The Covenant Curses and the Messiah

While rereading St Athanasius' On the Incarnation to teach from it in class tonight, I came across a very interesting passage that I'd not noticed before (para. 35):

But perhaps, having heard the prophecy of his death, you ask to learn what is indicated regarding the cross.  For not even this is passed over in silence; but is expounded with great clarity by the saints.  For first Moses, in a loud voice, predicts it saying, 'You will see your life hanging before your eyes, and you will not believe' (Deut. 28.66).

This rather caught me off guard: how could I have missed such a stark Christological note in Deuteronomy? Looking it up in the ESV, however, I noticed that it was translated:

Your life shall hang in doubt before you.

While it is feasible to get the same sense from this as the Saint does, it is a bit of a stretch.  However, in the LXX (closer to the version that St Athanasius would have used) we have this:

Your life shall hang before your eyes...and you will not believe in your life.

St Athanasius, reading the Scriptures christologically, sees here a potent prophecy against those of the Jewish Faith as to why they don't believe.  We might fruitfully connect this to Romans 9-11, where St Paul's argument is precisely why this is currently the case and the role of the Gentiles (such as the Alexandrian bishop) to rectify the situation.  It is, rather than being a terror passage of Calvinism, a hopeful statement of our co-labor with God in Christ.

What is particularly of interest to me, though, is the connection this makes between the covenant curses found in Deuteronomy 28 and the Cross.  Just as He had warned Adam, so YHWH warns the ancient Israelites: this is the consequence of rejecting Life in Me.  Being separated from our Life in God leads, naturally, to death: from dust we are and to dust we must return.  Man, whether as an individual or as a people, is not naturally immortal: we become immortal by sharing in the eternal life who is God.  The curses, then, are not threats (just as Adam was not threatened, but warned) -- they are an eschatological declaration of what happens when we break the communion with Life.  Corruption, then, is the tendency of all things when separated from the Communion of Christ.  St Paul, again, will pick this up as a prophecy of how the Gentiles will come to the Faith, followed again by the Jews in Romans.  What is fascinating to me is that the Cross is found smack dab in the midst of the curses: they are not general "this will happen any time someone sins" in Deuteronomy, but they are a specific prophecy, given all the way back on the edge of the Promised Land, for what will happen in Christ for the salvation of the whole world.

This means that the point of the curses, in the end, is not juridicial (curses come to satisfy the wrath of God); rather, they are eschatological -- Israel's calling is to go through, in the Person of her Messiah and King, the death of Adam and so liberate the world from the power of sin and death.  She would not, though, understand this ("you will not believe in your Life") and so will have the hard tasks of bringing Adam's sin to the full.  Instead of merely seeking to be "like God" in a way other than that already ordained by God Himself (Gen. 1:26), they will seek to usurp God by putting Him to death.  In that fulfillment, what St Paul calls the condemnation "of sin in the flesh" (Rom. 8:3), God Himself will trample down death and call all to Himself to partake of the freedom of the sons of God (8:21, etc.).

Over-determination and Inspiration

Douglas Campbell, author of The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul, has a helpful metric for discussing the rhetorical strategies we use to understand texts: over- and under-determination.  Over-determination is where the text under consideration says something unhelpful or even contrary to what the claims based on it needs (think of how St James says "justification is not by faith alone" (2:24) and then look at the collective hand-wringing being done by searching that phrase in Google).  Under-determination is where the text does not provide the necessary backing for the claims based on it.  He makes a compelling argument in the book that the standard Protestant reading of St Paul and 'justification' is riddled with over- and under-determinations.  The book (which is massive) is well worth a read, even if you don't end up agreeing with his conclusions.  I'd like to use that metric to return to the topic of inspiration of the Scriptures, which I've written on before and will repeat some of the things I said there.  (And, as always, I reserve the right to disagree with myself.)

The stereotypical argument concerning inspiration, at least as I learned it, went something like this:

A: The Bible is God's Word
B: God is Truth (or, negatively, God cannot lie)
C: Therefore, God's Word is true ("in all it speaks on" is a possible under-determination)

None of this is, for the most part, controversial (that the Lord Christ, member of the Trinity, is actually God's Word, from whom the Scriptures derive their authority, is an important point, but more is made of the difference between the two than is actually warranted).  Also, none of this speaks a whit about inspiration.  Inspiration is a teaching about the origin of the Scriptures, not their veracity or reliability.  There may be correlations between the two topics, but they cannot, and so should not, be collapsed into one another.  To do so would be to commit the genetic fallacy: the conclusion that the truthfulness of something is inherent in its origins.  This particular fallacy has gotten lots of play in biblical scholarship over the years, especially in Old Testament studies with the Documentary Hypothesis; it also has a long life within the culture wars when we assume that if we have evolved from brute animals, we must be nothing more than animals (and do note that I'm not making any claims about this subject: it is beyond my ken).

It is possible, though, that even saying inspiration is a doctrine of textual origins is an over-determination.  Once we clear out the texts about God's (and, consequently, His Word's and Spirit's) truthfulness, we have precious few didactic texts about inspiration itself.  The main one is found, of course, in 2 Timothy 3:16: "All Scripture is given by inspiration of God..."  Unfortunately, there is no parallelism, nor any explanation of the term used for inspiration, which happens to be, alas, a hapax legomenon.  The term itself, θεόπνευστος, is a compound word from "God" and "breathing," so it could mean "God-breathed." Again, though, this may be problematic as compound words in all languages do not necessarily equal the sum of their parts. As this seems to be a word of Pauline origin (it is not extant in any other relevant ancient literature), it would seem best to look at how God's breath/Spirit is understood in the rest of the Scriptures. Here we find, of course, God's breath fluttering over the primordial Creation (Gen. 1:2), or the filling of Bezalel and Aholiab "in wisdom, in understanding, in knowledge, and in all workmanship" (Ex. 31:3 -- the connections between this passage and that of 2 Tim. 3 should not be overlooked), or His dwelling with -- and leaving -- the judges and the kings, or the famous passage in Isaiah 61 ("The Spirit of the Lord God is upon Me...to preach..."). God's Breath, then, is God's coming in power, especially in regards to the granting of words and wisdom. If we take this background back to 2 Tim. 3, we might see that the passage isn't speaking of origins, but rather how the Scriptures, bearing the Spirit of God, have power and authority: it is because they are a conduit of the divine Spirit that they can "make wise unto salvation...[be] profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness." Read like this, the passage is utterly non-controversial. It does not speak about how the Scriptures came to be (other places speak vociferously about that: "the Word of the Lord came to me..."), but about the power of the Word in the apostolic ministry.


That last clause merits some unpacking. The biggest under-determination of this text is using it divorced from its canonical context. While one of the beauties of the Reformation was its opening of the Scriptures to any literate person (and the subsequent drive for mass literacy that is only now waning in Western culture), it came at the heavy price of all Scripture being read flatly, as if all Scripture was addressed to everyone in the same way at all times, and, worse, led to Scripture being read outside of its necessary ecclesial context. An argument I heard while listening to a podcast called "Kingdom Roots," made by Scot McKnight, assumed that this text meant anyone picking up the Scriptures could utilize that power and be "trained in righteousness," etc. However, this misses the point that St Paul the Apostle is writing this epistle to St Timothy, the designated guardian of the Apostolic Deposit (2 Tim. 1:14, 3:14, etc.). For him who has "carefully followed my teaching, manner of life, purpose, faith, longsuffering, love, perseverance, etc." the power, the God-breathedness, of the Scriptures is made available to him for teaching (as a catechist), for reproof (as a pastor), for correction (again), for instruction in righteousness (note the chiasm), "that the man of God [those in St Timothy's care] may be thoroughly equipped for every good work" (3:16-17), or as St Paul put it elsewhere, "and He gave some to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, and some pastors-teachers, for the equipping of the saints for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ..." (Eph. 4:11-12). What tools do these gifted by the Spirit have for this work of equipping and edifying? The God-breathed Scriptures. Along with them, though, and inseparable, is that Apostolic Deposit, that way of life learned from the Apostles, what came by mouth or by letter (2 Thess. 2:15). There is no tension here between the Scriptures and the Tradition, for both came from the same Source: the Spirit given to the Apostles by the Lord Christ. The Church, which is the dwelling place of that selfsame Spirit, is the keeper of the Deposit -- which includes the Scriptures -- and the place where they must be properly understood and applied to the life of the believers in communion.


All this to say, and the true impetus behind writing tonight, is that we need to locate the Source of the Scripture's inspiration: the Spirit working through the Church. We over-determine 2 Tim. 3:16 in an attempt to ground sola Scriptura in Scripture, creating a bizarro circular argument in a text that was never meant to bear the weight of the Chicago Declaration. What is missing in the arguments about inspiration, precisely, is the Church herself. Inerrantists will be quick, in the face of all the text critical facts, to say that the Scriptures have been preserved from all error; yet the Church, the dwelling place of the Spirit (according to those Scriptures), is untrustworthy, fallible, corrupt, etc. What the doctrines of inspiration and inerrancy should make us do is to probe further our own understandings of what God is doing in history through His people, whom He has promised to indwell by His Spirit. The hard questions raised by post-evangelicals who have modified their views of Scripture based on the dilemmas and problems sola Scriptura and inerrancy (particularly) can be answered, but only as (paradoxically) we return to the Scriptures -- in their proper context, the Church -- and see what God has actually said about those Scriptures and the Church (and not just already assume our post-Reformation traditional answers).

Full Disclosure in Evangelism

This reflection does not arise, alas, from personal experience of evangelism: I live in a Christian bubble most days and so find little opportunity for it.  My own method, especially as I tend towards introversion with age, is to pray for those around me, with as much unceasing effort as can be managed.

This reflection, instead, arises out of my existential experience as a Christian.  Or, maybe more, in the tensions I've noticed in the theology of broader evangelicalism of which I am a part.

