Nearly two years ago now, I
interviewed the Orthodox biblical scholar and theologian Edith Humphrey about her book on liturgy, published in 2011. Well, she's a busy woman, and has another book out this year:
Scripture and Tradition: What the Bible Really Says (Baker Academic, 2013), 192pp.
AD: Tell us about your recent background, and in particular what led
you from your last book on liturgy to this new book, Scripture and
Tradition
.
EH: Thanks for the opportunity to talk to you about my new
book. In some ways,
Scripture and Tradition may seem like a spin-off
from
Grand Entrance: Worship on Earth as in Heaven because one of the major questions people ask about
worship styles is why a particular liturgical (or “non-liturgical”)
tradition has developed in the way that it has. Why is there no
instrumental music in the East, while organs and other instruments are
used in the East: is this simply circumstance, or do these things have
theological foundations and implications? Or why does my childhood
ecclesial community, the Salvation Army, not baptize or celebrate the
Eucharist, but instead dedicates babies and calls worshippers to the
altar and holiness table to “give their lives as a living sacrifice.”
Are the shape and content of such rites optional, responding to felt
needs with “no disputing about tastes,” or are there some traditions
that have been given and that we are to receive from the apostles and
thus from the Lord? Is there “Holy Tradition”? If so, how do we tell
the difference between mutable traditions, good in their own time but
not necessary for every age, and the ongoing Tradition of God? No doubt
I was thinking about some of these issues as I did the comparison of
worship services in my book on worship,
Grand Entrance, but the focus of
that book was very particular—to remember that our worship is entrance
into the very presence of God.
My book on worship touched
frequently upon questions of tradition, but it was not these hanging
threads that led me to write
Scripture and Tradition. Instead, my
husband asked me one of his annoying but tantalizing questions one day,
“Why don’t you write a book about what the Bible says concerning
tradition?” and I promptly responded that I was too busy. Then, one
night when I couldn’t sleep, the question came back to haunt me. So I
sat down in the living room, searching my Greek New Testament for places
where the verb
paradidomi (“I give over as a tradition”) and the noun
paradosis (“tradition”) are found. I was stunned, because, being
raised on the King James and then the original NIV Bible as a
Protestant, I did not remember these particular passages as speaking
specifically about tradition. A quick search in those translations
confirmed my memory. For in these translations, the English word
“tradition” is used in
negative contexts, but avoided and paraphrased
where the same Greek words are used positively, such as in St. Paul’s
“Be steadfast firm and hold to the traditions that you were taught,
whether by our spoken word or by our letter” (2 Thess. 2:15). This
midnight treasure-hunt and discovery became the nucleus of a new book.
The more I read, the more I discovered the rich teaching about worship
that is both latent and explicitly articulated in various books of the
Bible. To start with what the Bible itself says would, I hoped, turn a
topic that is a source of conflict among Christians into words of
encouragement. From there the book grew.
AD: Drawing on Jaroslav
Pelikan among others, you recognize the tension in discerning what
constitutes tradition and how to relate to it--what to keep, what to
jettison. Tell us a bit about that tension.
Jaroslav Pelikan (of
blessed memory!) distinguishes between “tradition” as the “living faith
of the dead” and traditionalism as “the dead faith of the living.”
Perhaps we might want to respond to his first statement, that the dead
are “alive” in Christ. However, his point is well taken. Tradition is
God’s gift to the Church, and has an honoured place among us: some
traditions, for example, the creeds and ecumenical councils, are
indispensable--part of our DNA, so to speak.
Other traditions, however,
we know very well have changed through the years, and are not the same
across the world, even among a single communion. For example, the
Russian jurisdictions of the Orthodox church sing the
beatitudes at the
opening of Divine Liturgy, while the Antiochian do not. The Antiochian
Church of North America retains a full 40 days of feasting at Easter,
whereas other jurisdictions revert to Wednesday and Friday fasts after
Bright Week. It would be easy for the more rigorous to scorn those
whose tradition is different, or for a liturgical enthusiast to deplore
differences in liturgy in another jurisdiction. (“What is the
difference between a terrorist and a liturgist? You can negotiate with a
terrorist!” Ba-dum-dum!) Our brother Jaroslav, now among the blessed
himself, reminds us that our focus is to be the Lord, the Holy Trinity,
and not any “ism” at all. Tradition is good, kept where it belongs, and
not worshipped. Tradition for its own sake rather than for the sake of
the One who gave it, is a deadly thing. This would be parallel to
those Jewish rigorists who made the Torah the center, rather than the
Lord of the Torah, and so missed God’s greatest action in Jesus. We
might think, too, of some fundamentalists who formally make the Bible
the center, but forget that the Incarnate Word is the one to whom the
Bible witnesses. (And they sometimes don’t notice that it is really
their
interpretation or tradition about the Bible that becomes the
center of their teaching, either!) So, then, what we have received is a
great gift, but our adoration goes to the Giver!
