It’s probably a symptom of how deeply Apple has seduced our culture that many will read the title of this post as though it were the announcement of a new Jamie Smith app to be downloaded for their devices. In fact, I am just blogging an extended quotation from Smith about the problematic nature of Apple’s (and Samsung’s, etc.) touchscreen devices. Our family owns several of these, and we are, frankly, addicted to them. And I fear something will have to be done about it.

Don’t get me wrong. These devices are extremely useful, especially for missionaries in a foreign country without easy access to libraries and many books. Our iPads and iPhones give us the ability to read eBooks, to communicate face-to-face with friends back home via FaceTime or Skype, to take good photos for use on our blog and our monthly newsletter, to learn Cebuano vocabulary (Quizlet app), write emails and quizzes for class, get GPS driving directions, and coordinate our respective to-do lists and calendars. Indeed, when Sora’s iPhone was stolen in Manila in March, we felt the need to replace it because we were so dependent on it for our missionary communications with our senders.

Yet all this comes at a steep price, and I am thinking hard about whether it may be too steep. Here’s the passage of Jamie Smith’s Imagining the Kingdom that has me worried:

Every technology is attended by a mode of bodily practice. So even if the computer is primarily an information processor, it can never completely reduce us to just “thinking things” because it requires some mode of bodily interface: whether we’re hunched over a desk, glued to a screen; looking downward at a smartphone, our attention directed away from others at the table; or curled up on a couch touching a tablet screen, in every case there are bodily comportments that each sort of device invites and demands. Apple has long understood the bodily nature of this interface. In this respect, we already take for granted how revolutionary the touch screen is: a new, differently tactile mode of bodily interface, a heretofore-unimagined level of intimacy with machines. Indeed, working on a laptop feels distant and disconnected compared to the fingertip intimacy of the iPhone or the iPad or other tablets. (Do you ever thoughtlessly try to touch your laptop screen? Then you know what I’m talking about.) The technology affords and invites rituals of interaction. One could suggest that our interface with the iPhone (or any other smartphone) is just this sort of microtraining that subtly and unconsciously trains us to be more like Milton’s Satan, rather than conforming us to the image of the Son—and not because of the content communicated via the iPhone but because of how I interact with the device and the subtle pedagogy of the imagination effected by that intimate interface with a tiny machine. The iPhone brings with it an invitation to inhabit the world differently—not just because it gives me access to global internet resources in a pocket-sized device, but precisely in how it invites me to interact with the device itself. The material rituals of simply handling and mastering an iPhone are loaded with an implicit social imaginary. To become habituated to an iPhone is to implicitly treat the world as “available” to me and at my disposal—to constitute the world as “at-hand” for me, to be selected, scaled, scanned, tapped, and enjoyed.

As is so often the case, this zeitgeist is succinctly pictured in a rather inane Michelob Ultra commercial in which the world obeys the touch commands of an iPhone screen.

 

Don’t like that car? Swipe for a different one. Wish the scenery was different? Swipe for an alternative. Wish you could be somewhere else? Just touch the place you want to be. Wish you could see her just a little better? Zoooooom with the slide of a couple of fingers. A way of relating to a phone has now become a way of relating to the world. The practices for manipulating a small device are now expanded to show how we’d really like to manipulate our environment to serve our needs and be subject to our whims. And while we don’t go around swiping our hands in front of us to change the scenery, we perhaps nonetheless unconsciously begin to expect the world to conform to our wishes as our iPhone does. Or I implicitly begin to expect that I am the center of my own environments, and that what surrounds me exists for me. In short, my relation to my iPhone—which seems insignificant—is writ large as an iPhone-ized relation to the world, an iPhone-ization of my world(view).

This is a serious problem, and it will require some serious discipline to tackle. Already I have clamped down our our kids’ use of electronic devices, effectively limiting them to reading eBooks on them. What remains to be done is to limit and restrict my own online time and touchscreen usage. This is a painful process partly because I am an introvert, and am far more comfortable reading a book or operating an iPad than I am being available – frightening word! – to other human beings. But I think Smith is right, and so the painful discipline will need to happen. I hope that I can retain the ability to use the iPhone as a pocket camera for our newsletters, and to continue to produce communications that give our senders a good sense of what we’re doing here in Davao.

One of my church’s bishops, the Rt. Rev. George Fincke, posted a link to this article by TEC bishop Daniel Martins reacting to presiding bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori’s now notorious sermon on Acts 16 from Curaçao. Bishop Martins says:

I’m going to cut right to what seems to me a rather larger and more fundamental issue, which is the duty of all Christians, but particularly those in ordained leadership, to operate from within the tradition, as an insider looking out, and not from a critical distance, as an outsider looking in. …Such critical inquiry is not in the remit of a bishop; in fact, bishops pretty much surrender the option of engaging in that sort of work the moment they are consecrated. A bishop is, by definition, by job description, thoroughly a conservative, operating as a custodian of the tradition and articulating an insider’s point of view. Is there room on the margins for prophetic voices that challenge the establishment, speaking words of truth and justice? Yes, there certainly is room for those voices. But they are not the voices of bishops. It is, rather, the job of bishops, speaking as consummate insiders, to equip the baptized faithful to listen to the voices from the margins and discern between true prophets and false ones.