In some ways, and maybe this is because our evangelistic context is America, our sharing of the Faith tends to sound like political campaigning: Jesus will "save" you from your sins, from your loneliness, from your brokenness, from your X, Y, and Z.  If only we will vote Him in as "personal Savior" or "Lord of our life," then...well, what?  Here's the tension.  We make great claims as to what Jesus accomplishes through that moment of decision (or whatever), but then are catechized into simul iustus et peccator, with particular emphasis on the peccator.  For some of the preaching that I have heard over the years, even after salvation we are just as mired in sin as we were before.  Our wills are inable, after conversion, to seek the good.  All our actions are sin, or as Luther supposedly put it, all our works are mortal sins.

It is a preaching of despair.

The point, as it has been explained to me, is to drive us again and again to Christ on the Cross.  Having forsworn works in the earning of our salvation, we must now be sure to not use them to maintain or prove our salvation.  (Yet, how do we know we are saved? Good works.). In other words, it is a continual chopping down of our Self, so that God alone may get glory.  God and man are locked in a zero-sum game: what is good for one necessarily takes from the other.  Our will, created by God to seek Him, is essentially or naturally at odds with Him, as salvation itself does not restore us to any Adamic (or Christic) freedom -- it only tackles the problem of legal justice and wrath.

It must be noticed, then, that the "salvation" offered is wholly eschatological: there is no actual deliverance from the power of sin and death until the afterlife.  It is possible -- nay, required -- that one become more moral, but there is no real power given with which (or by Whom) to accomplish and maintain it.  In this, again, our evangelism seems political: sure, we've got the right man in office, but he's unable (or unwilling?) to actually effect any change. We just have to hope that the future is better (which, of course, it will be, since the promise that this is so came from the same folks who promised us that we were going to be delivered from our sins...).

If this is, in fact, the Christian message and how it is lived out, is it any wonder Millennials are leaving the Church?  Especially when this message is juxtaposed with the optimistic narrative of Western materialism?

Could it be that our message of what salvation in Christ is, is too beholden to that dominant narrative? That the problem is primarily individual and legal (me and my sins), instead of ontological and relational?  Is the fundamental hope of our salvation fixing my broken actions and attitudes, or deliverance from what causes such things in the first place? (You'll notice, I hope, that I'm not "making light of sin" here: a doctor doesn't make light of the symptoms in treatment, even if they aren't worth mentioning in the context of the overarching disease.)

The problem, while exhibiting in every human individual, is cosmic: the whole of creation is under subjugation to Death and Satan.  As such, it is the environment in which, no matter how much we may want the Good, we cannot attain to it without egoism and violence against our neighbors: in the state of corruption, creation and man do get locked in a zero-sum struggle.  Here is where we find ourselves, without remainder, and so have a powerful evangelistic message: we are all confined under sin, in disobedience, but God has come in our form to deliver us from the bondage.  What must be remembered, though, is that as you leave the enemies territory, he will not let you go quietly.  He wants you to come back under slavery and will do everything in his power to make you return (why else would St Paul anathematize a different gospel, one that brought the hearers back into subjugation?).  Being delivered from bondage is only the first part: now you must train for war.  It is not that you can't please God -- far from it, as He now dwells in you and with you -- but you haven't yet built up the habitual defenses, the virtues, needed for full engagement with the enemy.  You will slip and fall from time to time -- the point is that you must resist becoming enslaved again.  For this God Himself abides in us, teaching us to say 'no' to ungodly and wordly passions and desires, and granting us access to His Body, the Church, where we labor with and for one another towards the fullness of salvation.

It seems, at this point, apropos to bring in the narrative of the Old Testament.  Here, again, we see its iconic nature, pointing beyond itself to God's larger story.  Israel, those who bear the promise, are under the heavy rigor of the Pharaoh, cry out for deliverance, and are released (set right, justified, etc.) by God the Redeemer.  However, Pharaoh pursues them until they go through the Sea, which St Paul connects to our passing through the waters of baptism.  Just because the host of Pharaoh is decimated, though, doesn't mean Egypt ceases to exist: there are many stern warnings in the Torah to not return to Egypt or take up Egyptian ways.  The Philistines, the perennial enemies of Israel who arise out of the Sea (sort of a Pharaonic redivivus), are descendants of ancient Mitzraim, Egypt herself.  Only King David will be able to fully subdue them...just in time for his son, Solomon, to make his chief consort the daughter of Pharaoh.  From there, his tragic story unfolds of looking more and more like Pharaoh himself: the conscripted labor force, the amassing of an army, the building of a 'large house' (the very meaning of the Egyptian title), and the accumulation of wealth.  It is possible, if we do not completely reject the corruption in the world, to fall back into it: the end will be worse than the start.

There are more layers to this, however.  After baptism, in which our enemies are thwarted and we are brought into union with Christ (symbolized by the covenant ceremonies in the Old Testament -- they point forward to the fuller union of theosis: covenant is iconic, not an end in itself).  However, the old way of life must be progressively overthrown.  Here is where the Conquest of Canaan becomes particularly significant.  We must, using the weapons of the Spirit, cast out and cast down all our passions, disordered desires, and sins, just as the Israelites were to do to the Canaanites.  We, of course, should add the exorcism of the demons, as a larger thread to this tapestry.  We should not, though -- and this is vital -- expect this to happen in a day: "and the Lord your God will drive out those nations before you little by little; you will be unable to destroy them at once, lest the beasts of the field become too numerous for you" (Deut. 7:22, cp. Ex. 23:30).  We are being trained up for spiritual war, which requires smaller battles until we are ready to enter our inheritance.  Or, as St Antony of Egypt put it, "Expect temptation to your dying breath."

What does all this mean for evangelism?  Certainly, Jesus has (not will) saved us from our sins, from death, and from the devil: once someone has been baptized and confessed the Faith, we can assure them that they are, indeed, free from that demonic dominion.  But, the work has just started, there is a practical eschatology: now we must be vigilant, must train and exercise, until we, through and with Christ, have conquered that and those which sought our enslavement and destruction.  That we are at war and expected to take part in it is an essential piece to evangelism.  Jesus has not died to make us comfortably middle class, but to deliver the whole world from its bondage to corruption.  Be free and enlist in the Kingdom that will throw down its enemies and bring the peace of which our satisfied, warmed, and filled human existence is but a shadow.  There is no room for despair here, for the King has conquered and continues to conquer: He gives us the eyes to see it and trains our hands for war.

Hallelujah, for this Lord is born as one of us and will lead us to the Promised Land.

Paul: Sonship, Resurrection, Justification, Predestination

It was a number of years ago that I made an offhand comment to a former student (who is now a prominent Lutheran apologist): "I think the key to 'justification' is the Resurrection." Since then the idea has been percolating away on the back burner.  In Romans, as well as elsewhere, St Paul collects strands of metaphorical theology to make his case for the significance and efficacy of the Christ event. It does not go too far to say that, for Paul, the Christ event (the Incarnation proper, which includes conception, birth, life and ministry, death, resurrection, ascension, and session) is our salvation: our belief, which I previously linked to baptism in ancient Church ritual, is decidedly secondary (yet not, therefore, of no importance). We can start to see this as we tease out the connections between Paul's language of sonship, resurrection, justification, and predestination.

In Romans 1:16 (a verse often taken as programmatic for the rest of the Epistle and St Paul's theology writ large), he says, "I am not ashamed of the Gospel of Christ: the power of God to salvation for everyone who believes, for the Jew first and also the Greek." What, though, is the Gospel? Paul has already alerted us to it in the opening salvo: "the Gospel of God, which He promised before through His prophets in the Holy Scriptures [here meaning the Old Testament], concerning [this word should be understood as "the content of which is"] His Son Jesus Christ our Lord, who was born of the seed of David according to the flesh, and declared to be Son of God with power according to the Spirit of holiness, by the resurrection from the dead." This version of the Gospel, which is both different and similar to his recounting in 1 Cor. 15, is decidedly similar to the narrative presentation of the canonical Gospels. As can be seen, the conception of sonship, of the paternity of Christ, is central to this telling. Yes, according to the flesh, He is the son of David, which entails all the requisite claims to kingship found in the Old Testament, especially the Psalms (2, 45, and 110 coming immediately to mind). However, St Paul makes the daring -- and important -- move to ground a divine paternity "in power," the same power by which salvation comes to "everyone who believes." What is this power? The resurrection from the dead. (If I wanted to emphasize the Trinitarian nature of all this, I would note that the agent of resurrection is the Spirit of holiness. That will have to wait for another day.) It is this "power" that enacts the "declaration" (or, better, "designation") of Christ as the Son of God; in other words, the resurrection was the public ("with power") justification of Christ's claim to be "Son of God" as recorded everywhere in the Gospels. Here we are already seeing a possible connection between sonship and justification, although the link is not yet particularly explicit. Having this start, though, allows us to reread Romans fruitfully.

It is worth noting at this junction an important aspect of sonship, both to the ancient world generally and Christian faith in particular. Sonship was not just about biology, or filial affection, but about authority and inheritance. The son and the father were, legally, co-authoritative over whatever property was in the possession of the father. Of course, the son had to reach legal age, otherwise the property would be held in trust by regents or stewards (who could be slaves, cf. Gal. 4:1ff.): once he came into his full inheritance, however, he could be co-regent with his father (we see this in the co-reigns of many of Israel and Judah's kings). Now, if a naturally-born son either died before (or after) this or was disinherited, someone could be adopted in his stead. We see this happen with Julius Caesar's adoption of Octavius to be his "son": the point was that Octavius would inherit Caesar's legal authority, if not his role as dictator for life (obviously, this was contested). If the father happened to be a king, then the inheriting son would have the kingdom as his own, which was more than just authority: kingdom are made up of subjects, of property, and privileges. What if, though, the son (whom the father wishes to bring to "glory," that is, into the inheritance with all the attendant privileges) has been kidnapped and enslaved? This seems a strange thing to say; however, it is St Paul's argument in Galatians 3-4:

If there had been a Torah given which could have given life [not biological life, but God's Life], truly justice would have been by the Torah. But the Scripture has confined all under sin, that the promise by the faith of Jesus Christ might be given to those who believe. But before faith came, we were kept under guard by the Torah, confined for the faith which would afterward be revealed. Therefore the Torah was our pedagogue to Christ, that we might be justified by faith. But after faith has come, we are no longer under a pedagogue. For you are all sons of God through the faith in Christ Jesus...Now I say that an heir, as long as he is a minor, does not differ at all from a slave, though he is master of all, but is under guardians and stewards until the time appointed by the father. Even so we, when we were children, were in bondage under the elements of the world. But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the Torah, to redeem those who were under the Torah, that we might receive the adoption as sons...but then, indeed, when you did not know God, you served those which by nature are not gods. But now after you have known God, or rather are known by God, how is it that you turn again to the weak and beggarly elements, to which you desire again to be in bondage?

