The God Fearin' Fiddler has a post up on the historical significance of transubstantiation which has led to some interesting discussions. The principle problem with this post and the discussion that follows it, however, is that no one seems to understand the difference between transubstantiation and the Real Presence. Unfortunately, I'm not an expert on this either, but I do think I know enough to clear up some historical and metaphysical confusion. I am going to use two principal sources - session 13 of the Council of Trent, and the relevant article from the Catholic Encyclopedia - to explain the historical development and specific content of the doctrine of transubstantiation, and then attempt to show two things: (1) no such doctrine is affirmed by Ambrose in the passage the Fiddler likes to quote in this connection, and (2) it would be very difficult for Christians with strong Platonist leanings, such as Clement of Alexandria, Augustine, and most early Christian theologians, to even make sense of this doctrine, which renders it highly unlikely that they implicitly accepted it, or that they would have accepted it had it been explained to them.
Let us begin with an outline of the history. From the beginning, Christians used the words Christ himself used in describing the Eucharist. Christ himself said "this is my body" and "this is my blood." This is in essentially all of the records of the words of institution, including 1 Corinthians 11:23-29, the passage most churches read before serving the Eucharist. Christ also speaks this way in John 6, which is one of the most important texts on the theology of the Eucharist.
Now, all Christians, including even Zwingli, have used and still use this language in describing the Eucharist, so it is important to note that if Zwinglian or similar interpretations will work for the text of the New Testament, they will also work for most writers who merely adopt the New Testament's language and don't attempt to describe it in any more detail. Zwingli specifically argued for a symbolic interpretation by pointing out all the places in Scripture where "is" is used to mean "signifies." There appears to be a more or less uncontestable example of this even in the words of institution themselves, as they are recorded in Luke. Jesus says "this cup is the new covenant" (Luke 22:20, emphasis added), but the cup clearly isn't actually the new covenant (how could it be?). Rather, it is the sign and seal of the new covenant. I don't think that either Catholic and Orthodox believers, who like to interpret the words of institution literally, or fundamentalists, who like to interpret everything but the words of institution literally, would want to say that the cup literally is the new covenant.
I am not an expert on patristics (though I am working on it), but I suspect that most of the fathers, especially the earlier ones, simply used the same language as Christ and didn't provide or attempt to provide much further analysis. The question at issue here doesn't hinge on whether we affirm these words to be true. All Christians agree on that. We all agree that these words express some important truth; we don't agree about what truth they express. (Actually, there is some agreement, but there is a lot of disagreement about the details.)
That said, a case can probably be made that many of the fathers explicitly affirmed the doctrine of the Real Presence (certainly at least a few of them did), and that no writings survive from an otherwise orthodox writer in the early period of Christianity who denies this doctrine. The doctrine of the Real Presence is simply the claim that these words are to be interpreted literally: the bread is the body of Christ and the wine is the blood of Christ. In the Eastern Orthodox Church, any attempt at further analysis meets with suspicion. However, as we shall see, the Roman Catholic Church has not only given a metaphysical theory of this doctrine, but has elevated that theory to the status of dogma (that is, all members of the Church are in principle required to assent to it).
According to the Catholic Encyclopedia article, transubstantiation properly so-called (at least the details of the theory) is a uniquely Western doctrine. The word was first used by Hildebert of Tours around 1079. Note that this is contemporary with Anselm, the first of the Scholastics, but before the wide availability of the words of the Arab Muslim philosopher Ibn Rushd (aka Averroes) and through him the works of Aristotle in the West. This will become significant later.
Of course, the history of the word is not a history of the doctrine. I have already outlined the doctrine of the Real Presence (it really is that simple). The Catholic Encyclopedia states that "the Catholic doctrine of Transubstantiation sets up a mighty bulwark around the dogma of the Real Presence and constitutes in itself a distinct doctrinal article, which is not involved in that of the Real Presence, though the doctrine of the Real Presence is necessarily contained in that of Transubstantiation." So when did this distinct doctrine develop? Before or after the use of the word? Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find an answer to that question, and I don't know enough about Anselm and friends to know whether the philosophical commitments of the 11th and 12th century Western Christian philosophers and theologians left room for full transubstantiation. However, the Catholic Encyclopedia informs us that the word first entered Catholic dogmatic definitions at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, but the text of that council says only "[Christ's] body and blood are truly contained in the sacrament of the altar under the forms of bread and wine; the bread being changed [Lat. transsubstantiatio] by divine power into the body, and the wine into the blood, so that to realize the mystery of unity we may receive of Him what He has received of us." Here we do have the word "form" (presumably Latin "forma") which is often a synonym of "species", a Scholastic/Aritotelian technical term used in later discussions of the doctrine. Nevertheless, since outside the technical jargon of scholasticism, "forma" just means "shape" and "species" just means "appearance," in order to show that the Fourth Lateran Council actually affirms transubstantiation as we know it today, rather than just using the word, it would have to be shown that the word already had the present day meaning. On the other hand, the word itself would seem to have some Aristotelian baggage (I promise I'm about to explain all of this - I apologize if anyone has to read this long post twice due to my poor organization): the bread and wine are not trans-formed - they retain their original form. Rather they are trans-substanced. The form remains the same, but the substance changes. This is the essence (that's another loaded term in Aristotle/Aquinas talk) of the doctrine. So it is probably affirmed by the Fourth Lateran Council.
At any rate, it is quite clear in the Council of Trent in 1563. Here are some excerpts from the thirteenth session (translated by Philip Schaff):
Chapter I ... after the consecration of the bread and wine, our Lord Jesus Christ ... is truly, really, and substantially contained under the species of those sensible things ...Chapter IV On Transubstantiation. And because that Christ, our Redeemer, declared that which he offered under the species of bread to be truly his own body, therefore has it ever been a firm belief in the Church of God, and this holy Synod doth now declare it anew, that by the consecration of the bread and of the wine, a conversion is made of the whole substance of the bread into the substance of the body of Christ our Lord, and of the whole substance of the wine into the substance of his blood; which conversion is, by the holy Catholic Church, suitably and properly called transubstantiation.
