"Only in receiving can we know"

In Chapter 4 of The Spirit of Early Christian Thought, Wilken writes about the early Christian quest to formulate the doctrine of the Trinity. What's significant to me is what these early Christian thinkers had to say about epistemology:

Like Origen and Irenaeus, Hilary [of Poitiers] believed that God can be known only as God "has made himself known to us." The knowledge of God begins in receptivity, in openness to what is revealed and the willingness to accept what is given. Hilary singles out the word "receive" in a text from Saint Paul: "We have not received the spirit of this world, but the Spirit which is of God" (1 Cor. 2:12). When we speak of God we speak of what we know and we know what we have received and we receive what is given through the Holy Spirit. Everyone has the facility to "apprehend God," says Hilary, but it is only when one receives the gift of the Spirit in faith that the "gift of knowledge" becomes our own: "Only in receiving can we know."

One of the rare privileges I have living near family while I attend grad school is getting to watch my cousins' children, ages 1-5, grow and learn. If I were to base my understanding of how human learning works entirely on the environment of grad school, I wouldn't get anywhere close to what the early Christians were talking about. In the academy, knowledge comes through taking. It comes through skepticism, through holding things outside the mind until they're deemed worthy to enter in. Little children remind me that human learning at base level doesn't work like this. Learning comes through receiving.

My dear little cousins (once removed) have absolutely no control over what language they are being taught to use in order to communicate thoughts and feelings. The English language is, in a sense, forced upon them arbitrarily, as are a number of cultural habits that will stick with them for the rest of their lives. This is no doubt offensive to certain modern sensibilities which picture little children as blank slates with an infinite range of possibilities. Yet it is precisely by imitating the very particular customs of their parents, and by adjusting to the natural rhythms of the very particular world around them, that these children will be able to formulate their own independent thoughts and ideas. It is by receiving the very particular life we have been given that humans have a chance at that dream of universality.

How do we know what things are true? Modern secular thinkers seem to range in their answers between appealing to some sort of universal "reason," which always seems to have an elusive but ultimately impersonal meaning; and embracing some sort of relativism, which basically rejects the idea of ever conclusively evaluating something as "true." Many devout Christians have responded to these equally unappealing alternatives by asserting that Truth (with a capital "T"!) is grounded in the propositional content of Scripture as breathed by God. I suppose there is some truth (with a lowercase "t") in that, but the thought that really strikes me as more useful in developing true epistemology is that we worship God both as Sovereign Lord and as Father. We are little children. We come into a world we did not create and are shaped by its patterns, which we did not determine.

We are children. We receive knowledge. There is no one alive today with any knowledge of anything who did not first have a foundation built by a parent figure. I have heard of some extremely sad cases in which children are so abused and neglected that they utterly fail to learn any language whatsoever. After a certain age, it is simply impossible for them to learn it. It has nothing to do with IQ; after a certain point language can no longer be learned. It is unclear at this point whether ideas can genuinely be formed at all. What is clear is that without the gift of a parent's love, a child can gain no knowledge expressible in any human language. This is surely one of the most profound of all tragedies.

Yet that is precisely the condition of human thinking without a Father. We have knowledge of what is true only because we are taught. Every rhythm and pattern of nature that we notice is given to us by our Father. We learn because we receive. There is no other ground for actual knowledge. If the world around us does not exist intentionally, then neither is there any real knowledge, since knowledge is only the end result of a parent's love for his child. God our Father has sovereignly determined an order to the universe because of which we learn to speak His language back to Him. If this order is not from our Father, then we have not learned a language but mere nonsense. Without love, there can be no knowledge.

"The Face of God for Now"

The title of this blog post gets its name from the title of the third chapter in The Spirit of Early Christian Thought. As with a previous blog post, the occasion for me writing about this is that I have missed yet another meeting with my Bible study during which we were supposed to discuss this chapter in Robert Wilken's book. Since I'm the one who recommended this book to our Bible study in the first place, I feel some sense of guilt for not being able to be there to discuss it. Also, it seems like a good exercise to blog through books like this one.

What I love about Wilken is that he reports on how early Christians thought, without assessing the relative merits of their ideas. This chapter, in particular, dealt with ideas which appear to me to exist in tension with one another. I'll explain momentarily.

The chapter deals with how the early Christians dealt with Scripture--"the face of God for now." No doubt about it, the early Church took Scripture very seriously. But the way in which they took it seriously is fascinating. The context in which they read Scripture was very different from ours. Ours is an era in which the Bible is now the most widely distributed book in the history of the world, and the Bible has greatly shaped our culture. For the early Christians, Greek and Roman thought was the setting into which the Bible came as something new.

