Category Archives: Scripture

An Interesting Carolingian Reading List

Many of the readers here will know the name of Notker Balbus (the Stammer). He is the monk of St Gall who is famous for his chant sequences. Upon reading through de Lubac, I’ve learned that he’s also the author of an interesting little treatise called On the Interpreters of the Holy Scriptures. The scan from the PL may be found here. Fascinating stuff—it goes a quick glimpse into how these folks went about the study of Scripture, who they turned to first and how they categorized who they read. Here’s a quick paraphrase of his section on the Gospels:

…For Matthew, Jerome[‘s Commentary] should be sufficient for you. As Mark is the abbreviator of Matthew, so Bede is the abbreviator of Jerome [referring to Bede’s commentary on Mark]. So the unique Luke by the broadminded Bede so much so that everything one discovers in the Gospel is touched upon in his one volume. The cloud-soaring Augustine (among* others) pursues the heaven-seeking John [Tractates on John]. After these is the book of Augustine On the Sermon of the Lord on the Mount according to Matthew. Also his Questions on the whole Gospel. Furthermore also the Collection of Eugippus. Furthermore the homilies of John Chrysostom, Origen, Augustine, Gregory, Maximus [of Turin], Leo, Bede, and the responses of Jerome to the questions of Algasia and Denobia.

* I wonder if this should be “above” or “without equal”…

(The high-flying rhetoric around John is a trope of Augustine’s explanation of John’s symbol of the eagle at the start of Augustine’s De Consensu which, interestingly, doesn’t get a mention…)

Clearly, I’m interested in the list of recommended homilies. Does the line-up sound familiar to anyone? It’s practically the table of contents of Paul the Deacon. Also interesting is the fact that Paul doesn’t get a mention—nor does Smaragdus’s collection on the Gospels and Epistles.  Bede is the only author who could enough roughly be considered a contemporary (and even that’s a stretch).

Scripture Trouble at the Breviary

Over Christmas we’ve been having some Scripture trouble at the breviary… The problems stem from one of the initial decisions I made about the project. Rather than selecting out all of the readings individually, I decided to install entire Bibles, then to install a parsing mechanism that would determine which passages to select. This gives the breviary a tremendous amount of flexibility, because it opens up the option of putting in new translations and new lectionaries without have to go and cut and paste a whole new edition.

Unfortunately, it also means working out how to deal with various complications in a lectionary with likes to leave out verses in the middle of a selection.

Too, the interactions between the kalendar codes, the lectionary codes, and the Bible tables is one of the reasons why I say the site is still in beta.

Today’s problem has been solved and I’m working on the lingering issues…

Two Scriptural Notes on the MP Readings

  • The first reading, Amos 5:1-17 has one of my favorite bits of prophetic poetry in it, one that gets used for an opening sentence at evening prayer. Yet the context is important, especially understanding exactly what’s being said. Here’s the bit in full:

For thus saith the LORD unto the house of Israel, Seek ye me, and ye shall live: But seek not Bethel, nor enter into Gilgal, and pass not to Beersheba: for Gilgal shall surely go into captivity, and Bethel shall come to nought. Seek the LORD, and ye shall live; lest he break out like fire in the house of Joseph, and devour it, and there be none to quench it in Bethel. Ye who turn judgment to wormwood, and leave off righteousness in the earth, Seek him that maketh the seven stars and Orion, and turneth the shadow of death into the morning, and maketh the day dark with night: that calleth for the waters of the sea, and poureth them out upon the face of the earth: The LORD is his name

It’s important to catch the significance of the places mentioned at the beginning: Bethel, Gilgal, and Beersheba. These are all names we’ve heard before, of course, but they have a special significance. We often have this idea—because it’s pressed quite hard by the Deuteronomistic tradition—that the Jerusalem Temple was the only worship site where the Israelites ever worshiped. That’s not accurate, especially given the seperation of the Northern and Southern Kingdoms after Solomon. Jerusalem was in the South—Northerners didn’t go there so much… In any case, these three places were all major religious centers discussed in the OT histories.

