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Sometimes you take a job; sometimes the job takes you.
Please give my Amazon review a helpful vote -
This is a Tor.com short story, which usually means that it is an incomplete prequel for some novel by the author.
Not this one, though. In this one, we get a complete origin story that emerges as a bit of a surprise when our narrator, Chessup, takes a crappy day labor job cleaning up a river in Colorado with o Sometimes you take a job; sometimes the job takes you.
Please give my Amazon review a helpful vote -
This is a Tor.com short story, which usually means that it is an incomplete prequel for some novel by the author.
Not this one, though. In this one, we get a complete origin story that emerges as a bit of a surprise when our narrator, Chessup, takes a crappy day labor job cleaning up a river in Colorado with other losers in the rat race, discovers some skeletons in the roots of an uprooted tree, and while deciding how to hock the bones, discovers something far darker.
This was a fast-moving, gripping story that was worth its Tor.com price and the half hour spent reading it. ...more
Please give my Amazon review a helpful vote -
This is a Tor.com short story, which usually means that it is an incomplete prequel for some novel by the author.
Not this one, though. In this one, we get a complete origin story that emerges as a bit of a surprise when our narrator, Chessup, takes a crappy day labor job cleaning up a river in Colorado with o Sometimes you take a job; sometimes the job takes you.
Please give my Amazon review a helpful vote -
This is a Tor.com short story, which usually means that it is an incomplete prequel for some novel by the author.
Not this one, though. In this one, we get a complete origin story that emerges as a bit of a surprise when our narrator, Chessup, takes a crappy day labor job cleaning up a river in Colorado with other losers in the rat race, discovers some skeletons in the roots of an uprooted tree, and while deciding how to hock the bones, discovers something far darker.
This was a fast-moving, gripping story that was worth its Tor.com price and the half hour spent reading it. ...more
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Peter’s last review of the year
it was amazing
Interpreting Scripture with the Great Tradition: Recovering the Genius of Premodern Exegesis
For nineteen centuries, Christians have understood that the prophet Isaiah spoke about Christ in his description of the “suffering servant.� (Isaiah 53.)[1] As a newly installed pastor, Craig Carter wanted to preach a Good Friday sermon based on Isaiah 53. The problem for him was that he had been educated according to the standards obtaining in a lot of mo Interpreting Scripture with the Great Tradition: Recovering the Genius of Premodern Exegesis
For nineteen centuries, Christians have understood that the prophet Isaiah spoke about Christ in his description of the “suffering servant.� (Isaiah 53.)[1] As a newly installed pastor, Craig Carter wanted to preach a Good Friday sermon based on Isaiah 53. The problem for him was that he had been educated according to the standards obtaining in a lot of modern seminaries:
But, alas, I was too educated to be able to preach this message with a clear conscience! In the seminary studies I had just completed, I had been taught the historical method of interpreting the Bible. I had a liberal-leaning professor who was always going on about “the assured results of higher criticism,� and also some more conservative ones who had advocated a grammatical-historical approach. As far as I could see, both liberal and conservative scholars were united in stressing that the text has only a single meaning: what the original author meant to convey to the original readers in the original situation. This is why the seminary had taught me Hebrew, Greek, ancient history, and critical methods like form criticism and source criticism: so that as a pastor I would be equipped to do what laypeople for the most part could not do� namely, recover the historical meaning of the biblical text.
Carter, Craig A.. Interpreting Scripture with the Great Tradition (pp. 3-4). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
This conundrum started Dr. Carter on the path that eventually led to this book.
The theme of modern biblical scholarship is to read the Bible like any other book. A modern trope is that the Bible is not a book, but a library of books. Under the modern approach, the focus is to look for the author’s intent in a given text. This involves determining the context of the author and the concerns of his readership, and excluding doubtful or speculative influences. By their nature, supernatural influences are doubtful and speculative.[2] Thus, the text must be interpreted as the human author is inferred to have intended. Since the human author of Isaiah 53 � one of four possible authors and several editors, based on a Critical Historical examination of the text[3] � could not have humanly known about Christ, the author could not have intended the text to refer to Christ. Further, since we know (or assume) that human authors always intend a single meaning, we need only determine what was most likely intended by the human author of Isaiah, which would have been something involving his day and time and not some fanciful event in the future.
