Well, I hope it’s not my final interview ever, and since we’re going to announce his next book, already under contract (and I have a preliminary manuscript in hand!), it likely won’t be. But it’s a wind-up interview for my study of According to John using Dr. Weiss’s book Meditations on According to John. You can find out more about the interview on the Google+ Event Page, or simply come back to this post and use the viewer embedded here.
Be sure to post any questions in the comments here and I’ll ask Dr. Weiss during his interview.
It has been that kind of a day. I apologize for not posting this earlier. You can find out more about this discussion on the Google+ Event Page or view it using the YouTube embedded below.
I had a great time yesterday interviewing Drew Smith for my study on the gospel of John. I wanted to talk to him about how one “does” biblical thelogy and do some comparisons between John and Mark. Drew is very knowledgeable, having written his dissertation on a narrative critical reading of the gospel of Mark for his PhD in New Testament from the University of Edinburgh.
Here’s the interview:
We were left with one question: Is there a case in Mark where one can unequivocally say that the title “son of God” is not the equivalent of Messiah. “Unequivocally” is a tall order, but Drew said he’d look at it. I look forward to posting the results in the comments here.
We had lots of audio problems last time we tried, so we’re trying again! Tonight (7/16/15), Drew Smith will be my guest on my study of the gospel according to John. Drew got his PhD in New Testament from the University of Edinburgh, and wrote his dissertation on the gospel according to Mark. Tonight we’ll compare the theologies of the two books and ask Drew about adoptionism. Does the absence of a birth narrative in Mark mean support adoptionism?
You can find more information on the Google+ Event Page, or view using the YouTube embedded below.
I’ll be discussing this tonight at 7:00 pm via Google Hangouts on Air. You can find out more on the Google+ Event Page. You can also view using the YouTube viewer below:
This is a late announcement, but I will be doing my According to John study tonight. The Google+ Event page has details. The YouTube viewer is embedded below. I’ll be working from Chapter 20 of Herold Weiss’s book Meditations on According to John.
Well, last night my discussion of According to John covered a lot of other ground. In particular, I was looking at the eschatological use of “hour” and “now,” and I suggested that John has a fairly simple eschatology to go with his fairly simple soteriology. I’m not going to rehash all of this. The foundation is found in Chapter 19 of Herold Weiss’s book Mediations on According to John: Exercises in Biblical Theology. For those who might wish to review the video, here it is.
In the middle of this discussion I got into talking about the ‘L’ word. No, not liberal. Literal. I tell people that we should avoid simply saying that we’re not taking something literal, and get specific about just how we are taking whatever it is. “We don’t take that literally,” has become commonplace in discussions of the Bible in mainline and progressive circles, but often we don’t tell people just what we do with the thing we aren’t taking literally.
Last night I was talking about something that is fairly simple to pinpoint, symbolic language in a vision report. (Note that you don’t necessarily have to believe that a person has received a divine vision in order to accept a literary category of “vision report.” I do believe people have visions, but the form remains no matter the source.) If we take a vision such as Daniel 7, for example, we have beasts (which represent something), coming up out of the sea (which represents something), onto the land (which represents something), and so forth. “Not taking Daniel 7 literally” means that I don’t believe that Daniel’s vision was about actual creatures coming from an actual sea onto the land. Rather, these beasts represent something else. Rather than taking them literally, one should take them as symbols of something else.
One of the problems with the way visions are often interpreted is that people drop from the symbolic to the literal. The beasts, the sea, and the land are symbols, sure enough, but when the Son of Man appears in the clouds, that’s literal. But there isn’t any justification in the text for taking one part of the vision literally. One interpreter of Revelation has maintained (actually more than one, but I won’t list) that we should take everything literally that we can in the book, and only treat it as symbolic where that is essential. It’s a vision! It is filled with symbols! The default has to be that anything in the vision is symbolic unless you have good reason to believe that the writer is seeing actual events. And quite bluntly, in Revelation (or the latter chapters of Daniel), you don’t.
I think a couple of extensions of how symbols might function would be in order, and Revelation provides examples. First, something literal can be used as a symbol. There is no doubt that the seven churches were real places. Under the rule of taking what can be taken literally, we would see the messages as tailored messages to those particular seven churches. But I would argue here that the actual churches are being used symbolically, with the number seven indicating that the messages to the seven churches constitute as a whole a message to the whole church. Various schemes, such as applying the churches to periods of history and their messages as specifically applicable to such times, while interesting, have the potential to lose us part of the message to the whole church. Second, I would use Revelation 12 as an example of where a visionary symbol points not to something physical, but to something spiritual. We might call it a symbol of a symbol.
