"Pilate therefore said to him: Art thou a king then? Jesus answered: Thou sayest that I am a king. For this was I born, and for this came I into the world; that I should give testimony to the truth. Every one that is of the truth, heareth my voice. Pilate saith to him: What is truth?"
--John 18: 37-8
How do Christians dare to make claims about truth, especially truth that we understand to be both absolute and of ultimate importance? In light Jesus Christ's words to Pilate, how do Christians dare shrink back from declaring the absolute truth? Epistemology, defined in the Oxford English Dictionary, is "the science of the method and ground of knowledge." When we attempt to base our lives on that which we call "true," how do we decide what that truth is? Pilate's retort to Jesus certainly re-echoes in the sophistry of our day! We live in a culture that more and more distrusts claims to truth while at the same time demanding that we be honest and act with integrity; only a few minutes of deliberation reveals the terrible dilemma created by this distrust and these demands. Even those who consider themselves to be staunch believers in a particular religious viewpoint find it difficult to declare publicly: "I believe what I believe because I understand it to be absolutely true." We will read things this semester that address this problem. We will not always be comforted by what we find, but we will be challenged. For some, the content of the course will be compelling and call for some decisions; for others, the content will be exhausting. What you will finally decide is your business; it is my business to help each one understand the substance and weight of that decision about truth as fully as possible. This course is not Sunday School.
In Theology 1 we studied Dante's Divine Comedy and spent much time learning classical doctrine. If you have completed that course, everything we do in this semester will build on that foundation. If this is your first course, you will find that what we do this semester serves as a foundation for what you will do in Theology 1. The courses flow logically in either sequence.
Expect to read carefully every day. There is no substitute for this. If you find yourself saying "This is boring," I offer you this thought. Some years ago a fellow student in a class I was taking complained that it was boring. The teacher responded very sharply, "The boredom is not in the material, it is in you." Indeed, that was the case. Deep reading of Holy Scripture and theological material can be hard work. This material cannot be glanced over; it must be carefully and deliberately read. Things that really matter, especially when they concern the "ultimate things" that we consider in Theology, cannot be reduced to cliche' or sound byte. Nothing that we do in this class will reduce to that, as much as you may feel a need for it to be that way.
The semester will begin with a look at the principles of biblical interpretation (hermeneutics) of the New Testament writers and the early Church Fathers.
These offer us a look at how the first Christians understood God's actions in history; it will also give us basic insights into the dynamics of how Christians relate to the world around them as people who are living in the world but not of it.
Understanding the relationship between Scripture and prayer in the ebb and flow of human history, the Apostolic Church and the Church Fathers press us to challenge some the assumptions that we make about late 20th and early 21st century concepts of the human person. We must ask this question: Can human beings be reduced to biological, psychological and sociological categories? Many reject the notion that there is a spiritual dimension to the human reality that is absolute and ultimate. In adhering strictly to empirical scientific categories in attempting to understand the nature of the human person, these views treat the realm of spirituality as a category of psychological or sociological construction. In such views, it's unthinkable that an innate spiritual reality exists, through which an invisible God can communicate in an absolute, clear and knowable way to human beings.
A colleague of mine years ago, who was at that time a committed atheist, once said to me, "Well, Bert, the universe is really just a big haunted house to you." I answered, "Yes, I suppose it is! It's a very exciting place, and it keeps breaking into the little world we call reality."
The first Christians understood the wisdom tradition and the prophetic traditions as anticipatory of Jesus Christ. God reveals himself to us, and in so doing God imparts to us the genuine identity that makes us truly human. Perhaps the thesis of this course is something like this: to be truly human, we must be infused with the life of God, what theChurch Fathers called theosis [1] (click the link to read a sermon about St. Gregory Palamas; the last 3 paragraphs offer an excellent discussion), the action of the Holy Spirit working in our lives to make us participants in the divine nature (see I Peter 1: 3-4). This idea is embedded in the Old Testament writings and brought to full light in the New Testament. We will apply our hermeneutical principles to The Gospel according to St. Luke and The Acts of the Apostles. These are St. Luke's Volume 1 and Volume 2; Volume 1, his Gospel, concerns the identity and work of Jesus Christ; Volume 2, The Acts of the Apostles, concerns the identity and work of Christ's body known as the Church. In both volumes, the Holy Spirit emerges as the active agent of revelation. From the Annunciation and birth narratives of John the Baptist and Jesus in the first two chapters of Luke to the final scene of Acts 28 in which St. Paul speaks to the Jewish elders of Rome, the Holy Spirit confronts the characters in the narrative (and us as readers) to "see" and "hear" and "receive" what God is doing. This theme of acceptance vs. rejection is a St. Luke's unifying constant. So we must come back to the question of epistemology: is what we see and hear with the eyes and ears of faith true? If God has entered the realm of our senses, making himself known and acting in the empirical world in ways we can hear, see, touch and handle (see I John 1: 1-5), then we must ask ourselves just what we have fabricated for ourselves that would prevent us from calling it true. In the end, the epistemological question forces us to ask whether God shows us reality. If we answer "No," we must then face the chaos of replacing God's revelation of himself with our various constructions of reality. Such is the challenge we face in the rubble of late 20th century postmodernism. The Christian of the 21st century must either recover that awareness of standing at the threshold of God's ongoing purpose or retreat into the collapsed pillars and broken foundations of the recent past. Perhaps the ancient voices will prove to be the permanent truths we have been yearning to hear, offering us the vision we have been hoping to see.
Such matters, once raised, have implications: the challenge of discipleship. Let us for the moment agree that there are some people who hear the call of Christ and wish to follow. For help in this we will turn to the Benedictine Rule, a practical guide to Christian life that was formed in the midst of terrifying cultural and economic breakdown as the Roman Empire crumbled in the 5th Century. We will also consider what Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German Lutheran minister who wrote The Cost of Discipleship in the midst of the Nazi rise to power and was murdered by the Gestapo in 1945, has to say about genuinely following Jesus Christ.
Finally we will read The Apocalypse, known to us as Revelation, the last book of the Bible. At this point the whole of our reading will come into focus. My goal is that whatever decision you make will be based on a clear perception of what is at stake for yourself and everyone you love.
"And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." --John 8: 32
Bert Harrell
July 2010
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1] St. Gregory Palamas calls us back to the earliest Fathers, who taught, in simplicity, that Christ became man, so that men might become gods. By this, we do not mean the New Age nonsense of humans becoming God and usurping His power and Being, since God transcends all that we can ever be; rather, we mean that, by the ascetic struggle of transforming ourselves, becoming a peculiar people apart from the world, we take on the traits of Christ and become, as Scripture tells us, "partakers of the Divine nature," or, to translate the Greek original into idiomatic English, "participants in the Divine nature." God remains what He is, when we are united to Him, but we become what we are not, yet what we were created to be: Jesus Christs within Jesus Christ, as St. Maximos the Confessor writes, sons of gods within the Son of God. And again, this we accomplish by humility, the death of the ego, fasting, taking on Christian names, living a life centered on the Eucharist, and dedicated to purity and the Love of God. This is not something that we claim, like deluded New Agers, but is something which we accomplish and achieve by ascetic struggle in synergy with the Grace of God. --Archbishop Chrysostomos of Etna
Theology 2
Holy Scripture and the Christian Vision of Reality