Liberating Old Testament scholarship from reductionism

More from Brueggemann's, Theology of the Old Testament (page 28)

Walther Eichrodt seeks to do in Old Testament study what Barth undertook in dogmatic theology, against his liberal antecedents....

Eichrodt's program is to explore how all of the variations and developments of Israel's religion can be seen to be in the service of a single conceptual notion, covenant. It is impossible to overestimate what a singular intellectual achievement this project is.....
....In our current parlance, we might say that Eichrodt polemicises against the categories of modernity that critical study had imposed on the text; these categories feature individualism and autonomoy and resist articulations that are dialogical and therefore complex, ambiguous, and unsettled. The fundamental relatedness of all of reality, which is most charateristic of Israel's faith, makes the Old Testament inimical to the categories of modernity.

As an aside, I found this interesting because it confirms a point (Barth liberated theology from the limitations of reductionism imposed by liberal 19th century theology) I tried to make in my paper, Emergence and reductionism in theology and science, that is forthcoming in the Scottish Journal of Theology.

The rise and fall of historical criticism

I am really enjoying and learning a lot from reading Walter Brueggemann's Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, and Advocacy, which I have mentioned in a couple of previous posts. In the first chapter he discusses how Old Testament scholarship in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was largely shaped by ideas from Bacon (science), DesCartes (rationalism), Locke (empiricism), and Hegel (history). On the latter he says (page 12):

history had acquired a very different dimension and significance from all previous understandings. First, history had taken on a positivistic character, so that events came to be regarded as completely decipherable, to the exclusion of any inscrutable density. This change entailed that events have a simple, discernible, unambigious meaning from which all mystery can be squeezed out. Second, in the nineteenth century the idea of history as development came to be crucial, so that events came to be seen as progressively arranged in sequence. Events without inscrutable density but with progressive sequencing leave nothing for theology to do. And so history could and did become an autonomous enteriprise, without reference to any larger or coded significance.

He credits Barth's publication of Der Romerbrief in 1919 with the recovery of Theological Interpretation of not just the New Testament, but also the Old.

Reconciliation: past, present, and future

A story [maybe apocryphal?] is that Karl Barth told Billy Graham that he should not be telling people to "Be reconciled to God" but rather than "You are reconciled to God."

To illustrate these issues, it is interesting to just focus on one verse, Romans 5:10, and see how it includes past, present, and future tenses:

¹⁰For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life.

I take this as a caution to not be too rigid in my thinking about these profound issues, and particularly not importing "logic" from other areas of life and thought.

John Webster has said that a significant achievement of Karl Barth's Doctrine of Creation is that he liberated the doctrine from a pre-occupation with questions of causality. This preoccupation was arguably due to the influence of scientific concepts, from both Newton and Darwin. In science, (well at least in Newtonian mechanics) notions of causality (i.e., cause and effect) are well defined, meaningful, and helpful. But are they here?

A peaceful death for a famous scientist

Sir William Perkin (1838-1907) became famous for (accidentally) discovering the first organic dye, mauveine and then producing it in industrial proportions.
[This is of some interest to me because as some of my research involves using quantum physics to understand why such dyes have the colour that they do and how they can be used in LED's and solar cells...]

I was just browsing in the U. Washington bookstore [I am giving a theoretical chemistry seminar there tomorrow] and stumbled across a nice book,
Mauve: How One Man Invented a Color that Changed the World, by Simon Garfield (Faber, 2000).

Perkin was a Christian, active in a Wembley Anglican parish church and a generous supporter of various educational and mission activities. [In the 1860s Perkin started an inter-denominational church for his German workers in an old barn. In 1875 he paid for this to be replaced by a hall in Harrow Road, the New Hall].

Pages 136-137 describes Perkin on his death bed, aged 67:

Near the end, Lady Perkin told her husband that they must be separated for a time. According to The Christian newsletter, his reply was: 'May you have much of the joy of the Lord.' An attendant then told him, `Sir William, you will soon hear the "Well done, good and faithful servant"' Perkin observed: "The children are in Sunday School. Give them my love, and tell them always to trust Jesus.' He then let out the first verse of the hymn `When I Survey the Wondrous Cross', and when he reached the last line, 'And pour contempt on all my pride', he said, 'Proud? Who could be proud?'

A lawyer speaks the truth

Just in case, because of my last post, readers may think I don't like or respect any lawyers. I draw your attention to a moving and challenging article, Three gifts for hard times in Christianity today, by William J. Stuntz, a Professor at Harvard Law School. In the midst of incredible personal suffering and pain, he describes three lessons:

• God usually doesn't remove life's curses. Instead, he redeems them.
• Amazing as the greatest of all gifts is, God the Son does more than save sinners. Jesus' life and death also change the character of suffering, give it dignity and weight and even, sometimes, a measure of beauty.
• Our God remembers even his most forgettable children.

Other Choice quotes include:

In the Bible, remembrance usually combines two meanings: first, holding the one who is remembered close in the heart, and second, acting on the memory. When God repeatedly tells the people of Israel to remember that he brought them out of Egypt, he is saying much more than "get your history right." A better paraphrase would go like this: "Remember that I have loved you passionately. Remember that I have acted on that love. Hold tight to that memory, and act on it too."

Philosophers and scientists and law professors (my line of work) are not in the best position to understand the Christian story.....

Imperfect human justice

I am on holidays (vacation for US readers) in the San Juan Islands of Washington state, the home of my lovely wife. Yesterday, we saw a seal eating a salmon. This morning we spent a restful time kayaking around a bay.

My holiday reading is The Associate by John Grisham. I am a big fan of his legal thrillers, but have a real dislike of his attempts at other genre's. It is amazing how Grisham paints parts of the legal profession (particularly corporate lawyers) in such a terrible light. I am struck by how dehumanising many big practices are and how so much youthful energy, idealism, and talent of top law school graduates gets wasted on dubious ventures. The novels highlight greed, infantile macho competition, deceit, arrogance, ....
The law is meant to protect the weak and punish evil. Unfortunately, it seems that sometimes it is used instead to protect the powerful and evil from being punished.

My favourite Grisham novel is The Testament, in which the protagonist, a hard-drinking lawyer becomes a Christian.

Will scientific truth set you free?

Max Delbruck (1906-1981) started his career as a physicist but switched to biology, and shared a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his contributions to genetics.

About 20 years ago I heard a speaker refer to a commencement (i.e., graduation ceremony) address by Delbruck at Caltech in 1978, entitled the Arrow of Time: Beginning and End. I always wanted to track down a copy and a few years ago via a web searchI was delighted when I found that Delbruck's son Tobi has a site with an annotated copy of the original text of the address.
It is really worth a read. A particularly fascinating aspect of the address is where Delbruck deconstructs the Caltech motto, "The truth shall set you free," pointing out how the Caltech founders took this saying of Jesus completely out of context. Overall, Delbruck gives a balanced view of what science can and cannot do.