Sarx

As I blogged a while ago, reading Dom Gregory Dix’ Jew and Greek, I was confused and surprised by his dual assertions that:

A) When meeting Gentiles, Jewish ideas about Jesus’ divine power needed to be expressly stated by assertions of Jesus’ divinity.
B) Nothing much changed as the Church evolved from a sect of Judaism to a mostly-Gentile movement.

But it makes sense, from a cultural standpoint. Even today, we hear about Rabbis who are especially holy and maybe even the Messiah. But we never hear of Jews saying Rabbi X is the Son of God and God Incarnate. Such concepts arise from Gentiles and from a Gentile reading of the Old Testament (and, specifically, from a Gentile reading of a Greek Translation of the Old Testament). Here is the original post on the topic from 2007. Read the discussion and you’ll find a link to part II. I’m most thankful to Fr E, William Tighe and Chris Jones for profound contributions to that discussion. (Rereading it for this post was a sheer joy!)

Equally confusing and surprising, in my mind, is Rick Fabian’s assertion (in Worship at St Gregory’s serialised in these pages) that the huge (especially Western) focus on the idea of Jesus Substitutionary Atonement arises not from Jewish teaching about sin and sacrifice, but rather from a pagan idea of Sacrifice imposed on an exaggerated and very late Jewish idea sin - both of which are used to misunderstand how Jesus would have seen himself. Check out the Excursus on Eucharistic Sacrifice for more information on this topic.

I want to accept these arguments as read for the purpose of this post and explore two questions:

The issue, in both, seems to be an assumption that a terrible error was made in the transfer (translation?) of Messianic teaching from Jewish to Greco-Roman culture. Is it important or even possible to go back to those earlier doctrinal positions?

What would a church with these positions look like?

Let me set the scene, as I’m editing the text of the Excursus on Eucharistic Sacrifice. I’ve read it several times before, of course, but I missed, entirely, the implications of the text. I usually read it to be denying something that I thought terribly important: the idea of Substitutionary Atonement. After I became Orthodox I learned the such an idea is only one of many possible positions within the Church’s tradition. Indeed, it is neither the most important nor the most popular in the Eastern Churches. It seems only to arise in the west after Augustine and only grows in popularity among Latin Christians rather than among the Greeks. But for most Western Christians it forms the basic filtre through which we read the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures and from which we grow nearly all of our theology (either in response or reaction).

Rick writes as one presenting a new idea. What comes across is this “radical new idea” that’s not new in the Church. But it’s a shocker, none the less. And the historical theory is good-or-bad (I’m no historian), but his ideas, slightly rephrased (perhaps without his appeal to Jewish/Gentile history), are 100% Orthodox. For more on this, listen to Bishop Kalistos Ware discuss different theologies of the Cross. Go to Holy Cross’ media page, click on “the Cross”. In other words they are a challenge to someone who is not familiar with the spectrum.

As I sat reading Rick’s words, suddenly it dawns on me that what he is implying (without saying it clearly) is that the West got the focus out of whack and he’s going to return to the Eastern (lack of) focus. His reason for doing so was blamed on the Byzantine Transfer of the Gifts of the Gospel from Jewishness to Gentileness from the Yiddishkeit to the Goyishkeit. It’s a common bugaboo and one that is easy to blame: we’re still discovering things about that Transfer of Gifts. There’s nearly nothing in writing! The thing that is clearest in my mind is that we have conflicting reports from the Council of Jerusalem (in Acts and in the letters of Paul) and so it seems clear that, from the beginning, the problem of “edited memory” was very real.

In his comment to Part Two, Fr E (who was Fr. Dcn. E then) says,

The other logical problem with calling the earliest Church something else is that, without gallons of proof, you are essentially making the claim that you can unpeel the hypothetical multiple layers of development to correctly discern what the original layer was.

A year and more later I wonder if that’s the issue. Do we want to “Go back to the way it was”? What is the problem is not the transfer between cultures, but something else?

One of the most common tropes in modern theological writing (from any POV) is the “winners get to write history”. From this arises, “My view is right because we won.” Just as much as we get “My view is right, but it was edited out by the historians.” The one says winners get to write history and other points of view are not important. The other says winners get to write history and we’re going to un-write it.

The question is not “Can we go back” to the clearly Arian point of view hypothesised by Dix, or the Gentile-free idea of sacrifice offered by Fabian. Rather, the question we should ask is “Can we allow for a Christianity where the spectrum of theology is not collapsed into only the bleeding edge?”

Accepting a view where development happens (as another comment offered in that series says, the Church is always becoming more Orthodox) should cause us to wonder what must happen to those who are left behind? Anglicanism is currently wrestling with this issue, as is Rome (Lefebvrists). Orthodoxy lives it with just about every change: the Calendar, the Russian Revolution, the revision of liturgy. Dix hypothesises a time when the split was between Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians. Fabian discusses the same split. The Church has been walking this way for a long time.

How would it be if we found a different way to evolve?

We (left and right) are so hung up on doctrinal purity, following the examples of our ancestors all the way back to the 2nd Century. We forget the example of the NT: of the different memories of the Council of Jerusalem and how those conflicting memories both made it into the Bible. But more importantly, the function of the Council seems different: gathered around St James, St Peter, St Paul, (etc) the Church is asking how do we hold all parties together. The point of the Council seemed to be “how can we include this new thing” rather than “how can we exclude this new thing.”

The history of every council since then, every doctrinal question, is written so as to ask “How can we exclude those that are clearly wrong?”

Is there room in a church for a spectrum of theologies (that may be different stages of historical development) or do those theologies imply instant division? Can we found communities that embrace evolutionary change, while still holding hands with the rest of the community? Is it possible to include those (left and right) who seek to exclude everyone else?

Or are we condemned by some sin (Human Arrogance disguised as Divine Right) to always exclude those with whom we disagree rather than simply admitting we disagree and moving in love together after God in the humble way of Jesus?