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Last time we met, Pius XII had published Divino, and set the Catholics on a glide path for a more productive encounter with modern life. I should emphasize that it’s a Catholic approach to modern life, so you won’t be finding a retreat from Catholic positions on faith and morals. But you will see that they are far more engaged than they had been.

Before we get into Vatican II, there’s one more event I’d like to mention because it gets at the relationship between exegesis and theology. Before Divino, and for quite some time afterward, many Catholic theologians used the Bible as a sourcebook for proof texts to create theologies that were often rather independent of the Bible. In the year preceding Vatican II, Karl Rahner, a theologian, tried to do something about that. His article was called “Exegese and Dogmatik” and it discussed the roles of exegetes and theologians. He used the formal “Ihr” (you) to address the exegetes and the familiar “Du” when speaking to his fellow theologians. To the exegetes he said that they must remember that they are Catholic exegetes, and that they must attend to “the Catholic principles governing the relationship between exegesis and dogmatic theology” and that they needed a more exact knowledge of scholastic theology. To his fellow theologians, however, he wrote:

You know less about exegesis than you should. As as dogmatic theologian you rightly claim to be allowed to engage in the work of exegesis and biblical theology in your own right, and not jsut to accept the results of the exegetical work of the specialist…But then you must perform the work of exegesis in the way that it has to be done today and not in the way you used to do it in the good old days…Your exegesis in dogmatic theology must be convincing also to the specialist in exegesis.

Among Catholics theology tends to be more highly regarded than exegesis. As is often the case, when an exegete must point out that some theological position is based on acontextual or ahistorical readings, or even just plain wrong, folks sometimes think that the exegete is attacking the Church. Rahner’s words came as a bit of a shock, but they were part of what was in the minds of those who worked on issues pertaining to scripture in Vatican II.

Continue reading “Vatican II and Modernity”

We’d like to welcome our newest guest blogger! Secco enjoys European breads, pastries, and all things chocolate (which fits in well over here). Secco is, as you may have already seen from the regular comments, full of interesting takes on scripture and Mormonism, and we look forward to the discussion that will no doubt be generated by this blogger’s presence. Welcome!

This is the third in a series of posts that will, at some point before Final Judgment, culminate in the exegesis of a selected section of 1 John. I will try to avoid the War and Peace effect this time but, my goodness, it is such fun to think about!

The bottom line is this: The community that had originally formed around the Beloved Disciple and the Fourth Gospel has now broken into at least two factions. The Elder writes to those who yet remain in his camp to confront and correct the errors of the schismatic group and to comfort them by assuring them that they have made the correct choice and are assured of eternal life. The cause of the break-up seems to be that while “both parties knew the proclamation of Christianity available to us through the Fourth Gospel…they interpreted it differently” (Brown, Community, 106).

HOW DO WE KNOW ANY OF THIS?

We know what we know about this conflict primarily from what 1 John tells us, so we have only the Elder’s word for the situation. There is no independent verification of the theological position taken by the Elder’s opponents, or of any of the ethical shortcomings that he attributes to them. It is quite likely that, if we had written evidence of their position, the Elder’s point of view would be declared just as profoundly inappropriate.

How, then, can we trust what he says? The best response to this question is to ask what might have been the consequences had the Elder misrepresented his opponents. It is clear enough that the breakup is quite recent, which implies that the Elder’s addressees knew from their own experience about his opponents. If his characterization were too far off, then his efforts to persuade and comfort would be rendered ineffective by this lack of authenticity. Personally, I think it more likely that we have an incomplete picture of the opponents rather than a very inaccurate one.

Finally, there is disagreement about whether or not the schism itself is the “main thrust” of the Elder’s remarks, or whether he has wider objectives including simply explaining what is an appropriate way to understand the Fourth Gospel. The folks who opt for the wider view are principally Pheme Perkins, Judith Lieu, and Ruth Edwards. My thought is that they have done us a service by calling attention back to the pastoral components of the text but I remain unconvinced of their larger position. You can get a synopsis of their thoughts and access to their works in any decent commentary. For my part, I will probably quote or allude to their thoughts at appropriate points rather than summarizing them now.

Continue reading “God is Light III: The Situation”

This is the second post in a series on 1 John. The point of this series is to illustrate how exegesis is done by “doing” a bit of exegesis in a rather step-by-step fashion. The first post dealt with author and genre. This one deals with the literary relationships between the Johannine Epistles and the remainder of the Catholic Epistles, the Gospel of John, and the rest of the NT.

Although I neglected to mention it in the first post, the content of the first four or five posts will cover what we might call “introductory matters.” It is easy to be impatient with the time it takes read this sort of thing. It is my experience, however, that it is invariably time well-spent. There is no substitute for context when you try to interpret a literary work.

Finally, Eric reminds me in a comment on the first post that part of this illustration should be to show how I use the various sources and tools that go into something like this. So I will!