Perhaps because of Bishop Martins’ personal and professional relation with KJS, he has not said nearly enough. The real problem with KJS’ creative misinterpretation of Acts 16 is not that she is standing “outside the tradition looking in” or that she is a “prophetic voice that challenges the establishment”, but that she is speaking, with an authority ostensibly derived from Christ, a message that overturns the gospel of Christ’s victory over the principalities and powers. This anti-gospel is characteristic of liberal Christianity, and it has tragic and horrible consequences for the victims who occupy, in our modern societies, the same position as the girl whom Paul freed from demon-possession in Acts 16.

Tertullian famously said, of Marcion and Valentinus, that “One man perverts the Scripture with hand, another its meaning by his interpretation.” KJS has gone for Valentinus’ strategy here. When we read a story, we do so with ideas about who is the good guy, what the goal is, and what the obstacles and “bad guys” are. Narratologists call these the “actants” of a story. Our experience of a story’s “actantial” workings typically happens at a pre-reflective level, with our guts more than our heads. That is why stories are so powerful. It is also why KJS’s misreading of Acts 16 has provoked such a powerful response. Reading a story against the actantial “grain” will typically produce either humor (like the Three Little Pigs retold from the wolf’s perspective) or else a firestorm of criticism. Needless to say, KJS’ sermon was entirely in earnest, so it provoked a firestorm rather than chuckles.

To Bishop Martins’ credit, he recognizes that KJS has done violence to the Scripture at the actantial level:

In Acts 16, the author (presumably Luke) portrays Paul and Silas as the good guys, the slave girl as the exploited victim, and her “owners,” along with the demon that possessed her, as the bad guys. What Paul did, operating in the power of the Holy Spirit, was to liberate an oppressed person.

But has Bishop Martins recognized the causes and the consequences of this? Has he recognized that this sermon is emblematic of the general approach that has now ruled TEC for many years? If you stand against the Scripture’s own actantial and moral values, so that you deliberately misread the text, then you are rebelling against Jesus’ authority exercised on you via Scripture. And this is a typical move, perhaps even THE hallmark, of liberal “exegesis”. Other famous examples could be adduced. (I think, for instance, of Walter Brueggemann’s evaluation of David’s and Solomon’s establishment of a central sanctuary for YHWH in Jerusalem as a bad thing.) The problem is not just that the sermon is wrong, but that the sermon’s wrongness is symptomatic of a theology that celebrates sodomy and other sorts of wickedness, and which has for many years now systematically persecuted faithful clergy and dioceses in the Episcopal Church. In this particular sermon, the presiding bishop was driven by this outlook (1) to overlook the fact that a “python” is a demonic power, (2) to blame a righteous apostle of Jesus for his righteous act of deliverance, and (3) to say nothing about the real oppressors who kept this girl in literal slavery for their own gain.

As Bishop Martins recognizes, Christian pastors must speak “as the oracles of God” — that is, in accordance with the story Scripture tells, not against it. The gospel is the declaration that “God has disarmed the rulers and authorities” – among whom are the demon that possessed this girl’s mind in Acts 16, and the slaveowners who possessed her body – “and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them in Christ.” (Colossians 2:15 ESV) The presiding bishop has taken a story about that triumph of the gospel and has made it into a lesson about how we need to see the bondage of this girl as a “gift of spiritual awareness”. This is an anti-gospel, which exchanges the victory of Christ for an accomodation with the very powers of spiritual darkness that He came to destroy. Think of the human-esque pigs laughing evilly at the end of Orwell’s Animal Farm.

And this is where TEC has been headed for many years, especially with its stance on abortion rights and homosexuality. Who are the real victims? Men trapped in a sexual lifestyle that dishonors their bodies; women who are deceived or coerced into committing murder via abortion. What would KJS tell them? Presumably that their condition ought to be celebrated and recognized as good, just like the girl with the “python” in Acts 16. Anyone who says otherwise is “putting himself in prison” by his “unwillingness” to see this apparent bondage and sin as “something beautiful and holy”. Thus, for instance, the hounding of Bishop Lawrence of SC and other conservative Episcopal clergy is justified, because they are oppressors who refuse to recognize the beauty and holiness of sodomy.

That is the real lesson to be learned from KJS’ sermon: theological “liberalism” does not lead to liberty. Rather, it perpetuates bondage to the principalities and powers. Christus Victor came to destroy the works of the devil. Calling the works of the devil “beautiful and holy” is a way of saying that they don’t need to be destroyed. It is a way of painting pretty rainbows on our chains.

I have blogged in the past about David Daube’s slicing of the Gordian knot that is 1 Corinthians 7. (See here and here for the old posts.)

One of the lingering questions about Daube’s interpretation was, “Is there any evidence that ‘your children are holy’ can mean ‘Your children are legitimate’?”

