Nova et Vetera, English Edition,Vol. 4, No. 4 (2006): 719–746

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Biblical Foundations for a Theology of Inspiration
D ENIS FARKASFALVY, O.C IST.
University of Dallas
Irving,Texas

Preliminary Considerations
F ROM ITS INCEPTION, Christianity was in possession of sacred
books.The Christian Church emerging from among the people and, out
of the religion of Israel, had kept the holy books of the Jews and claimed
them as its own.The experience of the Church demanded a new interpretation of these ancient writings. In fact, the oldest documents of
Christianity testify to a pristine interest in understanding both Jesus and
his deeds together with the experiences of the emerging community of
his believers as events revealing the meaning of the holy writings of the
Jews.Yet the Church went beyond the mere use and interpretation of the
Jewish Bible. Soon after it began to preach its message by word of mouth,
the need surfaced of putting this message into written documents.
Already in the lifetime of the first Christian generation, then more
urgently at the end of the lifetime of the first disciples of Christ, the need
of fixing the first Christian preaching in written form was perceived by
local communities and church leaders. Thus a new set of writings came
about, which, in a rather short period of time, began to obtain among
Christians an authoritative status equal to or even higher than the one
possessed in the Church by the holy books of old.
When dealing with biblical inspiration in the context of Catholic theology, one of our main tasks is to reconstruct the process by which a twofold
Christian Bible was formed: books of the “Old Testament,” apparently
“inherited” from the chosen people of Israel and a new collection of
books, testifying to the “New Covenant” or “New Testament” established
by Jesus, the promised Messiah.While studying this historical process, one
must not lose sight of the fact that the Christian Church did not come

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about as the product of literary activities nor did it see itself imprisoned by
written words. On the one hand, the Christians interpreted the sacred
books they had taken over from the Jews in a new light derived from their
faith in Christ. On the other hand, the spreading of their faith in Christ
was not achieved by the propagation of written documents, but first and
foremost by oral preaching and personal witnessing. Consequently, the new
literary output created by the early Christians was secondary to their faith
life, expressed through both oral propagation of their beliefs to outsiders
and through preaching and teaching within their own assemblies.
However, as the first generation approached their death, we see conscious
efforts on the part of the early Church aiming at fixing and solidifying in
written documents all the various areas and topics of Christian beliefs.
Christians believed from the very beginning that God’s Spirit, his
word and creative presence, which had formed the history and faith of
Judaism, was actively present in Christ and his Church. Christians saw
themselves—both their faith and their communities—formed as the
result of a new presence of God’s Spirit. It was this Spirit who began
acting in their midst with an unprecedented intensity and enabled them
to discover in the ancient, sacred writings a new meaning.This meaning
was both new in its actuality and yet authentic and thus “original,”
because divinely intended. Thus they found in Christ the culmination
and fullness of all the riches that the Scriptures offered.This understanding, however, was based both on new facts—the deeds and teachings of
Jesus—and new insights.And both novelties engendered controversy and
resistance. A need for new authoritative literary documents soon
emerged. One should say, Christianity was born with books in one hand and
was soon prompted to produce new books with the other.Their self-perception
made them cling to the books inherited from the Jews and present also
new books of their own: books containing the preaching of the first
Christian generation as God’s own word, that is, Scriptures of a dignity
comparable to those of the Jews.Yet the self-understanding of the Church
as the locus and the instrument of the Spirit’s presence and action in the
world never allowed the Christian Church to become a “religion of
books.”They continued to proclaim and witness their faith viva voce and
claimed to keep on experiencing God’s presence and activity within their
ranks and in their expanding institutional structures.
The main facts enunciated above outline the basic questions that a
Catholic theology of inspiration must treat.What does it mean for Christians to believe in the Scriptures as the word of God? In what sense and
on what basis can they be convinced that through the books taken over
from Judaism God speaks to all people today? How do we answer these

