The text of the book can be downloaded here:
— Part One: the Bible
Audio files of the chapters can be downloaded here:
— Chapter One: The Torah and the Former Prophets
Herewith follow the rules:
Preparations: First, determine how the variable categories will be directed: the “Date of Death” category may favor earlier or later saints, and the “Orders of Ministry” may favor Patriarchs (magisterial rules) or the Baptized (kingdom rules). Then deal the cards.
The Orders of Ministry are: Apostate, Baptized, Monastic, Deacon, Presbyter, Bishop, Patriarch. (“Apostate” always loses, whether by Magisterial or Kingdom rules.)
The degrees of Asceticism are: Virgin, Celibate, Chaste, Penitent, Unchaste. (The distinction between Chaste and Celibate is elusive and sometimes arbitrary. Virgins are always women; Celibates are men whose theology or practice foregrounded their sexual purity.)
The degrees of Orthodoxy are: Heresiarch, Heretic, Heterodox, Ambiguous, Orthodox, Theologian, and Doctor.
The degrees of Martyrdom are: Megamartyr (a martyr under extraordinary circumstances), Martyr, Confessor, Exile, Simplex (for those who just plain died).
The Play: Shuffle and deal the cards.
A turn consists of each player looking at the top card of their deck. The first player chooses one of the categories: Date of Death, Order, Asceticism, Orthodoxy, or Martyrdom. Players then compare the characteristics of the two cards in the category that the chooser indicated, and the player whose card is higher takes both cards and becomes the next chooser.
If the chooser’s card surpasses the responder’s card, the chooser gets both cards, puts them on the bottom of their deck, and and keeps the prerogative to choose the category when the next cards are drawn.
If the responder’s card is equal or higher when then cards are compared, the responder gets both cards, puts them at the bottom of their deck, and earns the prerogative to choose the category when the next cards are drawn. [Alternate Rule: In keeping with the multi-player option below, the responder may choose a category after the chooser; in case of a tie, the responder’s category determines who wins the cards. If both categories result in a tie, the next pair of cards will decide who wins.]
Multi-Player Option: If more than two players are to play, each will choose a category in turn. If the first player’s choice results in a tie, the second player’s choice will decide who gets all the cards; if the second player’s choice results in a tie, the third player’s category choice will decide. In the improbable event that all categories match, the last player wins the cards for that turn.
The designs for the cards may be downloaded as PDFs or from the Disseminary’s Flickr site:
I don’t want to persuade anybody of any particular biblical interpretation today. In fact, for today’s purposes, I want to strengthen even those interpretations with which I disagree, because my assignment is not to arm-twist anyone into thinking this or that, but to help clarify the grounds on which we can exercise our best interpretive judgment.
I try to frame the task this way: How can we best cooperate with the work of the Spirit? We know that he Spirit can accomplish whatever God wills; we can’t stop God. But we may, and sometimes do, resist and impede the Spirit rather than cooperating with the Spirit, and today I want to help us dedicate our energies toward cooperating and not resisting.
How do we resist the Spirit’s work of reconciliation? Oftentimes we resist the Spirit by making flat absolute claims about what something means. We may be right, of course — I’m not suggesting that you aren’t right; I’m pointing out that simply saying “I’m right and you aren’t” (however true the claim may be) doesn’t advance the discussion, doesn’t give our sisters and brothers any particular reason to assent. The claim, “This means X” short-circuits an opportunity to learn; the claim, “The reason I say ‘This means X’ is that [da da da da da da da]” gives us something to work with, helps us to see the basis for an interpretive claim. When we dig our heels in and say only, “I’m right and that ends it,” we give the Spirit less to work with in convincing our interlocutors that they should change their minds.
We impede the Spirit by introducing claims that others can’t examine or test. When we say, “The Spirit is doing a new thing here,” well, who’s to say? People over here think so, people over there don’t. That’s not evidence in an argument, it’s another flat claim — but it raises the stakes by introducing the idea that some people recognize the Spirit at work where other benighted souls don’t. In the context of a discussion, an exploration of how we should interpret the Bible, I find such claims insulting and presumptuous.
We impede the Spirit if we admit of no possibility that we may be wrong. I frequently cite Article 19 of the Articles of Religion: “As the Church of Jerusalem, Alexandria, and Antioch have erred: so also the Church of Rome hath erred, not only in their living and manner of Ceremonies, but also in matters of Faith.” If the Church is susceptible to error even in matters of the faith, then all the more each of us must be ready to consider the possibility that our favored interpretation may be erroneous. I’m not saying anyone specific is wrong; I’m simply saying that if we refuse to admit the possibility that we’re as fallible as the Churches of Jerusalem, Alexandria, Antioch, and Rome, that we give the Holy Spirit less to work with.
