INTRO
True, we've never before had a nearly-instantaneous, nearly-worldwide network connected to devices in our pockets alerting us to rising temperatures and the temperamental outbursts of tyrants or the spread of malicious insects and viruses.
And being constantly aware of all this can feel disorienting and surreal.
But even so, we're not convinced we should be so quick to call our times "totally unprecedented." Our ancestors weathered tyrants and plagues and renovated their political thought and activity when facing the consequences of previous human actions.
And for those of us within the Christian Tradition, we must always remember that our predecessors took on the challenge of reinterpreting all of reality in light of the singular life of Jesus of Nazareth.
What is not "unprecedented" is humans encountering the unprecedented. And in the midst of our own unique challenges, we unnecessarily feed the bad reactions that can come with fear and uncertainty if we believe we face our challenges alone.
So, in this series, we look at people and moments in the Tradition where those who came before us give us precedents for facing our epoch-shaping tests and tasks.
This time, we meet a man who's approach to interpreting the Scriptures has shaped our faith for centuries. His approach, known as the "rule of faith", still serves as a key for us today as we seek to interpret and understand the scriptures, especially the difficult parts of the Bible.
STORY
Even in a digital age, with infinite video content available on TikTok and Youtube, we still use writing every day. But just because we use it all the time doesn't mean we always nail it.
How many times have we seen a politician or celebrity tweet something and then have to explain what they really meant? But we don't need to create some distance by naming politicians and celebrities in our example, do we? You have personal experience with this, don't you? How often have you felt the need to text something like, "So what did you mean by 'o.k.'"?
At least with words spoken to us in person we can clue in on some of the things that help make the message clear - like the situational context, and the tone of voice and facial expressions of the speaker. But when we are on the receiving end of written text, we have a lot more gaps to fill in.
And if we sometimes struggle with interpreting 140 characters using our own language, it only gets tougher when the message starts in one language and ends in another. And when that is the case, it usually also means we need to add a cultural layer into the interpretive mix. And let's say the sender is from a direct culture and the receiver is from an indirect culture, where different interactions have drastically different meanings.
Next, let's say the original message was put into writing thousands of years before the receiver attempts to understand it. And then, just for fun, let's also have the message be directed originally to someone besides the receiver, so it'll have contextual clues and references that the receiver won't necessarily catch.
And finally let's say that the written bit of communication is dealing with complicated topics like economics and human power and life and death and sin and God.
Now a situation like this might sound like the ultimate game of telephone.You know, the game that starts with one person that has a secret message whispering that message into someone's ear, and then the second person whispers whatever they heard to the third person, and on and on until the message reaches the end and the final person announces to everyone whatever it is they thought they heard. With this kind of translation, if the person who kicked off the whole chain whispered "filet mignon", you're lucky if the last person announces they heard "flaming lawn." or anything that even sounds relatively close to the original message.
Which is great if the goal is to play an entertaining party game, but scary, if the message is no game and could have incredibly consequential effects for how we approach and live our lives, especially if it's a message that we give authority to, you know, like with the Bible.
Attempting to interpret the Bible can at times feel like a giant game of telephone. It has all the complexities that make it difficult to understand: it's in written form, it's ancient history, it's from different cultures, it's been translated, and it wasn't written directly to us.
So how are we supposed to be able to make sense of it? And then, when intelligent people do share their interpretations of the Scriptures but don't agree, who's right? Is just one person right, or are we all correct? Or nobody?
And people in recent decades have felt this problem with special potency when they consider the Old Testament, because it contains some particularly difficult texts. What are we to make of those texts that seem not just to contain or speak of violence, but seem to be violent themselves?
Thankfully, these questions aren't new to our faith, and we have a precedent that we can follow. For this, we'll turn to particularly helpful Saint from the second century, named Irenaeus. But before we get to Irenaues, we need to first talk about a heretic named Marcion
In the second century, Marcion was an influential theologian and teacher. He claimed that the Old Testament, then known as the Jewish Scriptures, was the story of an entirely different god, one who was not the Father of Jesus Christ. Marcion argued that the god of the Old Testament created our material world out of spite, or possibly out of simple ignorance, and that this god now rules on the basis of law and judgement. On the other hand, Marcion said, God, the Father of Jesus, is a God of grace and forgiveness. A God who rules in love and promises, according to Marcion, a particular kind of salvation, that involves an escape from this evil material world which was created by some lesser deity.
As a conesquence, Marcion argued not only for the exclusion of the Old Testament, but even severely edited the New Testament, cutting out every place a New Testament author quoted the Old Testament, or even carried too much continuity with Old Testament themes and ways of thinking. For example, Marcion rejected the entire gospels of Matthew and John for seeming too Jewish.