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same questions about the books of the New Testament? In what sense are
these books distinguished, on the one hand, from the sacred books of
other religions and, on the other hand, from other literary products of
ancient Judaism or early Christianity, some of them possibly contemporary with the sacred Scriptures of one or the other of the two Testaments?
Furthermore, if in the books of the Scriptures Christian faith finds the
word of God in a unique and special way, how does that belief translate
into exegetical practice when using Scripture? How do we concretely
honor the divine inspiration of these books? And how do we give
account of all their human qualities, which include both strengths and
limitations, culturally conditioned features, historically dated attitudes
and pronouncements, imperfections perceived on a literary or doctrinal
level? How does the investigation and interpretation of these documents
clarify problems of Christian faith, promote private and common prayer
life, and, according to the ultimate motivation of the religious quest, facilitate an encounter with God in a given context of a contemporary spiritual, intellectual, or emotional experience?
In the theological tradition of the Church, the problems outlined here
are divided into two large categories.The first group consists of questions
treating the origins of the sacred books as divinely inspired literary products (theology of inspiration) normative for the Church (canon and
canonicity), the second group is about the principles and methodology of
interpreting biblical texts (biblical hermeneutics). This division is helpful
and even necessary, but the two groups of questions cannot be treated
independently or separately. In fact, when examining the beliefs and practices of the Church with regard to the use of the Bible in the early Christian centuries (one may say the first thirteen centuries), we can see a close
interdependence between theories of inspiration and hermeneutical practices. It is quite striking to see that Christian theologians and exegetes
made statements about the inspired character of sacred texts or the inspiration of their authors most frequently or almost always for the sake of
introducing and qualifying statements about their interpretation. Principles of inspiration have been explained or argued for usually in the
context and for the sake of exegesis. Ancient Christianity formed and
specified its belief about inspired authors and texts for the sake of supporting or evidencing the principles that governed the use of Scripture in a
theological discourse. On the other hand, the role of scriptural arguments
in a theological debate has usually stimulated reflection and research about
the normative status of the sacred text, the nature of its inspired character,
and the presuppositions that such beliefs imply with regard to God’s action
upon the human authors who produced these texts.

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In other words, much of the material of our theological tradition
concerning inspiration is the product of “regressive analysis,” trying to
give account, in retrospect, of the necessary and sufficient conditions that
govern the exegetical process. Meanwhile it remains clear that, once the
principles of inspiration and canonicity had been clarified, theologians
had to proceed in a deductive fashion and apply all consequences to the
various uses of the sacred texts.
All this, of course, should not come as a surprise. In the Christian experience, beliefs in the normative role of Scripture as God’s biblical word
always preceded detailed reflection about the mode and way in which the
inspired books came about as a product of human and divine causality.
Therefore, in the history of theology, it is natural to expect any theory or
doctrine about inspiration to have been preceded by some kind of exegetical practice. Usually concrete methods of biblical hermeneutics (and possibly the difficulties that they engendered) were at work in determining both
the point of departure and the direction in which to move in investigating
faith in the Bible as God’s word.Yet, within a doctrinal system, it is always
assumed that from our concept of inspiration we should determine our
rules of hermeneutics and not the other way around. In any case exegesis
must become consistent with the ideas we form about the inspired word.
Of course, the questions listed above would suffice to fill several
volumes. But they help us retain the perspective of a synthesis, which may
need to be eventually composed in order to reconstruct the theology of
inspiration according to the needs of the Church today. In this paper,
however, I shall limit myself to three interrelated theses, with the aim of
determining how the texts of the New Testament establish the foundation for a theology of inspiration.
First, I shall demonstrate that at its very origins Christianity came
about as an exegetical enterprise, as it announced its single central topic:
the teaching and person of Jesus Christ, “according to the Scriptures.”
Second, I will show how the first Christian generations, while executing
their exegetical program, were led to create a body of writings that itself
became sacred Scriptures as it enshrined in written texts the oral preaching of Jesus and his disciples.Third, I will give a brief overview of biblical inspiration as it is expressed, for the first time as an integral part of the
Christian faith, in the New Testament.
Part I: “According to the Scriptures . . .”:
The Old Testament in the Apostolic Church
1. At its first emergence, the Christian faith—the faith of the primitive
Church—appeared to be already in close connection with “Scrip-