It’s a bit more complex to specify how this works in other passages. For example, I would call Genesis 1 liturgy. That is, by most people’s understanding, non-literal. In addition, there are symbols within the liturgical text. This is why I think it’s important to talk about how we understand a passage and why we understand it that way and avoid simply saying that we don’t take it literally. There are many non-literal ways of taking things.
I will go into these issues in greater detail when I begin my YouTube study on eschatology starting August 17. On August 10 I plan an interview with Dr. Herold Weiss, winding up my study of According to John. I will begin the eschatology study by looking at the landscape of eschatology using Eschatology: A Participatory Study Guide by Edward W. H. Vick, and then proceed to eschatological and apocalyptic passages. I talked about this in more detail yesterday.
Tonight (Thursday, June 25, 2015) via Google Hangout on Air I’ll be talking about chapter 19 of Dr. Herold Weiss’s book Meditations on According to John, title “We Must Work while It Is Day.” There’s a great deal of interesting material in this chapter, and I keep adding to it as I read and re-read the passages. I’ll be talking about what the Sabbath means to Christians and also about some basic concepts in eschatology, not to mention eschatology itself.
I also want to give everyone a tentative schedule for the next few weeks and let you know what I’m planning after this series is done.
Here’s the schedule (edited June 30 to add the interview with Drew Smith):
July 23 – Chapter 22 – Rivers of Living Water (since I’m preparing for a Sunday School series in August on the time of the exile, I will doubtless reference Ezekiel’s temple!)
July 30 – Chapter 23 – Where Are You From?
August 3 – Chapter 24 – Abide in My Love
August 10 – Closing interview with Dr. Herold Weiss
I am also planning to schedule a re-do of my interview with Dr. C. Drew Smith, which may move some of these sessions, or it may simply fill the open slot on August 3. This interview is now on the schedule for July 16, with the later chapters moved down to fill in.
I think I’ve mentioned a few times how far out of the box this whole series has taken me. I diligently pursued nuts and bolts of biblical studies, avoiding theology and liturgy as I would abominations (whatever those may be!). So to spend this much time thinking about theology from a biblical book was somewhat of a challenge. I’m going to move somewhat closer to my roots as we move forward, both in the sense of my approach, which will involved more nuts and bolts, and in terms of the topic, which will be eschatology, something rooted in my upbringing and education in the Seventh-day Adventist Church.
I’m going to start by using the book Eschatology: A Participatory Study Guide by Edward W. H. Vick as a guide to learning the general terminology and getting a view of the map of ideas on this topic. That will be quite theological, of course. Then I plan to look at a number of apocalyptic and/or otherwise eschatological passages in scripture, looking for the author’s intentions in the text and then also at how those words have become part of the various views about eschatology in the Christian community today. The idea will be to understand how people come to their conclusions, why there is so much variety, and how one can find one’s own way through the material. This series will likely continue for some time, as I have the complete books of Daniel and Revelation, not to mention a large number of shorter passages elsewhere. And yes, I would treat the first six chapters of Daniel as material that is just as eschatological (or not) as chapters 7-12.
If nothing else, I’ll have plenty of opportunity to learn new things myself! I have been gratified, however, to see that a few of these sessions have YouTube views in the teens, though most stay single digit. I really expected three or four to follow along the way. Over time, who knows! I am grateful to those who have listened and who have commented, either via the Q&A app or by e-mail. It has been a great experience already, and we still have several weeks to go.
I’ve generated a bit of surprise by my agreement with Dr. Herold Weiss (Meditations on According to John, chapter 18) in last Thursday’s video study from the gospel according to John (not to mention my Sunday School class), that the gospel is not attempting to institute or to teach sacraments.
As a foundation to this brief note, you might want to either read Weiss’s chapter (pp. 151-158), watch my video (about 1 hr, embedded below), or both. I’m just going to follow up on a couple of items here. I suspect not that many people will watch an hour of me talking, so I will try to make these notes self-contained.
First, the video:
My view of the sacraments is simple: I think that there are public actions and rituals that we take that reflect what is happening spiritually. I do not believe that the presence of Jesus in these activities is dependent on having ordained clergy to preside. I don’t believe that the rituals in themselves are valuable.
The value of sacramental acts is that they help us recognize and participate in the spiritual reality that is behind, in, and through them. Thus if I partake of communion, a shared meal, and then spend the following week withholding food from those in need, or cutting off fellowship from people I don’t like for various reasons, my act of communion has become a dead ritual.