Now I find N.T. Wright adducing 4QMMT as a parallel for 1 Corinthians 7:14:

MMT B75f.: לארשי שדוק בותכשמ שדק [ערז ינ]ב המהו םעה ךותב הסענה תונוזה. The lacuna leaves some doubt as to the meaning: I follow Wise, Abegg and Cook (‘concerning the fornication which has been done in the midst of the people, their children are holy. As it is written, Israel is holy’), and García Martínez (‘and concerning the forni-cations carried out in the midst of the people: they are members of the congregation of perfect holiness, as it is writ-ten, “Holy is Israel”’), against Qimron and Strugnell (who paraphrase the key passage as ‘[this practise exists] de-spite their being sons of holy seed’). For Paul cf. 1 Corinthians 7.14: ἡγίασται γὰρ ὁ ἄπιστος ἐν τῇ γυναικὶ καὶ ἡγίασται ἡ γυνὴ ἡ ἄπιστος ἐν τῷ ἀδελφῷ· ἐπεὶ ἄρα τὰ τέκνα ὑµῶν ἀκάθαρτά ἐστιν, νῦν δὲ ἅγιά ἐστιν. This parallel may perhaps even strengthen the case for the translation (and meaning) which I have followed: literally, ‘they are sons of the holy seed, as it is written, Israel is holy’.

This does not strengthen my and Daube’s case, but it is a worthwhile piece of evidence, and I reproduce it here for my readers who have followed this topic. I continue to think that Daube’s interpretation is generally correct, and I hold out for further corroboration from Jewish sources.

Above: Michelangelo’s depiction of kinaesthetic, bodily knowledge at the creation of Adam.

I’ve been a proponent of paedocommunion for about 13 years now. It is the issue that determined which church my family joined when we moved to Cincinnati 10 years ago. It is also the theological issue I have blogged about most. I have argued for paedocommunion…

1. From the nature of the covenant, i.e. the fact that the God we worship demands that we come to his feast with our children as well.
2. By attempting to overthrow the regnant assumptions about what “let a man examine himself” means in 1 Corinthians 11. (Also here.)
3. From the fact that the children of priests are entitled to eat of the same holy food that priests do. This involves proving that Christian baptism is an initiation to priesthood. Peter Leithart also makes this case in his masterful dissertation, The Priesthood of the Plebs, which is a Biblical study of the entire concept of priesthood.
4. By appeal to the precedent of the 16th century Swiss-German reformer Wolfgang Musculus.
5. From the fact that the inclusion of infants in Communion is a necessary consequence of their membership in the body of Christ, and that to exclude them is to say that they are not of the body, and that we have no need of them.

In this post, I want to pursue a sixth argument: namely, that credocommunionists are missing one of the most important ways the Supper actually works. This is, to my mind, the most powerful argument for including infants in the Lord’s Supper, because it has the salutary benefit of correcting how we think the Supper works in the case of adults as well: namely, in neither infants nor adults does the Supper work by our awareness or thinking. In the past, I argued that this is consonant with the original Passover, in which the Israelites were asleep in their beds when the angel of death passed over their houses because of the sign of blood on their doorposts and lintels.

This precipitated a discussion of what faith is. I quoted Bavinck to the effect that “Faith, the faith by which we believe, is not an organ or faculty next to or above reason but a disposition or habit of reason itself.” I added that

Faith is not a disposition of reason only, but of whole persons, including their unreasoned habits, desires, and loves… And for that reason, it can be a disposition also of infants, in a Psalm 22:9-10 sense: “I have trusted in you from birth; from my mother’s womb, you have been my God.” Indeed, I am not sure whether faith cannot be a disposition even of animals:

So the donkey said to Balaam, “ Am I not your donkey on which you have ridden, ever since I became yours, to this day? Was I ever disposed to do this to you?”
And he said, “No.” (Numbers 22:30 NKJV)

This is precisely a protestation of the donkey’s πιστις, its faithfulness and loyalty to Balaam. And the same sort of loyalty is precisely what God wants us to give Him.

I believe this more strongly than ever. I only wish that in the debate that followed, I had had what I have now from James K. A. Smith’s Imagining the Kingdom. The book is subtitled, “How Worship Works”. That is a rather bold claim, bolder even than a book entitled “How Marriage Works”, since the relationship of Christ and the Church is even more unfathomable than the way of a man with a maid. So I will not make the claim that Smith has provided an exhaustive account of how worship works. Rather, it is enough that he has explained in greater detail one of the most important ways that liturgy works upon us.

Smith introduces his claim this way:

What if we are actors before we are thinkers? What if our action is driven and generated less by what we think and more by what we love? And what if those loves are formed on a register that hums along largely below the radar of consciousness—but are nonetheless acquired products of formation and not mere aspects of “hardwiring”? Then any adequate account of Christian formation and discipleship—and hence any holistic vision for Christian education—will need to appreciate the dynamics of habituation that make us the sorts of actors we are.

This is precisely right: our loves and desires are shaped on a level deeper than and prior to consciousness. They are shaped via our senses, via our bodies. Smith draws on the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty for some conceptual explanation of how this sort of formation happens:

As Merleau-Ponty describes it, we build up a habitual way of being-in-the-world that is carried in our body, one that is “known” on a level that precedes and eludes conscious reflection and objectification.[89] “The body is the vehicle of being in the world, and to have a body is, for a living creature, to be intervolved in a definite environment, to identify oneself with certain projects and be continually committed to them.” My body is not just an object that moves through otherwise neutral space; rather, my body is surrounded by this “practical field” that shapes and constitutes its world. The cup is pick-up-able because I have hands and it has a handle. It’s not even that I “see” the cup “as” pick-up-able; that is too objectifying. It is pick-up-able for me, for my body. The stairs or rocks are climbable because my practical field already constitutes them as such. So we can no longer separate the body as physiological mechanism from the “habit-body” that has built up over time (PP 95). It is this “habitual body” that “knows” with a “preconscious knowledge.” It is the locus for a way of life.