The Canons anathematize anyone who disagrees with this (Canon II even anathematizes anyone who doesn't want to call it transubstantiation!), but don't really add anything.
Here is the metaphysical background: Aristotle was a proponent of what is called a "hylomorphic" metaphysics. That is, he affirmed that material objects were made up of "matter" (Gr. hylas) and "form" (Gr. morphos). There is a lot more complexity than this, but this is the basic idea. This is related to his distinction between "substance" or "essence" (Gr. ousia) and "accident" (I don't know the Greek word for this). The matter of an object is the stuff it's made out of, and it's form is its shape or organization. For the Scholastics, the Latin "species" seems to have been related to Aristotle's "form" but been more closely related to our cognition (the Catholic Encyclopedia article on this didn't make that much sense to me). Objects also have an essence, which is that in virtue of which it is the thing it is, and various accidents, or properties that could change without the object being destroyed. Often, the essence of an object is thought to be a collection of essential properties; thus I might be essentially human.
For the Scholastic/Aristotelian, the doctrine of transubstantiation is kind of weird, but no weirder than the Incarnation of the Trinity, and, more importantly, it is coherent. It is to be explained as follows: the substances or essences of the bread and wine are fully replaced by the substances or essences of the body and blood of Christ (I'm not sure if the matter is also replaced), but there is no change to the accidents, or to the form/species. Thus it still appears to be bread and wine, but it actually is the body and blood of Christ, since essence is what determines identity. Technically, the bread and wine are not changed into the body and blood, but replaced with the body and blood, since you can't change the essence of a thing and still have that same thing. Let me note that, while I'm not an expert on Aristotle, I suspect he would find it preposterous to claim that the essence of a material object could be replaced with another essence (and thus the material object be replaced with a different object) before our eyes without any perceptible difference in the matter before us.
Now we are going to examine Ambrose, and then the philosophical commitments of Augustine and his fellow Christian Platonists.
The Fiddler quotes Ambrose as saying:
Perhaps you will say, "I see something else, how is it that you assert that I receive the Body of Christ?" And this is the point which remains for us to prove. And what evidence shall we make use of? Let us prove that this is not what nature made, but what the blessing consecrated, and the power of blessing is greater than that of nature, because by blessing nature itself is changed.... [Ambrose discusses miracles performed by the prophets] ...
We observe, then, that grace has more power than nature, and yet so far we have only spoken of the grace of a prophet's blessing. But if the blessing of man had such power as to change nature, what are we to say of that divine consecration where the very words of the Lord and Saviour operate? For that sacrament which you receive is made what it is by the word of Christ. But if the word of Elijah had such power as to bring down fire from heaven, shall not the word of Christ have power to change the nature of the elements? You read concerning the making of the whole world: "He spoke and they were made, He commanded and they were created." Shall not the word of Christ, which was able to make out of nothing that which was not, be able to change things which already are into what they were not? For it is not less to give a new nature to things than to change them.
But why make use of arguments? Let us use the examples He gives, and by the example of the Incarnation prove the truth of the mystery. Did the course of nature proceed as usual when the Lord Jesus was born of Mary? If we look to the usual course, a woman ordinarily conceives after connection with a man. And this body which we make is that which was born of the Virgin. Why do you seek the order of nature in the Body of Christ, seeing that the Lord Jesus Himself was born of a Virgin, not according to nature? It is the true Flesh of Christ which crucified and buried, this is then truly the Sacrament of His Body.
The Lord Jesus Himself proclaims: "This is My Body." Before the blessing of the heavenly words another nature is spoken of, after the consecration the Body is signified. He Himself speaks of His Blood. Before the consecration it has another name,after it is called Blood. And you say, Amen, that is, It is true. Let the heart within confess what the mouth utters, let the soul feel what the voice speaks.
In order to show that Amborse accepts transubstantiation, we have to show that he explains the words "this is my body" by the claim that the form and accidents of the bread remain, but its essence has been replaced by the essence of the body of Christ. Do you see that in the above quotation? I don't see any such thing. Ambrose certainly affirms the Real Presence: he says that if God can become human flesh, certainly he can become bread. He says that we shouldn't be surprised if Christ's body doesn't follow the ordinary course of nature, since God often performs miracles in Scripture, and since even Christ's human birth did not follow the ordinary course of nature. But I see nothing here about form and matter, or about substance and accident, or about species. And I'm not just looking for the words, I'm looking for the content. All Ambrose says is "this may look like bread, but it's actually the body of Christ, and God certainly has the power to make what looks, feels, and tastes like bread into the body of Christ." That is the doctrine of the Real Presence.
The last thing I want to cover is the issue of the Platonist leanings of many of the early fathers, notably the Alexandrians and Augustine. I shouldn't have to take pains to show this, because the Catholic Encyclopedia says, "even Augustine was deprived of a clear conception of Transubstantiation, so long as he was held in the bonds of Platonism." Nevertheless, I will at least try to explain it.
Platonism holds that material objects are what they are in virtue of their "participation" (more literally: "having a share") in a transcendant, changeless, immaterial "form" (not morphos, but eidos or idea, which Aristotle also uses, but in a somewhat different meaning than morphos, I think). You and I are both human because we participate in the form of Human, or, as Plato often says Humanity Itself. The bread is bread because of its relationship to Bread Itself. Things are, of course, generally participants in multiple forms, and everything is a participant in Goodness Itself to a greater or lesser degree because Plato holds to a privation theory of evil (which is where Augustine got it), so anything that had no goodness at all would not exist. Christian Platonists generally want to avoid the idea that the forms are co-eternal with and independent of God, so they say that they exist in God's understanding.