QED � Isaiah 53 is not about Christ.
Of course, a problem with this approach is that the canonical New Testament cites Isaiah 53 as a prophecy of Christ. In an exercise of an academic magisterium, the historical-critical approach is to declare the New Testament authors to have been mistaken.
In other words, modern seminaries train pastors in “methodological naturalism,� which isolates the Bible from such supernatural presuppositions as “inspiration.”[4]
“Methodological naturalism� assumes a metaphysical position, to wit, that there is nothing supernatural relevant to the subject under examination. Most modern people reflexively occupy a position of “methodological naturalism�; we don’t think Zeus when we hear thunder anymore. As a consequence, when modern people look at things from a position of methodological naturalism, they think that they are free from metaphysics, when, in fact, they are in the grips of a particular kind of metaphysics, one they don’t recognize.[5] Dr. Clark explains:
Everyone who has theological opinions has metaphysical doctrines that guide the way that one interprets reality and the way that one understands Christian teaching. Our metaphysical beliefs inevitably shape our conception of the meaning of Scripture. They form a kind of grid on which we superimpose our theology; they are a kind of filter for how we understand what the Bible is saying. Upon first hearing this kind of talk, one common reaction is to be scandalized and to vow never to let it happen to us. We might think that the solution is to free our biblical interpretation from all metaphysical influences� as if that were somehow possible. In reality that is not possible; it is part of the human condition to read from within a set of presuppositions. It is not possible to advance deeply into the study of any subject without first adopting certain basic assumptions that form the basis of that subject and not rethinking them in every moment. There is nothing evil or wrong with this; it is simply a matter of the natural limitations of human creatures, and it is vanity to object to it. It is not a matter of being naive about what John Webster rightly called “the undeniably corrosive effects of certain traditions of metaphysics,� 1 but, rather, it is a matter of recognizing the need to articulate a fully Christian description of ontology that results from the contemplation of special revelation in full awareness of philosophical questions. The goal is not to rid ourselves of all metaphysical presuppositions, but rather to allow our metaphysical presuppositions to be reformed by Scripture. As Matthew Levering shows, Thomas Aquinas is exemplary in the tradition for doing this. Levering writes, “Aquinas deploys metaphysical (theocentric) analysis to raise or convert the mind to the self-revealing God who is triune spiritual substance and uncaused cause of all things.�
Carter, Craig A.. Interpreting Scripture with the Great Tradition (p. 62). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
The authors of the Bible were not methodological naturalists. They were overtly wedded to a supernatural worldview. The authors of the New Testament who interpreted Isaiah as referring to Jesus, or who found symbols and spiritual meaning in the Old Testament to explain the New Testament, believed that God inspired the authors and that God’s intent in such inspiration was as important as the quotidian concerns of the human author in Jewish politics circa 600 BC.
So, what right do modern scholars have to distort the meaning and understanding of these authors by imposing a foreign ideology on their writings?
Well, not much of a right, it would seem. Good history suggests that the best way to get a better grip on the meaning of a text is to situate oneself in the metaphysical/intellectual world of the author. Dr. Clark has the insight that the metaphysics that is best suited for such application is Christian Platonism. He explains:
The theological metaphysics of the Great Tradition can be described as Christian Platonism. Andrew Louth quotes Endre von Ivánka: “The phenomenon which characterizes the whole of the first millennium of Christian theological thought . . . is the use of Platonism as the form for [its] philosophical expression and the framework of the world-picture in terms of which the proclamation of revealed truths was made� in other words, Christian Platonism.� 7 As Louth goes on to explain, both Platonism and Christianity teach that we have a spiritual nature that can participate in the “realm of eternal truth, the realm of the divine.� 8 But whereas Platonism sees human nature as continuous with divine being and as capable of ascending to the realm of the divine, Christianity views man as a creature created out of nothing. Therefore, in Christianity there exists an ontological gulf that can be overcome only by God descending in Christ to save us. Yet, as Louth points out, we have been made in God’s image and have the possibility of communion with God, even though this possibility is realized only in Jesus Christ. What is open to us in Platonism by nature is only open to us in Christianity by grace.