Our bodies are the means by which we constitute our way of being-in-the-world. The insights of child psychology are also important here: When we are dealing, not with cups and stairs, but with other persons, then our bodies are not merely the means by which we constitute objects, but rather, we are ourselves significantly constituted by our relationships. A child wants to know “Am I lovable?” and “Will my parents still be there for me?” The answers to these pre-conscious and subconscious questions are formed before the child can formulate questions or reason. The child is constituted as the beloved child of his parents via his bodily experience of their love: being held, being nursed, being comforted when he is in pain. Or he may be constituted in the opposite way by the opposite experience: by abuse or neglect or harshness.

Mark Horne once asked, “Do Baptists talk to their babies?” I think this is part of what he was getting at with that question.

We need to take seriously the question of how our inclusion or exclusion of covenant infants affects them on this subconscious level, for if faith is primarily “seated” anywhere, it is seated on this level – the level of our desires and constitution, the level of our loves and self-identity. Perhaps we could even say that this is the level of our being that Jesus calls “the heart” in such utterances as “out of the fullness of the heart, the mouth speaks” and “the good man out of the good treasure of his heart brings forth good” and “as a man thinks in his heart, so is he”. If so, then the church should be very concerned with what we do to each other on this level.

So when Doug Wilson says,

“As soon as a child starts to learn that they are out by (your) passing them by (sc. with the elements), we think that that is the time to teach them that they are in, that they’re included, by giving them the elements of the Supper at that time — accompanied with teaching: ‘This is the body of Jesus. He died for you….”

Wilson shows that he is either not aware of the deeper level of knowing that Smith calls “praktognosia” or “kinaesthetic”, or else that he does not think the sacraments work on this level. For if he recognized these things, he would not wait until “a child starts to learn…accompanied with teaching.” He would get busy forming the consciousness of children in the church BEFORE they start to think about these things.

And no age is too early. Our daughter Naomi was born with a large amount of sticky meconium all over her face. Our midwife had to take a washcloth to her face to help her breathe. This involved some uncomfortable scrubbing that affected Naomi’s disposition toward washcloths for several years into her toddlerhood. So if baby Naomi gained a kinaesthetic knowledge that “washcloths are nasty things that want to take her face off” from that neonatal experience, what do covenant infants gain from their inclusion or exclusion from the Lord’s Supper? I think I could probably solicit testimony from paedocommunionist parents, and my email inbox or Facebook post comments would be filled with anecdotal evidence showing that the Supper works on this level. It is not the only level on which it works, but it is perhaps the most important one.

James K. A. Smith has done the church a great service by making it possible to discuss the issue in these terms.

Above: the beginning of the Lord’s Prayer from folio 45 recto of the Book of Kells.

Jesus teaches his disciples “pray thus” (οὕτως), that is, “in the following way”. This means that you are actually to say the following words. Some have tried to argue that the Lord’s Prayer was not meant to be recited, but only to be a model for other prayers. Such a position does not reckon with the way ancient cultures learned things: to say that it was to be a model meant that it was certainly, eo ipso, meant to be recited. That is just how things were learned in the ancient world. In some ways, it is still how things are really learned. And besides, Judaism has never had a problem with recited prayers. They were in use in Jesus’ day, and still are.

Jesus begins with Πατερ ἡμῶν, and it is interesting that he never elsewhere uses the ἡμῶν. He frequently calls God “the Father” or “my Father”, but not “our Father.” Clearly this is because He is the Son of the God uniquely, but also because He had not yet been raised. In John 20:17, after He has been raised, he tells the disciples that he is going “to my Father and your Father, my God and your God”.

The Fatherhood of God is a concept loaded with eschatological meaning. It is prominent in the Exodus: “Israel is My son, even My firstborn; let My son go, that he may serve Me.” (Exodus 4:22-23) But more important for our purposes is the role that this Fatherhood plays in Jesus’ and Paul’s eschatology. That eschatology is derived from the prophets. Isaiah 63:16 speaks of the redemption of Israel from exile:

Doubtless you are our Father. Though Abraham was ignorant of us and Israel does not acknowledge us, You, O Lord, are our Father.

When we turn to Paul, we find that he has very specific ideas about when it is possible to call God “Father”. Galatians 4:6 says

“because you are sons, God has sent forth the Spirit of His Son into our hearts crying out “Abba, ὁ πατήρ.”

This address of God as Father is thus something we do if the Spirit of His Son is in our hearts – a post-Pentecostal condition. And this condition was not always the case:

As a result you are no longer (οὐκέτι) a slave, but a son; and if a son, then also an heir through God. But at that time (τότε), not knowing God, you were slaves to those who by nature are not gods…

Paul clearly believes that calling God “Father” is a thing that is only appropriate to those who have received the υἱοθεσία, the placing as sons. This sequence is found also in Romans 8:15 contrasts the spirit of bondage to fear with the Spirit of Son-placing (υἱοθεσία). (I do not translate υἱοθεσία as “adoption” because Paul is clear that it is something that happens also to an heir who starts out as a baby (νηπιος) under stewards and guardians (Galatians 4:1-2). This state of minority ended after Christ redeemed “those who were under the Law, that they might receive the Son-placing (υἱοθεσίαν). Paul certainly has metaphors for transfer of Gentiles or unbelievers into the body of Christ: grafting into an olive tree, for instance. But υἱοθεσία is not “adoption” in the sense that we use that word in English, nor in the sense that obtained in the Roman world, e.g. Julius Caesar’s adoption of Octavius in his will, to make him his heir. Sorry to take this word away from the many Christians who adopt orphans from other parts of the world, but υἱοθεσία really means the acknowledgement of a son, the entry of the child into the public eye as the heir of his Father.