Galatians, as a letter written to a (set of?) congregation which had already been catechized by St Paul, is necessarily laconic: it is an occasional and pastoral epistle, not a fully-explicated statement of doctrine. In many ways the language employed in this passage is reminiscent of the fuller explanation found in Romans, to which we will need to go to fill out details. (It is my theory, which I need to work on more, that Romans is essentially an unpacking of the argument found in Galatians for an audience with whom St Paul had no previous personal contact. Even the altercation with St Peter is reminiscent of Romans 1-3.) The problem of justice ("righteousness" in most translations) is here again prominent; yet the Torah, and therefore the special elected relationship that the Jews enjoyed, could not bring this justice to bear. Why? Because "the Scripture has confined all under sin." Or, as put in Romans, "Now we know that whatever the Torah says, it says to those who are under the Torah [that is, to Jews], that every mouth may be stopped, and all the world may be accountable before God" (3:19), or, "For God has confined [the same word as in Gal. 3:22 and 23] them all in disobedience, that He might have mercy on all" (11:32). The purpose of the Torah was not to justify, to liberate from sin, but rather that through those who bore it [the Jews] God might judge sin itself for the salvation of all. For the Jew, then, to "boast" of their election (Rom. 3:27-31), was to commit to an over-realized eschatology: election was a means to a much greater end, but it had been reduced to the End. The problem with this, of course, is that if Israel's election had been the telos, then the problem of sin dwelling within man, of the corruption leading to death plaguing all humankind, had not been dealt with and God could not be truly just. A truly just God would save His creation from the nothingness it had become enslaved to and enamored with.

St Paul's rejoinder to the claim of privilege, of election, is that the point of it was to "confine all under sin," so that the faith of Jesus Christ, His allegiance to His Father as the Incarnate One, would lead to sin/death/Satan overplaying their hand by condemning to death an innocent human, not knowing that this Innocent One was the Holy One of Israel that cannot be contained by death, contaminated by corruption, or swayed towards sin. "Before that time," though, Israel [the only possible referent for Paul's first person plural pronoun] was given a teacher, a pedagogue, to point them towards the liberation to come, the maturity of the son into his inheritance. Israel, here, is acting as the representative of all humanity: their salvation, their maturity, would lead to "all the families of the earth being blessed" (Gen. 12:3).

The strange moment, though, where we see the severe providence of God, is how Paul then goes to compare how a minor is under "guardians and stewards" until maturity to being in "bondage to the elements of the world." Here the metaphor of household slaves could include the pedagogue, the Torah, but it seems rather odd to consider it as one of the "elements of the world," especially as the Apostle further explicates that the Gentiles were under the elements as well as the Jews, yet the Gentiles were not given the election and the Torah. The "elements," instead seem to refer to "those which by nature are not gods" (4:8), whom the Galatian Gentiles "served" (a term of bondage/slavery). The Torah served Israel, even though Israel did not have the full maturity; the elements are oppressive to both Israel and the Gentiles. However, by misusing the Torah, it becomes one of the "elements of the world" and therefore oppressive -- this is the main point of Paul's allegory of Abraham's two sons. All of this to say, though, that the "son" [humankind, both Jew and Gentile] is, by the permission (?) of the Father "under bondage" to the elements of the world, until such a time as his maturity/liberation is at hand. However, to become mature, to participate in the liberation, requires pistis, faith, which St Paul connects to the ecclesial sacrament of baptism. There is a rather poignant, if not difficult, mixing of metaphors going on here: are the powers that enslave the agents of the Father, or are they acting of their own accord against the Father's purposes? The answer takes us to another part of Paul's theology: the principalities and powers.

Paul recognizes that these beings are "created by Him [Christ]...whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers...all were created...for Him" (Col. 1:16), and that they rule with an authority granted by God Himself (Rom. 13:1); yet...the Apostle also says that they "crucified the Lord of Glory" (1 Cor. 2:8), that they are "the rulers of the darkness of this age...spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenlies" (Eph. 6:12) against which the Church must be armed by Christ; however...Christ is "far above all principality and power and might and dominion" (Eph. 1:21) and has "disarmed principalities and powers, [making] a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them in it [the Cross!]" (Col. 2:15). In other words, these authorities -- which can be conceived of both as political rulers and the (fallen) angelic hosts behind such -- had a role given to them by God from which they asserted their own will and became tyrants over humankind. The Incarnation, leading to the Cross, is God's great judgment against them and their leader, Satan, and the liberation of those so enslaved and enamored by them. The mixing of the metaphors in Galatians, then, is not confusion, but terse revelation of the true state of affairs that God's "son," both Jew and Gentile, find himself in. One of the truly awful corollaries of this is that the Torah, God's gift to the Jews for the sake of the world, has been turned from a pedagogue into a tyrant, into an element, which explains St Paul's polemic against it, yet his right admiration for it.

For Paul, then, there is a cosmic problem at work and a cosmic solution that has been enacted: the work of Christ is bigger than Israel, and even bigger than the Gentiles, it goes to the heart of the "subjection to futility" the creation has been put under by God.

Why, though, has the creation been subjected to futility? Why have all been confined to disobedience? Why are all under sin? Here is the place, I believe, that Paul is most profound in his theology and most misunderstood: all are kept in this fallen state so that God might save all from futility, from disobedience, from sin. To unpack this, we must return to Paul’s account of the Gospel as found in 1:3-4. The Son, Jesus Christ, our Lord has been “declared” or “designated” as Son of God “with power” by His resurrection from the dead. It is key to note that Paul does not identify Christ as Son after the resurrection, but starts his account of the Gospel with that identification. The “declaration” of divine paternity is not an adoptionist statement: Christ is acknowledged as Son – what He was before – “with power.” Jesus was already the Son of God, but His claim to be so (found everywhere in the Gospels) could not be believed, or even understood, until His vindication/justification, that is, His resurrection. At this point, the matter was settled: this One truly is the Son of God. From this point the apostolic mission begins. It is the same power, the power to raise from the dead, that can bring “salvation for everyone who believes, for the Jew first and also the Greek” (1:16). This revelation of God’s justice, Christ’s resurrection, shows as well that Christ is the “image of God” (2 Cor. 4:4, Col. 1:15), the image in whom humankind was created to begin with. Those who bear the image, though, have become enslaved by deception and now enact their own destruction, trending towards death, the opposite of God Himself, who is Life. What this says, then, is that humankind’s divine sonship is not what Christ’s sonship is based on, but the other way around. God, who is Love, so desired to share Himself with that which is outside of Himself that He created beings like Himself, in His very image, so that they might participate in His blessedness. Into this entered sin and death, which since man was God’s image-bearer meant that sin and death spread to the whole of creation which had been put in man’s trust and under his authority. The problem, for St Paul, is how to finally eradicate sin, death, and corruption from God’s created order and how to then bring that order into God’s glory. Now that sin and death had a foothold of universal corruption, now that the sonship of humankind had been spurned, it was God’s prerogative to so orchestrate history to save His world, His image-bearers, and deal with sin and death. Sin and death, though, had to be shown for what they really are. Hence the Torah, which would be the power that would be “an avenger to execute wrath on him who practice evil” (Rom. 13:4), that is, on Satan, for “the law brings about wrath” (4:15). How did it do this? “For sin, taking occasion by the commandment, deceived me, and by it killed me” (7:11), “sin, that is might appear sin, was producing death in me through what is good [that is, the commandment], so that sin through the commandment might become exceedingly sinful” (7:13), “for what the Torah could not do [give Life, Gal. 3:21], in that it was weak through the flesh [sin having produced death in it], God did by sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, on account of sin: He condemned sin in the flesh” (8:3). Christ’s death on the Cross, then, was God’s judgment against the encroachment of sin, death, and corruption as it tried to parasitically destroy God’s whole creation. This is the meaning of St Paul’s rather terse statement in 2 Cor. 5: “For He [the Father] made Him who knew no sin [Christ] sin for us” (v. 21). Note that there is an element of wrath here, but it does not divide the Trinity, as so many popular accounts of PSA do: God does not punish His Son, nor does He pour out His wrath on the hypostasis of His Son, but rather judges, condemns, and executes sin in the flesh of His Son. While God judges sin and what has caused it to be in His world, He freely pardons those humans (which St Paul tells us is all of them), “in His forbearance God had passed over the sins that were previously committed” (Rom. 3:25). Christ does not suffer some “penalty” for every human sin; God “passes over those” because of the Paschal sacrifice. Rather, God attends to the root problem of sin’s origin and continuing tyranny while protecting the very ones, humans, He has come to save. This is how Paul can say that “we shall be saved from wrath through Him” (5:9). There is a penal aspect to the Cross, but it is against sin, death, and the devil. Since these have become integrated into human persons, however, we must escape the judgment by joining ourselves to Christ in His protective Paschal death. It is in this very act of liberation, Christ’s death, that we are made to share in His divine paternity, that is, we are adopted into the family of God. Here is the connection between justification, that liberation from the power of sin, that deliverance from the wrath of God, that protection afforded us by the Passover Lamb, and adoption, the full sharing in the Life of God which He intended from before the creation of the universe (“predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son” 8:29).

