither may it so expound one place of Scripture, that it be repugnant to another.” The force of “repugnant” might be clearer, but it seems unlikely that it simply means “contradictory” (thought the Latin text does give contradicat here), since the Anglican tradition has typically not been shy about acknowledging the places where Scripture seems to give two opposite versions of a point; rather, I take it more narrowly in the sense that one portion of Scripture can’t be used to negate another. (Chris Seitz has an essay on just this subject, on which I can’t put my hand right now, but as I recall, he not surprisingly construed “repugnancy” in a more restrictive sense than I). At any rate, the point clearly holds that the Anglican tradition weighs in on not being able airily to dismiss the bits that aren’t amenable to our own argument — to say the least.

We agreed that points of orientation on which the church had attained effective unanimity (or near unanimity), such as the Creeds, definitions, and conciliar canons, bore an interpretive authority concomitant with their generality. [Note: I am not suggesting that the Creeds are optional; I’m adopting this way of saying it exactly so as to avoid needing to debate the point. Even people who want to call the Creeds into question must admit that the Creeds’ doctrinal force has been acknowledged at a tremendously high degree of assent, so I don’t need to deal with an argument about just who does and who doesn’t believe what about the Creeds.] An interpretation that presumes to set aside a creedal formulation on the basis of a hunch or a gut feeling, or even on the basis of “no intelligent person could possibly believe that now,” counts for little over against the preponderance of the Church’s wisdom.

What more? Well, prominently, the accumulated interpretive wisdom of hundreds of years of saints who have gone before. In the session, which was taking place at the same time as the hearings relative to John Roberts’s nomination to be Chief Justice, we talked a lot about stare decisis, the force of precedent and interpretive tradition. While we cannot preclude the possibility that the saints have erred, we likewise can’t rule out the possibility that we’re mistaken, and we ought not presume to a certainty that obliges us to suppress the testimony of our forebears in the faith as credulous buffoons. We may place distinct value on guidance from the conciliar church, from particularly Anglican divines, from scholars whose grasp of technical interpretive questions warrants our respectful attention.

Most particularly, it seems to me, we should attend to the traditions of shared worship as recorded for us in the Book of Common Prayer. This criterion is complicated for us by the path onto which the American church seems headed, where the creditable diversity in congregations issues in an increasing number of divergent, arguably incompatible, authorized expressions. I’m not against “diversity” — but I do regard a tradition that depends, to a great extent, on common prayer as endangered by so great a proliferation of forms of worship that the modifier “common” may no longer plausibly apply. That concern bear particular weight at a time when matters of doctrine are called into question; if we codify our doctrinal divergences into the very language of our prayer, we may simply have enacted the dissolution of the “shared” part of our heritage.

So we can draw on vast realms of evaluative criteria in proposing and justifying our biblical interpretations, and any interpretation worth our attention really ought to be able to make a case that appeals to a good many of these. In all this, though, we should remember to keep our eyes on the reasons, not on shorthands or slogans, not on flat assertions or free-floating assurances, not on the names of exegetical heroes or villains. If we share with one another our reasoning, and not think of ourselves more highly than we ought to think, but regard others as better than ourselves — in so doing, we’ll demonstrate our willingness for the Spirit to heal our divisions, we will have offered our very best wisdom to illumine others, and we can await with confidence the divine resolution of temporal confusion.

On Hermeneutics and Disagreement, Part Three

The first parts of my talk with Northern Indiana involved the premise that we do what we can to facilitate the Spirit’s work of bringing clarity where confusion besets the church, and that difference in interpretation doesn’t necessarily constitute a problem. “What more liberal and more fruitful provision could God have made in regard to the Sacred Scriptures than that the same words might be understood in several senses?” (Augustine, dDC III.27.38)

The third premise I suggested entailed recognizing that the literal sense of Scripture doesn’t solve our interpretive problems. That’s not to say it’s unimportant or bad; it just doesn’t resolve existing conflicts over interpretation. The literal sense functions most powerfully exactly where we don’t need it in a conflict: where we don’t even consider the possibility of a different interpretation. I coast to a rest when I observe a rectangular octagonal red sign (and you probably do too, unless you’re a practitioner of the Texas Rolling Stop), I don’t hesitate to ponder the various possible senses of the literal imperative to stop. If we experienced an active division, though, about how to behave at red-signed intersections, simply saying that the sign literally means “stop” wouldn’t advance anyone’s understanding of the problem. Put it this way: it’s entirely possible for people who agree about the literal sense of a passage to disagree about what follows from it, and it’s often quite possible for intelligent people of good conscience to disagree about the literal sense itself. If we identify a conflict in which one group avowedly rests its position solely (probably even “principally”) on a non-literal interpretation of Scripture I’ll gladly line up with people who ask that they justify their claims with appeal to the literal sense — but I’m not holding my breath.

Moreover, “the literal sense” can’t be reduced to just one thing. The church’s teachers recognized long ago the necessity of distinguishing the literal, grammatical sense — the sort of technical-literal sense, where words just flat-out mean what they mean — and a more general literal sense, where an expression that [obviously] functions figuratively is construed as a figure (in their terminology, a sensus literalis duplex). When Jesus says, “A man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho,” we need not reckon that the statement implies an actual specific person’s transit from one city toward another (though that’s literally what it means). Now, we can often find ambiguities and quibbles in the grammatical sense; these supply commentaries and text critics with ample material. The even greater difficulty comes when we try to pin down the more expansive literal sense, the difficulty signaled by my bracketed use of “obviously” in the previous sentence. That which seems obvious to one interpreter doesn’t always seem obvious to another (the doctors caution against a literality that leads to heresy, as Arius’s case illustrates; they used Wycliffe and Hus as examples of the problems that arose from sticking solely to the literal sense) — which engenders interpretive conflict, which is the topic of the whole discussion.

The church, even at the medieval height of figurative, spiritual interpretation, has upheld the importance of the literal sense as an indispensable reference point for interpretation. The medieval church, though, saw that the literal sense itself signified multivalent-ly; it can’t serve as a fixed point for interpretive navigation, but must always be checked against complicating contextual indicators. And once you introduce those complicating contextual factors, the “literal sense” — essential though it be — can’t function simply as the arbitrator of interpretive divergence. As I’ve suggested repeatedly in the course of these remarks, we need to give reasons for thinking that X or Y is the literal sense, and it’s our reasons that contribute to clarifying (if not finally resolving, since once again, that’s the work of the Spirit) our disagreements. And we contribute to the Spirit’s work by making our reasons explicit, and by refraining from clouding the issue with impertinent or tractionless claims.

Again I emphasize that this doesn’t depreciate Scripture, truth, or the literal sense; it simply points to the true dimensions of the problem we’re working through.

All of this points, hard, toward the vitally important final part of my presentation, on criteria. I’ll try to write that up after church.