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tures,” the Holy Scriptures of Israel. The oldest extant document
about the belief in the resurrection of Jesus, 1 Corinthians from the
years A.D. 55–56., explicitly states such a connection: “First of all I
have given over to you what has been given over to me, that Christ
died for our sins according to the Scriptures, was buried and rose from
the dead according to the Scriptures” (1 Cor 15:3–4, emphasis added). It
is not an easy task to determine what specific scriptural text or texts
the apostle has here in mind—maybe Isaiah 53 or Isaiah 43 or Hosea
6:2. But there is no doubt that Paul sees the Scriptures fulfilled in the
peak events of Jesus’ life.
Moreover, in this text Paul does not speak only of some scriptural
“anticipation” of the main facts of Jesus’ life-mission. Christian preaching and catechesis presupposed, in general, the faith of the people of
Israel, reflected in their sacred writings, and regarded these writings as
authentic sources for God’s word. The Acts of the Apostles makes it
clear that the Christian mission usually began everywhere by an
address to the local Jewish community. Even Paul, who claimed that
his special vocation was to be the missionary of the Gentiles, began his
activities (according to Acts) in each city by preaching in the Jewish
synagogues, and from there he recruited his first followers. When
approaching Jews, Paul argued on behalf of the gospel always on the
basis of the Scriptures. At the end of Acts, the description of Paul’s
activities in Rome well characterizes this fact:“With convincing arguments he began to explain to them the Kingdom of God, and from
morning to evening, he tried to gain them for Jesus with arguments
taken from Moses and the Prophets”1 (Acts 28:23; emphasis added).
Either by looking at Peter’s speech of Pentecost (Acts 2:14–36) or
Paul’s preaching in Antioch of Pisidia (Acts 13:15–41) or Philip’s
dialogue with the Ethiopian courtier (Acts 8:26–38), we come to the
conclusion that for Christian preaching the point of departure is
consistently some text from the Old Testament. It is on this basis that
the missionaries try to prove that Jesus is the Messiah and the Son of
God. How convincing this argumentation appears before modernday historical-critical exegesis may be set aside at this point; after all,
in the first century A.D., the whole cultural-religious context and the
perspective of dealing with history were quite different. For our
purpose here, it is sufficient to see that the first Christian missionaries
1 “Moses and the Prophets” is a technical expression, equivalent to “the Law and

the Prophets” meaning the totality of sacred Scriptures. The triple reference,
“Law—Prophets—Writings,” from which the current Jewish word for “Bible”
(TANAKH) was derived is, probably, of more recent origin.

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presupposed the authority of the Old Testament, started from the
Scriptures, and based their arguments on them.
But the testimony of the sources goes much further. In the practice of the apostolic Church, the Scriptures did not only serve as tools
by which Christian truth was demonstrated. The relationship was
mutual. The acceptance of Christ in faith provided also a key for
understanding the Scriptures. According to St. Luke, the risen Lord
explains to his apostles that through his passion and resurrection
“everything written about me in the Law of Moses and in the
prophets and psalms must be fulfilled.”2 And with this “he opened their
minds to understand the Scriptures” (Lk 24:44–45). This conviction,
that one fully understands the Old Testament Scriptures in Christ, is
expressed in the ancient Church quite often by reference to the
symbol of the scroll in the Book of Revelation: the scroll that the
Lamb takes into its own possession by breaking its seven seals (Rev
5:1–7). In fact, according to the earliest sources, the Church of the
Apostles considers itself a fully entitled proprietor of the Scriptures of
old, understanding and announcing their meaning.Thus faith in Christ
is not only built upon the Scriptures, but also introduces the believer
into the full and authentic understanding of the Old Testament.
2. The conviction by which the primitive Church considered the Scriptures of the Old Testament as its own has its roots in the thinking of
Jesus himself. In his ministry in Israel, the point of departure for all his
considerations was typically some biblical text. In the synagogues,
following Jewish custom, he read and explained selected biblical readings. We can spot this in each of the four gospels. When introducing
himself in the synagogue of Nazareth, his words are based on Isaiah:
“The Spirit of the Lord is on me. He anointed me to bring good
tidings to the poor” (Is 61:2). He rolled up the Scripture text and sat
down. In the synagogue, all eyes were fixed on him. He began to speak:
“Today this text came to fulfillment at your hearing” (Lk 4:18–21). But
one must not stop here and think that Luke just made this up in order
to match the end of his gospel (Lk 24:44–45, quoted above).
Matthew’s use of a chain of quotations from Isaiah in 11:4–6 has also
a clear programmatic purpose.As we see there, a delegation from John
the Baptist approaches Jesus to clarify his identity. The reply, using
2 Here again we find Law and Prophets as a bipartite formula for all Scriptures.