I see that George MacDonald put his finger on this issue of how to translate υἱοθεσία in the last chapter of The Hope of the Gospel:

I have omitted in my quotations the word “adoption” used in both English versions: it is no translation of the Greek word for which it stands. It is used by St Paul as meaning the same thing with the phrase, ‘the redemption of the body’–a fact to bring the interpretation given it at once into question. Falser translation, if we look at the importance of the thing signified, and its utter loss in the word used to represent it, not to mention the substitution for that of the apostle, of an idea not only untrue but actively mischievous, was never made. The thing St Paul means in the word he uses, has simply nothing to do with adoption–nothing whatever. In the beginning of the fourth chapter of his epistle to the Galatians, he makes perfectly clear what he intends by it. His unusual word means the father’s recognition, when he comes of age, of the child’s relation to him, by giving him his fitting place of dignity in the house; and here the deliverance of the body is the act of this recognition by the great Father, completing and crowning and declaring the freedom of the man, the perfecting of the last lingering remnant of his deliverance. St Paul’s word, I repeat, has nothing to do with adoption; it means the manifestation of the grown-up sons of God; the showing of those as sons, who have always been his children; the bringing of them out before the universe in such suitable attire and with such fit attendance, that to look at them is to see what they are, the sons of the house–such to whom their elder brother applied the words: ‘I said ye are Gods.’

Being sons of God is another way of saying that we are the sons of the New Creation. Romans 8:19 speaks of “the creation’s eager expectation of the revelation (ἀποκάλυψιν) of the sons of God.” The sonship of Christians is thus an eschatological reality, a long-awaited fact of the new creation.

Hebrews 2 confirms this view: “God did not put the age to come in subjection to angels,” but rather,

it was fitting for Him, for Whom are all things and through Whom are all things, in leading many sons to glory, to make the captain of their salvation perfect through sufferings. (Hebrews 2:10)

Thus, to call God our Father is to claim that Christ has suffered and been perfected; that we have acceded to full Sonship; that the Father has acknowledged us, and thus that the age to come has begun. We are no longer in subjection to the guardians and stewards, but

when the fullness of the time had come, God sent forth His Son…that we might receive the placing as sons (υἱοθεσία) (Gal. 4:4-7)

The reason I have dwelt so strongly on this Pauline view of Jewish eschatology is because I believe that the entire Lord’s Prayer hinges on this two-age eschatology. The hallowing of God’s name is an eschatological hope (Isaiah 29:23). The doing of His Will on earth as in heaven is an eschatological hope. The “coming bread” that I discussed earlier is an eschatological hope. The forgiveness of sins is an eschatological hope. The time of trial and the threat of the evil one from whom we ask God to rescue us – these are eschatological expectations.

Jesus wants His disciples to live in the new age already. The logic is that of His words to Martha in Bethany when He had come to raise Lazarus from the dead. “Your brother will rise again.” (John 11:23) Martha, knowing her Jewish eschatology very well, replies, “I know that he will rise in the resurrection on the last day.” Jesus replies, shockingly, “I am the resurrection and the life.” The new creation is here in Him, and if we are in Him, then we live in that new creation as a present reality.

Above: Henk Helmantel, Still Life with Bread and Brass Bowl, 2001

“Mother, I guess I was naughty last night. I said, ‘Give us tomorrow our daily bread,’ instead of today. It seemed more logical. Do you think God minded, Mother?”
– Lucy Maud Montgomery. “Anne of Ingleside” (1939)

Just how much more sense it makes, I doubt either Di Blythe or her creator, LM Montgomery, knew. But she has hit upon a key to the poetry of The Lord’s Prayer which is lost in the English translations.

First, some philology. Matthew 6:11 reads,

τὸν ἄρτον ἡμῶν τὸν ἐπιούσιον δὸς ἡμῖν σήμερον· (ΚΑΤΑ ΜΑΤΘΑΙΟΝ 6:11 SBLG)

Now, it is widely recognized by everyone who knows Greek that the word ἐπιούσιον is not Greek for “daily”. There is a perfectly good word for “daily” (ημερινος), and ἐπιούσιον is not it. After all, “daily” is not a rare concept. But ἐπιούσιον is a very rare word, and appears to be a Hebraism coined by the gospel’s author. LSJ cite Origen’s De Oratione:

τί δὲ καὶ τὸ «ἐπιούσιον,» ἤδη κατανοητέον. πρῶτον δὲ τοῦτο ἰστέον, ὅτι ἡ λέξις ἡ «ἐπιούσιον» παρ’ οὐδενὶ τῶν Ἑλλήνων οὔτε τῶν σοφῶν ὠνόμασται οὔτε ἐν τῇ τῶν ἰδιωτῶν συνηθείᾳ τέτριπται, ἀλλ’ ἔοικε πεπλάσθαι ὑπὸ τῶν εὐαγγελιστῶν…

But one must first understand what “ἐπιούσιον” means. And the first thing one must recognize is that the word “ἐπιούσιον” does not occur in even one of the Greek authors, not the wise ones, nor does it appear in the usage of the unlearned, but it seems likely to have been coined (Gk. “molded”) by the gospel-writers.

