Whence Hermeneutic Authority?
Tony Jones has posted a paper (downloadable as a PDF) and long and well-thought out post on the Fathers and Councils and their Authority for us today.
Tony writes from an emergent and post-modern context.
I argued that we’re in conversation with the Fathers today, just as they were in conversation with one another in their day. I also posited that the victory of one theological position over another was as much a matter of politics and context as a matter of divine providence. Finally, the lack of marginalized voices in all of the ancient (and medieval and modern) theological debates should give us all pause.
Does that mean that the Councils and creeds and Fathers lack authority today? I hope not. But I hope that they will have a more credible authority if we understand all of the vicissitudes of their times. As in our day, they had pressures on them from all sides, and, while I in no way think this precludes God’s Spirit from guiding the process, it was not a unanimous and clean decision on, say, the dual-nature of Christ.
In the paper, he does a close reading of the old standard, “that which is believed always, everywhere and by all” and realises that, like Oakland, there’s no there there. Then he takes on the Council of Chalcedon, getting into the politics both secular and political that ended up in the first Great Schism.
The paper was rejected by Wheaton. Not Kosher enough for them. Personally, I think that’s a good thing!
Take a look over there. I’m working out some kind of reply in my head, but it’s mostly filtering through the context of my daily Bible posts. I’ll get around to posting something here as it digests.
Props to Emergent Village.
PS: here’s a quote from the paper itself:
You have heard it said that the emergent church values orthopraxy over orthodoxy, but I say to you, if orthodoxy is an event, then another veil has been torn. There is no difference between the two. ìOrthoparadoxy,î as my friend Dwight Friesen calls it, is the dialectical tension in which these two poles stand. Let me put it more boldly: there is no orthodoxy without orthopraxy. It doesnít exist. People may talk about it, but they also talk about unicorns.
Category: emergent, orthoparadoxy
Discussion: You came too late to this party
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Great post, and I agree with most all of it, especially the paragraph about orthopraxy and orthodoxy. But I must point out that the opposing view is preserved more often than we think. It begins with the Bible; Peter, James, and their side are allowed their say in their own canonized epistles, but of course Paul and his school dominate the New Testament canon. The opposing views from the era of the councils survive through the churches that split as well as references in the writings of various church Fathers. Rejected fathers like Tertullian and Origen are still widely read today, and there are many among us who think the church needs to reconsider their status. The Christians of seventh century central Arabia probably didn’t know much beyond that they were Christians and probably did not even know how to make the sign of the cross, but they had an influence on the stories in the Qur’an. I think more of the voices are out there than we think (although with my examples I am probably betraying my own cultural touchstones). Scholarship, scholarship, scholarship.
I may be wrong – but while the other voices are out there, I think the issue the writer was raising is that, generally, these voices end up outside the “real” Church.
There are more opposing voices out there, of course. Some have survived in spite of the attempt to silence them – I think of Arianism in Islam and the texts such as the Gospel of Thomas, ect.
The question is, when “many among us who think the church needs to reconsider” the status of the “rejected fathers” how wide are they willing to draw the circle?
What about the Christians of Eastern Asia that bring us the so-called Jesus Sutras, or the Peshita text of the scriptures?
These are equally important “other voices”
By saying “the church” we are assuming a certain cultural context; it is similar to those Orthodox bloggers who say that the Western Rite is the natural form of worship for Americans – what a huge assumption to make about the cultural makeup of America as well as the abilities of people to think outside of their own cultural context. My best friend is a doctoral student (in Toronto!) born and bred in the Church Of The East. He is very vocal about “the Church” and it is usually political rants about the COTE. He speaks often and with authority, and that is his reference point. In my college days I would naively engage CCC, Intervarsity, FCA, etc. about my (Orthodox) faith and they had no idea what I was babbling about. Our internet exchanges are similar; there is a lot more out there going than we think, and we are very much anchored in our own universe here, myself first among all, since I post largely based on my own chaotic Greek Orthodox life.