Yet…whereas Christ’s sonship was justified “with power” by the resurrection, our situation outwardly seems the same. We still die, we still struggle against sin, we still groan for the liberation of all things. St Paul sees all this in eschatological terms: what is true of Christ is, by virtue of faith and baptism, true of us, but it has not been accomplished “with power.” However, based on the powerful resurrection of Christ, we know that this will happen. Whereas Christ has been “designated” as Son of God with power, we are “pre-designated” to be so conformed to that image. The word “designated” here is used both in 1:4 to talk about Christ’s paternity and in 8:29-30 to talk about ours: it is most often translated as “predestined.” However, that term carries a lot of baggage, especially since the time of St Augustine, that it was never intended to carry. There is no need to go to any “secret will” of God to understand it: the word isn’t speaking of any pre-temporal choice of those who would be saved and those “passed over.” Rather, it is an eschatological term of promise that what God has done in Christ, He will do in those who are sacramentally joined to Him. Christ has been declared Son, we will be declared sons: this is so certain that God has “pre-declared” us to be what we have not yet been revealed “with power” to be.

With all that has been said about sonship, about Israel’s election, about “confining all to sin,” and so on, chapters 9-11 of Romans make a natural home in St Paul’s explication: if this is what God intended from the beginning, to bring both Jew and Gentile into adoption by Christ’s faith and ours, what does that mean for Jewish history and, more pertinently, the Jewish future? So many had cast off God’s Messiah – in fact they had become agents of His demise – so what would happen to them? Paul’s beautiful answer (which has little, if anything, to do with Augustinianism or Calvinism) is that their work of bearing the covenant, of bringing the Messiah to judge sin in His flesh, has allowed the Gentiles to come in, which in turn will allow them, through jealousy, to abandon the supposed exclusive privileges of their election and cling to what God’s true plan all along was. The Jewish contribution (“the root” of 11:16-17) is what made possible the salvation of the world, which makes their rejection of the Messiah all the more tragic, as the Apostle laments in 9:1-5. By rejecting the work of the Son, the Christ, and clinging on to the privileges of Torah, they align themselves with the powers that abused the Torah to put all creation under God’s wrath and so, like any Gentiles who so refuse, fall under the condemnation that has come upon sin in Jesus Christ. Works of the Torah could not justify, that is liberate from sin, for the Torah was meant to bring wrath upon sin, that Life – that is, resurrection – could come through God’s Son, whom death could not hold.

Justification, Resurrection, Adoption, Predestination. While I will not claim to have fully expounded St Paul (nor do I think anyone can make that claim), I do think the argument presented here offers good clarity as to what his overall theology is and how these specific terms fit into that larger whole. I will continue to work on this, gladly accepting your comments and rejoinders.

The Scriptures, the Church, and the Trinity

Friends, what a long, strange trip it has been.

Over at Eclectic Orthodoxy, Fr. Kimel has been reblogging a shortened series of articles on the relationship between the Scriptures as we have them and the Church.  The full series starts with a fascinating and too-close-to-home salvo entitled "Unitarianism and the Bible of the Holy Trinity".  In it, he responds to a few evangelical thinkers, pastors, and scholars who are traveling the road away from any semblance of historical orthodoxy to a form of 'biblical' unitarianism.  Readers of this blog and close friends will see some remarkable similarities to my story, especially as it was expressed in my "Postmodern Protestant Dilemma" phase.  Reading the sources Fr. Kimel has been critiquing, along with the comments on the various postings, has been a trip down (a very painful) memory lane.  I've, in a certain narrative form, detailed most of the important things from that time before.  I still struggle, from time to time, with holdovers from that formative decade.  The strange thing to me, as I reflect on it further, is how those theological struggles effectively deconstructed my inherited Western (that is, Catholic-Protestant) understanding of God and built in its place an Eastern (that is, Orthodox) understanding via almost all the heresies of the ancient Church (as if they've ever really gone away).  To me, the grace of God is evident in hindsight; I wouldn't have known it at the time, though.

To continue the strangeness, Fr. Kimel's posts have been tackling the same questions I asked (and experienced as spiritual pain), in almost the same order.  One of the main ones, which I'd like to focus on here, is: is it possible to read a set of texts outside of their intended context and get their meaning?  In other words, can the Scriptures be divorced from the historical ecclesial setting they were written in and for, and still lead us to Trinitarian dogma?  It is a fascinating question; one that gets to the roots of lingering problems for Protestants and biblical interpretation.

One of the corollaries of sola Scriptura, as it is commonly practiced today, is that the Scriptures are a self-contained, self-interpreting set of documents.  Since they are the "only infallible rule for faith and life," they must contain completely clear and authoritative teaching on all that is necessary for faith and life.  (I know that this was not the original intent of the Reformation doctrine: I'm looking at my own experience with it and what I see in contemporary Protestantism.)  The Church can err; their interpretation of the documents can be taken as wisdom, but not ultimately authoritative, which includes confessional standards to which individual denominations and individual believers profess some sort of allegiance.  I've discussed this problem before.  Without a binding, authoritative (and implicitly infallible) interpretation from an ecclesial community, it falls to the individual believer to ascertain dogma for themselves.  This is key, as it opens up the problem of relativism: is there a dogma in these texts?  If so, how can we sufficiently prove it for the salvation of all humans?  In other words, once we determine the dogma behind the Scriptures, we must become apostles of it.  One can look at the work of Frank Viola in Reimagining Church for just such a stance.  One may also look at the work of Douglas Wilson and the CREC, or Mark Driscoll and the Acts 29 Network, or...etc.  But, and this is a rather sticky wicket here, if the individual is the arbiter of the text's meaning, how can it be objectively judged as the authoritative and binding (that is, true or infallible) interpretation of the text?

Short answer: it can't.

At this point, even if one were to adhere to some theory of "mere Christianity" (a common core of beliefs that are non-negotiable, whether C.S. Lewis-style or "The Fundamentals"-style), there is no medium to assure and discern either accuracy of interpretation or authoritative status.  One individual's reading is just as likely to be Spirit-inspired as another (especially given the demotion the Spirit often "enjoys" in evangelical circles from reality/hypostasis to emotion).  In the end, there is nothing that can be done about this, which calls for a radically different sort of ecclesiology, very akin to what we see in evangelicalism as it exists today.

However, the Scriptures never assert a doctrine of self-containment or self-interpretation.  In fact, "the Scriptures" itself doesn't exist in the Scriptures as understood in the modern world: what we call "the Bible" or "the Scriptures" are an abstraction.  The implicit understanding is that this collection of books is (a) self-authenticating, (b) complete by its own authority and testimony, and (c) self-contextualizing.  In other words, the Scriptures stand alone interpretively, without historical development or communal use.  This isn't to say that a community (or set of communities) hasn't utilized the books for its "faith and life," but that the community is always under judgment for error of misappropriation (semper reformanda secundum verbum dei).

Looking at the genesis of the texts (and here I'll concentrate on the New Testament), though, we see that this was not the intention of the authors.  Here's my claim: the authors of the New Testament never intended their epistles or books to have meaning outside their use in the ecclesial community started by Jesus Christ through His apostles and their legitimate successors.  In other words, there is no meaning to the, say,  book of Romans outside of its context in the Church.  Certainly, the words and sentences can be read and understood by those trained to read texts; but all that such a reading will generate are interesting tidbits that lack any binding authority for "faith and life."  Such a reading misses, for example, the link between St Paul's language of "faith" and the ecclesial sacrament of baptism.  The letter itself was never intended to be excised from this context, even though it was originally addressed to a certain (set of?) congregation in a historically delimited time and place.  Wherever the local Church is, there is the Catholic Church, we might say.  If we desire, then, to find the "original" meaning of a biblical text, it must be read within the liturgical and ascetic life of the Church.  To do otherwise is to produce, necessarily, eisegesis.

Another example might be the Gospels themselves: there are lots of scholarly theories about what they mean, which of the Lord Christ's sayings are "authentic," and what communities they were written for.  However, there is no evidence that the books ever circulated independently in disconnected communities (this isn't to say that they definitely never did, as one cannot prove an argument from silence): rather, the first mentions of them as authoritative texts come from, say, St Irenaeus who always speaks of them as a diverse unity.  What point, then, is there to trying to find their individual genesis?  Whether or not they ever circulated independently, they were not intended to stay that way (and very quickly left such a situation).  Any attempt to "get behind" the texts to figure out the "Johannine community" (for example) is an eisegetical red herring.

What, then, does the ecclesial context look like?  Here we encounter a question that I've only recently thought to ask: what did the Apostles hand on to the communities they established and nurtured?  I think I had always assumed that they gave them a verbal form of the Scriptures, maybe a copy of the Old Testament (and some not-yet-canonized New Testament works), and left it at that.  However, this assumption is riddled with problems: did they expect those who just came out of paganism, full of idolatry and immorality, to puzzle together what worship was and what it was for?  (I think, although I cannot prove this, that here is the origin of the various theories that put early Christian "innovations" such as invocation of the saints and iconography in the hands of the 'unwashed masses' who foisted them upon powerless and unsuspecting bishops.  These same pusillanimous bishops, of course, are they ones who used their power welded to Constantinian statecraft to force Trinitarian tritheism on the aforementioned pure unitarian 'unwashed masses.')  It seems clear, not only from the New Testament (particularly the necessarily laconic Pastoral Epistles) but also early Church history, that the Apostles were very thorough in passing on liturgies, ascetic practices, institutional forms, and dogmatic assumptions necessary for rightly reading and applying the inspired texts of Holy Writ.  In other words, "Holy Tradition" is just as old -- and necessary -- as the documents of the Church.  Tertullian and St Irenaeus, for example, received the (amazingly consistent, even with their variations) regula fidei from those who went before them as the necessary and unquestionable assumptions that guided biblical interpretation.  Those regula were, by all accounts, Trinitarian in form, even if not as fleshed out as they would need to become by the Arian, Eunomian, Pneumatomachian, Nestorian, Monophysite, Monothelite, Monoenergite, and other controversies that threatened to misinterpret and therefore damage the Apostolic Deposit.

What about the irregularities we see in these early centuries, though?  The whole of the Church Catholic did not, for example, use the so-called St John Chrysostom liturgy.  This is to be expected.  It only becomes a problem if we take the ecclesial context out of its own context: the action and work of the Holy Spirit within the community.  Could the liturgy develop in different ways in different historical and geographical contexts, yet still proclaim the same Faith?  Yes, as long as the same Spirit guided the developments.  Any theory that posits some some of "fall" of the Church needs to commit a terrible heresy: the Holy Spirit abandoned, wholesale, the Church sometime after the death of the Apostles.  In my own personal journey, this was the question that started to break up my own arrogance at interpreting the Scriptures outside the Pneumatic and ecclesial contexts in which their home is: if the Spirit had so abandoned the communities, why was my interpretation privileged?  Could the Spirit have just as easily (if not more easily, given my historical and cultural distant from the original Apostolate) have abandoned me?  Was it Descartes' proposed demon whispering my interpretive work in my ears?