What follows in the next section is about the most unhelpful stuff that Origen could possibly have written: he gives a mistaken etymology connecting the word with οὐσία, and starts to talk about invisible essences. Without delving into the evil consequences of this sort of philosophy (Could there be transsubstantiation without talk about “substance”, οὐσία?), it is sufficient for our purposes that the derivation is linguistically impossible.

There are two verbs spelled ειμι in Greek. One means “to be” and the other means “to go or come”. The verb of motion has an ι- at the beginning of all its verbals (participles, infinitive, etc). The verb of being does not. The former, ἰέναι, is related to Latin eo, ire; the latter, είναι, to Latin esse. Thus, ἐπ-ιούσιον, having the ι- at the beginning of its stem, must be from the verb meaning “to go or come”: “the bread of the coming day”, the eschatological bread.

As confirmation of this interpretation, note how the word order of the sentence is carefully framed to stress the contrast between “impending, coming” and “today”. To wit, Matthew’s Jesus has used a reiterated article to keep his adjective attributive rather than predicative: τὸν ἄρτον ἡμῶν τὸν ἐπιούσιον. He didn’t need to do that; it isn’t the simplest way to make an attributive position. He could have written τὸν ἐπιούσιον ἄρτον. He chose not to.

Why? Because he wanted to place ἐπιούσιον in a position of emphasis, and thus of contrast. It comes at the end of its phrase, and thus invites comparison with the other time-word at the end of the predicate, σήμερον. “The bread of ours that is to come, give us today.”

The result is that this is an eschatological petition. It is of a piece with the other great eschatological refrain in Revelation, Maranatha! – “Come, Lord!”

It is also – and this is the conclusive proof for me that confirms the interpretation with a resounding ring of truth – is of a piece with the rest of the Lord’s Prayer, which is preeminently concerned with the present age and the age to come, the two ages of Jewish eschatological thinking. It is a prayer that beseeches God to make the obedience of the eschaton, the obedience of heaven, present on earth now. It is a prayer that asks God to forgive our debts (then) as we forgive (now) our debtors. It asks for deliverance from eschatological tribulation (that is what is meant by “temptation” here, not petty lack of self-control). It closes with reference to the Kingdom, that eschatological reality. Indeed, if we don’t translate ἄρτον ἐπιούσιον as “coming bread”, then 6:11 becomes the only petition that doesn’t have an eschatological aspect to it. Much better to be consistent.

Thus, Diana Blythe is right: the logic is missing in the usual translation of the Prayer. The solution, however is to change our understanding of the bread, not ask for God to postpone the giving. With the right translation, we get better theology, better sense, better linguistics, and better poetry.

Of course, it is not clear at all to me how we will ever change the English translation of the Prayer. But there are many things like that in the liturgy and you can’t go through worship mentally footnoting everything.

“Honey,” my wife called from the living room, “your son’s diaper needs changing!”

“My son? What, did he spring full-armed from my head?”

I, being a bit of a philological pedant, call this the “second person of dirty diapers”. It is in my mental reference grammar in a numbered paragraph after the entry for the “royal we (“We are not amused”) and the medicinal we (“How are we feeling today?”). The second person of dirty diapers is used by one parent to dissociate herself from the undesirable qualities of her offspring, and to identify the other parent as the source of those qualities in the child.

This is the opposite of the verdict at the end of Aeschylus’ Eumenides, where Athena asserts that Orestes is not really a matricide because the female parent contributes nothing to the blood – we would say the genes – of the offspring.

οὔκ ἔστι μήτηρ ἡ κεκλημένου τέκνου
τοκεύς, τροφὸς δὲ κύματος νεοσπόρου.
τίκτει δ ̓ ὁ θρῴσκων,… (657-659)

The one we call mother is not the begetter of the child,
But the nourisher of the new-sown fetus.
The begetter is the one who sires it.

Thus, filial relationship has multiple implications for duties: it can imply the parent’s responsibility for the actions of the child, as in the second person of dirty diapers; but it can also imply the child’s duty toward the parent, as can be seen from the way Apollo excuses Orestes from the duty to refrain from matricide by trivializing the filial relationship to mothers, reducing them to mere incubators.

In Exodus 32, God and Moses trade upon the “second person of dirty diapers”:

And the Lord said to Moses, “Go, get down! For your people whom you brought out of the land of Egypt have corrupted themselves…”
Then Moses pleaded with the Lord his God, and said: “ Lord, why does Your wrath burn hot against Your people whom You have brought out of the land of Egypt with great power and with a mighty hand? (Exodus 32:7, 11 NKJV)

Nothing terribly profound, of course. Just neat that Moses and YHWH talk this way too. Who brought Israel out of Egypt? God says Moses did, so that they are Moses’ people, and God may destroy them. Moses says God did, so that they are God’s people, and He must take them in hand and not destroy them.