AD: As
director of programs in theology at my university, I realized shortly
after starting here that basic biblical literacy could no longer be
presupposed, even in homes of self-identified church-going Christians.
So I put together a new course, "Introduction to the Bible" for our
students. Your introduction also tells of your experience with such
illiteracy among your students, both in Montreal and Pittsburgh. What do
you think are some of its causes today? What can be done to mitigate
it?
The causes of biblical illiteracy are not so very difficult
to trace. First, there is a lack of interest in disciplined reading in
general: our culture is more oriented to the image, and schools do not
give priority to repetition or rigorous memorization today. Then, there
is the postmodern distrust of history in general, and the Bible is
considered one of those “old books”—a classic that culture has, by and
large, outgrown. The Bible is relegated in many minds to the same place
as that foggy and eccentric bishop in
The Princess Bride who
rapsodized on “mawwiage, that dweam within a dweam.”
In
the Catholic
and Orthodox communion, perhaps we have considered that an intimate
knowledge of the Bible is the purview of the clergy, and that we only
need what we get in the liturgy on Sunday. (This may have been
mitigated partially since the changes at Vatican II, but at the same
time that Bible study became more common in the Catholic communion,
discipline in general also flagged.) Even though Protestants
historically have stressed knowledge of the Bible, many from these
churches have abandoned close study of the Bible due to a fixation upon
personal spiritual experience as the end-all and be-all of the faith,
and an over-emphasis upon God’s grace freely given (which sometimes
obscures the need for human effort, including Bible study). Besides
this, the multiplicity of new translations (however helpful) has
obscured our common knowledge of specific verses of the Bible, which
Christians used to know by heart. Whatever the reason, it is absolutely
the case that the Scriptures are not known one tenth as well today as
they were 60 years ago, and this holds true across the Christian
communities in North America, though it is a more egregious problem in
some places than others.
AD: Your introduction references your
time in the Salvation Army, and also draws on the insights of Anglicans
among whom you spent some time. (I first came across your name in the
1990s in Canada when you were associated with the Anglican Essentials
movement, yes?) What do you think Eastern Christians can learn from
those two traditions in particular? What are they lacking in light of
Eastern Christian theology?
Well, I suppose that a look at the
daily life of a Salvation Army congregation might encourage historic
churches to recover a love for Bible study, because that this continues
to be the life-blood of Salvationists. Perhaps some of these studies
are not deep, and rarely do they incorporate the insights of the Fathers, but it is simply true that the detailed and personal knowledge
that an ordinary Salvationist has of the Bible would put most members of
the Eastern churches to shame. Also, love and care for the poor and
the marginalized is palpable there: I recently attended a “meeting”
(divine service) with my mom, and the presence of the handicapped and
minority groups was remarkable! (Those caring for them before, during
and after the service were not the pastors, either: most members
consider that they have a ministry).
As for those Anglicans who take
the Scriptures and their tradition seriously (over against the
revisionists who have over-run the national churches of the US and
Canada), we can, I think, consider their zeal for evangelization and
their strong exegetical preaching and teaching as helpful models.
These communities call us back to our roots, for of course the early
Church devoted itself to the teaching of the apostles, and continued in
the apostolic mission: in their strengths, such sectarian communities
are reminders to us of aspects of our identity that we may have put on
the back-burner. My Orthodox father in Christ once commented that we
could compare an Orthodox parish to an evangelical Protestant mission,
likening one to a state-of-the-art hospital, while the other is more
like a tiny clinic in a developing country. That is, the historic
Church has all the riches of the Christian tradition at its disposal,
all the “tools” and spiritual resources for healing, whereas a Salvation
Army corps only has the bare minimum (and not always that), for it
knows nothing of the mysteries, of the disciplines of corporate fasting,
of the deep traditional prayers of the Church. However, if it uses
what it has, some healing will come to folks where a perfectly equipped
but indifferent parish can fail. May it not be that we, with all that
we have, are less dedicated to the work of the Church in the world that
God loves—more is demanded of us because so much more has been given (or
received)!
AD: I wonder if you are familiar with the
philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, who speaks of an "epistemological
crisis" that often develops between traditions. Such a crisis, he says,
happens when Tradition A is challenged by Tradition B and the latter
seems to have better answers to the issue at hand. Tradition A must then
decide whether to scornfully ignore B, collapse and admit defeat, or
incorporate (critically but appreciatively) B's insights into A's life. I
mention this because you seem to have taken the third route with regard
to your time in Protestant traditions. You don't scorn those
traditions, but graciously draw on them to help Eastern Christians see
what is good in them--and what is lacking. Is that a fair assessment?