A Platonist does not have a concept of an essence as an Aristotelian does. Furthermore, Plato himself, and I believe most Platonists following him, generally cashes out "participation" in terms of "being patterned after." It is very difficult to see how the bread could change from being patterned after bread to being patterned after the body of Christ without any perceptible change. In what would the patterning consist? How does this object resemble a human body, and how Christ's body in particular? Now, there must be some way of getting this to work, because Father Nicolas Malebranche was a very intelligent Platonist Catholic priest in the 17th/18th century, after the Council of Trent, and he must have come up with something, but I don't know what he said.
At any rate, it is highly unlikely that any Christian Platonist held to anything like transubstantiation prior to Malebranche, and a great many of the early fathers, including, as I have said, the Alexandrian school and Augustine, were Platonists.
The situation is even worse for idealists such as myself (or 18th century Anglican Bishop George Berkeley). We don't believe that there is any such thing as the essence or substance or matter of the bread. All that exists, according to idealism, is what the Scholastics would call the "species." Transubstantiation is thus puzzling for the Aristotelian, more puzzling for the Platonist, and completely incoherent for the idealist. I should also note that most contemporary philosophers don't believe in any of these three theories, but transubstantiation is probably also incoherent for them, since material objects don't have undetectible essences (though they may have essential properties).
Now, a Christian idealist does have to come up with some explanation for the bodily resurrection and be able to say that the body that is raised is in some sense the same body although it is radically transformed in terms of its phenomenal properties. Whatever solution one comes up with for this problem could probably also be used to make sense of the doctrine of the Real Presence. However, this view cannot possibly look anything like transubstantiation, for the reasons discussed above.
Here, finally, is part 3 of my series on divine revelation. The story so far: part 2 argued that the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth constitute a self-revelation of God to mankind, and that the New Testament documents, and especially the synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke), constitute generally reliably historical sources as to the content of that revelation. These points will be assumed to have been established (but feel free to comment on the previous post if you want to contest them), and I will now argue that the entirety of the Hebrew Bible is included by reference in this revelation. I will also briefly touch on the question of the basis for belief in the Hebrew Bible before the time of Christ. Further, I will argue that the Bible in question is in fact the Hebrew canon in use by the Pharisees in the first century (i.e., the Bible still in use by Jews today, which contains the same content as the protocanonical Old Testament of the Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant churches, but divides up the books differently and puts them in a different order). The claims of the Septuagint in Eastern Orthodoxy do not stem from the witness of Christ, but from Tradition, and will therefore be dealt with in part three, on the witness of the Church. I'm not clear on the place of the Vulgate in Catholicism, but will probably also look into that for part three. And now: Jesus' witness to the Hebrew Bible.
First, some statistics to show just how central this issue is to the synoptic gospels' presentation of Jesus:
That's a lot of data to sift through! The most obvious passages to begin our search with are the six times Jesus uses the term ai graphai, "the Scriptures," which, in a Jewish context in the first century, refers to the entirety of the Hebrew Bible. Here are the relevant passages from the HCSB:
The stone that the builders rejected
has become the cornerstone.
This came from the Lord
and is wonderful to our eyes?
At that time Jesus said to the crowds, "Have you come out with swords and clubs, as if I were a criminal, to capture Me? Every day I used to sit, teaching in the temple complex, and you didn't arrest Me. But all this has happened so that the prophetic Scriptures would be fulfilled." Then all the disciples deserted Him and ran away.
Also of interest are the three occurences in Luke 24, all of which have Jesus interpreting or explaining the Scriptures.
What 'Scriptures' are we talking about?
Jesus is speaking primarily to Pharisees and Jews of the Pharisaic tradition. (He was barely on speaking terms with the Sadducees, but in Matthew 23 he recognizes the legitimacy of the Pharisees as "sitting in the seat of Moses," i.e. having authority to interpret the Law. In general, his criticism of the Pharisees seems to be not that what they are doing is wrong, but that they have missed the point. See Matt. 23:23-24.) One could take this as sufficient to prove that when Jesus speaks of "the Scriptures," or "the Law" without specifying he is referring to the same Scriptures accepted by the Pharisees: i.e. the 24 books of the modern Jewish Tanakh, which have the same content as the 39 books of the protocanonical Christian Old Testament. However, we needn't be satisfied with this, as there is a wealth of additional information.
First, Jesus quotes from the following books in the synoptic Gospels (using the Jewish order and book divisions): Genesis (Matthew 19:4-5, Mark 10:6-8), Exodus (Matthew 5:27, 5:38, 15:4, 22:32, Mark 7:10, Luke 20:37), Leviticus (Matthew 5:33, 5:38, 5:43, 15:4, 22:39, Mark 7:10, 12:31), Numbers (Matthew 5:33, 5:38), Deuteronomy (Matthew 4:4, 4:7, 4:10, 5:27, 5:31, 5:33, 15:4, 18:16, 22:37, Mark 7:10, 12:29-30, Luke 4:4, 4:8, 4:12), Joshua (Mark 12:29-30), Isaiah (Mathew 13:14-15, 15:8-9, 21:13, Mark 4:12, 7:6-7, 9:44-48, 11:17, Luke 4:18-19, 8:10, 19:46, 22:37), Jeremiah (Matthew 21:13, Mark 8:18, 11:17, Luke 19:46), Ezekiel (Mark 8:18), Minor Prophets (Matthew 9:13, 10:35-36, 11:10, 26:31, Mark 14:27, Luke 7:27, 12:53, 23:30), Psalms (Matthew 7:23, 21:16, 21:42, 22:44, 23:39, 26:64, 27:46, Mark 12:36, 14:62, 15:34, Luke 20:17, 20:42-43), Daniel (Matthew 23:39, 26:64, Mark 13:14, 14:62).