LITERARY RELATIONSHIPS: THE JOHANNINE EPISTLES

In the last post, I proposed that the relationship between 1 John and 2 John was that the latter was a cover letter for the transmission of the former. This, I think, is a good approach given that Irenaeus (d. 202 CE) seems to have thought that the two were one document. Sometimes 1 John is found alone, but this might be explained by the fact that the Elder would not have used a cover letter for his own church or those that were very nearby.

What about 3 John?
Continue reading “God is Light II: Literary Relationships”

Some time ago, quite some time ago, actually, Eric asked if I’d do a bit of exegesis of a passage in 1 John to illustrate the activities involved. I don’t remember quite what passage we agreed on, but I think it was the first substantive section of the First Epistle of John, 1 John 1:5-2:17.

So here we go…

GENRE

The first stop is genre. A literary genre is a group of texts that exhibit a coherent and recurring pattern of features, usually further defined in terms of form, content, and function. The nice thing about placing a text in a literary genre is that it gives us some idea of what to expect, although most authors subvert the conventions of genre to one degree or another. And that, in itself, is often very illuminating.

The title of the work in question is “The First Epistle of John.” This is a fine title except for the fact that it’s not an epistle (there’s no addressee or sender, no salutation and no closing) and there’s no indication it was written by anyone named John, let alone the prominent disciple of Jesus by that name. In fact, there’s no indication at all to tell us who wrote it. From the standpoint of genre the First Epistle of John resembles the Epistle of Paul to the Hebrews more closely than any other NT work. And like 1 John, the Epistle of Paul to the Hebrews is not an epistle, was not written by Paul, and is not addressed to the Hebrews. Other than that, though, it’s a great title.

OK, that was illuminating…

Continue reading “God is Light I: Genre and Author”

I think most of the people that frequent the Bloggernacle believe that classes such as Sunday School and Priesthood/Relief Society fall short as far as how engaging they could be. This has been discussed in numerous places. Most recently at BCC; and earlier here at FPR under the rubric of “Consequentialism”. “Engaging” of course means different things to different people, but it often is expressed along with the idiom of “milk before meat”. I want to argue in this thread that employing the “milk before meat” rhetoric will not solve the problems people are trying to articulate.

As far as I see it, the paradigm of milk before meat is heavily attached to the following ideas:

Continue reading “Toss the Milk and Lose the Meat”

For a long time I’ve felt a disconnect between the concept of “education” employed by programs such as the Church Educational System, and “education” in the context school learning (be it post-high or not). I think I recently have been able to put more of a finger on why I’ve felt this way. Before going further I should probably admit that this may reflect more of my own attitudes and experience with “education” both within and without the church, than an “objective” description of the situation, but I believe it will resonant with some. I’m also going to (over?) generalize, but hey, it’s a blog post and I’m happy to modify or defend my argument as needed Continue reading “Church Education as Consequentialism”

This post is a response of sorts to posts and comments here, here, and here.

Since much of this is anecdotal and based on my own experiences, I need to explain what those experiences are. I grew up outside Utah, attended early-morning seminary, and then Institute, but only during my freshman year (not at BYU.) I’m currently a Bible-oriented graduate student and a volunteer Institute teacher with several years of varied teaching experience. The students I’ve had are probably atypical in that they have always been college students or graduate students (mostly the latter) and returned missionaries (very often). Continue reading “Scattered thoughts on CES, nuance, gray areas, and teaching Institute”

A discussion begun over at BCC propelled a train of thought that has been chugging along in my mind for some time. Amri Brown’s cousin, on being called as bishop, decided to give up Diet Coke:

So, why, why is he giving up Diet Coke? He says it is because he never wants it to be a stumbling block to those in his ward. There are members of Church that do believe caffeine is against the Word of Wisdom and he doesn’t want that to get in the way of him being able to act as their bishop. … He says that he feels impressed that he needs to give it up for the sake of others.

The responses to Amri Brown’s questions, as you can imagine, ranged from applause of the cousin’s decision to a middle of the road approach (quietly giving it up, not making an issue of it) to disappointment that he would cater to the most sensitive of ward members to exasperation that it was ever an issue at all.

I suspect that most of us run up against this, and that it’s probably a phenomenon that affects (plagues?) all religious traditions in their need to accommodate shifting spectra of orthodoxy among their constituents. I, personally, have been in many a heated discussion over the appropriateness of white shirts, close grooming, orthodoxy in Word of Wisdom, etc. In almost every case, my interlocutors have conceded that there is nothing cosmically important [1] about the need to wear white shirts or not to drink caffeine or not to shop on Sunday, but that what is of utmost importance is not to become a “stumblingblock” for another member of the church, so it’s best just to conform, to “take one for the team” in Brown’s words.

This discussion, though benign enough, raises some broader issues about the negotiations of liberal and conservative factions within a given tradition. Continue reading “Neutrality, Stumbling Blocks, and the Path of Least Interference”