Saturday, 4/12/14

The veneration of saints, the honoring of icons and relics, the place held by the Mother of God are deeply offensive to modern democracy. The complaints heard by those who reject such things are quite telling. It is rarely the classical protest of true iconoclasts that are heard. Rather, it is the modern declaration, “I don’t need anyone between myself and God.” It is the universal access to God, without interference, without mediation, without hierarchy, without sacrament, ultimately without any need for others that is offended by the hierarchical shape of classical Christianity.

A spiritual life without canon, without custom, without tradition, without rules, is the ultimate democratic freedom. But it unleashes the tyranny of the individual imagination. For with no mediating tradition, the modern believer is subject only to his own whim. The effect is to have no Lord but the God of his own imagination. Even his appeal to Scripture is without effect – for it is his own interpretation that has mastery over the word of God. If we will have no hierarchy, we will not have Christ as Lord. We cannot invent our own model of the universe and demand that God conform.

It is a great spiritual accomplishment to not be “conformed to this world.” The ideas and assumptions of modern consumer democracies permeate almost every aspect of our culture. They become an unavoidable part of our inner landscape. Only by examining such assumptions in the light of the larger Christian tradition can we hope to remain faithful to Christ in the truth. Those who insist on the absence of spiritual authority, or demand that nothing mediate grace will discover that their lives serve the most cruel master – the spirit of the age.

(Fr. Stephen Freeman, The Sins of Democracy)

Re-read that, because although I say it differently, I can’t say it better.

So deep-seated is the democratic bias that most readers will, despite this trenchant indictment, locate “the problem” within the “hierarchical shape of classical Christianity.”

But a few readers may have begun to catch a glimmer that all is not well with individualism, that the spirit of the age is insidious, and that most American religion feeds rather than fights The Beast. For individualist religion to proclaim the Lordship of Jesus is always followed, tacitly, with “And what a congenial and accommodating Lord He is! So very like me in all his preferences!”

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When I write such finger-pointing things, three fingers point back at me, as I lived with an accommodating “Lord” for a very long time.

My own interpretation had mastery over the word of God.

I overlooked the end of the Gospel of John, Chapter 6 with the best of them.
I said, or refrained from saying, “for Thine is the Kingdom …” at the end of the Lord’s prayer depending how we were called to say it: if it was “Let us say in the words our Lord taught us,” I declined because my impression of the “original text” was that the words weren’t there; if it was a summons to say “The Lord’s Prayer,” I would since “Lord’s Prayer” was a term of art that included that closing.
I had no difficulty rationalizing conscientious objection from, say, the Epistle of James, Chapter 4 (and I’m still not sure I was wrong in seeking conscientious objector status, but that’s a long story and a long argument, with many twists and turns).
etc., including some etcetera that would be unedifying to tell.

I may be a poor example of an Orthodox Christian, but I’d not go back for anything.

I have found one “downside,” though, of becoming Orthodox.

The time I spent memorizing the books of the Bible and doing “sword drills,” is now substantially useless when it comes to the Old Testament, because the Septuagint on which we base our Old Testament is complete (i.e., we have all the original books, many of which Protestantism has abandoned), some book names differ (e.g., there’s no I Samuel & II Samuel, I Kings and II Kings, but I, II, III & IV Kingdoms instead; Ezra is split), and the book order changes after Ezra. I must use the index of my Bible still for most Old Testament readings.

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“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Who vandalized the Old Testament?!

I read a very good devotional Monday on Wisdom of Solomon 5:15 – 6:3. I wanted to share it, together with an excerpt from this book of the Bible.

But I couldn’t find a hypertext English version online, and therein lies a tale.

The content of the Christian biblical canon is a fairly vexed topic, which is one reason why lurid fantasies like Dan Brown’s capture people’s attention. I was going to try give you a thumbnail Orthodox version, and try not to load it up with hyperlinks. But a version that was simultaneously truthful and concise eluded me. So here goes a pretty defective version.

When the New Testament was being written, there was no New Testament yet. (Gee! Thanks, Mr. Obvious!) New Testament references to Scripture generally are almost invariably to the Old Testament, the exception that come to mind being II Peter 3:15-16, where the Apostle Peter refers to unidentified writings of the Apostle Paul implicitly as “scriptures.”

One of the most notable New Testament scriptures that, in referring to “scripture,” refers to the Old Testament is that favorite sola scriptura prooftext, II Timothy 3:14-17. Read in the Protestant way, but in historic context, it teaches not that the Christian Bible is all you need to be “perfect,” but that the Old Testament is all you need.

But I digress. What was the Old Testament? That had not then been defined authoritatively. Why should it have been? In “New Testament times,” there had never come any point when Jews said “okay, scripture’s all done now; we’re just waiting for Messiah.”

Many Jews of the diaspora were Greek speakers first, Hebrew second if at all. There was, consequently, in those “New Testament times,” a Greek translation and collection of Hebrew writings called the Septuagint. It included books that remain in Roman Catholic and Orthodox Bibles but are omitted from Protestant Bibles – one of which is Wisdom of Solomon, whence my difficulty finding an online hypertext version.

The New Testament repeatedly (340 times, by one source) quotes the Septuagint and much less often (33 times by that same source) quoted Hebrew texts. Here’s a table of the references, using the Roman Catholic numbering and divisions of books.

Centuries into the Christian era, the Jews formally closed their canon. They chose a 39-book “Masoretic” canon rather than the canon of Septuagint. There’s some Christian suspicion that they did so because some of the prophesies most clearly fulfilled by Christ are in books they omitted.

So why do more mainstream Protestants omit books with pointed Messianic prophesies? I honestly am having difficulty finding an argument that doesn’t sound like I’m setting up a straw man. I probably could do better with time, but the most sympathetic and credible account I’ve found is from the Orthodox Wiki:

The differences [of the Orthodox Old Testament canon] with the Protestant canon are based on the 16th century misunderstanding of Martin Luther. When he was translating the Old Testament into German, he mistakenly believed that the oldest source for the Old Testament would be in Hebrew, so he found and used the so-called Masoretic Text (MT), a 9th century Jewish canon compiled largely in reaction to Christian claims that the Old Testament Scriptures belonged to the Church.

I’m frankly making a judgment call here about the relative credibility of “scholars.” I discount sectarian internet cranks like Jim Searcy who, in claiming that Jesus and the New Testament writers never quoted the Septuagint, sound as if they could as well be arguing that Jesus never drank wine, or that “leaven” in the New Testament is always a bad thing. (Large red text on a turquoise background is a dead give-away, isn’t it?) They are not mainstream Protestants, but some kind of particularly deluded Fundamentalists.

I’m not likely to welcome comments from King James Only, New Testament Don’t Quote No Stinkin’ Septuagint types, but I’d welcome some Protestant accounts, especially those that aren’t circular (e.g, we reject from the canon those books that teach error and only retain those books that teach the truth, as we understand the truth, based on the correct Bible canon), to explain my tendentious question: Why do you prefer, to the Bible Jesus and the New Testament writers apparently used, a Hebrew canon that was not settled until centuries into the Christian era? Just because it’s in Hebrew?

Other Sources:

Orthodox Wiki on the canon of Holy Scripture generally.
Orthodox Wiki on the Old Testament.
Orthodox Wiki on the Septuagint and how other Christian canons differ.

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“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.