"The Bible," Wilken says, "formed Christians into a people and gave them a language." [Emphasis mine.] The thing Wilken focuses on is not primarily the doctrines and information about the world that Christians could gain from the Scriptures, but rather the way it shaped their vocabulary, their imaginations, and how they thought about living.

There are two big ideas that seem to me to be held in tension throughout this chapter on how early Christians used Scripture. On the one hand, there is the idea that the Bible is tied to history; one cannot divorce it from its original context. On the other hand, there is the idea that the Bible speaks allegorically, which seems to imply that the Bible can, in fact, take on new meaning in new contexts. When you state these two ideas as I have, they appear to be contradictory. Wilken doesn't address this tension directly, but the chapter contains clues that he has a very nuanced approach to Scripture in mind.

I think it's worth digging into this a little bit, because it is not a simple matter to read Scripture. Early Christian interpretation of the Bible was not one-dimensional, and I suppose there were as many reasons back then as there are now to puzzle over the meaning of Scriptural texts.

As one of the headings indicates, the Bible became for the early Church "a single story." This did not happen without some struggle, as this section of the chapter indicates. "Some Christians, notably Marcion and the Gnostics, believed that the Old Testament was a book about a lesser God who... had nothing in common with the universal and loving God who had sent his son into the world." In response to this, Irenaeus argued that "the Bible was a single narrative whose chief actor was God." Hence,

The Bible is a book of events with consequences, not only for those who lived through them or were influenced by them, but for all men and women. Its meaning turns on the history it records, whether it be God's creation of all things at the beginning of time, the sin of Adam, the giving of the Law to Moses, Christ's birth from a virgin, or his Resurrection on the third day.

This point seems to feed into the first idea I highlighted above, that the Bible is tied to history. You cannot take away the Old Testament, because the Bible demands to be read as a continuous exposition of the history of God's plan. You cannot remove any part of Scripture, because it is all tied together.

But in itself, the "one story" idea is a slight departure from the modern understanding of a strictly "historical" reading of the Bible. A modern historian approaching a biblical text would probably first divorce it from the continuous narrative of Scripture, try to put it in its own historical context, and interpret its meaning in that way. The early Christians would not have done this, and in that sense one could argue they were not fundamentally tied to the "original meaning" of the text, as in the meaning the author had in mind when writing it (assuming the author was a product of his own time and place).

The following section is titled "The Inevitability of Allegory." Citing Origen as the first example of how Christians interpreted the Old Testament, Wilken writes,

In a homily on the book of Exodus he observed that Saint Paul had shown Christians "how the church gathered from the Gentiles ought to interpret the books of the Law." The text he took as exemplary was 1 Corinthians 10.... Paul's interpretation of the Exodus and the wanderings of the Israelite in the desert, says, Origen, differs from the "plain sense" of the text.... Origen proposes that the several examples by Paul should be taken as models to guide Christians in their interpretation of the Old Testament.

Here we see that the Bible is somewhat divorced from its historical context, quite on purpose. Wilken makes this point even stronger with this statement: "Interpretation has to do with context. As moderns we are so accustomed to think of context as literary or historical that we forget that the words of Scripture come to us in many ways." How can this be reconciled with the idea that the Bible "is a book of events with consequences," whose "meaning turns on the history it records"?

Perhaps the point on which these two ideas hang is that the Bible is "a book about Christ." Christ is the goal of all the history of Israel, and he is the focal point of all human history since his death and resurrection. All Scripture should be interpreted through the lens of Christ; that is, we ought to have in mind that every passage is somehow about him. Even if this requires getting away from the "literal" meaning of the text.

Is this a solution to the problem of interpretation? It's a step, but I don't see how it can be a full solution. For then the question becomes, how far can we go with this? It seems natural to interpret the Old Testament in light of the New, since in the New Testament we have eyewitness accounts of who Jesus was and what he taught. Yet how far can the Old Testament be bent out of its natural shape before it breaks? This concern played a big part of the Reformation.

I think there's another step we should take toward faithful interpretation of Scripture. Let me bring back that quote I used near the beginning of this post, but now with different emphasis: "The Bible," Wilken says, "formed Christians into a people and gave them a language."

The thing I always find so unfortunate about our interpretation of Scripture is that we so often fail to interpret it with the goal of forming Christians into a people. It's fine if we're all hesitant to give up our various interpretations of Scripture; no one seriously committed to faithful interpretation will just roll over for the sake of unity. But sometimes it appears that we simply have no intention of uniting Christians through Scripture. Many traditions appear quite intent on using it to divide themselves from the rest of us.