The early church debated Marcion's views because his teaching seemed at odds with many of the fundamental doctrines of the church, such as creation being the good work of God, and the incarnation of Christ. In response to Marcion, Irenaeus, a bishop from Lyons (what we now call France), wrote the first extended theological essay in the church's history. In this treatise, Irenaeus argued that there was one God, the God of Abraham, Moses, David, the prophets, and the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, defended a fuller Christian account of salvation, and took on Marcion's views regarding Scripture.
To Irenaeus's mind, which shaped largely the orthodox mind of the church as a whole, the key to understanding the Bible was to keep in view Scripture's unifying narrative, in which the chief actor was God. In the biblical account, two histories intertwine: the history of Israel and the life of Christ. Although they diverge at places, both are the history of God's actions in and for the world, and so both are part of the larger narrative that begins with creation and ends not with a total escape from Creation, but with a vision of a splendid new city in which the Lord God will be the light.
And, according to Irenaeus, what had happened in Christ was the key to understanding the entire narrative. Even though the Bible is a large and diverse book including many literary genres from varying cultures and epochs, its central plot is rather simple. It is the story of the world going out from God, and a returning to God.
Irenaeus summarizes the narrative this way in his "rule of faith":
This, then, is the ordering of our faith. ...
God, the Father, uncreated, incomprehensible, invisible, one God, creator of all. This is the first article.
The second is the Word of God, God the Son, Jesus Christ our Lord, who was revealed to the prophets. ... At the end of times, to sum up all things, he became man among men, visible and palpable, in order to destroy death and bring to light life, and bring about communion with God.
And the third is the Holy Spirit, by whom the prophets prophesied and the patriarchs were taught about God and the just were led into the path of justice, and who in the end of times was poured forth in a new manner upon men all over the earth renewing man to God.
To understand and use the Rule of Faith well in our own times, with our own dealings with Scripture, we need to think of a "rule" not so much in the sense of an instruction to follow, like in a classroom, but more in the sense of a ruler that we would use for measuring a distance. Irenaeus's "rule" was used to "measure" other interpretations to see if they fit into the narrative of the Bible.
And Irenaeus' "rule of faith" is a piece of early Christian thought whose importance cannot be overstated. In fact, you may have noticed that Irenaeus's rule sounds a lot like the Apostle's Creed. That's because his rule went on to become the framework of the Creed. And Irenaeus's approach to understanding the Scriptures informed all later interpretative efforts. Whether one reads Athanasius against Arius, Augustine against Pelagius, or Cyril of Alexandria against Nestorius, all assume that individual passages are to be read in light of the story that gives meaning to the whole.
According to Irenaeus, reading and understanding Scripture is similar to arranging a mosaic. There are multiple ways to configure the individual tiles: but not all arrangements are the same. Some will give the reader a portrait of Jesus the King while others might reveal a total jackass. Without an idea of the central narrative and plot, or in other words, a "rule", to reference, it's incredibly difficult to see if what we are arranging is as it should be.
With the help of Irenaeus, the early church rejected Marcion's teachings as heretical. And although we would like to think that we have nothing in common with Marcion today, his views have been a constant temptation for Christians. We always need to guard against forgetting the narrative of the Scriptures, lest we de-link ourselves from something like the Old Testament and create a mosaic of a jackass or a brutal demigod and call it Christ.
An example of this today deals with the doctrine of redemption and/or salvation. When many Christians say that through Jesus we have salvation, most are referring to an eternal life after death, or going to heaven when they die. If this life after death was the central message of Scripture, it's a little bit odd that in most of the Old Testament it is not even mentioned.
And to be content with this commonly understood meaning of the good news of Jesus, we implicitly have to accept and follow Marcion's example and de-link ourselves from the Old Testament. While it is true that the New Testament affirms that there is life after death, this wasn't necessarily "good news", or really even "news". This was well known and believed by the Pharisees long before Jesus' time.
As Cuban-American historian and theologian Justo Gonzalez puts it: "The core of the good news is that the resurrection has already begun in the raising of Jesus from the dead. This certainly means that we can trust in him for our final resurrection. But even more, it means that the long-awaited (Old Testament) promises have now begun to be fulfilled. The Reign of God has dawned. Life after death is good news. But it is not all the good news, for the Old(er) Testament reminds us that the scope of God's action and revelation includes much more than life after death. The witness of the Older Testament reminds us that God's salvation is not purely 'spiritual,' in the common sense of that term, but is also political and social."