What
you say makes some sense to me, although I think that MacIntyre’s
typology doesn’t quite do justice to the reality. There is also a
situation where Tradition A has become weak in some areas that are
rightfully part of its own tradition, and Tradition B has accentuated
this part, while neglecting other important things, perhaps while
jettisoning these things. In that case, Tradition A can take a page, so
to speak, form Tradition B’s notebook, while also being wary of the
entire trajectory that Tradition B has taken. I think that the
emphasis upon evangelism is perhaps obsessive in some evangelical
communities. (For example, there is a common saying among evangelicals:
“The Church is the only institution that exists for the benefit of
others rather than its own members.” But this forgets that the purpose
of the Church is to
worship first, and that evangelism is not is primary
raison d’être.)
Yet, it is also the case that the historical churches,
in many places today, have become lazy, and are content to present the
Church as a kind of fulfillment to those who have already been
evangelized, rather than serving and speaking to those who know almost
nothing about the Way. The
Holy Spirit's free and can go where he
wishes—so indeed, we can learn from sectarians. But this does not mean
that we should relativize the difference, or back off from what we have
been taught about the one holy catholic and apostolic Church.
AD: Tell us to what extent you think Christian differences over
"tradition" are related to the difficulties of translating into English
the Greek terms you discuss in your first chapter.
Earlier I
mentioned that several influential English translations (e.g. the KJV
and the original NIV) avoid the word “tradition” when
paradidomi and
paradosis are used positively. There is also a difficulty simply in the
English in that we don’t have a verb “to tradition” that parallels our
noun, so that we have to use a paraphrase like “to pass on.” Both the
avoidance of the terms (which come from the early Protestant allergy to
Roman Catholic tradition) and the peculiarities of English certainly
reinforce a tendency among some Protestants to consider tradition to be a
category that is at odds with the gospel. But it is not all in the
translations. The translations that avoided the term “tradition” are
reflecting teaching from “non-traditional” or protesting communities,
not creating this attitude. More crucial for Christian differences
concerning tradition are the disagreements of the past (between
Protestants and Catholics) and the inability to understand these
disagreements from the inside (Orthodox). That is, there is now a long
tradition of dispute concerning the meaning and place of tradition in
the West, beginning with the fight of sola scriptura versus Scripture
and Holy Tradition, complicated by the Anglican tradition of the
“three-legged stool” (Scripture, Tradition and Reason) and hopelessly
confused by various expressions of the so-called “Wesleyan
Quadrilateral” (Scripture, Tradition, Reason and Experience) which is
now appealed to in many different communities. Western Christians often
do not even know why they have a visceral reaction for or against
tradition. Eastern Christians who have not known the debate from the
inside are apt to walk into a minefield in talking to those who have such
reactions. This is not a matter, then, merely of translating the
Greek New Testament, but of the history of the Church, especially from the
Reformation to today.
AD: The end of your third chapter
briefly refers to some Anglicans who "privilege" (to use a favored
academic pseudo-verb!) their own views in matters of sexuality and
abortion over Paul and Scripture generally. How can O/orthodox
Christians respond to such claims--or can they?
It may be helpful
for Orthodox Christians (and others who hold to Scripture as
interpreted by Holy Tradition) to point out that these are not single
hot-button issues, but indicative of an entire stance of faithfulness,
or lack of it. The rise of the “Wesleyan” Quadrilateral as an
interpretive method has emboldened some biblical scholars and pastors to
appeals to “experience” (their own, or that of contemporary Western
society) as a “trump card” in deciding whether to follow the Bible and
the consistent witness of the Church in these matters. The words of the
Apostle Paul are neutralized because he is said simply not to have had a
broad enough experience in matters of gender, for example: if he were
among us today, he would change his mind in accordance with the broad
inclusivity of the gospel. Similarly, the traditional understanding of
the Church regarding the sanctity of life, a stance drawn from
Scriptures as a whole, and its applicability to the unborn, is
questioned because (say some) we now understand that personhood is to be
“in relation.” The unborn child does not have this capacity, and the
rights and needs of the mother are more significant. But we worship a
God who created them “male and female” and who himself became an embryo,
sanctifying childbirth, human life, and human sexuality. Attention
both to the specific texts that deal with gender and the sanctity of
life, attention to the consistent witness of the Church in these issues,
and attention to the entire story of salvation are all important in
this time of confusion. This balanced approach removes the issues from
the center of attention as stand-alone issues, helping us to keep the
focus upon our Incarnate Lord, born of a woman, who graced a wedding
between a man and a woman at Cana. It prevents moralism, but allows us
to show
why these issues matter today.
AD: Your sixth chapter
talks about trying to discern between Tradition and human traditions.
