Who needs Scripture?

I wrote this piece for another publication a little over a year ago. Since I’ve been struggling for some time now with carving out time to read the Bible regularly, I read it as an exercise in de-planking my own eye. Anything you all have to offer is, as always, much welcome.

*****

[Jesus] said to him, “What is written in the law? How do you read?” (Luke 10.26)

Read assiduously and learn as much as you can. Let sleep find you holding your Bible, and when your head nods let it be resting on the sacred page. (St Jerome, Letter to Eustochius)

While working on a writing project yesterday I came across this text in Ezekiel:

Yet you say, “Why should not the son suffer for the iniquity of the father?”  When the son has done what is lawful and right, and has been careful to observe all my statutes, he shall surely live.  The soul that sins shall die.  The son shall not suffer for the iniquity of the father, not the father suffer for the iniquity of the son; the righteousness of the righteous shall be upon himself, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon himself.  (Ezekiel 18.19-21)

The word of the Lord given through the prophet appears to be addressing what we might call a theological opinion that had arisen among the exiles in Babylon, namely, that God punishes sons for the sins of their fathers.

I won’t go into further details about the meaning of this text because I’m not concerned here with an exegetical reflection of it.  What struck me, and what I want to write about, was that I’d never seen this text brought up in Orthodox-Catholic conversations about original sin and inherited guilt.  Having hung around some ecumenical circles in the blogosphere for a while, I’ve witnessed many a discussion (often polemical) about Orthodox and Catholic anthropologies, but strangely, I don’t remember one in which this passage was carted out and batted around. Instead, the conversations were often saturated with quotations both long and short from the Fathers and modern theologians, and centered on the implication or acquittal of St. Augustine.

I think this points to problem that is neither uniquely Catholic nor Orthodox, but rather common to those of us who are students (or self-proclaimed experts) of the Patristic tradition.  We often go on and on about how the Fathers did not possess as “systematic theology” as we now understand it, and that their endeavor of theologia stood solidly on the grounds of prayer, asceticism and the assiduous reading of God’s Word rather than on philosophical systems or—*gasp*—the scholastic method.  But for all this, are we not merely honoring them with our lips while keeping our heart far away from them?

I’ve always been taught to see the Patristic tradition as a commentary on Scripture, full of diverse voices and theological subtleties, conditioned by the historical particularities of the life of the Church—liturgy, heresy, cultural questions and so forth.  To use the terminology of Cardinal Ratzinger, the Patristic tradition is the primitive and archetypal response of the Church to the Word of God—a response which is not just one among many, but rather one to which we must ascribe authority for its unparalleled and definitive influence on the shape of our faith.  This is true not only of the content of their theology, but also of their method (if I may make a distinction between the two)—namely, the rigorous searching and exposition of the Scriptures within the lived experience of the Church.  But in all this there is still a primacy that belongs to Scripture, for the Fathers saw themselves as servants, not masters, of that revelation.

To come back, then, to my gripe: if the Patristic tradition is like a finger which pointing to the moon, have we, their disciples, often focused exclusively on the finger and forgotten about the moon?

There is among students in many Biblical Studies departments today the vice of drowning oneself in the ocean of linguistic, historical and cultural studies—the so-called “historical-critical” methods, if you will—which leads to an actual neglect of the primary text of the Bible itself.  Even as an amateur student, my experience is that many of the alleged exegetical dead-knots can be untied or at least loosened by a closer and wider reading of the text (which, I should also say, the Fathers had often already done several centuries ago).

Have we, the disciples of the Fathers, fallen into a similar vice by focusing on the commentary of the Patristic tradition to the neglect of a direct encounter with God’s Word? For all our talk, have we turned their love for the Scriptures into something to be discussed and admired from afar, rather an example to be imitated?  I can almost hear St. Ephrem say to me, “Busted!”

I’m reminded, though, of the practice of our Jewish brothers and sisters, who until today show great devotion to both Scripture and tradition in their practice Torah study.  The practice instituted by the Talmud is to read the appointed Torah portion twice, and after that to read the interpretive translation (one could say “commentary”) from Targum Onkelos once.  By doing this, the student is directly engaging the biblical text while simultaneously entering into a conversation with the ancestors of faith who’ve gone before him.