With this in mind, in the conversation that follows we'll discuss Irenaeus's approach to interpreting the Scriptures and how we, today, can utilize his rule in order to better understand and embody the communal apostolic faith as witnessed to in the scriptures.
DISCUSSION [Auto-Generated Transcript]
Julius: All right. Welcome back to “All Things”… this is Julius and Wil, and this is our…
Wilson: Should we like start doing when there is no guests do the back and forth, like “This is Julius…”… “and Wil” where, I would say my own…
Julius: let's do it.
Wilson: would that spice things up a little bit.
Julius: Let's do it. All right. All right. Welcome back to all things. This is Julius waves. That camera got him.
Wilson: that's way better.
Julius: We tried to change things up today. Um, I think
Wilson: small incremental improvements every day.
Julius: 1% improvements, um, I think are we approaching the last of the series?
Wilson: I think so.
Julius: Wow. Um, to, I guess almost wrap up this series today, we're talking about scripture and, um, I was just thinking about this. Um, reflecting on that story. I think that the question of what to do with scripture remains as timely as I think this, the stuff that Marcien was dealing with of like, uh, I think that, that overhanging question of like, oh, what is, what is the old Testament about and why does this seem like a different guy?
It is a timely question that a lot of people face. And I think that similar to, and I'm like, oh, where a lot of folks have landed is just a, well, we don't know what to do with it so that they kind of just get. And not just on the old Testament entirely, but kind of, I feel that the Bible has become such like a, we don't know what to do with this responsibly.
And so the people kind of just put it down and give up on reading it entirely. And I think that's the place that we're coming from. And we're trying to speak to today because it seems that at worst people write off the Bible as, um, and I understand. Based on kind of the ways that it has been used for harm and weaponized against people.
And then at best, I feel like even a generous understanding of why Christians, like the Bible at best. Some people might even just see, like, see it as like a, oh, it's just a book that kind of like a, like a glorified book club that like, uh, people are really into this fiction and they really like talking about it and like that.
Th th it can give like meaning to their lives or whatever, and like inspire them in the same way that a good work of fiction or like a trilogy might. But I think that what we're trying to get to today in addressing that, and just the overhanging question of what do we do with this. Um, I think that there's something more to scripture than that.
And it seems that IR NAS was a key figure in kind of helping lead the church towards that. So how can you state for us what IR NAS has to offer to our relationship to scripture, especially from where we are right now.
Wilson: What I would, I mean, in short, what I would say irony has, has to offer is a way for us to approach the scripture that allows us to recognize step one, to begin to recognize. And that's a, that's a bigger, more important first step than we tend to think. Um, or maybe. To say a little bit more clearly. What I mean by that is, is even the process of coming to perceive and recognize is much more of a process for us than we tend to think.
And so, um, but it, it offers us a way to recognize and to engage and move through that process where we can perceive, and then. The key goal. So these are both important steps, but I'd say the second is kind of the tell us or the purpose of the goal of scripture is to actually commune with a God of love.
So Irenaeus gives us a way to understand the scripture so that the scriptures become a means by which we recognize and commune with a God of love. Oh, now if I don't, if I don't have the burden of supporting that, I'm happy. Do we just wrap it up this shortest shortest episode yet?
Julius: At like eight minutes. I like that, especially the way you explained it. Just now I like that here in AIS elevates our relationship to scripture as being more than just a book for us to decode. Or like interpret to have some kind of like meaning or analysis. I know that was the way that I primarily related to scripture, especially in like my younger, like my, especially like my high school days.
I think that it was, um, that my quiet time of devotion in reading scripture always had a Bible, a commentary and like a pen and pencil in the hand. And. While I, I don't think that that's necessarily to be done away with how then do we take that piece as well as the invitation to see scripture as something that invites us to recognize it and commune with God?
What does, what could practicing the rule of Aaron AAS look like
Wilson: well, I guess we could then go through. Step-by-step what I laid out. You know, if, if in my head what I just said, there, there are four that rhymed, there are four. Ki like
linchpins
Julius: Great.
Wilson: to what I just said that if RNA is rule is understood and practiced that's one and two understood and practiced. It allows us to come to scripture in a way that scripture becomes a tool where we can perceive and commit.
With God of love. So that'd be perceived would be three commune would be four. So understood, practiced, perceive, and commune. Um, and so to, to understand his rule of faith, it takes time to just look at it. And so, uh, one of the things that we pointed out key to interpreting to understanding the rule is as a rule. And you think rule, not just as in here's the law, these are the rules of the classroom. You do this, this and this, this, but bigger than that, it's, it's a standard, it's a thing for comparison. All right. So if you use a ruler, you CA you lay it down and you compare it to the thing next to it, and that allows you to measure it.
