Sacraments and New Testament law

Christians believe that Jesus commanded us to baptize new Christians. However, there is a fundamental division in views: some Christians (such as Catholics and the Orthodox) have a sacramental view of baptism, on which baptism as such leads to an actual supernaturally-produced change in the person baptized, while others hold a symbolic view of it.

Here is an argument for the sacramental view. We learn from Paul that there is a radical change in God’s law from Old to New Testament times. I think our best account of that change is that we are no longer under divinely-commanded ceremonial and symbolic laws, but as we learn from the First Letter of John, we are clearly still under the moral law.

On the symbolic view, however, baptism is precisely a ceremonial and symbolic law—precisely the kind of thing that we are no longer under. On the sacramental view, however, it is easy to explain how baptism falls under the moral law. Love of neighbor morally enjoins on us that we provide effective medical treatment to our neighbor, and love of self requires us to seek such treatment for ourselves. Similarly, if baptism is crucial to the provision of grace for moral healing, then love of neighbor morally enjoins on us that we baptize and love of self requires us to seek baptism for ourselves.

The same kind of argument applies to the Eucharist: since it is commanded by God in New Testament times, it is not merely symbolic.

A New Testament argument against young earth creationism

The New Testament says, in multiple places, that the end of the world will come soon.

It’s been about two thousand years and the end of the world has not come.

If the world is only about 10,000 years old, then 2,000 years is about 20% of the age of the world. And that’s not soon. So, if the New Testament is right, the world must be rather more than 10,000 years old.

Indeed, we have this: the older we think the world to be, the easier it is to accept the New Testament teaching that the end of the world would come soon after apostolic times.

On standard scientific views, the 2000 years that we’ve had since the time of Jesus is about one percent of the time humans have been on earth, one two millionth of the age of the earth, and one seven millionth of the age of the universe. A blip.

A reading of 1 Corinthians 14:33b-34a

1 Corinthians 14:33b-34a is one of the “hard texts” of the New Testament. The RSV translates it as:

As in all the churches of the saints, the women should keep silence in the churches.

Besides the fact that this is a hard saying, a textual difficulty is that earlier in the letter, at 11:5, Paul has no objection to women prophesying or praying (it seems very likely that praying would be out loud), though it has been suggested that this was outside of a liturgical context. Nor does later Church practice prohibit women from joining in vocal prayer during the liturgy.

I assume that the second "the churches" means "the churches of Corinth", while the first "the churches" refers to the churches more generally. And yesterday at our Department Bible study, I was struck by the fact that the “As” (Greek hōs) that begins the text can be read as “In the manner of”. On that reading, the first sentence of the hard text does not say that women should keep silent in the Corinthian churches. Rather, it says that women should keep silent in the Corinthian churches in the way and to the extent to which they keep silent in the other churches. In other words, women should only speak up in Corinthian liturgies at the points at which women speak up in non-Corinthian liturgies. This is compatible with women having various speaking roles—but only as long as they have these roles in “all the churches of the saints.”

(Note, however, that some versions punctuate differently, and make “As in all the churches of the saints” qualify what came earlier rather than what comes afterwards. My reading requires the RSV’s punctuation. Of course, the original has no punctuation.)

On this reading, the first sentence of the text is an application of a principle of liturgical uniformity between the churches, and Paul could equally well have said the same thing about the men. But the text suggests to me that there was some particular problem, which we can only speculate about, that specifically involved disorderly liturgical participation by Corinthian women, in addition to other problems of disorderly participation that Paul discusses earlier in the chapter.

The difficulty for my reading is the next sentence, however:

For they are not permitted to speak, but should be subordinate, as even the law says. (1 Cor. 14:34b, RSV)

I would want to read this with “speak” restricted to the kinds of speech not found in the other churches. Perhaps in the other churches, there was no “chatting in the pews”, or socializing during the liturgy (Mowczko in a very nice summary of interpretations notes that this is St. John Chrystostom’s interpretation).

Another interpretation is that “the law” here is Roman law or Corinthian custom (though I don’t know that in Koine Greek “nomos” can still cover custom, like it can in classical Greek), so that Paul is reprising a motif of noting that the Corinthians are behaving badly even by their own cultural standards.

I don’t know that my reading is right. I think it is a little bit more natural to read the Greek as having a complete prohibition on women speaking, but my reading seems to be grammatically permissible, and one must balance naturalness of language with consistency in a text (in this case, consistency with 11:5). And in the case of a Biblical text, I also want an interpretation compatible with divine inspiration.

Ethics of love

New Testament ethics holds that loving (God and human neighbor, at least, but maybe the rest of creation as well) is sufficient for fulfilling moral obligations. This could be taken in weaker and stronger ways. The weaker view is that:

1. Necessarily, anyone who fails morally fails in loving all.

And "necessarily" might not even be metaphysical modality: it might be something "nomically necessarily", or "necessarily in light of God's commands". But there are stronger readings, such as:

2. Necessarily, every moral failure constitutes a failure in loving all.

For instance, take someone who steals. To have (1) hold of the case of the theft, all we need is that, say, the theft makes perfect universal love psychologically impossible, or that perfect universal love would make the theft psychologically impossible. That's a strong claim but nowhere near as strong as the claim we would get from (2) that the theft constitutes a failure in loving all.

I prefer the stronger view. I don't think the New Testament claims are merely claims about moral failings being correlated, even necessarily so, with failures in love. Given that God is love itself, and we are in God's image and likeness, it is quite plausible that (2) is true.