The Psalms are mentioned separately either because of the frequency of their
use, or as an incipient form of the tripartite formula, so that “Psalms” stands for
“writings” (the sapiential books).

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mostly Isaiah 61:2, not only serves the purpose of describing in what
sense and way Jesus is the Messiah, but, at the same time, it is like a
“catalogue of messianic deeds” giving sense to each and every episode
of the beginning of Jesus’ first ministry in Galilee, as described by
Matthew 4:16–9:38. In a more sketchy but similar way, Mark’s gospel
introduces Jesus and his “good news” by a double reference to “Law
and Prophets” when in his opening lines he quotes Exodus 23:20 and
Isaiah 40:3 as characterizing the “beginning of the gospel.”
While St. Luke, the author of the third gospel and of Acts, is one
of the New Testament authors who notes most clearly the connection between faith in Christ and the biblical texts of the Old Testament, in different modes and with diverse emphasis, the rest of the
evangelists express similar thoughts. In Matthew, the Sermon on the
Mount is filled with references to the Mosaic legislation. Jesus as
Legislator is of higher rank than Moses as this recurring phrase tells
us: “You heard it said to those of old . . . , now I tell you” (Mt 5:21,
27, 33, 38, 43). He gives new legislation, but at the same time, he
came for nothing else than to “bring to completion” or “to a fullness
of perfection” the Law and the Prophets (5:17). In St. John, the testimony of the Scriptures is a most crucial issue. Jesus’ enemies argue
from the Scriptures: “How can the Messiah come from Galilee? Do
not the Scriptures say that the Messiah will be born from the family
of David and the city of Bethlehem where David came from?” ( Jn
7:41–42).Those who reject Jesus are said to be rejecting Moses just
as well, for the acceptance of the books of Moses would result in
accepting Jesus also:“Your accuser will be Moses in whom you have
put your hope. If you believed in Moses, you might believe me, just
as well, for he wrote about me” ( Jn 5:45–46). St. Mark’s gospel may
appear to contain relatively few explicit statements about the value
of the Scriptures, mostly because, in general, it contains more narratives than didactic passages. But this gospel, too, shows clearly that
Jesus repeatedly refers to the Scriptures (cf. Mk 2:25, 4:12, 7:6–11),
and he teaches in the synagogues frequently (1:21, 3:1, 6:2). His
messianic identity is suggested and outlined, in typically Markan
style, by means of scriptural references (12:10–11, 12:36–37).
The relationship between Jesus and the Old Testament is illustrated in a particular way in the parable about the wicked vinedressers, which is found in all three synoptic gospels (Mt 21:33–46;
Mk 12:1–12; and Lk 20:9–19). The comparison of Israel to a vineyard comes originally from Isaiah. The vineyard owner sends his
servants one by one (one prophet after the other) to the vinedressers.

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Denis Farkasfalvy, OCist.

Finally, he sends his own son whom they kill. The parable communicates in the form of a story that the coming of Jesus is in succession to a long row of divine missions that dispatched the prophets of
the Old Testament. Jesus stands at the end and constitutes the peak of
this series of prophetic sendings. While standing in continuity with
the sending of the servants, the son is of higher rank than any of
them: thus does his mission proportionately transcend theirs.
3. It is a commonplace to state that the Church “inherited” the Old
Testament Scriptures from Judaism.Yet making this statement we say
at once too much and too little. Too much because at the time the
Church began to use it, the Bible of the Old Testament did not even
exist in the form of an exactly defined collection of books.3 Only after
the first Jewish War, about A.D. 90, was a final list of the holy books for
Judaism defined. One must rather say that the Christians took over and
began to use all those texts, which at a later time Judaism included in
its canon of holy books. Christians, however, began to quote authoritatively from books that, at the time of Christian origins, Judaism had
not yet formed a final consensus of, and which, later on, Judaism did
not include in the Hebrew Bible. Consequently, the Old Testament of
the Catholic Christian Bible contains several more books than the
Hebrew Bible. Thus, some products of Jewish religious literature
became part of the canonical books of the Christians, while “Judaism”
(the Jewish groups that survived beyond the destruction of the second
Temple) ultimately decided not to include them in its canon. Historically, the fact remains that the nascent Church did not take over a
ready-made canon of the Old Testament, but chose to form its own
canon by selecting from among the sacred books of the Jews that had
been in use during the first century.4
On the other hand, speaking of “inheriting” the Old Testament
from Judaism affirms too little. For the faith that Christians have in the
inspiration and canonicity of Old Testament books coincides only
partially with what Jewish communities would believe about the
3 Moreover, this “Bible,” such as it was, was not even a collection of Hebrew texts,