Julius: Yeah.
Wilson: if, if it's a rule, this is a, this is a succinct statement of the faith that if we're going to come to some of the. By scripture or through experience or what other other means, some other sort of understanding articulation of what the faith is and what it's about. This is the thing that we lay down next to it so that we can measure her articulate, um, or measure our articulation or our understanding of what the faith is.
And again, whether that's, you know, then it can act as a rule for that. Whether we come by that articulation through personal experience. You know, some mystical experience. Some communal we had a, we had a big committee meeting and we hammered out the big things, and these are the points we came at. Right.
Which those are happening all over the place right now, by the way, if, if you, if you. Any foot in any of the Christian worlds, odds are pretty good that in the last five years you've engaged a camp saying, well, here are our five tenants. Here are our
Julius: Sure.
Wilson: And so here are, whereas, whereas, whereas it, it, it is resolved this, this and this, you know, these kinds of statements are popping up all over the place.
Any of those, you know, whether it's a personal thing or whether it's a new committee from this convention or this loose association of Christians that share this kind of ethos, you know. Or whether it's done by the interpretation of scripture, you can take any of those things and lay it down next to Irenaeus’s rule and say, let's, let's measure it next to this.
Julius: Hm.
Wilson: And so that's what it's intended for. Right? So the, and, and what it gives us. If we take seriously, if we, if we seriously attend to what's laid out in his rule, what he gives us is not just bullet points that does the doctrine match this and this and this, what he gives us as a story, right? This is God, God has come to us in Christ.
And now by the holy spirit, right, we're brought into communion with God through.
Julius: Yeah.
Wilson: And this is what renews us and, and through us, like it's covering, you know, he says, look over the earth, renewing man, mankind, humanity to God. Right. And this is what he lays out for us. And so then if you, that first step, if you really understand it, Implicitly an unpacking what's there inside its rule.
It leads to that second point that this is the kind of thing that must be practiced. Um, and there are all sorts of analogies to this, right? Just like it's one thing to understand the rules of basketball
Julius: Right.
Wilson: and to be able to watch a game and describe this, this and this, but can you play,
Julius: Yeah.
Wilson: thing to be able to, to look.
Uh, and here's a great place, the gap between me and then my wife and my, and my oldest son. I can look at a recipe like laid out right there and I can mentally comprehend it. But if I go to put those ingredients together, what comes out of the oven is never. Somehow it's turned to some like spongy, nasty textured thing with an aftertaste that nobody wants in their mouth.
But I, even though I comprehended the recipe, my wife, or my oldest son they'll look at that thing and they can do it, they put it together. And so what the rule gives us is something that if it's under. Then leads us to good practice so that we can live into this faith, which is to be renewed too. I mean, it's right there.
This is where it culminates in the rule of faith to be renewed to God. Right. Reconnected, leading to communion with God. So bringing this in, I took kind of a roundabout way, but I feel like was important to lay the foundation, bringing that back into your question about. Right. So when you're a kid and to have, um, your devotions and all of what you laid out there, I would say, Okay.
no, no, no.
There's not necessarily anything I heard there that sends off any alarm bells, Right.
Or that light that's, but that might actually be a great personal example that we could lay down next to RNA as is rule. Right, And so if we lay what you just described out to his rule, the question his rule would lead me to ask is, okay, no, no, that's good.
Because some of that's difficult. right.
And this is throughout the history. I mean, you want to, I just love, I absolutely love looking at how the early church theologians treated scripture. I mean, you can, you can look at there, there is example upon example upon example, but just off the top of my head, I think of, uh, like. Saint Augusta.
Julius: Um,
Wilson: more towering figure in at least in Western Christianity than Augusta. And you look at how, when he starts off to read the Bible, he starts first with, uh, let's say he's got all sorts of commentaries and sermons on Genesis, but if you, if you look at how his process, that's, that's there for us in historical record, he starts with what he would call the literal.
Of the scripture of Genesis. And now when, when he says literal, he doesn't mean what we would mean as far as like a literalistic or fundamentalist, uh, understanding what he means is just seriously attending to what the words actually say. And if we re and it's like, right, and again, there's already a chord with RNA. Like rule of faith, just if we attend to it. So that's the first step is really looking at and Tinder and he points out over and over and over again, if you really pay attention to them, especially in the first two chapters of Genesis,
Julius: Yeah,
Wilson: it's going to lead you to questions beyond just the literal level,
Julius: definitely.