This isn't to say, in the aftermath and my salvation via St Irenaeus and St Antony of Egypt, that things have gotten particularly easier.  The questions of where (that is, in what community) the Spirit resides, which form of the text is authoritative, and so on continue to dog me.  But the air has been sufficiently cleared from trying to read the Scriptures as a stand-alone document.  Conceived as such, they are a wax-nose: the Trinity won't be found in them because, and this is vital, the Trinity is the assumption needed to make sense of the texts.  Salvation is, in the end, sharing the Life of God (called "the Kingdom" and "eternal life"), so it only stands to reason that participating in that Life is necessary for the right use and understanding of the texts gifted to us by that very same God: Father, Son, and Spirit.

Rereading Romans 1-3

My friend, colleague, and professor has, in his comments on "Atonement and Iconicity", encouraged me to look more deeply at Romans 1-3.  Since I was teaching on chapters 1-8 tonight, there was opportunity to start digging in.  I am by no means anywhere done meditating on these chapters, but I did find some very interesting things I'd never noticed in the text before.  I won't be tackling the issues he raises specifically, as we've reserved those for a personal meet up.

What I did notice, and I think this helps my overall reading, is that St Paul has a very specific set of pronouns he uses as he develops his argument, an argument that has hints of chiasm as well.  In 1:1-17, the Apostle is very comfortable using first person singular pronouns, climaxing in the grand statement of "I am not ashamed of the Gospel of Christ: for the power [referenced in 1:4] of God is to salvation for everyone who believes, for the Jew first and also the Greek.  For in it [an ambiguous pronoun, is it referring to the Gospel, that is, the proclamation found in 1:3-4, or the 'power' of resurrection by the Spirit?  I'm inclining towards the latter.] the justice of God is revealed by faith to faith, as it is written: 'The Just One shall live by faith'."  (It is controversial, but I think reading the Hosea passage as referring to Christ, who by faithful obedience to the Father lived, that is, was resurrected, is a preferable reading to the commonplace interpretation.)  What is key to note, at this point, is that St Paul has brought us a compact and lovely declaration about what the Gospel is (1:3-4), about the revelation of God's justice, and faith.  We'll return to that shortly.

The gears are shifted, then, to third person plural pronouns in 1:18-32.  The whole passage is describing the work of "men who suppress the truth in injustice" (1:18).  I think it important to ask whether or not the comma, which the NKJV has between "men" and "who" is warranted.  Is St Paul making a broad, universalizing claim?  This is the traditional reading, as I understand it.  There are textual reasons, however, to withhold that judgment, particularly chapter 2, where the pronouns switch again to second person singular, with the vocative of "man" being used.  The "men" of chapter 1 are being contrasted against the "man" of chapter 2, in the form of a dialogue (starting in earnest in chapter 3).  The "man" critiqued in chapter 2 assumes that he is not part of the deviant cadre of "men" in chapter 1.  The context clues (particularly 2:12-16, 17, and so on) show that the critiqued "man" is a Jew who has rested on the blessing of Torah and covenant who thinks that the "men" of chapter 1 are the Gentiles ("sinners" -- Gal. 2:15), well deserving of the "wrath of God" (that is, being left to their own devices leading, ultimately, to death).  However, as chapter 2 starts, St Paul turns the table of this interlocutor in the most dramatic fashion: "Therefore, you are inexcusable, o man..."  If chapter 1:18-32 is true (and, as St Paul avers later, it is), then both Gentile and Jew are "under sin," that is, under the power/dominion of sin, awaiting the end of that state, which is death.  This helps to explain what the Apostle says at the beginning of chapter 8: "Therefore [since Christ has delivered us from the 'body of death' (7:24-25)] there is no condemnation [that is, death has been defeated and life has come in the resurrection] for those who are in Christ Jesus..."

All of this to say: 1:18-32 is a very common set of Jewish critiques of pagan life, assumed by everyone.  However, the problem St Paul is explicating is that even the Jew is in danger of death, of reverting to the nihil from which he was formed (as St Athanasius might put it), since both are "under the power of sin."  The major problem, then, isn't the distorted will (that does mean it isn't a problem, though) but the bondage to death and sin that distorts the will in the first place (7:5, 8).  Man is a sinner because he is born into that state: "through one man [Adam] sin entered the world, and death through sin, and thus death spread to all men, in which [eph ho] all sinned" (5:12).  How can man do anything but sin and die, Jew or Gentile, when he is in this state?  Indeed, the Jew is no better off for having the Law, except that the Torah was given to them that its purpose, of "bringing about wrath" (4:15), of "making the offense abound" (5:20), of being taken advantage of by sin so that sin "might appear sin", and therefore "become exceedingly sinful" (7:13), so that Christ might "condemn sin in the flesh" (8:3).

God's wrath, it appears, is a function of His love: He is condemning sin in the flesh of Jesus Christ, even the sin that makes us enemies of God (5:10 -- note that we are God's enemies in this passage, yet God is consistently said to bear towards us love, not hatred or animosity).  It also appears that God's wrath is twofold: He is actively condemning sin, yet for humans it is experienced as allowing them to actualize their desires and passions, distorted as they now are since they are separated from the Source of Life.  That is, God's wrath is letting them go the full way to death (1:32 and 5:23).

This does change the lawcourt metaphor from its common presentation.  Instead of God as Judge, mankind as defendent, and sin/death/Satan as prosecutor, with Jesus stepping in to take the punishment deserved by man, God is the Judge who is punishing Satan for enslaving and perverting mankind, with Jesus Himself being the rescuer.

More, of course, needs to be said about this.  This is in no way a complete understanding of God's work of salvation in Romans, especially as I've not discussed the act of faith done by trusting in the blood of the Passover lamb, nor of Christ's identity as said Lamb.  I also have not gotten to the chiasmus present, but it is late.

St Paul and Baptism: An Early Foray

What is meant by St Paul’s phrase “in Christ”?  It is a common enough phrase in his corpus, whether in the form already listed or in some other configuration (“in Christ Jesus,” etc.); however, as with many things in Paul, the amount of occurrence tends to be inversely proportional to its explanation by teachers and preachers. As far as I’ve been concerned, the phrase has worked as shorthand for “one saved” or “one exercising faith.” Aren’t we, after all, “saved by grace through faith” (Eph. 2:8)? And isn’t it true that “if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved” (Rom. 10:9)? What do we make, then, of Paul’s passages about the centrality of baptism? Is it necessary? Isn’t it a “work”? (A related question, one that I cannot dive into just here, is: what about infants/children?) It is here that the phrase “in Christ” as “one with faith” becomes problematic.

“For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ…” (Gal. 3:27)

“Or do you not know that as many of us as were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death?” (Rom. 6:3)

“In Christ” seems to be shorthand in Paul for having been baptized. However, this goes further: “For as the body is one and has many members, but all the members of that one body, being many, are one body, so also is Christ. For by one Spirit we were all baptized into one body – whether Jews or Greeks, whether slaves or free – and have all been made to drink into one Spirit” (1 Cor. 12:12-13). “In Christ” is shorthand for baptism, which itself means we are part of the ekklesia, the body of Christ, which Paul accounts as Christ Himself in this passage. To be “in Christ” is to be a baptized member of the Church. What that means, at least for the present passage and for Galatians 3:28, is that the old modes of life (Jew/Gentile, slave/free, male/female) no longer hold. Why? Because they have died with Christ. “Therefore we were buried with Him through baptism unto death, that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life” (Rom. 6:4), which holds the eschatological promise of resurrection/sonship.

Here an interesting corollary becomes apparent: if we die in baptism and are raised to “newness of life,” this could metaphorically be understood as a “new birth.” The old has gone, the new has come. This ties Paul’s theology very closely to that of St John, as he explicates the mystery of baptism in John 3. The reality of baptism is a change, then, from the mode of existence characterized by death (“in Adam”) to that of one characterized by life (“in Christ”), which is to say an ecclesial existence (to use the terminology of Metr. John Zizioulas).

What role does faith play in this? I have not time, nor energy, to go into the debate over whether pistis Christou means “the faith of Christ” or “faith in Christ” (I incline to the former). Instead, I think ancient liturgical practice informs the relationship between faith and baptism. In the catechumenate, the candidate would confess faith in Christ (using some form of what would become the Apostles’ or Nicene creeds) and then receive the sacrament: in other words, faith and baptism were the same event. “Faith” was not merely an inward disposition of assent, but a (semi-)public affirmation and declaration of allegiance to the Christ which was then followed immediately by the new birth, baptism. This is why Paul is so insistent that one must “confess with your mouth” in Romans 10. This sacrament, which secured deliverance from the principalities and powers/stoicheia, then, was the moment of justification, of the declaration that one was innocent before God, as sins/bondage had been put to death in the font and the baptizant was raised to newness of life, foreshadowing their full sonship in the eschaton (which was “predestined” – see my earlier posts on this concept). One was justified by their faith, their profession of allegiance to Christ, in the rite of baptism: there is no conflict between the two, rather they are an integrated whole. This goes a long way to explaining why some of the “quirks” of the earliest church exist, such as why catechumens were considered “saved” if they died in martyrdom before baptism: it isn’t that baptism became a proto-Pelagian “work,” but rather that it was considered the moment of saving faith through the work of the Spirit. One can also see why “validity of baptism” is such a contentious issue to this day: salvation in Christ is necessarily through His Body, the Church.

A benefit of this reading is that the tension between Paul in Romans and Galatians (where he is supposed to be “anti-works”) and the Pastoral epistles (where he is viewed as “too Catholic” and therefore probably not the author) evaporates: St Paul is, very early, a liturgical and ecclesiastical Christian.