Carter, Craig A.. Interpreting Scripture with the Great Tradition (p. 66). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Both Judaism and Christianity developed in a matrix of Platonism. It is not for nothing that Christ is described as the Logos in the Gospel of John. Peter Schafer and Daniel Boyarin argue that Judaism recognized a Binitarian strand in Daniel, where God seems to have been two persons � the Ancient of Days and the “one like a Son of Man� � who were still one person. This tendency seems to have become stronger in the centuries before Christ in the Books of Wisdom and Ecclesiasticus. Clark points out the Platonic influence on St. Augustine, who certainly influenced the direction of Christianity. The Cappadocian Fathers read Aristotle’s The Categories. It seems that Platonism was pre-adapted for Christianity. Carter explains:
By now it should be clear why Christians like Augustine felt an affinity with Platonism that they did not feel with atheism, atomism, materialism, skepticism, and other forms of ancient thought. David is convinced that the heavens declare the glory of their Creator (Ps. 19), Genesis 1: 3� 25 portrays the heavens and the earth as spoken into being by the divine Word, and the Psalms see creation as set in order by the rationality of the divine wisdom (e.g., Ps. 104). The doctrine of creation certainly creates a reasonable expectation of teleology and order in nature that can be investigated by human reason. Natural theology, natural law, and natural science thus all have a basis in reality. Platonism and Christianity together form a unified foundation for the development of empirical science on a foundation of mathematics. To oppose Christian Platonism, therefore, is to oppose philosophy itself and, in so doing, to set oneself in opposition to reason, the moral law, and natural science.
Carter, Craig A.. Interpreting Scripture with the Great Tradition (p. 82). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Carter further explains:
Christianity could thus be described as “sacramental-historical� in nature. It is sacramental because it holds to the reality of universals, which Thomas Aquinas understood to be ideas in the mind of God. Since individual created things providentially participate in universals and thus are upheld in being by Christ (Col. 1: 15� 17), we know God sacramentally. Our being is upheld in existence by divine being, and we can know God as the source of our being. There is a vertical dimension of existence because this world that is accessible to our empirical senses is not the sum total of reality. Rather, this world participates in a reality greater than itself and is only a shadow of this greater reality. As far as this goes, the “Platonism� side of the label “Christian Platonism� is being stressed. But what makes Christian Platonism uniquely “Christian� is a cluster of doctrines centered on creation and the incarnation. God is the transcendent, self-existent Lord who brought the cosmos into existence ex nihilo as an act of his will. And God has entered into history in the person of Jesus Christ in order to redeem the fallen creation and redeem it to his glory. The church is the community of the saved, who form the nucleus of the new humanity that God is fashioning to populate the new heavens and new earth that he intends to bring into being at the end of history through the return of Christ, the resurrection of the dead, the last judgment, and the transformation of all things according to the pattern known to God from eternity and revealed in Christ. Christianity is thus also a matter of horizontal relationships as well as vertical ones.
Carter, Craig A.. Interpreting Scripture with the Great Tradition (pp. 83-84). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Seems reasonable.
So, how did we get to a point where Christian scholars of a Christian book are adopting an atheist metaphysics?
In a phrase: Prussian Academic Liberalism.[6] Clark offers a fascinating history of the development of Bible Studies as a discipline in the 19th Century. A series of scholars influenced by the Deism of the Enlightenment began to reflexively feel that God would not be involved in miracles. God set up the world and left it to run on its own. The Christian position is to the contrary:
Once again, the Enlightenment has created a pseudo-problem that is not a problem in the Great Tradition and exists only when the Christian Platonism of the Great Tradition is arbitrarily rejected. Miracles are the unusual, as opposed to the usual, manner of God’s action, but they are not in essence different from the action of God that is going on at every moment of history. God’s action is God’s action, whether it is providential or miraculous is a secondary point. It is only from our human perspective that an unusual action is surprising.