In 2005, while preparing to teach a theology class at my old school, I read Klaas Schilder’s Christ and Culture. As a sort of public service and a way of attaining clarity for myself, I began a chapter-by-chapter precis of the book, with comments and thoughts that it provoked. Because these notes were posted on my old, extinct Upsaid blog, I am reposting them here on my current WordPress blog. And I’m going to try to finish them now, 8 years later. (The old entries accounted for 17 of the 29 chapters of Schilder’s book, so it shouldn’t be too hard to finish.)

(Above, Klaas Schilder in his study, from this page.)

First, the chapters I already covered:

While reading Padraic Colum’s The Adventures of Odysseus to the kids last week, I came across this scene:

“And that the messenger, Palamedes, might believe he was mad indeed, Odysseus did a thing that no man ever saw being done before—he took an ass and an ox and yoked them together to the same plough and began to plough a field.”

I’m not sure what the source is for Colum’s version. Possibly it derives from Bulfinch, who gives the animals as an ox and ass, but it takes a bit more digging to find Bulfinch’s source.

The first century mythologer Hyginus records that Odysseus yoked two different animals, but they are an ox and a horse, not an ass:

And so when he learned that spokesmen would come to him, he put on a cap, pretending madness, and yoked a horse and an ox to the plow. Palamedes felt he was pretending when he saw this, and taking his son Telemachus from the cradle, put him in front of the plow with the words: “Give up your pretense and come and join the allies.” (Hyginus, Fabulae 95)

Servius’ commentary on the Aeneid says only that the two animals were “different”:

… cum enim ille (sc. Ulixes) iunctis dissimilis naturae animalibus salem sereret, filium ei Palamedes opposuit. quo viso Ulixes aratra suspendit, et ad bellum ductus habuit iustam causam doloris.

…for when he was sowing salt with animals of different natures yoked together, Palamedes put his son in front of him. As soon as Ulysses saw him, he halted his plow and when he had been led off to the war, he considered this incident as a warranted grievance.
(Maurus Servius Honoratus. In Vergilii carmina comentarii, ad Aen. II.81)

The Routledge Handbook of Classical Mythology lists schol. Lyc. 384 as the source for the animals being an ox and the ass. But I wonder if this may not be another ancient near eastern influence on Greek culture. For this is the combination of draft animals forbidden by Deuteronomy 22:10:

You shall not plow with an ox and a donkey together. (Deuteronomy 22:10 ESV)

The most commonly consulted Christian commentators are of almost no help. For it is an almost absurd law: an ox and an ass cannot pull a plow together, and only a madman would so yoke them. John Calvin says the law is a warning against “departing from simplicity”. Calum Carmichael sees the law as a coded allegory of the intermarriage of Jews with Gentiles, especially the story of Shechem and Dinah. Shechem’s father is Hamor, “ass”, while Dinah is avenged by Simeon and Levi, whose father Jacob curses them, saying that they “hamstrung an ox” — thus showing that the ox is a symbol for Jacob himself, weakened in his relations to other nations. I’m not sure I buy Carmichael’s interpretation, or even if I’m remembering it aright. It has been years since I read it.

I don’t know what to make of it, but the discovery of Odysseus doing the very thing prohibited by the law in Deuteronomy is a spur to further thought about this verse.

In the last two meetings via Skype of my men’s Bible study, I have discussed Jesus’ divorce and remarriage halakha; I gave my opinion that Jesus does not permit remarriage after divorce at all, hard though that may seem.

Some further thoughts about that discussion:

• I am quite aware that this view of mine involves me in nearly impossible pastoral difficulties in our society of frequent premarital sex, adultery, and easy divorce. Yet I would remind everyone that for 1900 years, the church taught something very close to, and just as hard as, my view. While in practice, Roman Catholic annulment may be granted too easily, in theory it is only a recognition that a true marriage never really existed between two persons – it is not the dissolution of a marriage that really exists. We may hold that the halakha of Christendom during most of its existence has been mistaken or unbiblical, but I do not think we can call it impossible or unloving.
• In many ways, the case for a permissive divorce regime by appeal to the pitiable cases of innocent victims of adultery or spousal abuse – “Why would God punish her twice?” – relies upon an individualistic perspective. Individualism has always led to permissive, liberal divorce regimes. In the 19th century, archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann was an abusive husband who wrote in letters to a friend that he had twice raped his wife. When he wanted to divorce her so that he could marry someone else, he had to come to liberal and individualistic America and get the divorce in Indiana’s courts. So an individualistic approach is a very American one, and it is ingrained in our thinking. Yet a moment’s reflection should show us that Jesus does not want us to think about the question in terms of individuals: “So then, they are no longer two, but one flesh.” (Mt. 19:6) If a marriage has taken place, then we are dealing with a new, two-headed creature, not with two individuals.
• I have read, and appreciate, Greg Bahnsen’s theses on divorce. The conclusion of that paper strongly resembles (though it does not exactly match) Ray (now Bishop) Sutton’s book Second Chance in that both would permit divorce and remarriage for any victim of spousal sins that were capital crimes in the OT, or that strike at the essence of marriage.
  In theory, I agree with this article’s approach to the question: a close, careful examination of Jesus’ and Paul’s words should yield a divorce halakha that is consistent both internally (with itself) and externally with the rest of the New Testament. But in practice, Bahnsen’s misunderstanding of 1 Corinthians 7 leads him to define porneia wrongly, as including abandonment. This then opens the door for him to appeal to metaphorical passages of the OT in order to include other non-sexual sins. The result is, in effect, a broad divorce halakha. It is not “any cause” divorce: Bahnsen and Sutton limit the grounds for divorce to only certain sins. It also is not “no fault” divorce: grounds must be adduced. But in practice, the acceptable grounds are so expansive that it is actually quicker and easier to list the circumstances under which divorce is not permitted than to enumerate the conditions under which it is. To wit, on Bahnsen’s view, you may divorce your spouse unless he/she has been perfectly pure sexually during the marriage, and has always given you the required provisions of shelter, raiment, and marital affection. Thus, abandonment, physical abuse, and many other non-sexual sins are oddly included under the heading of “porneia”. This expansion stretches the meaning of that Greek word beyond the breaking point. But doesn’t Bahnsen demonstrate that the label porneia is applied to Israel’s national idolatry, political apostasy, and other non-sexual sins? Yes, but we have no right to take such metaphorical meanings and read them into a legal context discussing actual marriage between men and women. Unlike the hieros gamos of the Babylonians, YHWH’s “marriage” to Israel was never a matter of actual sexual intercourse. Rather, sexuality was a metaphor for non-sexual national behavior. Bahnsen cannot use this pattern of metaphor as proof that non-sexual sins constitute non-metaphorical, legally actionable porneia.