Wilson: part of attending to what the words actually say, like, how are their days, if there has not been a sun made or if the sun has not been made yet. Right. And these are the kinds of questions he asked. Centuries ago. And then from, from that first step, right? If you, if you really look at it, it's going to lead to big questions that have to be interpreted and what I, what I like to point out and, and just to have people look at, in this case, we're looking at Augusta, but across the board, the earliest church theologians, when they moved to that place to actually interpret and understand the scriptures, they come.
Uh, I mean, I guess to, to some contemporary eyes, contemporary Christianized, they, it would seem like just wildly creative interpretations and applications of the scripture. But the church at that time was able to say like, all of these are our faith can hold and, and integrate and benefits from all of these like different interpretations of scriptures.
Julius: Yeah.
Wilson: And that doesn't mean all of them were totally perfect. Right. But we even have the resources to discern. Why? Because that wasn't the here's, here's where all this was, was coming to the main point relevant to your prompt
Julius: Okay. Yeah.
Wilson: they understood widely because of like internalizing something like irony.
This is rule of faith that decoding wasn't the main point, the decoding, and coming to the one. The single one-to-one correspondence will this, if it is a metaphor, this is the only proper right. Interpretation of the
Julius: Oh,
Wilson: or if there's it. right. So it's the, the whole point wasn't to come to the one single proper, like a decoding, the, the end point as we gleaned from. the, the, not just the logic. Yes, the logic, but the, the ethos and the heartbeat of Irenaeus is rule of faith. When we come to that, because we understand that the end point is communion with God. And so where these different interpretations genuinely facilitate communion with God, then we embrace them, we recognize them as valid.
And so that to say, with young Julius pulling out commentaries—good. Because the Bible is a difficult text and there are certain things that, because it was, I mean, it's very, I mean, you just look at the things that some of what we pointed out in the story that made the scriptures difficult to interpret, there are so many massive things that can make it challenging… we should come to it. That’s… and, and even more.
On the intellectual level of the problem of interpretation. But if our, and, and understanding, given all these challenges, but even more so if the heart is communion with God, that puts us in a place where we're ready, because we're coming with humility and openness, a willingness to be challenged to grow and to actually learn something.
Not, I mean, if we come with the attitude that I basically already know everything, I need to know, I just want this holy scripture to confirm it. Uh, the. We're not coming in a place of, of openness and humility that could lead us to the kind of communion with a transcendent world-rearranging-and-healing God that we're after.
Julius: Hmm.
Wilson: So, good… to come at. but the key point is to understand that that's a good part of the process and that's not the end you…. And the way I say it to some of my students is when you've come to that point of, okay, this, this helps me interpret and understand. Right?
Julius: Yeah.
Wilson: And you close your Bible and you close your commentary, you review your notes to let it sink in…once you've got that info there, as long as you understand, once you reach that point, you're not done interpreting and practicing the Bible that when you put the book aside and you go out into the world, if you remember what was there and you take steps of risk to actually trust. To look for God and to trust God's nature, God's character to live into God's intent for the world, as we've learned and encountered in the scriptures. When you, when you put the book aside and you go out and you live you're still interpreting scripture.
Julius: Yeah.
Wilson: And it's out of that, that dynamic, that kind of, uh, that kind of spiral in relationship between reading and interpreting and living is where the word true genuine Christian theology comes because it's, it's genuine testimony.
Julius: Yeah.
Wilson: And then again, expound it too. It's not just the personal individual's experience of doing this, but it's the church's experience… of learning, reading, engaging with God and the text. And then from that look going out and finding analogous, uh, continuous meaning like continuous, as in like there's, there's some sort of connection between the communion we found in the text and the communion we find with God in the rough and tumble of everyday life. That it's that personal and communal testimony. That is, well, we we've said earlier in the series, that's how the church arrives at doctrine, not the reverse.
Julius: Yeah, I think that's, I think that's a really helpful point. And it makes me think back to, for anyone listening, who hasn't listened to our past series, where we talk quite at length about practice, um, in a meaningful way as something that, um, well… you can listen back. We define it well there.
Um, but the whole thing of kind of like what you minutes ago, talking about basketball and kind of like… almost understanding the scripture's role as being held in a practice in the same way that one studies the rules of basketball, or like a recipe for…something right. That it's, there's an interaction between studying the, the thing and then practicing it. And that, that helps to kind of shape you come back to the text with different questions or different thoughts once you kind of embody it.
Especially to see the ways that scripture is an account of God's ongoing presence with the world, with a particular people. And then as that extends out to the many, like, people that are affected by, um, this, the story as it continues to unfold through the Old and New Testament.
Wilson: Yes.