The Atonement and Iconicity

Lately, as I've been reflecting on the Calvinistic understanding of predestination, I've also had an opportunity to meditate on the most common view of atonement, called Penal Substitutionary Atonement (PSA),  I'll direct interested parties to the post entitled "The Penalty of our Sins" for more on that topic.  What I say there, though, is mostly negative; you can't, however, beat something with nothing -- as regards atonement, a purely via negativa approach does not ultimately satisfy.  Here is a small contribution towards a positive understanding of atonement, one that, I think, avoids many of the pitfalls of PSA.

The Exodus Motif

As I've averred previously, I think the Exodus from Egypt should be the controlling metaphor utilized to understand the atonement.  I'm unhappy with the use of the word "metaphor" here, though, as if this was just some sort of Wittgensteinian language-game, disconnected from actual reality.  To speak of the atonement in terms of Exodus is to engage in a sacramental-iconic reading of the Scriptures, in which the events of the Exodus are truly connected with the events of the Incarnation, without the one being reduced to the other.  The Exodus truly occurred, as did the Incarnation, yet both are sacramentally the same event.  I find this way of reading (and inhabiting) the texts extremely revelatory, but also almost impossible to describe in this medium.  When I use the word "metaphor," then, it is to be read in a "recapitulatory" manner: Christ is fulfilling the form of the Exodus in His salvific life and death.

The motif itself precedes its explication in the book of Exodus, a sort of adumbration of events to come (just as the Incarnation was foretold in types before it occured historically).  We see it in the enslavement of Adam and Eve to the domain of death, for example.  However the slavery comes about (whether retribution based on Joseph's enslavement of all Egyptians or as a consequence of distorted willing), the Lord has come to pass judgment on the captor and lead His people out through a trial of water.  The connections to justification (understood in a liberative sense: being freed from unjust captivity) and baptism (the Red Sea) are apparent.  The strength of this model, other than it being eminently biblical, is that it properly places the wrath of God against the captors, instead of those captive.

The Wrath of the Liberator

One of the commonplaces of, at least, Reformed preaching is that because of sin, God is angry at every human person and only the sacrificial death of His Son can placate that anger.  What has made God so angry with all humanity is the primordial (or original) sin: Adam sinned and all humankind bears his guilt, so all bear the wrath of God for that sin.  This understanding of the human predicament (whether it comes from Augustine, Anselm, or elsewhere) leads to some very sticky pastoral questions: what about those who never hear of the Christian God?  What about babies who are aborted or still-born?  (Apparently according to Augustine, prebaptismal deaths necessarily lead one to hell: I cannot verify this reading of the saint, but it is carted out often enough in debates).  While maybe God had a beef with Adam, the first man's judgment and punishment are recorded in Genesis 3: he is exiled from the Garden and given over to the forces of entropy and corruption.  Why are his children, all of us, then punished for his sin?  There is no court of law that would uphold such a practice, yet this is the common interpretation placed on the event and its aftermath.  Indeed, here Romans 1:18-32 is brought forth to cement this interpretation: "for the wrath of God is revealed against all godlessness and injustice of men..."  There are certain reasons why this passage, though, should not be universalized: have all known God and then refused to be grateful (v. 21)?  Have all professing to be wise (v. 22)?  Have all dishonored their bodies with "unnatural" uses of the same sex (v. 26)?  The answer to these questions are an uniequivocal 'no.'  The passage does read well, though, as a retelling of the story from Adam and Eve (who did know God, yet did not glorify Him, nor were thankful -- they also ate from the Tree that they believed would make them wise -- Gen. 3:6) to Sodom and Gomorrah (the exchange of the "natural" use) and so on.  It does not make sense to jump from these narratives to a universalized willing depravity.  Rather, what St Paul seems to be doing is to take a commonplace of Jewish theology and turning it back against those who would condemn Gentiles while relying on their own religious heritage (2:1, 17, etc.), particularly the gift of the Torah which has paradoxically brought both "Jew and Gentile under sin" (3:9).  The Law, then, has revealed the wrath of God against sin itself, but is powerless to stop that force.  Humankind is, then, not guilty of Adam's sin and so under divine censure, but is under the power of sin from which it needs to be liberated.  The Law cannot do it, especially since it divides Jew from Greek.  The point of the Law, then, becomes eschatological: it was intended to create the conditions for God's theanthropic Messiah to come and be put to death by, thus freeing God's humanity (the Jew first and also the Greek) from the tyranny that Adam had put them under.  In other words, God's wrath is directed against godless and injust actions (Rom. 1) because it is primarily directed against sin, death, and the devil (7:13, for example).

While We Were Yet Sinners

This context of Exodus liberation (sin/death/Satan playing the part of Pharaoh/Egypt) makes sense of a passage that PSA is necessarily ill at ease with in Romans: "God demonstrates His own love towards us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.  Much more then, having now been justified [set free from our captivity to sin] by His blood, we shall be saved from wrath [the wrath intended for sin/death/Satan] through Him.  For if when we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved by His life" (5:8-10).  This brings out an important point: while we were in slavery to sin and the corruption of the world, we were in fact under God's wrath, just as citizens of a country are liable to feel the brunt of a war upon their soil.  The Israelites, to go back to Exodus, had to suffer through some of the plagues along with the Egyptians: for those who turned to God, they were an eschatological sign of impending judgment against the evil powers; for those who did not, they became a foretaste of hell.  The mercy extended in them, however, was the same from God's point of view: God's judgment against sin is the clarion call to us to "come out from among them and be holy" (2 Cor 6:17).  The anger expressed, then, is not towards men in their Adamic guilt, but towards the power of sin over them ("Jew and Greek under sin"): if they remain in that state, however, they feel the consequences of that wrath.  Here the will does play a part in the salvation of humankind; it is enslaved to sin, yet the Liberator has come and is calling all men to freedom, even offering all that is needed to make the escape: how shall we respond?  (It probably goes without saying here that an enslaved will is not necessarily an inoperative or powerless one).

Baptism and Death

Just as the Israelites needed to have the Egyptians cut off from them by water, so do we need the old impulses of sin and corruption to be washed from us: enter baptism.  This requires baptism is be more than promissory or merely symbolic: it must be sacramental.  This is in line with St Paul's argument concerning baptism in Romans 6.  We who have been baptized have shared in the actual death of Christ, dying along with Him, sharing in the final Exodus moment of freedom.  Sin and corruption have no rightful claim over us, therefore, and we need not heed them.  (This also helps to make sense of the debates between communions as to whether the various baptisms are valid or not.)  This then connects the Exodus back to the Garden: to be free from the power under which Adam foolishly (God forgive him) put us, death was required.  Baptism is our death into Christ, He who death has no rightful claim on, so our participation in Him through faith means that we can, in the present time, rise to "newness of life" (6:4) and, in the age to come, experience the adoption, "the redemption of our bodies" (8:23).  Christ's death, then, is necessary not only as the "demonstration of God's love" (5:8), but also as the event which judges sin and Satan, finds them wanting, and destroys their power of death (Heb. 2:14, cf. John 16:8-11).  As noted, this is an eschatological reality: what has happened in Christ is complete, but not fully realized under the Last Day -- Satan has been judged and cast out (exorcised), but yet he still prowls around like a lion.  The difference is in whether we are "in Christ" or "in Adam."

The Continuing Wrath?

What do we make, then, of the Wilderness Wanderings?  Don't we see God's wrath poured out, over and over again, on His people then?  Let us remember that these things are written to us as types, for our admonition (1 Cor 10:11).  In other words, God's judgment on His people in the wilderness (and when they were in the Promised Land) is meant to cleanse out the old Egyptian life, just as our discipline from God (which can include our physical death -- 1 Cor 11:30) is meant to purge out the consequences of Adam's sin (death and the corruption of our nature, not guilt for his action), so that we might be "conformed to the image of His Son" (Rom. 8:29), which was the plan God had from the beginning.  The Wanderings should be read as a narrative of "making good on baptism": as truly dying to the world through repentance, so that we might live.  Christ is recapitulating these events in us so that we might be fully made holy in His love.

Concluding Remarks

This is, obvious, just a bare-bones sketch of an atonement theory: I haven't dealt with the sacrificial system in any way here.  Much more could and, of course, should be said: about the importance of the Incarnation and hypostatic union, our becoming "co-workers" with Christ in the Christian life, and so on.  It is meant as no more than a different, yet biblically coherent, reading of atonement as set against Penal Substitionary Atonement theory.  I'm sure I've made mistakes here; God forgive me.

A Dialogue about the Job of Christians

At his website, Ed Cyzewski has very recently posted a provocative little essay on the true essence of the Christian Faith (short form: loving others out of the loving presence of God).  I don't know Mr. Cyzewski, and my thoughts here are unsolicited, so I'll call this a dialogue rather than a response.

As I perused the piece, I often found myself agreeing with Mr. Cyzewski; many of the points are one's I've grappled with and come to myself.  The questions that I'm left with at the end, though, are worth taking some time to elucidate:

1) How do we define 'love'?  In the piece, the whole argument hinges on being centered and settled in God's Love, so that we might love as well.  So far, so good.  However, it is very easy -- and we are seeing this happen in the broad Evangelical movement -- to let 'love' mean whatever it is we think is good, just, and true.  If that is the case, though, we've let ourselves be swayed away from the love of God and into the love of the world; in the process we will have idolized the world in its fallen state, which always leads to its demonization and corruption.  This is one of the main issues facing Evangelicals in the realm of what might be called "sexual ethics": have we made romantic or sexual attraction a good in its own right, rather than seeking (yes, even -- or especially! -- married people) to bring it to the Cross and crucify "the flesh with its passions and desires" (Gal. 5:24).  In many Christian circles (including my own), we've valorized sex to the point where we have given it over to the "flesh with its passions desires," instead of seeing it as an ascetic way to become more like Christ and the Church (1 Cor. 7:2-9 and Eph. 5:22-33).  'Love' continues to be a tricky concept, an even trickier life: we need guides to become lovers in God.