This is a hard one: if we simply pick interpreters based on their proposing readings that throw the names of our favored interpreters at one another, we aren’t advancing the work of the Spirit. We can help others understand our arguments if we explain the basis of what we propose, and we can strengthen those claims by associating them with recognizable authorities — but our authorities aren’t intrinsically more authoritative than their authorities (they don’t deliberately seek out inferior scholars, or less admirable theologians; once we get past the initial invocation of reputable witnesses, we need to let go (respectfully) of them. The game of “my hero is a greater scholar than your scholar” doesn’t facilitate the Spirit’s mission of bringing us to the mind of Christ. Yes, you have favorite expert interpreters who propound good arguments for your position, but we have favorite expert interpreters who propound good arguments for our position. There’s no disinterested point from which to ascertain that one person’s favorite has formed a stronger argument than another’s (if we could tell, we wouldn’t opt for the weaker side).[*]
Finally, I suggest that we impede the work of the Spirit when we ascribe others’ positions to motives less worthy than our own. When we arrive at our interpretations on the basis of high-minded, objective reflection, and explain our neighbors’ interpretations as the ideologically-determined, morally-compromised (or “bigoted”) capitulation to mortal frailty, we give these neighbors no reason to see matters any other way. We can make room for the Spirit by accounting our adversaries every bit as intelligent and clear-sighted as we, or we can resist the Spirit by abusing and insulting our sisters and brothers.
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The conception of Christ was perfectly natural from the standpoint of His Person and purpose, and it could hardly fail to differ in method from the conception of a purely human child; for the causal antecedents of nativity determine the rank in being of what is born. But when considered from the standpoint of the native capacity of a human virgin, His conception was plainly supernatural and, in the order of sensible phenomena, miraculous. The effect - the entrance of very God into human life - transcends the potentialities of the sphere in which it emerged, and therefore demanded the working of a transcendant factor, the Holy Spirit; but this did not interrupt the continued validity of the laws of purely human birth. The event was not contra-natural, but super-natural.
Elaine Pagels, Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas. New York: Random House, $24.95.
In Beyond Belief, Elaine Pagels presents a touching, insightful series of chapters whose common thread proposes that Christianity has lost touch with its own truest insights.
Pagels, whose scholarly works on diverse versions of early Christianity have consistently attracted a broad popular audience, now addresses her readers directly with a readable collection of essays that rest on her outstanding scholarship in the field of Gnosticism and early Christianity. Instead of teaching her readers how to understand better the earliest centuries of the church, however, she here invites them to re-imagine a contemporary Christianity that more closely resembles the faith she sees in the ancient texts she has studied so thoroughly.
Pagels frames the work in the context of her own spiritual life. From the devastating grief of her young son's death to a moment of exaltation shared with her daughter at a Christmas Eve service, she has pondered her persistent attraction to and aversion from Christianity, and this book begins to explain those feelings.
As a tract aimed at evangelizing its readers into a sort of non-conforming faith, the book derives its strength from Pagels’s manifest commitment to the vision that she describes. Here unfold the passions for ancient sources that lurked latent in her more strictly academic books; here she makes explicit connections between her scholarship and her spirituality. Few readers will not be moved by Pagels’s accounts of how her evolving understanding of Christianity comforted and clarified for her the ways of God and humanity.
Moreover, she rebukes orthodox Christianity for its narrow insistence on doctrinal conformity. Time and again, she adduces the weak arguments and awful consequences of authoritarian theological leadership. Pagels does not soft-pedal the harsh language that church leaders directed against those with whom they disagreed, and she invites readers to identify more closely with the free thinkers whom she admires than with Athanasius, Irenaeus, and other bishops of the dominant tradition.
Finally, she advances theological arguments in favor of the traditions she favors. She sets the Gospel of John over against the Gospel of Thomas and suggests that John was written as a somewhat peevish rebuke to Thomas’s mystical spirituality. She argues that the orthodox churches committed themselves to a fourfold gospel canon and to the creedal definition of sound faith; thus they shut out the profound spiritual insights of the many texts that she has devoted her career to understanding, translating, and expounding. Pagels lobbies gently for Christians to devote their energies more generously to spiritual growth, so that they might welcome the resources that non-canonical texts (and non-Christian faiths) stand to offer. Pagels sketches a non-judgmental, deeply personal, open-hearted faith that stands, as her title suggests, beyond mere belief.