This leaves the following books of the Tanakh unquoted: Judges, Samuel, Kings, Proverbs, Job, Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, Esther, Ezra-Nehemiah, and Chronicles. Jesus does not quote as Scripture any book outside the Jewish canon.
Of course, every book quoted is uncontested, and also included in the Septuagint, and the Gospel writers (who are writing in Greek, whereas Jesus was almost certainly speaking Aramaic, and therefore probably quoting the Bible in Hebrew) sometimes quote from the Septuagint. However, there is another indication, and this I owe to the John Piper teachings available for download here: in Matthew 23:35, Jesus refers to "all the righteous blood shed on teh earth ... from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah." However, Zecheriah was not chronologically the last prophet to be martyred: he was last in the canonical order of the Hebrew Tanakh. In the Septuagint, Jeremiah is last. So for these three reasons (he was speaking to Palestinian Jews and didn't correct them on what constituted 'Scripture,' he never quotes as Scripture a book outside the Hebrew canon, and he relies on the canonical Hebrew book order), we can conclude that the Scripture Jesus bore witness to was the Hebrew Tanakh.
What does Jesus have to say about them?
Jesus clearly sees himself as the fulfillment of the writings of the Hebrew prophets (see, e.g., Luke 4:18-21), and even of the Law (Matthew 5:17). In John's gospel, Jesus even tells the Pharisees "you pore over the Scriptures because you think you have eternal life in them, yet they testify about Me" (5:39). In short, Jesus sees himself as the subject of the Hebrew Scriptures.
But where do these Scriptures come from, and what is the source of their authority? John Piper gives a very useful observation on this as well. Matthew 19:4-5 reads,"'Haven't you read," [Jesus] replied, 'that He who created them in the beginning "made them male and female," and He also said: "For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife and the two will become one flesh?"'" This is a quotation of Genesis 2:24. However, if you look back at Genesis, you will notice that this is not marked as a quotation of God by the author of Genesis. Thus it would seem that Jesus thinks it is correct to say "God said" and cite the Torah, even if it is not marked in the original text as a quotation of God.
Does this apply to the whole Tanakh, or only the Torah proper? I understand (and I am explaining this from memory of a class I took a few years ago, and couldn't find a web reference for it, so feel free to correct me) that in traditional/Orthodox Judaism the Torah (Law), Nevi'im (Prophets), and Ketuvim (Writings) are considered to be on three different levels of inspiration: in the case of the Torah, even the decorations on the page and ornaments of the letters are considered to be inspired and significant (Jesus seems to hold this view of the Law as well; see Matthew 5:18). In the Nevi'im, the idea is that when it says "thus says the Lord," it is really reporting what God really said to the prophet. In the case of the Ketuvim, at the lowest level of inspiration, God has insured that these are generally accurate records of what he really did with his people.
It has been my experience that Protestants, especially the truly Reformed (as opposed to the simply not-Catholic variety), tend to be very troubled by the possibility of multiple 'levels' of inspiration. This, I take it, is one reason Protestants are so hostile to the idea of the existence of a deuterocanon, even though the Orthodox (I don't know about Catholics) do not place it on the same level as the protocanonical books. The idea of multiple levels of inspiration within Scripture properly so-called would be even more troubling. It needn't, however, be taken to indicate that some books of the Bible are imperfect: it need only be indicative of a slightly different relationship between the divine and the human in different parts of the Scripture. There are, in principle, infinitely many ways that the divine and the human might be related. Many Christian theologians, such as Donald Bloesch, want to say that just as Jesus is fully human and fully divine, so the Bible is completely the word of man and completely the Word of God. Even if this is true of the entire Bible, it doesn't necessarily preclude the possibility of different levels, or at least different modes, of inspiration from one part of the Bible to the next.
So does Jesus believe in the traditional Jewish account of multiple levels of inspiration? As a Protestant (though perhaps not one of "the truly Reformed"), I would be much more comfortable categorically denying that this is the case. However, there is significant reason to believe that it is.
We have already seen that Jesus seems, based on Matthew 5:18 and 19:4-5 to hold the Jewish view of the Torah discussed above. I am unaware of anywhere else where he quotes a book outside the Torah and says "God says" in a place that is not marked as a direct quotation of God in the original. He certainly doesn't make statements about "one jot or tittle" with regard to the whole Tanakh, but only with regard to the Torah, which is a very traditionally Jewish perspective. The closest he comes, as far as I know (and this is due to John Piper as well), is at Matthew 22:43 where he says that David composed Psalm 110 "in the Spirit" which is again very consistent with the Jewish view (Psalms belonging to the Ketuvim).
Nevertheless, Jesus clearly treats the entire Tanakh as inspired and authoritative. In fact, the reason he points out that the Psalm in question was inspired is in order to use it as an authoritative source as to the identity of the Messiah.
The evidence for Jesus' exact view of inspiration is very sparse and it will be noted that all the verses cited are from Matthew (of course, this is because Jesus relationship to traditional Judaism is a particular interest of Matthew, whereas Luke, for instance, is concerned simply with setting out the historical events accurately and in order - see Luke 1:3). As such, although there is some reason to suppose that Jesus took this traditional Jewish view, we must at this point remain agnostice on the question of an exact theory of inspiration and say simply that Jesus testified to the following claims about the Hebrew Bible:
Appendix: why did people belive in the Hebrew Bible before Jesus?