Carter, Craig A.. Interpreting Scripture with the Great Tradition (p. 121). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.[7]
Carter asks:
The rejection of Christian Platonism makes the mystery seem suspiciously like a contradiction instead of a paradox. But, we might wonder, why reject Christian Platonism in the first place? In fact, a Christian has no reason to do so, and the felt need of atheists to distance God from the world because they misunderstand the nature of God and mistakenly consider him a threat to their freedom does not constitute a valid reason.
Carter, Craig A.. Interpreting Scripture with the Great Tradition (p. 121). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
It is here that something very weird happens when conservative Christians get swept up in naturalism.[8] It is as if they are embarrassed about appealing to miracles lest they seem backward. [9]Clark writes:
Strauss, however, does have one valid point, and it is an important one. He makes clear that conservative modernists who oppose naturalism by searching for the historical core truths in the narrative are fighting a losing battle. He writes, “So true it is that supernaturalism clings with childlike fondness to the empty husk of historical semblance, though void of divine significance, and estimates it higher than the most valuable kernel divested of its variegated covering.� 69 The temptation to abandon divine authorial intent and spiritual meaning and to accept the challenge to defend the historicity of the text as alone the source of meaning was very strong for those conservatives who conceded the mechanistic view of the universe that drives modernity. It would have been better for theological conservatives to be much more conservative than they were by never embracing modern, mechanistic metaphysics in the first place. The lesson we learn from this is that the mechanistic metaphysics must be resisted lest pseudoproblems be created and require solutions that dissolve the orthodox doctrine of God into heresy. Unfortunately, however, there is a conservative wing of the liberal project that strives to adapt Christianity to modern metaphysics at the lowest cost possible by arguing for as large a kernel of historical fact at the heart of the myth and legend surrounding it as possible. Strauss is right to discern this as a losing proposition, and so should we.
Carter, Craig A.. Interpreting Scripture with the Great Tradition (pp. 121-122). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
The end result of bad metaphysics is bad theology. Clark counsels:
The liberal project needs to be abandoned because it is a dead end. Modern historical-critical study of the Bible is based on a false conception of created reality, a false conception of history, and a false conception of the Bible. The study of the Bible is not enhanced by historical criticism; it is only eroded and demeaned. Of course there is much that is good in the modern, scholarly study of the Bible, because much of it is just a continuation of the kind of scholarship that existed prior to modernity. But, as a general rule, what was good in the Enlightenment was not new, and what was new was not good. The Enlightenment did not invent textual criticism; Origen did that. The Enlightenment did not invent history; Augustine wrote a great philosophy of history. The Enlightenment did not invent reason; Thomas Aquinas wrote possibly the most rationally beautiful work in history.
Carter, Craig A.. Interpreting Scripture with the Great Tradition (p. 128). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
The result of the 19th-century Liberal Prussian hermeneutics was to orient Bible Scholars away from the tools that had previously been used by Church Fathers to explore and explain the Bible. These tools included “prosopological exegesis � where text was read as if it involved a dialogue between the persons of God, typology, analogy, and other forms of exegesis. The common root of these approaches was the understanding that Jesus Christ was the subject of all scriptural texts. Christ was found in the Old Testament and the New Testament. The Bible is and is not a library of books. It is in that it reflects different genres and different human authors, but the books of this library all share a divine co-author. So the various books in this library can be read as being really in conversation with each other.