Isn’t there a way Christians can practice something similar? Must we be necessarily torn between Scripture and the Fathers?  I’d like to think not.

By persuasion, and not by compulsion

And was [Christ's] coming, as a man might suppose, in power, in terror, and in dread? Not so; it was in gentleness and humility. As a king sending his royal son, so [the Father] sent him; He sent him as God; He sent him as Man to men; and that because He wanted to save us by persuasion, and not by compulsion–for there is no compulsion found with God. His mission was no pursuit or hounding of us; it was an invitation to us; it was in love, not in judgment that He sent him (though one day He will indeed send him to judge us, and then who shall abide the day of his coming?).

Letter to Diognetus, 7.3-4

Reactivation and Sisoes

My European adventure ended last week, and I apologize for having left this blog dormant without notice for so long. Don’t have much to say these days but perhaps soon I’ll post a little piece I’m submitting for a newsletter.

For today, since it is the feast of one of my favorite Desert Fathers, St. Sisoes the Great, I’ll share this word:

Abba Sisoes expressed himself freely one day, saying, ‘Have confidence: for thirty years I have not prayed to God about my faults, but I have made this prayer to him: “Lord Jesus, save me from my tongue,” and until now every day, I fall because of it, and commit sin.’ (The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection, trans. Benedicta Ward, SLG, Sisoes §4)

And lastly, a picture I took one evening in Bad Dürkheim, where my aunt and her family generously hosted me for a total of 6 weeks:

Liturgy and memory

The liturgy, it seems to me, is a living organ of ecclesial memory holding within itself the legacy of the Fathers, those pioneers of the Way who shaped Christianity definitively by what Cardinal Ratzinger calls their “primordial response” to the Word of God. Not everyone has the ability, time or the means to read and study the writings of the Fathers, but every Christian who worships in and with the Church steps into and, in a very real way, lives in the spiritual home which they’ve built for us by their devotion to Living God.

Sunday after Sunday, season after season, year after year, one sings hymns and prays prayers broken in by use, stretched and worn to comfort by generations upon generations of holy men and women and not-so-holy men and women. In the liturgy one finds the familiar stories of Scripture, the broken heart of St. Ephrem, the textured (and verbose!) eloquence of St. Basil, the grandeur of the Jerusalem Temple, the songs carried on the lips of kings and peasants. The whole thing has the feel of a ragged prayer book, its tattered and dog-earred pages stained sometimes by sweat, sometimes by tears, sometimes by blood.

The liturgy, I think, is a house that is the way it is because it is “lived in”. If there are parts of the liturgy that seem outmoded, messy or awkward in their place, perhaps they reflect the outmodedness, messiness and awkwardness of a home that’s housed peoples of different times, shapes and sizes, who each in the course of discipleship thought to leave behind some furniture—or in some cases, entire rooms—for the heirs they knew would follow them. Any impulse toward its renovation and renewal, it seems to me, must always be nurtured with this in mind.

So I think.

Two teachers

The West Syriac calendar commemorates on the 2nd Saturday of the Great Fast two very important saints in our tradition, St. Ephrem and St. Isaac. (Two of the hymns for this feast in our Church’s canonical hours can be found here.) They also happen to be two teachers to whom I owe much and feel a special kinship.

I was struck that the Penqitho (the West Syriac book of offices for Sundays and feasts) remembers St. Ephrem and St. Isaac as “Teachers of Prayer”. Their greatest legacy lies not their theological smarts but in the hymns and writings by which they have taught—and continue to teach—the Church to pray. “Teacher of prayer”—isn’t that a great definition of “theologian”?

Since the Byzantine calendar recently commemorated these men on January 28th, Kevin and Jonathan already wrote beautiful and informative posts about them, so I’ll just supply the links:

• Kevin Edgecomb (Biblicalia): “Two Syrian Pearls“
• Jonathan Allen (Thicket and Thorp): “An Ineffable Transformation“

Oh, and since I’ve been thinking Confucius, here is a saying attributed to one of his disciples which I think sheds some light on the importance of honoring the saints:

Master Zeng said: “When the dead are honored and the memory of remote ancestors is kept alive, a people’s virtue is at its fullest.” (The Analects 1.9)

A great weekend to all!