I have argued, following Richard Swinburne, that, for those of us alive today and investigating this issue, the best reason to believe in the Hebrew Bible is on the basis of the testimony of the New Testament, and especially of Jesus himself. If this is so, why did people already believe in it when Jesus came? Wouldn't God have provided a rational foundation for their belief as well?
Recall from part 2 that Jesus' resurrection is God's 'signature' on the revelation that is the life and teachings of Jesus. Compare this with the circumstances surrounding the books of the Hebrew Bible. Throughout the Torah we are continually reminded of one thing as evidence of God's involvement in the production of this book: "the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and with an outstretched arm, with great terror and with signs and wonders" (Deuteronomy 26:8). This is the reason we are to believe Moses. However, these "signs and wonders" have fallen into the mists of time in our own day. We are not in a position to effectively investigate the question of whether the Red Sea actually parted, and so forth. Thus the prophets came, generation by generation, and each of them was validated by divine miracles, and each of them testified to the authenticity of the Torah, and thus those who witnessed their miracles, or at least were able to examine the evidence and be convinced that God had really validated this prophet, had reason to believe in both the prophet and the Torah. We, however, are unable to investigate these signs, and are therefore reliant on the one sign that is historically well-documented: the resurrection of Christ. On this basis we accept his testimony to the Hebrew Bible, and it is on account of this that we believe.
Welcome to part 2 of my promised series on divine revelation! My apologies for the long delay (it's been over a month since I first posted my plan of attack), but I've been very busy moving here there and everywhere, and I still don't have all my books and stuff unpacked (nor do I have a desk).
According to the plan of attack, this part of the argument "will argue in a manner based heavily on Swinburne that there is good reason to suppose that the life and teachings of the historical person Jesus of Nazareth represent a revelation of God to mankind." The chief source here is Richard Swinburne's book Revelation, but the general form of the argument is not an uncommon one. The idea is that the central revelation of God is to be found in the life and teachings of the historical person Jesus of Nazareth (Hebrews 1:1-4), which were attested to by miracles, primarily his own resurrection from the dead (see Matthew 12:39-40). Swinburne has, however, presented the clearest version I have seen (not that I have seen that many different versions of the argument), and so my argument will be based chiefly on his.
We must begin by stating our initial premises, which will be as follows: a Being exists who is far more intelligent and far more powerful than I am. The limits, if any, of his power are beyond my knowledge. He is the ontological source of the world I experience, and the purpose of this world is in part to be community of minds with whom he desires to have meaningful interaction. These premises will not be argued for here. They are assumed. If there is great interest I may post and argue for them elsewhere.
Note that the argument does not assume the existence of a God like that of the Judeo-Christian tradition in advance, but merely a super-human mind. I've phrased the problem this way because I'm not convinced that 'natural theology' is able to establish the existence of the tri-omni God. I think we may need to appeal to Scripture for that, which means that we must not assume it in advance. I will nevertheless refer to the Being described as 'God' for the sake of convenience, but ask the reader to keep in mind that this Being's identity with the traditional monotheistic deity is not yet established.
Now, it has been posited that God desires to have 'meaningful interaction' with a 'community of minds' (i.e., us). He does this in part simply in the design of the world: he creates stimuli around us, and we respond to them (this ties into George Berkeley's theory of sense perception as language on which I plan to write my honors thesis next semester, but that's another story). Would God be satisfied with this level of interaction? Is it 'meaningful'? Well, perhaps, but perhaps not. We can interact with him in this way without even knowing it, and that might make the interaction less meaningful. Also, human beings (and, presumably, God) are capable of abstraction, but our actions are very concrete. Our interactions with the physical world may well be the most important of our interactions with God, but there is at least some reason to suppose that he would desire another type of interaction: interaction on a more 'human' level, possibly through human language. Therefore, if we accept the initial conditions of the argument, it seems that we ought to be on the lookout for a 'divine revelation' on the human level, perhaps in verbal form (although we haven't yet proven that such a thing exists).
What would the divine revelation look like, and how would we be expected to recognize it? Swinburne asks how we solve the question of authorship in general: if I want you to know that I am the author of a text, I affix to it my signature. The point of my signature is that it is very easy for me to make it, but very difficult for anyone else, and so if you see it, there is a high probability that I did indeed write it myself. What would God's 'signature' look like? Well, it would be something that was very easy for God to do, but difficult or impossible for anyone else to counterfeit: a miracle. Furthermore, if the revelation was intended for all of the successive ages (it might not be), then it would be well-attested and more or less verifiable, even across centuries.
Now, it may be a bias because of my growing up and being educated in the West, but I can see only one place and time that really might fit the bill: Jerusalem, c. 33 AD.
(Note: the historical arguments below will be familiar to many readers, who may want to skip to the end - for the record, Swinburne's book skips over this part of the argument, referring readers to the historians.)
It is absolutely indisputable that something highly unusual occurred in or around Jerusalem in the first century and as a result the world is a different place. Furthermore, I would argue that none of the commonly proposed explanations are prima facie plausible: some people claim that Jesus of Nazareth never lived. Others claim that he wasn't really dead (but how did he manage to get out of the tomb, if it was sealed with a big rock, and he had passed out from blood loss three days earlier, during which time he had eaten nothing?). Still others claim that his disciples (the same disciples who ran away and hid during his execution) stole his body in order to claim that he rose from the dead (and that ten out of twelve were martyred for what they all knew to be a hoax). Finally, there is the mother of all improbable claims: he was in fact quite dead, and even "descended into Hades" ("The Apostles' Creed" - see also Ephesians 4:9-10), and on the third day after his death simply decided to 'get up' (the Greek word used in Matthew 28:6 ordinarily means simply to get out of bed in the morning; on the ease of Jesus' supposed resurrection, cf. John 10:18).