2.  The entrance into the love of God that Mr. Cyzewski describes leaves me wondering about the ultimate place of Christ and His Body in the love of God: "I’m not here to tell you the only ways to experience the loving presence of God. I have found ways that help, but there certainly are many paths. The pursuit is what’s it’s all about."  I'm struggling with what question to ask about this -- it is a deeply unsettling set of statements.  What about the sacraments? might be a good start.  Opening ourselves us to God, doing centering prayer, or whatever avoids, it seems to me, the very character of the one path (narrow and difficult it may be: Matt. 7:14) given by Christ and His Apostles.  The one way to the love of God is the Cross -- how we partake of the Cross is through the sacraments (particularly baptism, per Rom. 6, and Eucharist, per 1 Cor. 10:17, although this passage is cryptic).  The necessity of the sacraments, however, points us to the necessity of the Church as bearer of such.  We cannot be saved alone; rather, it is within the context of mutual confession in the Body that we, through Christ, save one another.  That last phrase should shock us, but not much.  It is found in St James' epistle: "Brothers, if anyone among you wanders from the Truth, and someone turns him back, let him know that he who turns a sinner from the error of his ways will save a soul from death and cover a multitude of sins" (5:19-20).  It isn't for no reason that St Cyprian famously quipped, "he can no longer have God as his father, who has not the Church as his mother" (Treatise 1).  There is a path to experiencing the loving presence of God: it is the Way, the Church of the Son of God.

Now, one of the tools that the Church has at her disposal to direct her children (Gal. 4:26) towards the love of God is the Scriptures, which are "able to make [us] wise for salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus.  All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work" (2 Tim. 3:15-17).  Here I think Mr. Cyzewski is onto something important: knowing Scripture without the love of God will not save us.  However, knowing the Scriptures is one aspect of the Way in which we come into God's love.  The attitude that he and I used to carry, that knowing Scripture, theology, church history, whatever is vital because it seems like the "Christian" or "moral" thing to do, is indeed error.  But it isn't the content that is erroneous; it is the method of reception.  If I study the Bible to be "right" about God, or because I confuse knowing Scripture with knowing God, then I have fallen into the trap of pride: I can know God intellectually without faith.  On the other hand, if we come to the Scriptures (and to the Churchly interpreters of the Scriptures -- let's remember that St Paul was talking to St Timothy, not just to Christians at large: he was given him pedagogical and catechetical directions in how to apply the inspired texts) seeking teaching, reproof, correction, instruction, then we will be complete and equipped for that one work, one job, God has called us to: love of God and neighbor.  As a benefit, these Scriptures are replete with concrete direction on what it means to love.

Mr. Cyzewski states: "I have one job and you have one job: find the love of God."  My whole point here is that we need help to find it.  The Church is our guide, just as a good mother should be.  She uses her holy texts for our maturation.  However, if our eyes are clouded by sin and the corruption of the world (1 John 2:16), how can we find the right path to God?  "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God" (Matt. 5:8); "...let us cleanse ourselves from all filthiness of flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of God" (2 Cor. 7:1).  In other words (and passages such as these could be multiplied fruitfully), to find the love of God takes work, what the Fathers call "ascesis" or "discipline."  This was the whole point of fasting, of almsgiving, of Scripture reading, of prayer: training in the life of holiness that we might see God and be transformed in His Image (2 Cor. 3:18; 1 John 3:1-3).  The final verse in the last cited passage is instructive: "and everyone who has this hope [to see God and be like Him] in Him purifies himself, just as He is pure."  None of these activities is worth anything separated from Christ (John 15:5), but in Him they have great power.

In the end, if I have any critique, it is the same one I've made of myself and many others: we talk about coming into the love of God, but neglect the proper method for doing so.  The whole of the spiritual life, which has at its goal the love of God, is not meriting things for ourselves, or feeling morally superior, or placating some Zeus-like deity; it is taking up the Cross and becoming sacraments for the life of the world.  There is a Way and it has been opened for us (Heb. 10:19-22).

The Range of Inspiration

One aspect of Evangelical and Protestant theology that is in desperate need of rethinking is inspiration.  This is, arguably, happening already through the work of Pete Enns and others.  The payout of this is yet to be seen: the work is in its very earliest days.

One of the questions that must be asked is: when did the work of the Spirit in inspiration stop?  The obvious answer is: when the last Apostle finished writing their last book/died.  However, it is not so easy.  Does the Spirit only inspire writing?  We might get this idea from 2 Timothy 3:16, but to do so would be to misread the text.

"All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work."

Where in this text does it say that only the Scriptures are inspired?  It doesn't.  Such is an assumption brought to the text.  Now, a rejoinder might be that nothing else in Scripture is explicitly called "inspired."  As is well known, an argument from silence is not ultimately convincing, to say the least.  (It is also worth noting that St Timothy is an apostolic legate, so this verse is not saying the Scriptures can do all these thing outside or without the Church:  Timothy, as the de facto bishop, is being given instructions on how to utilize the Old Testament in the context of his ecclesial work.). What can be learned from this is that while the Scriptures are inspired, that doesn't mean that nothing else is.  When  Paul tells Timothy or St Titus to "guard the deposit/that which has been entrusted to you," it is a safe, and historically accurate, assumption to believe that this Apostolic tradition was itself inspired.  What that Deposit consisted of, of course, is a matter of long debate.  At the very least we learn from early apologists such as Tertullian and St Irenaeus that it entails the Trinitarian regula fidei (which is the basis of my contention that the Trinity is the necessary assumption behind understanding the Bible: God Himself is the interpretive key, what Irenaeus calls the hypothesis and St Athanasius calls the skopos).

Back to the initial contention: inspiration ceased with the last writing of the last Apostle/their death.  It would seem that I've taken care, at least provisionally, of the first part. However, as the Deposit would have been completed by the death of the last Apostle (and, according to St Jude, much earlier: "the Faith once for all delivered to the saints"), then the initial definition still stands, even if slightly modified.  However, it seems that this understanding of inspiration was not held by Christians at all from their earliest days.  In the Counciliar Definitions, there is an appeal to the work of the Spirit in the deliberations: "Seven holy and ecumenical Synods which were directed by the inspiration of the one and the same Holy Spirit" (text from the so-called Eight Ecumenical Council of 879/880).  In some way, the Spirit continued to move and speak in the Church: not in the sense of adding to or augmenting or contradicting the ancient Deposit, but clarifying through the Fathers the language and the means used to teach it and apply it to the life of the Church.  Many, I know, would object to this line of reasoning, especially if they are traditionally Protestant (i.e., icons had been exonerated in the 7th Ecumenical Council).  There are disturbing questions that must be addressed if this is not the case, though.  Did the Spirit cease His work with the death of the Apostles?  The Lord Christ promised that the Spirit "would lead in all the Truth" in John 16:14 -- is this promise only for the Apostles?  If so, what guarantees do we have that we (or the Reformation, for that matter) have access to the unadulterated truth?  (Answer: none.).

And so, again, it comes down to which ecclesial tradition bears the Spirit?  As should be plain by now, I cannot confidently answer that question.

Some of the corollaries of all this (being the actual reason I started writing tonight) concern what might be called "later" practices of the Church.  To return to the Facebook discussion referenced in the last post, what about "prayer beads"?  Can this practice, which seems to have arisen in the Egyptian monastic movement, be legitimate even though it isn't Scriptural?  One Reformed who answered the question said a very interesting thing (paraphrased): we don't find prayer beads in the pre-Christian Jewish tradition, therefore they are a later pagan influence.  This sort of thing is certainly heard often, especially in some Reformed circles (those influenced by Theonomy, for example).  The assumption behind it is that the inspiration of the Spirit in praxis ceased with the Apostles.  To truly discern appropriate practice becomes, then, somewhat conjectural and certainly a form of archaeology.  It certainly runs the risk of Judaizing.  It also vaunts an unrecoverable past over the historical practice of the Church (interesting to note that this same critique can be applied to the textual theory that centers inspiration in the non-extant autographa).  However, there is no biblical reason to favor a reconstructed Jewish tradition over what actually happened historically: St Paul became a Greek for the Greeks, and so did the Church herself.  It has, and I think this is probably most true in Orthodoxy, retained many aspects of her Jewish heritage, but the Tree has not been stunted at the roots.  Rather, through the ingrafting that Paul mentions in Romans 12, the Tree is truly cosmopolitan: the standard by which praxis is judged is not by its Jewishness, nor even necessarily if it appears in Scripture (let us remember that Jesus did not condemn phylacteries, jus the enlargement of such), but by whether it accomplishes the goal of theosis, or becoming like Christ, or acquiring the Spirit (three ways of saying the same thing): inspiration, in other words.

Brief Thoughts on Christian Ethics

The point of the Christian life is not to become a better, more moral person.  The end, the telos, is to become Christ: not just to be like Him, but to participate in His Life and His Body.  If we think about this, though, this precludes all moral striving.  No matter how hard we work, we will never be filled with the Holy Spirit and so share in the divine nature.  Hence the necessity of faith, not just as rational (or even moral) assent, but coming under the authority and obedience of the King who offers the grace (Himself) so to do.  To become Christ is the goal: who is Christ?  He is the theandros, the God-Man, one who in His Person as the Word indivisably and unconfusedly unites the divine and the human natures.  How are we in any way to attain to Him?  We are human persons, who through faith in baptism are filled with the Holy Spirit who shares His nature with us.  This is why the Spirit rested on Christ in His baptism; this is why our Lord did nothing without the Spirit in His sojourn; so that we might, as sons of God remade in the pattern of the Son of God, might be joined with the Spirit for our salvation.  To acquire the Spirit, then, is the goal of the Christian life.  To acquire the Spirit is to become Christ; to become Christ is to become divine, glorified, theotic.  Here is where the central importance of the Tabernacle cultus and liturgy, detailed in the middle of the Torah, becomes so key: the Law was never about becoming moral, it was about becoming a Temple: pure, undefiled, holy.  A place for God to dwell.  The whole point of the commandments of God is not to make Him happy, as if our Lord needs that emotion (the One God dwells in blessedness of which happiness is but a pale shadow), no, the point of the commands is to be prepared for God's residence within us.  But, just as the unclean always threatened the sanctity of the holy courts, so sin, death, Satan, and the disordered passions threaten Christ's Holy Temple, His Body, the Church.  This makes the Law not about ascent to God to curry favor, but about guarding sacred ground: ethics, then, is priestly work.

