B&C, Ever the Bellwether
May 11, 2006
Sarah Hinlicky Wilson reviews Junia: The First Woman Apostle for Books & Culture, noting that “The early church [probably in a correct interpretation of scripture] thought that Junia the woman was an apostle, yet remained indifferent to the implications of her status. The modern church [and critical scholarship] disbelieved the apostolicity of any woman, and so ignored the hard evidence.”
On the same page of B&C, there is a related review of Peter Enns’ Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament by Susan Wise Bauer. She explains why, according to Enns, St. Paul “would have flunked hermeneutics” with his inaccurate, eisegetical, “Second Temple” practice of biblical interpretation. Evidently Enns is trying to help Evangelicals overcome some of their “fundamentalism” without instigating a crisis of faith. He contends that the Apostle’s subjective, culturally formed, historically particular (and peculiar) use of scripture is something that must be admitted and accepted as a “scandal” that Evangelicals (his intended audience) must grapple with and overcome in a fideistic manner by their (presumed) prior commitment to belief in the Incarnation. (That is how Enns understands and justifies St. Paul’s hermeneutic—it takes the truth of the Incarnation as a starting point.) This leads Bauer to ask,
“Do we know what we are saying when we stand in an American church on a Sunday morning in 2006 and recite, ‘He was conceived of the Holy Spirit, born of the virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried’? This polished, grammatical, creedal acknowledgment, transmitted to us via centuries of church tradition, of liturgy and Advent custom and carols, of Bible-school illustration and triumphant hymnody, has scrubbed up and made deceptively commonplace the essential weirdness of God becoming man.
I believe in the Incarnation, but then on the other hand I have never had to stand face-to-face with a grimy, troublemaking, blue-collar worker who claims to be God.”
But why believe this? It seems that the only not merely experiential, subjective, and fideistic basis for belief must be Tradition, which does unpolitically correct things like recognize Junia’s womanhood and apostolic title while yet failing to develop a “biblical” case for female ordination. Tradition, Bauer points out, provides us with “polished,” “scrubbed up,” and “deceptively commonplace” creeds, a description that seems to invite a hermeneutic of suspicion yet is based on a an ignorance of tradition—history as it pertains to the creeds. Most texts look polished if you don’t know their history.
From Bauer’s point of view of “wrestling” with a “messy” biblical text—driven by a distrust of tradition—what separates sola scripturists of even the most conservative variety from Protestants who allow the ordination of women, those who “struggle” with the place of homosexuals in the church, or the “Emergent” types who do all of those things and more, such as agree with Brian McLaren’s intuition that Dan Brown is on to something with The Da VInci Code? What separates them from the anti-tradition revisionism and fideistic Gnosticism of Brown himself? Simply stopping at an arbitrary line on some issues today while accepting a fundamentally historicizing, revisionist, tradition-corrosive, rationalistic form of Christianity? And is everything really staked solely on the Incarnation? What about the Resurrection and hard won doctrines about the Trinity and its members?
Those questions are posed and further reinforced, at least in my mind, by Roger Lundin’s article, which follows these two reviews in the print version: “’To the Unknown Gods’ : Pragamtism, Postmodernity, and the Theology of Experience.” Strangely Lundin is content to merely chart the descent of (principally American) “philosophy of religion” from Emerson’s anti-Catholic rejection of tradition and the church in favor of “Nature” (and then “Experience” when the former failed him) down through James, TIllich, Rorty, and Fish. An apt quote, apposite Bauer and Enns:
According to Rorty, a “pragmatist philosophy of religion must follow Tillich and others in distinguishing quite sharply between faith and belief.” In this curious use of terms, “faith” is our warranted talk about ourselves and the experiential god(s) in whom we have placed our fanciful trust; “Liberal Protestants” eagerly speak of their “faith in God” in this sense. “Belief,” on the other hand, involves our fruitless efforts to speak of a God who creates, reveals, and redeems; according to Rorty, it is “Fundamentalist Catholics” who belong in this camp, because they are “happy to enumerate their beliefs by reciting the Creed.”
I also note the irony of a large book advertisement appearing alongside Lundin’s article: “Twenty-Eight Spiritual Exercises to Help You Discover a Whole New Dimension to Your Life with God.” The book being advertised is Marcia Ford’s Traditions of the Ancients: Vintage Faith Practices for the 21st Century. Sounds bracingly retro, doesn’t it?
(I should also note friend-of-TNP Wilfred McClay’s review (in this same issue of B&C) of TNP contributing editor Christopher Shannon’s new, revised edition of Conspicuous Criticism: Tradition, the Individual, and Culture in Modern American Social Thought. McClay’s review indicates a number of fortifying critiques and suggestions relevant to the problems discussed above.)
This is B&C, Ever the Bellwether in The Japery, a part of The New Pantagruel. Previously: Sincerely and Death to America | Next: My Brother’s Keeper | TrackBack (0) | Comments (0)
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