So what evidence do we have, some 2000 years later, regarding this bizarre event? Well, some hundred years or more after the fact, once the story of Jesus become central to the lives of many people, a huge body of literature sprang up. However, most of the authors had little if any knowledge of the events that took place, and were simply using an influential story to teach their theology. Are there any sources recording the resurrection of Jesus that might have been written by people who did actually have knowledge of what happened? The answer is yes.
First, there are indeed a handful of sources by non-Christians which make brief reference to the existence of Jesus and are close to the time, but there are, in general difficulties with these sources and they tell us very little about Jesus (a brief list of them is to be found here).
The reason for these 'objective' sources being so sparse is simple: for people who didn't believe Jesus' claims, there was little that was noteworthy about him until at least the mid-second century when Christianity began to be a large enough movement to attract imperial attention. Thus it is unsurprising that only those sympathetic to Jesus give us any detail about him close to the time of his life (incidentally, the same is true of Socrates, about whom we have much less evidence). Most of the sources that might plausibly have been based on direct knowledge have been included in the New Testament canon simply because that's what Christians were looking for when canonization was being discussed beginning in the third century.
Some have doubted whether these sympathetic accounts are even legitimate: that is, some people have thought they weren't actually written by the people they claim to be written by, or close to the time of the events at all. As to the former claim, let me simply state, as a classicist, that there is no more reason for doubt as to authorship in the case of the New Testament books than there is with regard to classical Greek texts. That said, there is some room for doubt with the classical texts, but no one seems to think it is significant enough to be a source of doubt as to, e.g., the reliability of Herodotus' Histories. Furthermore, it is almost certain that the majority of the New Testament books were written in the first century. While secular scholars have some doubt about the legitimacy of the First Epistle of Clement, which was traditionally believed to have been written c. 95AD and quotes several NT books, it is clear that several books of the NT were available to early Christians writing in diverse parts of the Roman Empire in the early second century. Manuscripts of pieces of NT books have also been found dating to the mid-second century. It can be assumed that the books were written substantially before this, in order to have acheived such wide circulation. (See here for a brief listing of the evidence, but note that the list is somewhat biased). The books which are critical for our purposes are the synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke), Acts, and 1 Corinthians. All of these are quoted in 1 Clement (if legitimate), and the Epistle of Polycarp to the Philippians, c. 120. Matthew and 1 Corinthians are also quoted by Ignatius, c. 115.
What do these sources say? Well, they all claim that Jesus did in fact rise from the dead. Matthew accounts for one of the other explanations at 28:11-15, where he claims that the Jewish priests bribed the Roman soldiers to claim that the body had been stolen. Furthermore, Luke and Paul both give accounts of the evidence in favor of the resurrection: "He also presented Himself alive after his suffering by many infallible proofs" (Acts 1:3); "He was seen by Cephas [i.e. Peter], then by the twelve. After that He was seen by over five hundred brethren at once, of whom the greater part remain to the present, but some have fallen asleep. After that he was seen by James, then by all the apostles. Last of all He was seen by me also" (1 Cor. 15:5-8). Elsewhere in Acts we have Paul claiming that Herod Agrippa must already know the story of Christ's death and resurrection which Paul has just told him: "I am convinced that none of these things escape his attention, since this thing was not done in a corner" (Acts 26:26). What is significant here is that there are appeals to evidence which was available to the readers, and enough readers found the account credible that the account was preserved. This is one of the chief ways that historical books are judged for their reliability. A book that appeals to no evidence, or a book that had no real evidence available to the readers, is not necessarily reliable, but one which appeals to evidence that admits of independent verification, it is probably fairly reliable. When Paul says that "this thing was not done in a corner" and that most of the 500 people who saw Jesus at once are still alive ("go ask them!"), he makes a strong case for the credibility of his account.
The point as far as our overall argument is concerned is this: I claim that, based on the above evidence, if we accept our postulate from the beginning of the post that a very powerful being is trying to get our attention, then the most coherent of these explanations is that the texts are true, and Jesus did in fact rise from the dead. Of course, the evidence is not sufficient that an individual whose worldview precludes the possibility of a resurrection should change his entire worldview, but such an individual should certainly be deeply troubled by the facts of this bizarre incident.
So suppose the resurrection did occur, as now seems likely, and that this was God's 'signature' pointing us to his revelation, as also seems likely. What exactly was God signing and validating? Well, Jesus made some very peculiar claims about himself, and he further claimed that his resurrection from the dead would serve as evidence of those claims (Matthew 12:39-40). Thus we can claim, even granting the New Testament texts only the status of fallible historical sources, that God has validated the claims of Jesus of Nazareth as his own self-revelation (the content of these claims is, of course, beyond the scope of this series - go read it!). Stay tuned for the next part of the series, which will discuss Jesus' claims about the Old Testament Scriptures, and argue that the entirety of the Hebrew Bible is 'included by reference' in the revelation of God in the life and teachings of Jesus.
There has been a lot floating around about the doctrine of inerrancy recently. I posted on this subject not long ago, responding to a post at World of Sven and a lengthy series at Chrisendom. Since then, there has been a second World of Sven post, and also a post from the No Kool-Aid Zone about just how important inerrancy is.
This is a problem that I've been thinking seriously about for some time. Actually, I started by asking the question "just why do I believe in the Bible?" then realized that the answer to that question would have a big effect on exactly what I should believe ABOUT the Bible. I do believe that there is good reason to accept Scripture as an authoritative source of divinely revealed truth. I haven't got all the kinks out of the arguments, so I'm hoping for a little help along the way, but what I propose to do is a five (or more?) part series laying out an argument for the authoritative nature of the canonical Christian Scriptures (we'll get into what counts as 'canonical' along the way). This may take me quite a while to get through, as I'm about to start finals, and still have one more term paper to write here in Athens, then will be moving back to the States on the 19th, but by breaking it into so many pieces, I hope to have manageable chunks and be able to keep working on it. Major influences on the arguments I'm going to make are Richard Swinburne's book Revelation (I posted my first response immediately after finishing it here) and a series of teachings on the subject by John Piper, which I downloaded from the Theopedia article on the inerrancy of the Bible. I hope to accumulate more sources along the way. In particular I'm planning on reading Calvin, the Westminster Confession, and the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy on this subject.