Julius: So with that said, I think. What I want to talk more about, which I think will help me with kind of the hanging questions for me—especially with what to do with the problem that Marcion faced, with like this… so what do we do with the passages, especially in the Old Testament where. If we're seeing this through the lens of like, does this help me commune with God that there are some difficult passages, like you'd alluded to that make it, that it's kind of difficult to commune with God through those stories…
And it seems to me that the story that we laid out prior to this conversation, um, really centers on the way that the, that Jesus Christ, that Christ is key in helping us to perceive that God as being the same God— that the revelation of Jesus is like crucial to how we perceive God through scripture, especially those difficult passages. So can you speak more about that?
Wilson: So… and especially now that the reasons why people have difficulty with something like scripture, um, require… So I’m kind of already the king of caveats and roundabout answers, but, but because of the particular difficulties that are born on it, like real misuse and serious, like, I mean, in, if we're just honest about history places where you can't use a word less than like atrocity, um, w-w-when knowing that it's born out of stuff like that, I feel like caveats like this are absolutely necessary.
And so I will say this what I'm about to say about the Old Testament, teaching us to see God in Christ is peculiar to, particular to, a Christian reading. And just want to acknowledge that this would be the point that would make Jews say no. So what I'm going to say, it's going to involve portions of scripture, that Jews claim as their own and I do not contend their right to claim these scriptures as theirs. Right.
But. Just naming, they, uh, they would treat them differently. And the caveat would be, uh—to not to really direct our attention where my criticism would genuinely fall the criticism that's implicit in what I'm about to say is not actually directed at the, any form of the Jewish faith. It's more directed at contemporary misunderstandings and just broadly cultural prejudices that the west shares. So it gets to a place where we notice this like, “Ooh, a travesty we…” So we're really reticent to say this way of reading is better or right or any of that kind of thing. And if, if out of that, we end up, which we so often do explicitly or implicitly saying, “Oh, well they're all the same.”
Anyway, that's actually not being respectful to other folks. So like, I mean, just all it takes is situate that same thing in like an interpersonal conversation. And if you're saying something that you care about, it matters to you and somebody else, the person on the other side of the table keeps going, “Oh yeah, same thing. Same, same, same, same. I agree. The same thing.”
And then they say something that like totally cuts against , that is incompatible with what you just said. That's offensive. That's disrespectful, right? It's way more respectful to say I hear you. And here's where we actually disagree. It's totally disrespectful to say, “Oh no, no, no we agree…” when you don't.
Julius: Yeah.
Wilson: Right. So here I'll that preface to say Jews would not agree with what I'm about to say. That's a different conversation to be had respectfully between different parties at a different time. So that caveat to say what Chris. Say what the Christian faith, what the rule of faith from Irenaeus on would help us say about how the old Testament helps us see Christ is let's start with the rule of faith, which is, and it would be the second point. It’s the word of God, God, the son, Jesus Christ. Our Lord that's, that's a central core tenant to the Christian faith who was revealed to the prophets. Right.
So this would be in that. That through the prophets— and, and this carries, um…definitely up to Irenaeus’s time and a good while passed to us. When we hear the profits, we might think the last group of books in the old Testament, but to Irenaeus back, that just meant the old Testament. It was all prophetic.
You know, it wasn't, it wasn't like Isaiah, Jeremiah Lamentations and those following. Those are the profits, but the Psalms, those are just songs… and Ruth and Esther, those are just stories…and first, second Kings are kind of like theological history… all prophets.All prophetic, um, to the Jewish mind, this is a point where, to this point we agree, Right.
Um, the difference is, oh, do these prophets witness to Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah. Right now Jews would say, yes, these prophets witness to the Messiah and the coming messianic age, when God will convict everyone, convince everyone in their hearts, not just in their minds, but of God's reality.
Right. But where Christians and Jews begin to diverge is to say, it's Jesus of Nazareth is that Messiah. And God has done that in Jesus. So. The second one in RNs through the profits. This word was initially was beginning to be revealed and where you could point to the book of Hebrews, where it calls the things.
And in the old Testament, prophets, like the tabernacle and the law, it calls them shadows of things to come. We hear shadow and especially recording this just days before Halloween, we think, Ooh, like. It has connotations of evil, bad dark, but that's not at all in the context of Hebrews. That's not at all what the author is saying.
What the author of Hebrews is saying is this is beginning to teach us to recognize, right. Now we're seeing the theme. This is when I said it helps us perceive God. And, and then in that perception also helps us further down the step to actually commune with this God. It helps us perceive God, and Christians believe the fullest revelation has been in Jesus of Nazareth. But the point of this would be like, um…infants, like newborns—they see their hands.
It’s right in front of their face and, and it totally confuses them.
Julius: Definitely.