The chapters of the book follow one another only loosely, and the book would benefit from more clarity at many points. Although the book seems to be written for non-specialists, Pagels doesn’t devote much attention to the content of any of her preferred texts; the book’s subtitle mentions the Gospel of Thomas, but Pagels expounds the Gospel of Truth, the Acts of John, the Secret Gospel of John, and other texts as much as Thomas. Her argument that the canonical Gospel of John marginalizes Thomas sounds forced; if John wanted Thomas to appear heretical, John would hardly have shown Thomas identifying Jesus as “my Lord and my God” (John 20:28). Pagels’s loose argumentation will attract readers already disposed to be sympathetic to her position more than it will win over either committed mainstream Christians or critical nonpartisans.
No one can gainsay the testimony of Pagels’s own experience; she writes with grace about her heart-breaking pain and about the consolations she finds in the texts that orthodox Christians rejected. At the same time, it’s not exactly clear how this functions as an argument. Many people, after all, have experienced consolation from reading many different texts. Presumably some further criterion of spiritual soundness rules out The Greatest Salesman in the World, while including the Gospel of Truth — but Pagels doesn’t articulate the basis on which one might make that judgment. Indeed, it would be difficult for her so to do without sounding judgmental in the same sort of way as the early bishops whom she chides. The necessity of discernment, however, lies at the heart of many spiritual traditions, and at precisely this point, Pagels leaves her readers to their own devices.
Pagels justifiably deplores the violent words and harsh actions with which early Christians distanced themselves from the various constituencies they deemed heretical. That granted, the questions concerning the ethos of dissenting groups involves some further complexities. Early Christians seem sharp-tongued in debate, but that property applies not only to ancient Christians, nor only to the orthodox. Church leaders of various persuasions were quick to stifle dissent, and when the Empire deployed its coercive power to settle ecclesiastical conflicts, both sides of the dispute customarily hustled to win imperial favor and thwart their enemies. Heretical groups spoke roughly about their orthodox adversaries, and took advantage of state power to oppress theological opponents. If we should apply contemporary Western standards of politeness and toleration to ancient theologians, we should apply them even-handedly.
That rhetorical equity could even extend to the ways we weigh contemporary church policies and theologies. Pagels decries the practice of requiring participants in religious congregations to assent to things they don’t believe, and proposes her more inclusive Christianity as though it were the only alternative to fundamentalism. In so doing, she conceals from view the many Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant theologians who have spent recent decades explaining a variety of ways that doctrines do not function as propositions to which believers must assent. A reader who wasn’t already acquainted with the last forty years of theological deliberation might think that Pagels’s position represents the only non-propositional approach to Christian faith.
Pagels’s book does present an appealing case for a spirituality that prescinds from assessing truth-claims other than its own reliance on a universal inner light, a theology that dovetails with the felt needs of many in contemporary Western culture. This spiritual path offers solace and affirmation, indeed; a seeker risks misplaced faith only when she or he neglects the authoritative guide that abides within her or him.
On the other hand, as much as the contemporary cultural moment favors comfort over criticism, everyone benefits when sharp minds lend themselves to the task of assessing the stakes in matters spiritual. If the dissenters in the early church were wiser than their orthodox rivals, Pagels could help readers by citing specific reasons for such a judgment and promulgating some criteria by which one might recognize sound (and mistaken) faith. Her approach to spirituality shows an admirable openness and fluidity, but it remains to be seen whether this recipe offers hungry souls a hearty, nourishing soup on which one might thrive, or simply a watery broth that slakes the thirst with neither nutrients nor flavoring.
We use Moveable Type weblogging software for other projects, though — for our web publication of study materials such as Francis Hall’s Theological Outlines, for the Polycarp Project, and perhaps for an online seminar. We may also add other weblogs to the project, sometime.
]]>Each of the quaestiones appears on a separate page, with footnotes in the “Extended” area of the page format. As many readers may want to dispute, defend, or nuance Hall’s representation of pertinent topics, we have left comments open on the pages.
Readers will appreciate Hall’s work to varying extents, but its presence here demonstrates the possibility and value of online publishing (with commenting and CSS-based layout) via a system such as Moveable Type.
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