Thus, my proposal is that Paul and Jesus are actually completely at one in their divorce halakha: they do not allow it at all. Paul in 1 Corinthians 7 permits believers to allow an unbelieving spouse to leave if he is unwilling to continue after the believer’s conversion, but this permission is not a permission to divorce, but a recognition that the marriage has been ended by the “death” and new creation of the believer. The porneia exception in Matthew 19 is an exception for porneia in a narrow, technical sense: namely, incest. That is, where a marriage was illegal in the first place, it must be dissolved. But nothing done after the marriage can legitimate divorce.

You can read my old entry about David Daube’s brilliant interpretation of 1 Corinthians 7 here. It clears up all the old, intractable puzzles that have bedeviled Christian interpreters over the centuries. It solves them by appeal to Jewish background. It makes better sense of the Greek, and results in satisfying “aftershocks” as other odd locutions suddenly make sense.

The result is a strict divorce halakha. This is hard to swallow, to be sure. But it needs to be. All looser divorce halakhoth are defeated by two main objections. In my view, neither of these objections can possibly be answered by Christian defenders of divorce. They are:

• There is no way that such a divorce halakha would have elicited the reaction of shocked dismay that is recorded from Jesus’ disciples in Matthew 19:10. Try it out. Jesus: “Whoever divorces his wife, except for if she has been unfaithful, or abandoned him, or assaulted him, or refuses to have sex with him, or abuses the kids, causes her to commit adultery.” What would the disciples have said? I think they would have replied with something like this: “Um, OK, that’s kind of strict, but at least we know there’s a way out if things get really bad.” But what we actually have recorded contains none of those exceptions, and evokes a quite different reaction: “If such is the case of a man with his wife, it is better not to marry.” No divorce halakha acceptable to modern North American churches could possibly have produced this dismayed reaction from the disciples of Jesus. Therefore, they cannot be what Jesus taught.
• Let us suppose, argumenti gratia, that Jesus and Paul taught something like Bahnsen’s halakha. We will then be up against an insoluble historical puzzle: How, then, can we explain the origin of the early Church’s uniform prohibition against remarriage during the lifetime of the divorced spouse? How did the early church overthrow a more permissive halakha in favor of a stricter one? Note especially that such a declension from permission into rigor could not take place except by overthrowing the judicial precedents of the apostolic age. It would not have been enough for the Church to lose sight of the true meaning of a few texts of Scripture. No, they would have needed to overcome the protests of persons whose divorces and subsequent marriages had received apostolic approval: “But the apostle Paul approved of my divorce!” This puzzle is formally parallel to N.T. Wright’s argument for the historicity of Jesus’ bodily resurrection: If Jesus did not rise from the dead, the rise of the post-Easter church is historically inexplicable. Just so, if the apostles and Jesus permitted divorce and remarriage on the grounds acceptable to the modern church, there is no way that a stricter halakha could come about within 100 years of the apostles.
• There are, to be sure, plenty of instances where the Church has erred, sometimes for hundreds of years. So it is with icons, clerical celibacy, communion in one kind, and prohibition of paedocommunion. But in all of these cases, we can demonstrate the genesis of the error and find evidence of the original, correct practice before the error’s introduction. In all these cases, there is record of an outcry, resistance, and pockets of continued opposition to the erroneous practice. But in the case of the early church’s prohibition of divorce, we find none of these things. I conclude that the early Church’s strict prohibition of remarriage after divorce was of apostolic and dominical institution.

Lest I be misunderstood, I recognize that we are in a social and ecclesiastical pickle. Many years of lax divorce in North America have filled churches with millions of people who Scripture says are committing adultery by continuing in their illicit new marriages. I do not pretend to know what to do about this. In that respect, this blog entry – and that is all it is, a blog entry – is extremely unpastoral. I can only suggest that if I am anywhere near the truth, the Church will need to move to a stricter divorce halakha, and this move cannot be made in an instant.