My plan for this series is outlined below. If I change my plan, I will update this post to reflect it. I will also link each post from here.
And that's the argument. If you have any suggestions of issues to deal with, directions to take, or sources to read along the way, please let me know. I expect to write part 2 some time in the next two weeks (before I leave Greece), but no promises.
It is officially Christmas in the Eastern timezone! (We'll conveniently ignore, for the moment, the fact that I am currently at my parents' house in the Pacific timezone.) This being as it is, and since I have no classes and therefore time for blogging, I thought it would be appropriate to post some thoughts on the miracle of the Incarnation.
We will all, I'm sure, be hearing the story of the birth of Christ read from Matthew's or Luke's Gospel in the near future (most likely, in fact, we'll all be hearing Luke's account of the birth of Christ and the events preceding it, and Matthew's account of the visit from the Magi). These stories are wonderful, traditional, and inspirational (and also, importantly, TRUE). However, these are, in important ways historical accounts of the coming of Christ, and as such, at least for me, they fail to impart the true magnitude of the event. They are tip-of-the-iceberg Ernest Hemingway types of accounts and it requires long hard consideration for us to even begin to understand their import. On the surface, Matthew and Mark tell a simple story of a peasant girl giving birth to her peasant son in a barn in a backwater province of the Roman Empire in the first century AD. Other children have been born in barns in backwater provinces. Sure, Matthew and Luke record various signs and portents surrounding the birth, but history claims the same for such figures as Alexander the Great. What is so special about the birth of this Jesus of Nazareth fellow?
For years, I believed that Christmas was greatly overemphasized in the church. I often stated quite explicitly that Christmas was important only insofar as it was a necessary prerequisite for Easter. I no longer believe this; I believe that this event of the Incarnation is deeply meaningful in its own right, independent of the further important events in the life of Christ. This realization could, I'm sure, have been made by a deeper reading of Matthew and Luke in the broader context of Scripture, but, for me, it came through John's account. He writes:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made. In Him was life, and that life was the light of men. And the light shines in the darkness, but the darkness did not comprehend it. There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. This man came for a witness, to bear witness of the Light, that all through him might believe. He was not that Light, but was sent to bear witness of that Light. That was the true Light which gives light to every man coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made through Him, and the world did not know Him. He came to His own, and His own did not receive him. But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, to those who believe in His name: who were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. And the Word become flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth. (John 1:1-14)
As often in the Johannine literature, we have a beautiful glimpse of what is really happening behind the scenes. Matthew and Luke give us neat factual narratives of events that took place in Roman Judea 2,000 years ago, but here, here in John, is where we find the meat of the matter. The Word became flesh.
There is something very unusual about God, logically. John expresses this in his bold statement, "The logos was God." Logos, "word," in Greek is the intelligible content of speech. A proposition, if you will. A statement, a truth, a story, a message. It is the content, the meaning. The Meaning was God. And the Meaning became flesh. Huh?
The Scholastics expressed something like this when they said of God things like, "his essence includes existence." Or they sometimes explained that you and I represent the instantiations of essences, but God - God is His essence. God is something deep, something logical. He has His existence in the realm of logical truth, God exists the way 2+2=4. And yet ... personal. He is no mere abstraction. He is at once the Deep Truth of the universe and a person (or three), a living entity actually existing in the world, existing as you and I do, only infinitely more so. The logos was God.
Here is a highly exalted picture of eternal glory that is positively unimaginable! "He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him." And so the Word, the logos, the Meaning, the Rational Principle brought the world into existence, and brought the world to order. Christ was that Word God spoke in the beginning when He commanded, "let there be light!" And the Word of God is effective, it is potent, it is irresistable. And there was light. "And the Light shines in the darkness, but the darkness did not comprehend it."
The word "comprehend" here is like the English word "grasp." We speak of "grasping" a message or a truth, to mean that we understand it, but this use is figurative. Really the word means to grab hold of something, and so here. The word here also possesses a definitely hostile sense. This is expressed by the NKJV footnote which gives the alternative translation, "overcome." The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it. It completely fails to grasp the situation taking place around it. It can't get a grip. It has no way to work against, to react to, this light. The darkness is baffled.
Long lay the world
In sin and error pining
'Til He appeared
And the soul felt its worth
The thrill of hope!
The weary world rejoices!
For yonder breaks
A new and glorious morn!
The word became flesh, and we beheld His glory, glory as of the only begotten of the Father. And the darkness was baffled.
In the beginning the Word was God. In Him was life and that life was the Light of men. And the Word became flesh. And the darkness was baffled.
Not only is the Eternal Word - this logical construct, this eternal truth, this deep organizing principle of the universe, the meaning of all things - not only is this Word a Person, but this Person became a Man. And we beheld His glory. Not just glanced at, but beheld, gazed upon, stared at. John writes as an old man, remembering. "We, my fellow disciples and I, we for three years were looking, gazing intently, at His glory, glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth!" The Eternal Word became human, and moved in with us. The darkness was baffled.