Carter affirms that the literal sense controls the spiritual sense. What this means, I think, is that the literal sense of the Bible tout court is about Jesus. Carter writes:
This Christ is not merely the man Jesus; as the eternal Son of the Father, he is the Word by whom and through whom the cosmos came into being. This Christ interrelates the two Testaments in himself; therefore, figurative readings always point to him. This is why Paul can say that Christ was the rock from which the Israelites drank spiritually in the wilderness (1 Cor. 10: 4). For Augustine, what we need to grasp is that the manna, for example, was not just a picture or symbol of a future reality that would someday come into existence, that is, Christ as the bread of life. For Augustine, Christ was already sacramentally present in the manna, just as he was in the rock. Here we see his Christian Platonism put to good use in the service of a christological reading of the Old Testament that recognizes that Christ was ontologically real and sacramentally present before his incarnation, just as he is in the current age after his incarnation. The upshot of all this is that Christ is literally present in the Old Testament, so the texts that speak of him do so in a literal sense. The distinction between the literal and the spiritual senses that once seemed so significant to the young Augustine eventually recedes into the background as the gap between the two senses is closed by what Jason Byassee terms his “christological literalism.�
Carter, Craig A.. Interpreting Scripture with the Great Tradition (p. 175). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
So, is Isaiah “literally� about Jesus?
...more
For nineteen centuries, Christians have understood that the prophet Isaiah spoke about Christ in his description of the “suffering servant.� (Isaiah 53.)[1] As a newly installed pastor, Craig Carter wanted to preach a Good Friday sermon based on Isaiah 53. The problem for him was that he had been educated according to the standards obtaining in a lot of mo Interpreting Scripture with the Great Tradition: Recovering the Genius of Premodern Exegesis
For nineteen centuries, Christians have understood that the prophet Isaiah spoke about Christ in his description of the “suffering servant.� (Isaiah 53.)[1] As a newly installed pastor, Craig Carter wanted to preach a Good Friday sermon based on Isaiah 53. The problem for him was that he had been educated according to the standards obtaining in a lot of modern seminaries:
But, alas, I was too educated to be able to preach this message with a clear conscience! In the seminary studies I had just completed, I had been taught the historical method of interpreting the Bible. I had a liberal-leaning professor who was always going on about “the assured results of higher criticism,� and also some more conservative ones who had advocated a grammatical-historical approach. As far as I could see, both liberal and conservative scholars were united in stressing that the text has only a single meaning: what the original author meant to convey to the original readers in the original situation. This is why the seminary had taught me Hebrew, Greek, ancient history, and critical methods like form criticism and source criticism: so that as a pastor I would be equipped to do what laypeople for the most part could not do� namely, recover the historical meaning of the biblical text.
Carter, Craig A.. Interpreting Scripture with the Great Tradition (pp. 3-4). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
This conundrum started Dr. Carter on the path that eventually led to this book.
The theme of modern biblical scholarship is to read the Bible like any other book. A modern trope is that the Bible is not a book, but a library of books. Under the modern approach, the focus is to look for the author’s intent in a given text. This involves determining the context of the author and the concerns of his readership, and excluding doubtful or speculative influences. By their nature, supernatural influences are doubtful and speculative.[2] Thus, the text must be interpreted as the human author is inferred to have intended. Since the human author of Isaiah 53 � one of four possible authors and several editors, based on a Critical Historical examination of the text[3] � could not have humanly known about Christ, the author could not have intended the text to refer to Christ. Further, since we know (or assume) that human authors always intend a single meaning, we need only determine what was most likely intended by the human author of Isaiah, which would have been something involving his day and time and not some fanciful event in the future.
QED � Isaiah 53 is not about Christ.
Of course, a problem with this approach is that the canonical New Testament cites Isaiah 53 as a prophecy of Christ. In an exercise of an academic magisterium, the historical-critical approach is to declare the New Testament authors to have been mistaken.