Wilson: They do not understand that this is “my” hand. They don't, they don't understand that it's a hand cause they have no concept of hand. They don't know what this object moving. And in fact, newborns even have trouble distinguishing the difference between like, if they're laying down and their hand is moving in front of the face against the background of a ceiling, they even have trouble distinguishing the difference between the ceiling and their hand because they don't have either of those concepts.
They don't have the ability to perceive that difference. To them it's it's all just one thing coming all at once. And even distinguishing the sight perception and the sounds that are coming, it's one just big jumble chaotic thing what it's just w-it’s just sameness without any differentiation in their mind.
And so this is why they look at their hand and they're so amazed by it, then they come. Right. And you can s-you can see… I remember my kids catching a couple moments of realization where it certainly wasn't the fullness of, “Ooh, this is a hand and it is mine.”
But something clicked where I remember one kid was like… you saw it going from just out of control in front of their face to… there was a look of realization and the movements became intentional.
And what they started to realize now is “I have some agency. I have some say in what this thing does.” And then they gradually come to know through better and better—and again, not perfect, not…y’know. But better and better concepts. right.
Of, oh, this is a hand and it's mine. And so when would I say better and better? That can sound weird, but I mean, think about it. If you really start asking questions about like subatomic particles and energy fields and your hand gets really weird, even to you, right, But your concept of hand is more useful, more accurate, more true than what it was when you were an infant. right.
And so your mind has to have some kind of, some kind of experience and growing category through which it can make sense of what it sees.
And so all of that. Just like with a newborn bam, there's this thing moving in front of my face. It makes no sense if God had just bam. Here's Jesus. It's totally lost on humanity.
Julius: Right.
Wilson: There’s, and we already see, even with all the preparation, I mean, read Mark it's, it's difficult for even the disciples to come to a realization of who this is. I mean, that's a question that pops up over and over to who is.
Julius: Yeah,
Wilson: Y’ now, chapter four— “Who is this, that even the wind and the seas obey him?” Right.
Even with the prep. But what, what Christians would say is we were given just enough preparation and that this would be the fullness, the appropriate time for the human consciousness to even have a shot at, at, and again, not fully, not totally, but to even have a shot at reliably, initially, recognizing who and what this.
Julius: Okay.
Wilson: the gift there to see what to come or what to do with it. And this is what the writer of Hebrews means by shadows.
Julius: Hmm.
Wilson: They're outlining. They're their initial experiences and initial, uh, initial revelations that would allow us to begin to see the contours begin to recognize as something involved in God and God's work for the world that, that would be able to begin to form in our minds, the concept of—and the language that we, that the tradition gave to it, is "The Messiah.” And who the Messiah is and what it would take for the Messiah to be the Messiah and to do what the Messiah… it's all beginning to prepare us to see.
And this is why Irenaeus, the rule of faith, the book of Hebrews would say, we can't do away with that. There that's, that's the background. And just like anything for you to differentiate, you need a backup. To recognize what's happening here. So like the Mona Lisa— that's my favorite example here is, why is the Mona Lisa smile so intriguing? Cause that's the thing about the painting everybody talks about is the smile, but the smile, if it didn't, if it weren't set in that context, right?
The background of that painting is, is like bleak. It looks, it looks post-apocalyptic. If it were set against a different background, if it were set against like rainbows and rollercoasters and cotton candy, then this smile is going to make more sense and not be intriguing. But because she's there and she's smiling that way, the smile becomes intriguing.
The background allows us to recognize something about what's there, and without the background of the Old Testament with—without all the. The difficulty and the reality of what it is to wrestle with God, in the midst—and that's what Israel means wrestles with God—and to bear witness to that wrestling with God in the midst of the tumult of, of like the blood and the loss and the pain and… like politics and economics and everything that comes with being human in the world…without that background, we don't see Christ as clearly as we could.
And so there's that background since, but also this rule that allowing us to get to the second thing, right? The Word of God revealed to the prophets. It also begins to shape in us, uh, the beg- like the ability to perceive, to, to look for at least an outline, the right thing so that when Jesus is there doing those things, we've at least got a shot of recognizing it for what it is instead of it just being a totally confusing experience that's ultimately lost on us.
Julius: Right. Okay.
Wilson: The only thing. And it's important to note for the Christian. It goes both ways. The old Testament prepares us to perceive and to commune with Christ, but then that goes back to the. W once we've initially perceived and communed to the degree that we're capable at that time. Right. That communion does something to us.
It expands us, it expands, right? Just like, I mean, just like once you, I get to know my wife, I can recognize marks of her all over the place because I've communed with her, you know? So it brings us to that place where there can be an initial record. And a communion should the degree that we can, but that creates new, new, uh, abilities.