I once heard a pastor giving a Christmas message refer to something Robert Lewis Stevenson said as a child. The story is that the young Stevenson saw the lamp-lighter out the window of a home in London and exlaimed, "Look! A man poking holes in the darkness!" The darkness was baffled. The glory of God came down to earth and rested upon a Man, a Man full of grace and truth, a Man who, little did we know, was the Eternal Word of God - God Himself. What could the darkness do? How to react? How much darkness does it take to extinguish the light of a single lamp? And here, not a lamp, not a hole poked in the darkness, but a tear, a rip, and suddenly, all heaven breaks loose upon the earth. "And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying, 'Glory to God in the highest, and on earth, peace, goodwill toward men!'" And the darkness trembled, quivered, and gave way.
And so the Light was born into the world. "He was in the world, and the world was made through Him." Suddenly, in that instant, the Creator, the Sustainer of the world, the Eternal Word, the Meaning of it all, was here, among us, in the form of ... What? A baby? In a barn? In a backwater province of the ancient Roman Empire? The illegitimate son of a poor carpenter from Galilee?
And so the story has its meaning. And what a meaning it is! "The thrill of hope" indeed. The God who saves, here among us, humbling Himself to be the least among us, although He was before us and is eternally, completely, necessarily. And one day that baby would be the sacrifice for us, that sin might be punished to fulfill the righteous requirement of the Law. He bled and died. And so, once for all, the darkness perished.
Merry Chrismas.
So I was looking at the Greek text of Matthew 27 today (for those of you who have not read my posts on these subjects before, I have been studying classical Greek at Penn for two years now and have been taking some time on my own to look at the text of the NT), and I noticd that Pilate twice (vv. 17, 22) identifies Jesus of Nazareth with the phrase, Iesous hos legomenos Christos, "Jesus, who is called 'Christ.'" The reason I thought this was curious is that it lacks the article (equivalent of the English word "the"). My first intuition was that if the article was added, that is, if the phrase was Iesous hos legomenos hos Christos, then the phrase would be "Jesus, who they say is the Appointed One," and I wondered, at first, if perhaps Pilate, being Roman, didn't really understand what all this "Messiah" stuff was, and was using christos not substantively, but simply as an adjective attributed to Jesus, in which case the correct translation would be "Jesus, who is called 'anointed,'" with a "whatever the heck that means" implied by the context. However, my intuition may very well have been based on English rather than Greek (English "Anointed" vs. "the anointed one"). To research this point, I used the crosswalk.com Greek Lexicon to find all the occurences of christos in Matthew (I ignored occurrences of the phrase "Jesus Christ", assuming that that was a different case than the one I was interested in). The result was somewhat surprising. Christos occurs without the article and without the name Iesous immediately preceding or following it only four times, and three are in the phrase Iesous hos legomenos Christos (two of these are uttered by Pilate in chapter 27, the third is at 1:16, in the genealogy). The fourth usage is in 26:68 where Jesus is addressed as Christe, the vocative case of Christos. The surprising conclusion that I have come to is that Matthew is using Christos (in his own mouth in 1:16, and in the mouths of Romans in the other three cases) as a proper name of Jesus.
Perhaps this is not surprising to some people. The reason it surprises me is that I was always taught that Christ was not part of Jesus' name, but rather a title.
In fact, Matthew does not seem to use the word always this way, but sometimes seems to treat it as a surname, just as Peter was a surname of Simon Bar-Jonah. Surnames in the ancient world were primarily meaningful (in the Bible, usually very deeply meaningful) nicknames used to distinguish between people with the same first name. For instance, in a few texts of 27:16, Barabbas's first name seems to be Jesus as well, so that Pilate is asking, "which Jesus do you want me to release - the one who is called 'Barabbas', or the one who is called 'Christ?'" (As for the significance of the name "Barabbas", it happens to look suspiciously similar to the Aramaic for "son of my daddy." I don't read Aramaic, but it has been guessed that this may have been a name this bandit/insurrectionist went by to hide his identity.)
What effect does this have on translation? Well, I would suggest, first, that where Christos is used as a proper name it should always be transliterated (i.e., rendered as a proper name, "Christ" with a capital C, in English translations). Second, it seems that we can identify some cases where it is not used as a proper noun. For instance, both Matthew 22:42 and 24:5 are obvious cases where it is not a name, but a title. In these cases we should probably NOT transliterate, but render the word as "the Appointed One" (a rendering I was convinced of by my interaction with The New Testament in Plain English Blog) or something similar. Of course, the meaning of the name Christ should be footnoted at its first use in a given book. Note also that, since this is a blog post and not a dissertation, I haven't looked at the uses of the word in the rest of the NT, let alone all of early Christian literature, so I couldn't say just yet whether this should be extended to the rest of NT translation, or if it only applies to Matthew.
Anyway, for those of you who read this far in expectation of some kind of theological point, I don't really have one, I just ran across this today and thought it was interesting. I also thought that if I posted it and I happened to be greatly mistaken in this matter, someone would be good enough to tell me.
Douglas Groothuis, professor of philosophy at Denver Seminary, meditates on Jesus as a philosopher in a post today on his blog, Culture Watch: Thoughts of a Constructive Curmudgeon. The article makes a good read and asks an important question, Why has there been so little serious study of Jesus as a philosopher to date? I have long propounded a belief that Paul has a sophisicated philosophy of mind, and John a philosophical cosmology, but what of Jesus Himself? Professor Groothuis points to a couple of passages suggesting a deeply philosophical outlook in the thought of Jesus; a devotion to reason and thorough examination of the world. In particular, Groothuis suggests that Matthew 7:1-5 is significant not to ethics directly, but to the epistemology of ethics (i.e., the question of how we can know ethical truths), since a failure to apply our ethical standards objectively, applying the same standards to ourselves which we apply to others, impedes our ability to make ethical judgments. I think this area could easily yield much fruitful analysis, for both our understanding of Christian doctrine, and philosophy in general.