Does Scripture itself offer any guidance here?
Yes, indeed, I
think so, though sometimes the difference can only be seen in
retrospect. The best clues we receive are, I think, in the
decision-making passages of the early Church. In the first council of
the Church, decisions were taken regarding which instructions should be
given to Gentiles who had become Christians—did they need to be
circumcised or not? The decision the James and the others took is
presented with reference to custom, knowledge and reason, and it appears
as a kind of compromise. The Gentiles did not need to keep the whole
law, but should avoid meat offered to idols, avoid porneia (sexual immorality,
or possibly, the specific immorality of close inter-sanguinal
marriages), and not eat meat with blood still in it. Though this was an
early and general council, its specifics have not been maintained by
all Christian communities since, especially the command having to do
with properly-bled meat. Why have Christians not felt so bound? The
clue is in the language of deliberation (“it is my judgment,” Acts
15:19), and the reasons given by James for the decision—“For Moses has
been preached in every city from the earliest times and is read in the
synagogues on every Sabbath" (Acts 15:21).
Why these rules? Because
they know Moses and will understand why we are saying these things.
(Notice he does not give theological reasons, but cultural ones). The
ruling made it possible for Jewish and Gentile Christians to live in
peace, and its main reason was summarized in some later versions of the
Acts passage which omit the actual commands, and simply put a version of
the Golden Rule in its place. This was a compromise measure meant to
promote the harmony of the early Church.
The spirit of the
regulation continues, as do the principles of morality and faith in
one God, but its specificity is no longer necessary in later contexts. We
may also take note of the decision process—the witness of various
members of the community is heeded, the
Old Testament Scriptures are
searched for words about the Gentiles, and the focus is upon God’s
action in Christ. The issue at hand is put in the context of the larger
picture; there is collegial discussion among the leaders; and the bishop
speaks, taking all of this into consideration. This tells us that when
making decisions about tradition in the Church, this is not a solitary
or hasty affair, but it requires care, discernment, and deference of one
to the other. As I say in the book, deciding between mutable
traditions and Holy Tradition is not a matter for the arrogant, the
hasty, or the faint of heart.
AD: Your conclusions
speaks of "newcomers" engaged in "'cherry-picking' of the Tradition."
That, it seems to me, is an especial danger for Catholic and Orthodox
converts today. What suggestions would you have to avoid the pitfalls of
such an approach?
That is interesting. My experience with
converts is that they tend to go whole hog and become purists about
everything rather than engaging in a pick-and-choose cherry-picking! I
was actually thinking more about intrigued Protestants who fasten upon a
particular part of the tradition without seeing how it relates to the
whole. Consider the Reformed Christian who stumbles upon icons, and
blithely puts them up on his or her wall without a thought of Calvinist
theology, and without understanding that these icons are not little
illustrations of the gospel, but part of an entire theology of
Incarnation. Or the more sophisticated theologian who loves the Eastern
emphasis upon “mystery” but uses it to downplay the importance of the
ecumenical creeds. Or the biblical scholar who fastens upon the
“Christus Victor” approach to atonement in order to get away from
sacrificial language—but doesn’t notice that the Eastern liturgy is full
of the language of sacrifice! For those who are tempted to flirt with
aspects of Eastern Christianity, as well as for new converts, I
recommend that they start reading the
Fathers (start with St. John
Chrysostom’s sermons!), and attend Divine Liturgy and Vespers. This
puts the elements that they are in love with in context, and prevents
distortion or one-sidedness. It also is in the worship that we really
come to understand. As Jesus invited, “Come and See!”
AD: Sum up the book briefly and tell us who you think should read it.
The
book demonstrates from the Bible that Scripture and Tradition are
intertwined, and that if one accepts the authority of Scripture, one
will not dismiss Tradition. It discloses some of the history of the
debate, and current tendencies today. Its target audience is evangelical
Protestants, but I think that it holds interest for for Catholics,
Orthodox and mainline Protestants as well. It is always helpful for
traditional Christians to appreciate the biblical center of our Holy
Tradition, and it may be helpful for more “liberal” Protestants to
consider how we have come to be polarized in these areas, that is, the
reasons for our disagreements today.
AD: What are you at work on now? What are the upcoming writing projects?
I
am finishing off an article on “sacrifice and sacrament” for a volume
to be edited by
Hans Boersma and
Matthew Levering, a "Handbook on
Sacramentality." I am also about to begin a long-term work, reading the
apostle Paul’s passages on righteousness and justification through the
eyes of the fathers, moving towards a book entitled (provisionally) "Let
Us Meditate Upon Your Righteousness." I am also planning a more popular
book about the importance of mediation in the spiritual life,
tentatively entitled "Mediation and the Immediate God."