In other words, modern seminaries train pastors in “methodological naturalism,� which isolates the Bible from such supernatural presuppositions as “inspiration.”[4]
“Methodological naturalism� assumes a metaphysical position, to wit, that there is nothing supernatural relevant to the subject under examination. Most modern people reflexively occupy a position of “methodological naturalism�; we don’t think Zeus when we hear thunder anymore. As a consequence, when modern people look at things from a position of methodological naturalism, they think that they are free from metaphysics, when, in fact, they are in the grips of a particular kind of metaphysics, one they don’t recognize.[5] Dr. Clark explains:
Everyone who has theological opinions has metaphysical doctrines that guide the way that one interprets reality and the way that one understands Christian teaching. Our metaphysical beliefs inevitably shape our conception of the meaning of Scripture. They form a kind of grid on which we superimpose our theology; they are a kind of filter for how we understand what the Bible is saying. Upon first hearing this kind of talk, one common reaction is to be scandalized and to vow never to let it happen to us. We might think that the solution is to free our biblical interpretation from all metaphysical influences� as if that were somehow possible. In reality that is not possible; it is part of the human condition to read from within a set of presuppositions. It is not possible to advance deeply into the study of any subject without first adopting certain basic assumptions that form the basis of that subject and not rethinking them in every moment. There is nothing evil or wrong with this; it is simply a matter of the natural limitations of human creatures, and it is vanity to object to it. It is not a matter of being naive about what John Webster rightly called “the undeniably corrosive effects of certain traditions of metaphysics,� 1 but, rather, it is a matter of recognizing the need to articulate a fully Christian description of ontology that results from the contemplation of special revelation in full awareness of philosophical questions. The goal is not to rid ourselves of all metaphysical presuppositions, but rather to allow our metaphysical presuppositions to be reformed by Scripture. As Matthew Levering shows, Thomas Aquinas is exemplary in the tradition for doing this. Levering writes, “Aquinas deploys metaphysical (theocentric) analysis to raise or convert the mind to the self-revealing God who is triune spiritual substance and uncaused cause of all things.�
Carter, Craig A.. Interpreting Scripture with the Great Tradition (p. 62). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
The authors of the Bible were not methodological naturalists. They were overtly wedded to a supernatural worldview. The authors of the New Testament who interpreted Isaiah as referring to Jesus, or who found symbols and spiritual meaning in the Old Testament to explain the New Testament, believed that God inspired the authors and that God’s intent in such inspiration was as important as the quotidian concerns of the human author in Jewish politics circa 600 BC.
So, what right do modern scholars have to distort the meaning and understanding of these authors by imposing a foreign ideology on their writings?
Well, not much of a right, it would seem. Good history suggests that the best way to get a better grip on the meaning of a text is to situate oneself in the metaphysical/intellectual world of the author. Dr. Clark has the insight that the metaphysics that is best suited for such application is Christian Platonism. He explains:
The theological metaphysics of the Great Tradition can be described as Christian Platonism. Andrew Louth quotes Endre von Ivánka: “The phenomenon which characterizes the whole of the first millennium of Christian theological thought . . . is the use of Platonism as the form for [its] philosophical expression and the framework of the world-picture in terms of which the proclamation of revealed truths was made� in other words, Christian Platonism.� 7 As Louth goes on to explain, both Platonism and Christianity teach that we have a spiritual nature that can participate in the “realm of eternal truth, the realm of the divine.� 8 But whereas Platonism sees human nature as continuous with divine being and as capable of ascending to the realm of the divine, Christianity views man as a creature created out of nothing. Therefore, in Christianity there exists an ontological gulf that can be overcome only by God descending in Christ to save us. Yet, as Louth points out, we have been made in God’s image and have the possibility of communion with God, even though this possibility is realized only in Jesus Christ. What is open to us in Platonism by nature is only open to us in Christianity by grace.
