Getting Past Augustine: Reading Scripture Is A Lot Harder Than We're Commonly Led To Believe

I have recently read the exchange between David Bentley Hart and his fellow theologian and scholar N. T. Wright over objections that Wright had about Hart's translation of the Greek New Testament which was published not long ago, that N. T. Wright had written a critique of it was, from what I understand, something of a departure from the often violated scholarly convention that you don't review a book which is in competition with one you've recently published,  N. T. Wright had published his own translation.   But that's not as interesting to me as the way that the disagreement pointed out some of the major problems within the long history of Christianity, especially the divide between the West and East of Europe, between Orthodoxy and Catholicism-Protestantism.   A lot of that seems to be due to the great influence of Augustine and his line of thought in the West and certain basic concepts some invented or popularized by Augustine, original sin, predestination, eternal damnation, etc. and the accusation that some of that is due to Augustine's inability to understand the distinctions among ideas which depend on a more subtle knowledge of Greek which, being the continued language of the early Greek Church was far clearer to them than it was to Western theologians who didn't know Greek and who depended on faulty translation starting with Jerome.  Or at least that's my understanding of the problem.

Considering such things as the damnation of unbaptized infants and the scandalous character given to God to make him conform to that Augustinian innovation by some of the major figures in Western Christianity have been of the most use to those who want to produce religious neurosis and depravity and, in the fullness of time, atheism, it's an important issue to finally get cleared up.  But that's only one of the issues that arise when you look at the understanding that an educated Greek speaking Pharisee like Paul and why he used different words which we don't understand did, actually, mean quite different and distinct things.  These issues tend to hinge on what Paul, the second and second greatest theologian in Christian history said, that is if you consider Jesus as the first and greatest of all Christian theologians, a theologian being a person who tries to make God comprehensible, in part, to human understanding.   I do have to say it is rather remarkable, as Hart pointed out, how many of the major figures in Western Christianity have turned the Good News of Jesus into the worst of all possible news and turn God into someone we have to be saved from.  I am hardly a great reader of Augustine but in almost every instance I've run up against the angry insistence on such things the angry protector of eternal damnation, the damnation of infants, predestination, is more interested in protecting the thoughts of Augustine than they are the Gospel or the Epistles. 

This article by David Bentley Hart, The Spiritual Was More Substantial Than the Material for the Ancients, was a real eye-opener to me, pointing out that it is the misunderstanding, distortion through simplification, confused changes in meaning of words that Paul and the other writers of the Second Testament when those were translated from the Greek original to Latin and other languages and how even modern translations are often made by those who are unable to understand their mistake because they are thoroughly bound up in things like the thinking of Augustine and through him Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, etc.   I am not a scholar of 1st century Greek, though I have started learning to read it, but the examples in the article become far clearer if you take the real and serious difference in meaning that Hart points out to into consideration.  I have to say that some of N. T. Wright's ideas about the nature of the life to come, the life after the Judgement, that I'd heard from his lectures didn't exactly sit well with me so maybe that colors my judgement, nor does it make sense to me considering the accounts of the risen Jesus in the Gospels or in Paul's experience, which does, actually make more sense if those distinctions in the meaning of words was part of Paul's daily use of language.

I do have to say that Hart's criticism of the common habits in imagining 1st century Judaism and, so, of earliest Christianity of that period has been something I've come to to see the more I've read about the period:

I can think of no other popular writer on the early church these days whose picture of Judaism in the Roman Hellenistic world seems better to exemplify what I regard as a dangerous triumph of theological predispositions over historical fact in biblical studies—one that occasionally so distorts the picture of the intellectual and spiritual environment of the apostolic church as effectively to create an entirely fictional early Christianity. Naturally, this also entails the simultaneous creation of an equally fictional late antique Judaism, of the sort that once dominated Protestant biblical scholarship: a fantastic “pure” Judaism situated outside cultural history, purged of every Hellenistic and Persian “alloy,” stripped of those shining hierarchies of spirits and powers and morally ambiguous angels and demi-angelic nefilim that had been incubated in the intertestamental literature, largely ignorant even of those Septuagintal books that were omitted from the Masoretic text of the Jewish bible, and precociously conformed to later rabbinic orthodoxy—and, even then, this last turns out to be a fantasy rabbinic orthodoxy, one robbed of its native genius and variety, and imperiously reduced to a kind of Protestantism without Jesus.