If this is right, then we can give a sketch of the sorts of questions we would want to answer to get a Christian ethics.

Metaethics:

• What is the modality in the "Necessarily" in (2)?
• Why is (2) true? (Is it a brute truth? Is it true in virtue of a divine command? Is it true in virtue of our nature? Etc.)

Normative Ethics:

• What is it to love?
• Are there any restrictions on the quantifiers in the "all" of (2)?
• What is it to fail in loving? (Is it the same as to fail to love, or can one fail in loving x while still loving x but not the right way?)

Applied Ethics:

• Analyze which particular actions are constitutive of a failure in love in light of the analysis of love and failure in the Normative Ethics section.

I see my One Body book as tackling some of the questions in the Normative and Applied areas. I wish I had the time and wisdom to handle the other questions. Maybe one day I will at least have the time.

The character of God in the Bible

The Old Testament has a picture of its central character, God, that is on its surface inconsistent, with apparently contradictory features. But a deeper reading shows a deep consistency: a consistent but from our point of view complex character displayed in a variety of circumstances, from a variety of points of view, and also reflected in the emotions of narrators and interactions of other characters.

I shall not try to defend this reading of the Old Testament here. It cannot be done in a post, and maybe not even in a book, and certainly not by me. One must drink in the texts. Personally, I have found very helpful our Department Bible study in this regard. We are doing Book III of the Psalms (Pss. 73-89), and this has been one of the things that has led to this post.

Now, there come to mind four prima facie plausible explanations for the portrayal of a single character across a large body of literature by a large set of authors.

1. Imitation by a number of authors of a canon of primary texts or stories originally by a single author.
2. Harmonization by selection of texts and/or editorial work on particular texts.
3. Cooperative authorship.
4. A modeling of the character on an actual person with whom the diverse set of authors all interacted "in real life."

If (4) is the right explanation, then the fact that the authors wrote over a period of many centuries, in different social circumstances, together with the essential otherness of central character of the texts, makes it most unlikely that any mere human was the model. And the simplest explanation is that the authors were in fact interacting with the person they claim to be describing—Y*WH, the God of Israel. Therefore, if (4) is true, then we have strong evidence that God exists. Observe that it is not uncommon for the same person to have apparent surface differences as seen in different contexts and by different people—we call this "complexity" in the person and it lends reality to the person (which character complexity in the case of God is, I think, compatible with ontological simplicity, but that's a different question).

Note that the deep consilience not only suggests that the various authors interacted with the same person, but that they did not do so in a shallow way. It is possible to have portrayals of the same person by different people who were acquainted with the subject where there isn't such a consilience—I feel this way in the case of Plato and Xenophon's respective portrayals of Socrates, though I could be wrong (I have not drunk in the Xenophon texts sufficiently).

If (1) were the right explanation, we would expect shallow consistency in the portrayal of the character, and quite likely some deep inconsistencies, whereas we observe the opposite. It is hard for one author to take another author's character and portray that character in a consistent way, and the likely result of an attempt to portray that character is that one will have a similarity of outward mannerisms, but to a careful reader (or viewer) it just won't be the same character but an impostor. For instance, the Sherlock Holmes of the "New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes" TV series from the '50s is a case in point (this is the most absurd example from the seires). But when two authors portray different surface detail with a deep consistency, then we have something quite unexpected on a copying hypothesis. Granted, this could result from literary genius combined with depth of appreciation of another's work on the part of the copyist, but such a combination is rare. Most literary geniuses create characters on their own, often even when the character bears the name of some historical figure. And the Hebrew Scriptures weren't just written by two or three authors, but by a much greater number. Thus, explanation (1) does not fit the phenomena very well.

As for (2), again harmonization might explain doctrinal agreement and agreement as to surface features, but unless the harmonization takes the form of a rewriting of the whole body of texts by a literary genius, it would not produce a deep consilience in the central character. And no such unified rewriting in fact happened: the Hebrew Scriptures retain a great diversity of genres and styles. Another striking feature is that at least as regarding texts from before around the 4th century BC, it does not appear that there was much in the way of centralized selection. It seems that the main criterion for canonicity in the first century—to the extent that the concept of canonicity existed—was not deep consilience in the character of God, but something more extrinsic like Hebrew-language authorship combined with venerable age.

Option (3) could work with a small number of contemporaneous authors—but certainly not with the great number of authors of the Hebrew Scriptures strung out across centuries.

So that leaves option (4), and so we have good reason to think that at least a number of the authors of the Hebrew Scriptures had encountered the character of God in reality.

What does the New Testament add to the argument? I think the deep consilience with apparent surface difference continues. So the argument is strengthened. And another point emerges. Jesus Christ, although typically not explicitly portrayed as God, is portrayed in a way that gives him a deep consilience of character with the Y*WH of the Old Testament. Just to give one example, he appropriates, in a credible way, God's desire to gather the Israelites to himself like a mother hen.

May we be thus gathered to him.

Of course, I do not claim originality for this argument. It is inspired by similar arguments seen in various places. Nor do I promote this argument as a way of convincing atheists. Because the evidence of the deep consilience needs to be gathered over years of drinking in the Scriptures, and maybe this can only be done while living the life of the community that has produced the Scriptures (i.e., the life of the Church or of the Synagogue), this argument, while of significant epistemic weight, may only be evidentially useful to Christians. Yet, God can help someone not living the life of the community to see the consilience, so it could have some value outside the community, too.