Bethel was the site of Jacob’s famous ladder and his reception of the name Israel. The Ark of the Covenant was kept there before its move to Shiloh and Jeroboam after Israel and Judah split made the shrine at Bethel the theological counterpart of the Temple at Jerusalem (complete with golden calves).

Gilgal was the site of a major shrine mentioned repeatedly in Joshua through 1 Saumel. This is where the Israelites crossed the Jordan with a miraculous rolling back of the water, twelve stones were set up as witnesses, where sacrifices were brought, and where Saul was anointed king.

Beersheba is also one of the great early centers of Israelite religion. It is mentioned several times in Genesis as a worship site in the time of the patriarchs. Other references make it clear that major religious activity happened there—but none of them are as explicit about it as the two above.

The point that Amos (who was operating in the Northern Kingdom or else one suspects Jerusalem may well have made the list…) is making here is that seeking the places of sanctuary and great sacrificial worship are not enough—one must seek the Lord. Sacrifice and adherence to the ritual laws is not enough and is incomplete without also adhering to the social laws that mandate justice for the oppressed and care for widows, orphans, and sojourners.  I don’t think Amos is being “anti-liturgical” here as some would like to make it, rather, he’s once again calling Israel to observance of the whole Law with all its demands, not just the easier and more publicly performable parts.

  • The Daily Office lectionary has, well, its issues… In particular, it tends to jump around when we get near to significant feasts and one wonders what gets missed. Indeed even in its continuous reading it seems not to be so continuous. I remember a complaint on the Ship of Fools a while back that it specifically skipped the condemnations of sexual immorality from 2 Peter; this was produced as proof of TEC’s screwing around with the Scriptures. Let me explain that today by way of noting the second reading from Jude 1. Yes, the Daily Office lectionary does leave out a fairly large bit of 2 Peter 2—but that’s because 2 Peter 2:1-22 comes directly from Jude 1:4-16. I’m guessing the compilers decided it didn’t make sense to read the exact same passage within a few days of each other… And yes, this is one of those on-going conversations in Scripture that bls is talking about.

What He Said. And Then Some

He being Christopher in this case.

And I’ll go a step further.

We have to have constant engagement between content and method. As Christopher reminds, at the end of the day it’s method that makes one patristic, not simply parrotting patristic content.

How about Scripture?

I will argue that Scripture is a different case as we recognize it to be of a higher order than the patristic writings. It is a more direct channel of God’s self-revelation. And yet Scripture points us continually beyond itself to God and the person of Jesus Christ the Word Made Flesh.

Content matters. Interpreting the content is a matter of method, however.

And watching Paul play with the Old Testament in passages like Gal 2 or Romans 4—or looking at the entire Book of Hebrews—we see them making unusual (even shocking) moves in light of the revelation of the reality of the Word Made Flesh.

That’s what keeps us Scriptural. Not just knowing the content but following the method to utilize the dead letter to assist us in encountering the Living Christ.

Of course, as I’ve said before and I’ll say again, I think Augustine totally nails method in On Christian Teaching, especially 3.10. That’s patristic content that delivers a key to the method.

Apocrypha in the Daily Office

In case you were wondering, the Daily Office contains:

  • Much of the first four chapters of 1 Maccabees (but none from the other 12),
  • 5 verses from 2nd Esdras,
  • Bits of Baruch 3 and 4
  • Quite a goodly selection from Ecclesiasticus,
  • Wisdom of Solomon gets some readings in there too.

Too, there are the stealth additions—Canticles 1/12, 2/13, and 14.

Scripture and Naughty Bits

While doing lectio this morning, I ran across one of the passages in Scripture that most clearly spells out the Biblical Approach to “the naughty bits”—you know, that dangling portion of the human anatomy that gets the church and Christians into so much trouble. So, without further ado…:

5So also the tongue is a small member, yet it boasts of great exploits. How great a forest is set ablaze by a small fire! 6And the tongue is a fire. The tongue is placed among our members as a world of iniquity; it stains the whole body, sets on fire the cycle of nature, and is itself set on fire by hell. 7For every species of beast and bird, of reptile and sea creature, can be tamed and has been tamed by the human species, 8but no one can tame the tongue—a restless evil, full of deadly poison.