This is why St Silouan the Athonite's dictum that "My brother is my life" is so important: the priests are not doing an individual task, but the collective work of protection and sanctification of the Church.  I cannot do my work as a priestly guardian without reference to my brothers and sisters, nor without their constant aid and intercession so for strength and forgiveness of sins (which, to digress briefly, is why the communion of saints is so vital).  All are saved together, none are saved alone.

It is worth noting that in the cultic regulation there are two categories of defilement: sin and symbols of death.  Sin is, in Levitical terms, the conscious breaking of the Torah, which leads to death (whether as a consequence of the action, i.e. murder or the death penalty, or on the social level, i.e. adultery shredding families apart).  The symbols, though, are those things that are not inherently sinful, but still reference death, especially as inherited through Adam.  An example would be the regulations concerning childbearing (Lev. 12): after a woman gives birth, she must go through a period of ritual purification after the flow of blood dams.  Then she must, if she is to readmitted to the Temple, offer a "sin offering."  Why?  Has she sinned?  No, rather the term is better understood as "purification offering" (cf. Milgrom's commentary on Leviticus): since Eve, childbearing has been a sign of both hope ("your Seed shall crush the serpent's head...") and the consequences of death ("greatly will I increase your pains in childbearing").  A birth symbolizes the curse on Eve, but it is not insurmountable: there will come One who will save all women through being born by a virgin.  This second category, the symbols of death, are fully dealt with by the destruction of death through the Resurrection.  No longer do menstruations or child bearings make women unclean and disallowed from worship of the true God (one has only to reach in faith for the fringes of the Lord's garment to be fully healed!).  Sin, however, remains as a defiling agent; here is why St Paul, for example, speaks of various actions, attitudes, and lifestyles as defiling or polluting the people of God.

To return to the main point, we know that the power of sin is strong enough, compelling enough (why else would our first parents even countenance the serpent?), and pervasive enough that we cannot resist it.  Here is where our brothers and sisters come in, especially those who have had their passions healed and purified ("saints"): they can offer us forgiveness.  Now, some might say, only God can forgive sins!  True!  God is the only One who forgives sins and He deigns to do it through the intercessions, through the rebukes, through the gentle and stern corrections of others.  The root of forgiveness, which is often lost in our overly legal culture, is release: the Church, as the Body of the Christ, undoes the bonds that hold us tight.  And the Lord promises (and warns) that if we forgive the trespasses of our brother and sister, our own trespasses are forgiven as well.  We are set free as we set others free.  This is the acquisition of the Holy Spirit, the forgiveness of the world.  This is, not morals and ethics, but entering the Cross, actualizing baptism, becoming the body, sharing the One Loaf, salvation.

The Scriptures and the Traditions of Men

In Mark 7, Jesus is excoriating the Pharisees for their subversion of God's commandments.  He says, "For laying aside the commandments of God, you hold the tradition of men -- the washing of pitchers and cups, and many other such things you do...All too well you reject the commandment of God, that you may keep your own tradition...making the Word of God of no effect through your tradition which you have handed down.  And many such things you do" (vv. 8-13).

A couple of days ago, Pete Enns had a nice post about faulty "rhetorical strategies" used in evangelical circles to dismiss or avoid substantive arguments.  If you've read the post, I'm sure you've seen exactly what he is referring to.  I think that the Lord's words here are often mishandled to make them into such a rhetorical strategy: anything that happens in the Church that is not according to *my* reading of Scripture is a "tradition of men" and therefore automatically suspect.  Usually this is followed with an argument meant to show how *my* reading is the "plain sense" or "obvious" reading.  However, here lurk some dragons to which we must attend.

On a superficial level, we have the problems of translation: what is the proper reading of the Scriptures in our language?  Even literal translations can differ significantly from each other: which one represents the true Word of God?  (Is it possible that multiple translations or, even, multiple textual variants could all be inspired, however we understand that word?)

Going one level deeper: which text is the true text, the one that preserves the "original" reading (if, in fact, any such thing ever existed)?  Byzantine, Majority, Textus Receptus, modern eclectic texts?

Going yet further: which canon is the authoritative one?  Protestants suppose it is, basically, the canon as set by Luther and his successors.  But why privilege that one over the ones (yes, plural) that the Church had used since at least the fourth century (as evidenced by St Athanasius' 39th Festal Letter, more on that in a moment): the Catholic or the Orthodox or the Coptic?

Each of these decisions is, properly, a "tradition of men."  Each one comes not from the Scriptures themselves, but the minds and hearts of many people over a long period of time.  Who decided the Christian canon?  While I have read arguments that Sts Paul and Peter determined it in Rome in the first century, no one really gives any historical credence to that theory.  No, the Church, based on her experience of bringing people to Christlikeness (theosis) and her union with Holy Spirit, privileged some books over others.  Athanasius speaks about this (seemingly traditioned) process thusly:

"3. In proceeding to make mention of these things, I shall adopt, to commend my undertaking, the pattern of Luke the Evangelist, saying on my own account: ‘Forasmuch as some have taken in hand,’ to reduce into order for themselves the books termed apocryphal, and to mix them up with the divinely inspired Scripture, concerning which we have been fully persuaded, as they who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the Word, delivered to the fathers; it seemed good to me also, having been urged thereto by true brethren, and having learned from the beginning, to set before you the books included in the Canon, and handed down, and accredited as Divine; to the end that any one who has fallen into error may condemn those who have led him astray; and that he who has continued steadfast in purity may again rejoice, having these things brought to his remembrance."

He is pastorally listing out those books which are "handed down" (that is, traditioned) and "accredited as Divine" (that is, inspired).  These he will set against the "hidden" or "apocryphal" books.  Care must be taken here, as "apocrypha" means something very different today.

"4. There are, then, of the Old Testament, twenty-two books in number; for, as I have heard, it is handed down that this is the number of the letters among the Hebrews; their respective order and names being as follows. The first is Genesis, then Exodus, next Leviticus, after that Numbers, and then Deuteronomy. Following these there is Joshua, the son of Nun, then Judges, then Ruth. And again, after these four books of Kings, the first and second being reckoned as one book, and so likewise the third and fourth as one book. And again, the first and second of the Chronicles are reckoned as one book. Again Ezra, the first and second are similarly one book. After these there is the book of Psalms, then the Proverbs, next Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Songs. Job follows, then the Prophets, the twelve being reckoned as one book. Then Isaiah, one book, then Jeremiah with Baruch, Lamentations, and the epistle, one book; afterwards, Ezekiel and Daniel, each one book. Thus far constitutes the Old Testament."

Fairly standard definition of the OT canon, at least from our historical vantage point, save for some difference in the order and composition of the Prophets (you thought Malachi was the last book of the OT, didn't you?).  Baruch does make an appearance here, which already raises the question of why he is absent in modern Protestant bibles.  We might argue that St Athanasius isn't the authority on biblical canonicity, but then again, who is?  Who has the authority to set the canonical limits?  If the battle is between the Reformers and Athanasius, I'm going to have to side with the Alexandrian.

"5. Again it is not tedious to speak of the [books] of the New Testament. These are, the four Gospels, according to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Afterwards, the Acts of the Apostles and Epistles (called Catholic), seven, viz. of James, one; of Peter, two; of John, three; after these, one of Jude. In addition, there are fourteen Epistles of Paul, written in this order. The first, to the Romans; then two to the Corinthians; after these, to the Galatians; next, to the Ephesians; then to the Philippians; then to the Colossians; after these, two to the Thessalonians, and that to the Hebrews; and again, two to Timothy; one to Titus; and lastly, that to Philemon. And besides, the Revelation of John."

The NT in all her glory, laid out for us.  But why, if the Scriptures are self-evidently the Scriptures (an assumption behind the problem I'm writing about), do we need to have clarity about which ones are in and which are out?  Because it isn't self-evident.  The Scriptures are the book(s) of the Church, collected, preserved, and handed down from one generation to another.  There is no divine "table of contents" in the front: rather, these books are part of the larger Tradition of the Church.  Hence, the Church (whatever that exactly is), as historical community filled with the Spirit of God, decides which books are truly "theopneustos" or "inspired" (2 Tim. 3:16).  What about all those others books, which we call apocryphal?

"7. But for greater exactness I add this also, writing of necessity; that there are other books besides these not indeed included in the Canon, but appointed by the Fathers to be read by those who newly join us, and who wish for instruction in the word of godliness. The Wisdom of Solomon, and the Wisdom of Sirach, and Esther, and Judith, and Tobit, and that which is called the Teaching of the Apostles, and the Shepherd. But the former, my brethren, are included in the Canon, the latter being [merely] read; nor is there in any place a mention of apocryphal writings."

These books that we now call "apocryphal" Athanasius did not.  They weren't quite Canon -- that is, the were not for the public services of the Liturgy -- but they were to be read, particularly by catechumens.  Preliminary reading, in other words.

The canon of Scripture, which books are in and which are out for the purpose of "doctrine, reproof, correction, instruction in righteousness" (2 Tim. 3:16 again), was established by the "pillar and ground of the Truth, the Church of the living God" (1 Tim. 3:15) through the wisdom bestowed on Her by the Holy Spirit.

All this to say that the argument that some interpretations are "traditions of men" instead of the "plain reading" of the Scriptures are fraught with complexity, to say the least.  The Scriptures do not exist in a vacuum and should not be treated that way.  There are more part of interpretation, especially the indwelling of the Spirit through holiness of life, that need to be taken into account.  The Lord Jesus Christ can rightly use this argument, as He is the Truth that the Scriptures witness to.

There is no reading, for us, outside of some tradition.  The question for us is, which tradition is the tradition of God?  Certainly, we must be on the lookout for those who would sneak in things that lead us away from Christlikeness (Athanasius makes a point of this in some of the portions I didn't quote; St Paul does as well in Colossians); but, unless we possess the Spirit (or better, the Spirit possesses us) we must be humble as to what the "plain reading" of the Scriptures are and, to take it a step further, what Church practices really are "commandments of God" versus the "tradition of men."