Like it expands the degree to which we can perceive and commune with God. And so now with that expansion, it flips back and now we're more capable of seeing Christ in the old Testament, more reliably. And that's where it comes down to faith for us. When we look at some of the really well. Inter to us really wild, uh, analogical interpretations and allegorical interpretations of old Testament stories that we see.
Uh, it seems wild to us, but if we can trust that that was born out of community. Right. Did that, that really does become the place where it's born when they do things. Like for instance, there's the, Um,
like one of the many really troubling texts is when God commands genocide in the old Testament to root out these people, everything from it, one of this pretty standard.
And again, it's, what's interesting about this. Is there a lots of church fathers that say something similar, right? Like Gregory of Nyssa origin. Uh, Aquinas does similar things with other texts. Uh, Augustine does this, some Maximus confessor for certain like, but it's interesting that not totally independently, but to a certain degree on their own in reading these texts, they all do something pretty similar, which is to look at that text and say, no, no, no.
Like, of course, if God, God would be a month. If you take it just at that superficial level. So what do we do? And, and again, they share their tradition. They share this rule, but out of that, in a certain sense independently, they all come to some sort of interpretation that says, well, what, what we're talking about here is like the places where sin has taken root and.
And so we must treat this as a war against sin within our very souls. And don't make friends with it. Don't make, don't make a place for hate and division and, and greed in your heart, but you must, you must completely remove it from the land the kind of interpretation there. This is what we say it as the old Testament teaches us to see Christ Christ then teaches us to see Christ in the old Testament in more and more faithful, beautiful ways that facilitate communion with God in ourselves.
Right. And in the way that we live, not just having information about God in our heads.
Julius: Yeah.
MEDITATION
We are not the first to find certain passages of scripture incredibly difficult, or even offensive. And because others before have engaged this difficulty and found ways to commune with God through it, we have been gifted with a very precious precedent.
This meditation is meant to give you an opportunity to practice using Irenaeus' rule as a guide in a concrete and particular place your faith has needed such a guide.
So, to really facilitate this, we cannot simply pick a passage of scripture we think you have struggled with, or should struggle with, then read through it and tell you what interpretation Irenaeus' rule might lead us to.
To give you a real opportunity to practice this, you're going to need to find the difficult passage yourself.
So, bring to mind a biblical text that has given you trouble.
Pause the podcast if you need to, grab a bible, find that passage, and read through it again.
Don't shy away from the details. Look what is concretely written directly in the face. What is the main action or idea or emotion portrayed?
Say out loud what you think the passage is saying. Now name, as exactly as you can, what is troubling you, and why.
Lay your interpretation and current understanding of this text out in the open before you and examine it.
Now, remember Irenaeus' rule is intended to be something like a ruler that you lay next to another thing to measure it, and to help you read individual passages in light of the foundational story running through all the twists and turns to give meaning to the whole.
So here again is the Rule of Faith. Lay it down next to your understanding of the text.
God, the Father, uncreated, incomprehensible, invisible, one God, creator of all. This is the first article.
Trust God is able to be present in all times, and in all things, even now. And that God is infinitely creative and powerful and good, and so also able to meet you in the difficulties of this passage, and your thoughts and emotions, and guide it into something beautiful and true.
The second [article] is the Word of God, God the Son, Jesus Christ our Lord, who was revealed to the prophets. ... At the end of times, to sum up all things, he became man among men, visible and palpable, in order to destroy death and bring to light life, and bring about communion with God.
According to the rule, God is most clearly seen in Jesus, who entered fully into our human situation to destroy death and bring us to communion with God. So where is death revealed in your difficult passage?
And how could you see death at work in a similar way in your world? Or in your life?
And if God works in Christ to meet us at our darkest places to destroy death, what would God be doing in your passage?
In your world?
If this is who God is and what God does, what would God be doing in you?
And the third [article of the rule of faith] is the Holy Spirit, by whom the prophets prophesied and the patriarchs were taught about God and the just were led into the path of justice, and who in the end of times was poured forth in a new manner upon [people] all over the earth renewing [humanity] to God.
How is the Spirit present in this moment and this text, leading you into the path of justice and renewing you in God?
How is the Spirit pulling you into the biblical narrative, where two histories, ours and God's, always intertwine, but where God is always the primary actor, but who also always acts like we see Jesus act.
So how is the Spirit present now, in your reading, in this moment, inviting you not to escape the difficulties of a fallen creation, but to join God in moving it toward a splendid vision of creation's renewal through communion with God?
How is your engagement of this difficult text becoming the occasion for you to see and join the story of the world going out from God, and returning to God?