The Nature Of Faith

[♦ ficino ♦]

Hello Philo, what you say sounds as though it is consistent, not only with modern hermeneutics, but with the traditional rabbinic conviction that in the text are deeper and deeper levels of G-D's self-disclosure--even in every letter of the text is G-D touched. And G-D's disclosure of himself for us is never complete; there is always more of the divine.

 

One of my friends from seminary days, a Missouri Synod Lutheran born of a converted Jewish mother, later on so fell in love with Ha Shem in and behind the text that he returned to his Judaism in an orthodox but critically informed way.  His wife remained a Lutheran.  I had been best man at their wedding.

 

But the rabbis don't generally propose that you try to unravel the text on your own.  One is to have a teacher who himself had a teacher all the way back... One learns in a group.  One does the rituals, does mitzvot, lives and learns from within the tradition. Some religious Jews say that hermeneutical methods that go back to 18th-19th century Germany and that prevail in academia are all wrong for approaching the Torah etc., which "is not your book."

 

I don't think I can really argue against what you say except to note that you seem to be going on your own.  That is not the ancient Christian way, either.  The Tradition is bigger than the understanding of any of us because it resides in, and is passed down by, the living body of Christ, his Church. The Tradition is more than a collection of documents.  I'm using capital letters here as a rhetorical device, but I think you can get their purpose.  I agree with you that it is not the unaided intellect that even reaches the Church as the place where the fullness of revelation is passed on.  As in the Father Brown story read by Lady Marchmain in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, God is like an angler, who pulls on the line - I think, as a fisher of men.

 

I agree that scripture is for the early church the chief part of tradition.  It was never promoted, however, or meant to be understood, outside of an ecclesial context, as far as I know.  To be read in the right spirit, the reader needs to be part of the whole body, which is the recipient en masse of all the charisms. 

 

My earlier "listen to yourself" remark envisioned your position as one of advocating a single reader relationship with God as mediated through the Bible.  I doubted, and still doubt, that this picture is adequate.  Do you know the old story of the faith of the charcoal burner?  Two (I think it was) sophisticated churchmen ran into a "carbonarius," a simple man who made his living by burning wood to make charcoal.  When they asked him what he believed, he replied, oh, what the church believes.  When they asked, what does the church believe, he replied, oh, what I believe.  John Henry Newman somewhere praises this simple faith of the carbonarius.

 

The learned Protestant alone in his study with the Bible is not in the same position as the carbonarius, however great the Protestant's erudition.

 

That's the historic understanding going back to the Fathers.  When we get into the question, OK, which of the modern ecclesiastical claimants is that historic church, well...  I leave off here.

 

I also can't argue against your choice of the Bible as the text that you plumb.  Had you chosen, say, the Bhagavad Gita, I'd probably say much less, seeing as Hinduism was never my tradition - I was only a wannabe Hindu for a while. 

 

Why any of us who have been through Christianity and are through with it should be convinced by your attempts to promote a sophisticated form of that religion escapes me.  I respect your right and decision;  I don't follow it.  Between you and most of us on here, it seems to come down to, you have your experience and your reasons, we have ours.  And our reasons include some pretty serious problems with the text that you promote, however subtly the interpreter tries to plumb its complex layers. 

 

It's at this point that I part with Tradition/traditions. If the average person can't, say, quote Hebrews 11:1 to get at least a preliminary definition of theological faith, the Bible doesn't seem to be of much use as the locus of revelation.  In the end, each of us must decide; we can't get away with simply following what our rabbi or priest or learned interpreter tells us is the way to live.  (After all, the authorities never stop their disagreements and schisms!)