Carter, Craig A.. Interpreting Scripture with the Great Tradition (p. 66). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Both Judaism and Christianity developed in a matrix of Platonism. It is not for nothing that Christ is described as the Logos in the Gospel of John. Peter Schafer and Daniel Boyarin argue that Judaism recognized a Binitarian strand in Daniel, where God seems to have been two persons � the Ancient of Days and the “one like a Son of Man� � who were still one person. This tendency seems to have become stronger in the centuries before Christ in the Books of Wisdom and Ecclesiasticus. Clark points out the Platonic influence on St. Augustine, who certainly influenced the direction of Christianity. The Cappadocian Fathers read Aristotle’s The Categories. It seems that Platonism was pre-adapted for Christianity. Carter explains:
By now it should be clear why Christians like Augustine felt an affinity with Platonism that they did not feel with atheism, atomism, materialism, skepticism, and other forms of ancient thought. David is convinced that the heavens declare the glory of their Creator (Ps. 19), Genesis 1: 3� 25 portrays the heavens and the earth as spoken into being by the divine Word, and the Psalms see creation as set in order by the rationality of the divine wisdom (e.g., Ps. 104). The doctrine of creation certainly creates a reasonable expectation of teleology and order in nature that can be investigated by human reason. Natural theology, natural law, and natural science thus all have a basis in reality. Platonism and Christianity together form a unified foundation for the development of empirical science on a foundation of mathematics. To oppose Christian Platonism, therefore, is to oppose philosophy itself and, in so doing, to set oneself in opposition to reason, the moral law, and natural science.
Carter, Craig A.. Interpreting Scripture with the Great Tradition (p. 82). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Carter further explains:
Christianity could thus be described as “sacramental-historical� in nature. It is sacramental because it holds to the reality of universals, which Thomas Aquinas understood to be ideas in the mind of God. Since individual created things providentially participate in universals and thus are upheld in being by Christ (Col. 1: 15� 17), we know God sacramentally. Our being is upheld in existence by divine being, and we can know God as the source of our being. There is a vertical dimension of existence because this world that is accessible to our empirical senses is not the sum total of reality. Rather, this world participates in a reality greater than itself and is only a shadow of this greater reality. As far as this goes, the “Platonism� side of the label “Christian Platonism� is being stressed. But what makes Christian Platonism uniquely “Christian� is a cluster of doctrines centered on creation and the incarnation. God is the transcendent, self-existent Lord who brought the cosmos into existence ex nihilo as an act of his will. And God has entered into history in the person of Jesus Christ in order to redeem the fallen creation and redeem it to his glory. The church is the community of the saved, who form the nucleus of the new humanity that God is fashioning to populate the new heavens and new earth that he intends to bring into being at the end of history through the return of Christ, the resurrection of the dead, the last judgment, and the transformation of all things according to the pattern known to God from eternity and revealed in Christ. Christianity is thus also a matter of horizontal relationships as well as vertical ones.
Carter, Craig A.. Interpreting Scripture with the Great Tradition (pp. 83-84). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Seems reasonable.
So, how did we get to a point where Christian scholars of a Christian book are adopting an atheist metaphysics?
In a phrase: Prussian Academic Liberalism.[6] Clark offers a fascinating history of the development of Bible Studies as a discipline in the 19th Century. A series of scholars influenced by the Deism of the Enlightenment began to reflexively feel that God would not be involved in miracles. God set up the world and left it to run on its own. The Christian position is to the contrary:
Once again, the Enlightenment has created a pseudo-problem that is not a problem in the Great Tradition and exists only when the Christian Platonism of the Great Tradition is arbitrarily rejected. Miracles are the unusual, as opposed to the usual, manner of God’s action, but they are not in essence different from the action of God that is going on at every moment of history. God’s action is God’s action, whether it is providential or miraculous is a secondary point. It is only from our human perspective that an unusual action is surprising.
Carter, Craig A.. Interpreting Scripture with the Great Tradition (p. 121). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.[7]
Carter asks:
The rejection of Christian Platonism makes the mystery seem suspiciously like a contradiction instead of a paradox. But, we might wonder, why reject Christian Platonism in the first place? In fact, a Christian has no reason to do so, and the felt need of atheists to distance God from the world because they misunderstand the nature of God and mistakenly consider him a threat to their freedom does not constitute a valid reason.