This is me dealing with these issues, not Wilken. But in reading this chapter, I can't help but try to work through the difficult questions of biblical interpretation. I like where Wilken ends up, though, which is something that every Christian tradition can agree on:

For early Christian thinkers the Bible, finally, was a book about how to live. God's Word is not something to be looked at, but acted on. Saint Bernard, the medieval mystic, said it well: the interpreter must see himself in that which is said.

Indeed, "You will progress in understanding the Holy Scripture only to the degree that you yourself have made progress through contact with them."

An Awesome and Unbloody Sacrifice

This blog post takes its name from Chapter Two of The Spirit of Early Christian Thought, which my Bible study is reading and discussing this summer. Primarily the reason I am writing this post is because I will be out of town and will not get to discuss this remarkable chapter with the guys in my Bible study. It also gives me an opportunity to reflect on my latest theological struggles.

What is sound thinking? How do we learn it? Modern thought places emphasis on skepticism--if I can't prove it, I can't accept it. Yet even the most extreme skeptics will admit that we all develop most of our common beliefs based on experience. Not just individual experience, but communal experience. If we cut ourselves off entirely from the community to live with only the knowledge we could come up with by our own skeptical methods, we would hardly get anywhere in life.

Early Christian thinkers developed their deepest thought in and through the communal life of the Church, particularly through its worship. Knowledge of God through Christ was experienced regularly, not just through preserving ideas handed down from the Apostles. On this point I think Wilken contributes something not just historical, but epistemological; that is, he tells us something about how we can know what we know about God.

At the same time that it gives inspiration for all of us Christians, Wilken's chapter challenges us Protestants on three major issues of Christian practice: the sacraments, the tradition of the Church, and the communion of saints. I'll talk a little bit about each of these in turn.

Sacraments

As the title of the chapter suggests, one of the central topics here is the Eucharistic sacrifice. Wilken describes it as a genuine re-presentation of Christ's once-and-for-all sacrifice. He explains that the word anamnesis, usually translated "remembrance," really means "recall by making present." (p. 34) Wilken is not presenting his own theological opinion on the matter; he is presenting the understanding of the early Church, for he quotes the Fathers from the early 2nd century onward.

There is some theological wrestling to be done here with our Protestant reaction to Catholicism on this point. Although we have historically rejected transubstantiation, the idea that the bread and the wine literally become the body and blood of Christ, yet many people do not even realize that Calvin and Luther had their own views of the Eucharist that did not constitute mere memorial. They, too, accepted some "mystery" to the sacrament.

In 1 Corinthians 10:16-17 we read, "The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a sharing in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a sharing in the body of Christ? Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread." This is not an often-quoted text in Protestant evangelical circles, but this is straight out of Scripture. Don't think it proves transubstantiation? Fine, I don't either. But don't tell me it says nothing mystical about the Lord's Supper. "Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body"? Something supernatural is going on, or at least something we can't understand with our rational minds.

Additionally, note the significance this verse has to what it means to be the Church. We are one body because we eat the one bread. Many people argue that they would prefer not to take the Lord's Supper more than, say, once a month, simply because multiple repetition makes it less special. Do people who make such an argument take this text into account? If we understand taking communion together as actually making us one body, then how can we think it wise to take it less often simply because we want to preserve the specialness of it? I can't prove that communion ought to be taken every week, but I do know that many Protestants just seem to be unaware of what all is really at stake in the matter.

Moving onto baptism, I find that here Wilken makes a couple of statements that are rather shocking for their total lack of comment. The first is on page 37: "Baptism was a ritual for adults, not infants..." and the second is on page 40: "Early Christians did not sprinkle or pour, they immersed." Wilken is a Catholic, and as such he must have been pleased to be able to demonstrate the Catholic view of the Eucharist appearing in the early Church. However, on the point of baptism, he seems to have no problem with suggesting that the Catholic Church has clearly veered early Church practice, and moreover he simply has nothing to say about it in this book. That's a testament to his faithfulness to his purpose: he is writing a book about early Christian thought, not about arguing doctrines.

Nevertheless, the uncomfortable thing that all Protestants, both baby baptizers and Baptists, are faced with in this chapter is the core meaning of baptism for early Christians. Wilken is pretty clear that the waters actually meant something. It wasn't simply a sign to let people know that you had converted--though it was certainly that. It was a tangible part of God's grace, which allowed the believer to actually feel the washing of regeneration. Something happened in that baptism, which the early Church would not have rationalized away as "just a symbol." Anyone who came into contact with the waters of baptism came into contact with something transformed by the work of Jesus Christ, filled with the presence of the Holy Spirit, and thus became something holy (see pages 40-41).