No such Judaism ever existed, either in the days of Christ and the apostles or in any other period; but it has enjoyed a long and vigorous life in Protestant dogmatics and biblical criticism. And I was recently reminded of this by Wright himself, when he publicly objected to a footnote in my own recent translation of the New Testament.  In that note, I mentioned more or less in passing that Paul seems to have thought that some of the narratives of the Jewish Bible not only were apt for allegorical readings, but might also have originally been written as allegories.  For Wright, this was tantamount to a suggestion that Paul did not believe in the reality of God’s covenants with Israel. Now, needless to say, nothing of the sort follows logically from my observation; more to the point, my footnote did nothing more than call attention to Paul’s own words. (And, really, how often does Paul not employ allegory in reading scripture?) But Wright’s anxiety is quite in keeping with a certain traditional Protestant picture of the pagan and Jewish worlds of late antiquity, one that involves an impermeable cultural partition between them—between, that is, the “philosophy” of the Greeks and the “pure” covenantal piety of the Jews. And, as I say, the results are sometimes comic. Unfortunately, they are at other times positively disastrous. Nowhere is this more strikingly the case—and nowhere does Wright’s work in particular present a more troubling specimen of pious exegetical violence to scripture—than in regard to the New Testament’s use of the words πνεῦμα (spirit), ψυχή (soul), and σάρξ (flesh), as well as to the theologies of resurrection that attach to them.

Which, if nothing else, points out how dangerous it is for understanding to read the Scriptures naively, as if you could reach any deep understanding of them without understanding such issues.  The Bible, even the New Testament can't be read as a modern History book or science, which hadn't been invented and, so, they weren't written to be used like that.  Nor can it be read as an introductory textbook or a novel which doesn't require you to have previous knowledge of the kinds of things that Hart talks about.  And even knowing that isn't enough.   It's not that a scholar like N. T. Wright could be accused of being unprepared to read the books more on their own terms, Hart's accusation that he reads the books of the Bible, shaping his understanding of them on later theology instead of on what the authors said is the way that all of us read it to some extent, it's the way we read everything.   It takes an enormous effort to strip away things like the through saturation of Western culture in Augustine's thinking, to understand that he, also, read the Scriptures from his own experience, to make distinctions and come to understandings at odds with those.

I agree with Hart that Gregory of Nyssa had a far deeper understanding of the Scriptures than later, especially Latin speaking and writing theologians did.  His conclusions are certainly far more consonant with the definition of God as the ultimate source of love in the universe than Augustine's or Aquinas or Calvin or Luther or, I'll have to say, Karl Rahner, though I think Rahner's  readings are more due to his saturation in modern, contemporary German philosophy than Augustine.  I'm not sure I think those are all that much of an improvement.  With the great advance in rigorous modern scholarship comes the problem of modernism, though they can be divorced.  Modernism, itself, can become a polluting hermenutic.

That's not to say that in many instances those theologians are worthless, it means that they have to be read with the same care and understanding of where they're coming from and where they wanted to go to.   I think Augustine turned sour when he saw the Roman Empire falling in the West and he was way too involved with politics.  And speaking of which . . .

Reading more Orthodox thinking it is striking to me how different it is in so many ways from the Western thinking I grew up in.  That's not to say that it's perfect, as one Orthodox thinker I listened to recently pointed out that Orthodoxy has a huge problem of being, so often, bound up in nationalism and the politics of the countries they are tied to.  In that, I think that, to some extent, Catholicism and many of the Protestant churches have left much of that behind, in many cases. 

For more examples of such differences, here's a recent lecture and Q&A "Is Everyone Saved? Universalism and the Nature of Persons."

I'll point out that the quote I used about Pope Francis the other day comes at about 58:00

I can say that this all points out that the slam that Protestants made against Catholics, that they were against non-specialists reading the Bible being both right and wrong.  If the motives of keeping the Bible locked away from the common people by authorizing only the  Latin Vulgate were bad, they did, at least, protect Catholics from coming to The Bible totally unprepared with the myriad of problems that can lead to.  If it's going to be read, and it should be, it should be read for an actual understanding of the language and minds of those who composed it, the extent to which that can be had.  I hope we call all, eventually, get past Augustine.  My rule of thumb is that anything  inconsistent with God being good, of God's love, with God holding out against even the most intransigent of stubborn humans of God being as depraved as the worst of predestination and those eager to send people to eternal torment is suspect to the highest degree.  I don't believe any of it.