Carter, Craig A.. Interpreting Scripture with the Great Tradition (p. 121). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
It is here that something very weird happens when conservative Christians get swept up in naturalism.[8] It is as if they are embarrassed about appealing to miracles lest they seem backward. [9]Clark writes:
Strauss, however, does have one valid point, and it is an important one. He makes clear that conservative modernists who oppose naturalism by searching for the historical core truths in the narrative are fighting a losing battle. He writes, “So true it is that supernaturalism clings with childlike fondness to the empty husk of historical semblance, though void of divine significance, and estimates it higher than the most valuable kernel divested of its variegated covering.� 69 The temptation to abandon divine authorial intent and spiritual meaning and to accept the challenge to defend the historicity of the text as alone the source of meaning was very strong for those conservatives who conceded the mechanistic view of the universe that drives modernity. It would have been better for theological conservatives to be much more conservative than they were by never embracing modern, mechanistic metaphysics in the first place. The lesson we learn from this is that the mechanistic metaphysics must be resisted lest pseudoproblems be created and require solutions that dissolve the orthodox doctrine of God into heresy. Unfortunately, however, there is a conservative wing of the liberal project that strives to adapt Christianity to modern metaphysics at the lowest cost possible by arguing for as large a kernel of historical fact at the heart of the myth and legend surrounding it as possible. Strauss is right to discern this as a losing proposition, and so should we.
Carter, Craig A.. Interpreting Scripture with the Great Tradition (pp. 121-122). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
The end result of bad metaphysics is bad theology. Clark counsels:
The liberal project needs to be abandoned because it is a dead end. Modern historical-critical study of the Bible is based on a false conception of created reality, a false conception of history, and a false conception of the Bible. The study of the Bible is not enhanced by historical criticism; it is only eroded and demeaned. Of course there is much that is good in the modern, scholarly study of the Bible, because much of it is just a continuation of the kind of scholarship that existed prior to modernity. But, as a general rule, what was good in the Enlightenment was not new, and what was new was not good. The Enlightenment did not invent textual criticism; Origen did that. The Enlightenment did not invent history; Augustine wrote a great philosophy of history. The Enlightenment did not invent reason; Thomas Aquinas wrote possibly the most rationally beautiful work in history.
Carter, Craig A.. Interpreting Scripture with the Great Tradition (p. 128). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
The result of the 19th-century Liberal Prussian hermeneutics was to orient Bible Scholars away from the tools that had previously been used by Church Fathers to explore and explain the Bible. These tools included “prosopological exegesis � where text was read as if it involved a dialogue between the persons of God, typology, analogy, and other forms of exegesis. The common root of these approaches was the understanding that Jesus Christ was the subject of all scriptural texts. Christ was found in the Old Testament and the New Testament. The Bible is and is not a library of books. It is in that it reflects different genres and different human authors, but the books of this library all share a divine co-author. So the various books in this library can be read as being really in conversation with each other.
Carter affirms that the literal sense controls the spiritual sense. What this means, I think, is that the literal sense of the Bible tout court is about Jesus. Carter writes:
This Christ is not merely the man Jesus; as the eternal Son of the Father, he is the Word by whom and through whom the cosmos came into being. This Christ interrelates the two Testaments in himself; therefore, figurative readings always point to him. This is why Paul can say that Christ was the rock from which the Israelites drank spiritually in the wilderness (1 Cor. 10: 4). For Augustine, what we need to grasp is that the manna, for example, was not just a picture or symbol of a future reality that would someday come into existence, that is, Christ as the bread of life. For Augustine, Christ was already sacramentally present in the manna, just as he was in the rock. Here we see his Christian Platonism put to good use in the service of a christological reading of the Old Testament that recognizes that Christ was ontologically real and sacramentally present before his incarnation, just as he is in the current age after his incarnation. The upshot of all this is that Christ is literally present in the Old Testament, so the texts that speak of him do so in a literal sense. The distinction between the literal and the spiritual senses that once seemed so significant to the young Augustine eventually recedes into the background as the gap between the two senses is closed by what Jason Byassee terms his “christological literalism.�
Carter, Craig A.. Interpreting Scripture with the Great Tradition (p. 175). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
So, is Isaiah “literally� about Jesus?
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What did you read this year?