Weiss discusses the difference between footwashing and communion in his chapter. One has become a sacrament and one a sacramental act, the latter rarely performed. I could perform the ritual act of footwashing, which rarely has the same impact or feeling that it would have had in Jesus’ time, and then go out and refuse to place myself in the service of others. In that case, the act of footwashing would be a dead and empty ritual as well.
In the video I relate the experience of my own baptism, at which time we celebrated, as Seventh-day Adventists do frequently, by washing one another’s feet. I was partnered with a Chamula gentleman (this occurred in the mountains of Chiapas, Mexico when I was nine years old) who had walked for days to be at this event. We were both newly baptized. He laughed when it came time to wash my feet because I had shoes, while he had but sandals, and I had walked a half mile or so as opposed to days. Washing his feet was meaningful to me and has stuck with me.
Despite my views, however, I don’t go out offering formal services of the Eucharist as an unordained person. Despite the fact that I don’t think the presence of an ordained pastor should be required, this is an act that is, by nature, done in community. As a member of a United Methodist congregation, part of my duty is to act in community.
At the same time, I believe that I can and should make every meal a sacramental act. The greater joy I get from the celebration of communion in the church congregation is not that I believe God is more present there, but rather that it is an act I perform in community and covenant. Sometimes in order to be in community, we have to do things the way the community does them, whether we think these things are special or not.
At the same time I have become fully convinced of the concept of open communion, and by this I mean fully open. I have long accepted the notion that when Paul, in 1 Corinthians 11, talks about taking this “unworthily” he is talking about the way in which the celebration is done, not about the character of the person receiving it.
By nature of its source, in the shared meal, and its institution, which included offering it to Judas as he prepared to betray Jesus, I think this sacramental meal is intended to invite and not to exclude. It is reaching out, not commemorating our special status as members of some inner circle. Thus communion should be offered to all both in church and when we share our meals with others. I question the idea of a Christian sacrament that celebrates membership in the club.
But, you might say, what about baptism? Surely baptism can’t be for everyone!
Yes, baptism is different, yet it is different by its very nature. It is the testimony, the ritual representation of our dying with Christ and being raised with him to new life. It is a singular (generally) event. It does not celebrate how we have become special, but rather how we have chosen to give ourselves up and become part of a community, a community that, in turn, reaches out to draw others in.
And even here we invite anyone who wishes to testify to that, anyone who wishes to become a servant.
I think this becomes a problem when we see these events as a sort of initiation, bringing us into the club of the special, in which there are other special rituals in which only other special people can take part. The “in group” view of the people of God that many of us have, consciously or not, leads us to misread scripture. The Jews weren’t chosen by God to sit around and be special. They were chosen to be a blessing. Sometimes being chosen isn’t much fun. There’s the great line in “Fiddler on the Roof” when Tevye wonders if God couldn’t choose someone else for a while.
Christians, who are often anxious to appropriate the promises made to the Jewish people, are not nearly as often anxious to appropriate the calling, the tasks, and the negative responses of others. Being chosen, being “in” with God isn’t necessarily a picnic.
In conclusion, I suppose I could say that I have a high view of sacramental acts, and that I consider sacraments to be no more and no less. My high view says God is present and active in sacramental acts. The Holy Spirit works in and through them. But just as the rituals of tabernacle and temple didn’t magically accomplish forgiveness and reconciliation, but rather accompanied God’s actions, so these sacramental acts are filled with God’s presence when done “worthily.” (Note: I’m indebted to Jacob Milgrom, author of the Anchor Bible volumes on Leviticus among many other works, for my view of the relationship between ritual and divine action. Milgrom sees this presented, in contrast to some of the surrounding religions, in the way rituals are presented in Torah.)
Paul’s words gave the Galatians hope for transformation and they are hopeful to us, too. Jesus Christ frees us from bondage. The external world may not immediately change, but the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ frees us from guilt, fear, anxiety, and hopelessness. God acts in Christ to set us free to live joyfully and creatively. The cross and resurrection are a matter of life and death – they must be proclaimed – spiritually, ethically, and communally. Anything that challenges God’s liberating message must be confronted boldly.
Besides the excellent message, there’s a good “editorial” moment in there. Do you see “the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ frees us.” Grammatically, I should correct that to free us, except that I know from the context that these are being seen as a single event. I’m sure some folks will say this is an error. Perhaps it is, but it is intentionally so.
Well, I hope it’s not my final interview ever, and since we’re going to announce his next book, already under contract (and I have a preliminary manuscript in hand!), it likely won’t be. But it’s a wind-up interview for my study of According to John using Dr. Weiss’s book Meditations on According to John. You can find out more about the interview on the Google+ Event Page, or simply come back to this post and use the viewer embedded here.