Almost makes you think the Cistercians are on to something…

Had St James known about blogging, fingers would probably have received a mention as well.

Benedictine Spirituality of the Offices

Here’s a nice little excerpt at Speaking to the Soul today.

The image of water on rock is a favorite one that comes out of the Sayings of the Desert Fathers. Abba Poemen is one of the greater fathers who appears quite a bit in the Sayings, having a large collection of his own and appearing frequently in the sayings of others. According to Benedicta Ward, one-seventh of the sayings are his and his material may have formed the original core of the Sayings material. Here’s the full text from which the image comes as found in his saying 183:

Abba John, who had been exiled by the Emperor Marcian, said, “We went to Syria one day to see Abba Poemen and we wanted to ask him about purity of heart. But the old man did not know Greek and no interpreter could be found. So, seeing our embarrassment, the old man began to speak Greek saying, ‘The nature of water is soft, that of stone is hard; but if a bottle is hung above the stone, allowing the water to fall drop by drop, it wears away the stone. So it is with the word of God; it is soft and our heart is hard, but the man who hears the word of God often, opens his heart to the fear of God.'” (Ward, Sayings of the Desert Fathers, 192-3)

Calibration

bls reminds us again of the truly important things that give us perspective. In harmony with that, Br. Stephen of Sub Tuum has made available the Cistercian Office of the Dead from Spring Bank’s new psalter.

I’ve just finished Michael Casey’s Sacred Reading: The Ancient Art of Lectio Divina which I highly recommend. While discussing it with the other adult ed teacher at church on Sunday we found ourselves talking about the great overarching hermeneutical principles, our preeminent guides to how we find meaning in the Scriptures. I returned, as always, to what I consider to be Augustine’s best phrasing of what all the Fathers and the Church rightly teach:

…Whatever appears in the divine Word that does not literally pertain to virtuous behavior or to the truth of faith you must take to be figurative. Virtuous behavior pertains to the love of God and of one’s neighbor; the truth of faith pertains to a knowledge of God and of one’s neighbor.  For the hope of everyone lies in his own conscience in so far as he knows himself to be becoming more proficient in the love of God and of his neighbor. . . . Scripture teaches nothing but charity, nor condemns anything except cupidity, and in this way shapes the minds of men. (Augustine, On Christian Teaching, 3.10)

This indeed is Christian proficiency—growth in love and virtue. And, mentioning again one of the gems from Thornton’s book of the same name, he reminds us that there is an objective standard by which we can learn if our prayer life/habits are effective: our prayer is working if we find that we are sinning less—and therefore loving more.

Learning to Love the OT in a Marcionite Church

The commenter Walmart Episcopalian has made a great comment down below that shouldn’t get lost. Here it is:

I know the discussion has moved on to the Bishop-elect of Northern Michigan, but I wanted to continue our discussion about the Liturgy of the Word.

I spoke with my Rector about the Liturgy of the Word, following our discussion here. His experience as a lay person and then as a priest tells him that most people are bored by the O.T. and Epistle and perk up during the Gospel because they have a greater sense of connection to it.

I was wondering if the Liturgy of the Word has lost its punch/relevance in a literate, information-saturated society where story-telling is not an exciting break in routine but something against which we learn to defend ourselves. I even wondered, to my shock and surprise, if returning to the proclamation of the Old Testament in the Liturgy was a good thing.

As the first reading, often the most difficult linguistically and most distant culturally, perhaps it causes shut-down among the people and by the time for the Epistle they’ve already glazed over and turned inward.