We live in a remarkable time in Western Christianity, in which some Christians want to maintain a religion based mostly on truth (by which they mean nothing more than words) while others want to know God through experience. But the experience they pursue is most often through whatever new innovations they can dream up (such as you can see here). Here is a challenge for us Protestants: why not return to the Sacramental vision of the early Church, and embrace those very ancient and tangible parts of God's grace which help us to experience him?

Church Tradition

If there is one word that American evangelicalism can't stand, it's "tradition." And yet at the same time, there has been a growing number of evangelicals in the past several years showing interest in ancient Christians traditions. Why? I suppose it's because many of us are realizing how ridiculous it is that we spend so much time trying to think of new ways to worship God when the wisdom of hundreds of years of Christianity has preserved many traditions that can lead us in the way we ought to go.

When Wilken is discussing baptism, he mentions that new initiates into the Church had to memorize "the creed." At least as Presbyterians, we have heard of this. In many Presbyterian churches, it is not uncommon to hear the Apostle's Creed recited at every worship service. At our church, we recite it at every baptism. The early Church took the creed seriously enough to make all initiates memorize it.

In describing worship on p. 43, Wilken describes the formation of a lectionary of Scripture readings, and then a liturgical calendar year. This was meant to preserve the Christian story by telling it in its entirety through the year-round worship of the Church. But it wasn't just about the story, the ideas, the words. It was about actually experiencing the presence of Christ. "As Christian thinking was grounded in the events recorded in the Bible, res gestae, the things that had taken place, so it was nourished in worship by the res liturgicae, the things enacted in the liturgy." (p. 44)

Tradition was not for the sole purpose of preserving truths, but also for preserving the experience of Christ in the Church. One thing I so often feel I am missing in my Christian life is a sense of organic connection with Christ. Protestants are constantly stressing personal prayer life, personal devotions, personal Bible study. But what about the rhythms of corporate worship that the Church took time to construct those many centuries ago? Maybe we could give the ancients another look.

Communion of the Saints

One aspect of tradition that troubles most Protestants is the idea of actually being connected with those who have gone before, as well as with the supernatural angels in heaven. I admit I don't know what to make of it, myself. I'm a bit of a rationalist by habit; I don't really know how to embrace this kind of connection.

Yet on pages 45-48, Wilken explains quite emphatically that the Church believed that the Church was called to worship alongside both the angels in heaven and the departed saints. This idea is simply dead in all the Protestant churches, and it probably isn't coming back any time soon. That's one of the things that hit me as I was reading about it. We can wrangle over the meaning of communion, but all Christians have communion. The same is true for baptism, preaching, singing, prayer, and most other Christian practices. But praying with and on behalf of the departed saints, as well as with the angels in heaven, is simply gone from Protestantism, so much that you'd never know it ever existed in Christianity unless you learned about Catholicism and/or Eastern Orthodoxy.

Nevertheless I hesitate to make any sort of recommendation on the issue, since I feel I know very little about it.

Seeing Ourselves in the Early Church

Despite all the things that I have to wrestle through while reading about the practices that shaped early Christian thought, I still find I have a lot in common with them. As in the first chapter, Wilken emphasizes the extensive use of Scripture in early Christian thought. He emphasizes the importance of Christian preaching, and the way in which is presents Christ to the believer. And in spite of all of our current doctrinal confusions and disagreements in the modern era, communion and baptism are still very dear to all Christians and constitute a crucial part of our worship.

In terms of intellectual life, Wilken did a good job in this chapter of emphasizing how the practice of worship shaped early Christian thought. But there is also the other side of the coin, which is illustrated by many examples in his writing, namely that early Christian thought did shaped Christian worship. It was not good enough for Christians to simply follow the traditions; the Fathers also explained the traditions so that people could understand. And this is one tradition the Reformation picked up on, and we Reformed have always believed that this is crucial.

As we seek a way forward as Christians struggling with a multitude of complex issues in the 21st century, I'm fairly convinced we ought to pay attention to what shaped the thought of the early Church, which faced a world every bit as complicated and hard to understand as ours is today. I'm not convinced that early Christians were necessarily right about everything, but I do know that their voice is all too easily completely lost. Surely it counts for something that these Christians lived far closer to the time of the Apostles than we do. At the very least, let's look back on the best of early Christian thought and ask ourselves if there's anything we have badly missed.