Also, the majority of Episcopalians I’ve met are crypto-marcionites, or maybe just marcionites. In Adult Ed. I constantly hear about how the God of Love would never countenance the killing of the Hivites, Jebusites, Perrizites, Egyptians, Amalekites et. al. and they simply don’t believe God had anything to do with it. They don’t believe the God of the Holiness Code is the God of Jesus.

They generally like the psalms, however, because most of the psalms address experiences in ways that are comprehensible to them. Except for the ones where the Psalmist curses his enemies or demands death, those make them uncomfortable.

Perhaps adding the OT was a bad idea for our marcionite church. Maybe the Hebrew Scriptures can only come back when the people again believe that the God of Hebrew Scriptures is the God of Jesus.

On the other hand, maybe we need to keep the OT so that we combat the marcionite tendency through proclamation if not in fact. (I would suspect the Bishop-elect of Northern Michigan would not be a big fan of the God of the Old Testament, the God who struck down Uzzah is not a God who trifles with his ‘otherness’ from humanity)

But there’s my current thought, boredom and Marcionism have gutted the liturgy of the Word. I don’t know how this could be addressed in practice. Any thoughts?

Indeed, I think this is of a piece with the issues surrounding the bishop-elect on Northern Michigan. Our people simple don’t know the Scriptures as well as they ought. This is especially true for the Old Testament.

Part of the issue is scope. The New Testament was written in and is concerned with events that happened within a fifty year span and many of the writings—especially the epistles—are focused enough an theological issues that they can be read without a whole lot of appeal to historical context. (Although I’d would never recommend divorcing them from said context.)

The OT is completely different. The events of which it speaks spans over a thousand years and involves a lot of odd places and things done by people with strange names.

I’ve recently come to some conclusions about how biblical teaching should be done in our parishes. I’m still working out how these will look in practice, but here’s the core of my thinking.

Proposal for Teaching the OT to Anglicans

Because of the issue of scope, clergy and congregations need a set of master narratives within which they can locate any particular OT text. These master narratives are:

1. Historical (I.e., an easily understandable grand sweep of Ancient Near Eastern history and Israel/Judah’s place in it.)

2. Geographical (Where the heck is Edom anyway? Or Babylon, Assyria, Carmel, Samaria (which Samaria!), etc.? We need a basic sense of what’s where.)

3. Literary (I.e., what are the major literary divisions on the OT [TaNaK is a good start…], what are the major genres, and what can we expect from these genres?)

4. Theological (I.e., what are the top 5 major themes running through-out the books that help us locate any particular text we read?)

Yes, these are a bit reductionistic—but any big picture view is. As fond as I am of adding nuance, people need a sense of the whole befgore nuance makes any sense.

The way into the whole of the OT is through the Psalms. It’s been observed by ancients and moderns alike that the Psalter is a microcosm of the OT as a whole. One the above four master narratives are in place, select psalms can be used to help familiarize people with how these things look on the ground. You start with the psalms, then move to the other books.

Does that make sense as a start?

Canticles. Again.

I keep going back and forth on the whole canticle issue. Deirdre has a nice article at the Cafe that looks at the Song of Judith and reminds us that when singing the canticles, it’s important to learn the stories from whence they come. That is, the canticle means a lot more when you consider its proper context and how it portrays God acting through Judith.

I note (indirectly) in the comments that the Song of Judith is one of the new canticles given us by EOW. I’ve discussed these in the past—especially with Christopher—concerning whether more canticles is a better choice. Following Deirdre’s logic, more is better because we get exposed to more songs that have literary contexts that folks may then be interested to go and learn. More Bible is always good.

My fear is that more canticles mean that we we don’t learn any of them well. In order for more canticles to be better they have to be sung/read regularly and in a discernable order.

I’m also a complete stick in the mud and refuse to budge on the Benedictus (Song of Zechariah) as the invariable second canticle of morning prayer which means that there’s really only one free spot in the rotation—the canticle after the first MP reading.

Ack! Fewer, more, what’s a liturgy geek committed to Scripture to do! Perhaps the Benedictine option is the best—weave more canticles in amongst the Psalter…