but texts in Greek translation.
4 Much confusion about this issue comes from the fact that the scriptural canon of

the Pharisees was reasonably well defined at the beginning of the first century, but
Judaism became identical with Pharisaism only after the two Jewish wars, which
made other factions disappear. Cf. D. Barthélemy, “L’état de la Bible juive depuis
le début de notre ère jusque la deuxième révolte contre Rome (131–135),” in Le
Canon de l’Ancien Testament, ed. J.-D. Kaestli and D.Weilmellinger (Geneva: Labor
et Fides: 1984), 9–45.

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books that they commonly view, with Christians, as “Scripture.” The
most important theological concepts and expressions about the Bible
held in common among Jews and Christians are the following: God’s
word addressed mankind through chosen individuals (Moses, David,
the patriarch, the prophets, or others); the biblical text represents the
“word of God” that the Spirit of God has moved the authors of these
texts to speak or write.These concepts and expressions found their way
into the New Testament, as well. Nevertheless the early Church came
to some radically new concepts about the biblical texts as it formed
different ideas about the meaning of salvation history. For Christians,
belief in the Scriptures became an integral part of their faith in Christ.
Members of the early Church who had a Jewish background initially
retained their Jewish ideas about the Bible and imported them into
Christianity. But as they became convinced of the truth of Christ’s
messianic identity and his divinity, they began to read the Hebrew
Bible with a new outlook and gave it a new interpretation. For Gentile
Christians the process was slightly different. They would first learn
about Jesus, and in a reversed order of logic they regarded the biblical
books of the Old Testament as Jesus’“pre-history,” and therefore sacred.
All in all, the Christian use and interpretation of Scripture by the
early Church is not a mere imitation of a practice preexistent in
Judaism but a new theological program based on the apostolic faith in
Christ. The Jewish holy books functioned and were interpreted as
documents of a Christ-centered salvation history with its full and true
meaning becoming apparent only in the light of the Church’s faith in
Christ. Christians were taught to read the Scriptures in the context of
their faith.They debated and defended it but remained convinced that
their understanding of these writings was superior to what those saw
in them who had no faith in Christ.As early as A.D. 56–58, Paul makes
a comprehensive statement about this in Romans 15:4 when he writes
that “all that has been written” (in a technical sense he means all Scriptures) has been written “for us” (that is, for the Christian Church).
Thus, he expresses the claim of the first Christian generation that the
Scriptures belong to them: Their Christological interpretation fulfills
their ultimate purpose and makes their comprehension possible.
Part II: “I Am Writing to You . . .”:
The Formation of the New Testament
1. The faith of Christ was first spread not by the written word but by
missionaries who preached viva voce. Narratives including the deeds
and sayings of Jesus, as well as the memory of his teachings, were

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preserved and popularized by live proclamation and oral tradition.To
the extent we know, the first products of Christian literature did not
deal with the life of Christ or the reproduction of his sayings, but
with exhortations and the theological, moral, or pastoral comments
of the missionaries. According to the quasi-unanimity of contemporary scholars, none of the canonical gospels was composed before
A.D. 60. The gospel of Mark is most frequently dated to the beginning of the Jewish War or, at most, shortly before. Even those who
claim the literary priority of Matthew’s gospel would rarely date it
earlier than the A.D. 60s, and often only circa A.D. 70. Books of the
New Testament to which an earlier date could be assigned are few.
These, like the letters of St. Paul, were written for practical reasons,
not for the purpose of producing a new set of “holy books.” To the
extent that we can reconstruct the dates and events of Christian
origins, one can say with a high level of certainty that almost all
twenty-seven books of the New Testament were written in the last
fifty years of the first century and, possibly, a few of them even later,
probably in the following two decades. The production, collection,
and preservation of these writings played a very important role in the
process by which the first generation of Christians transmitted its
faith, theological thinking, and moral standards to later generations.
Although the earliest pieces of the New Testament books were
written in the years A.D. 50–60 (1 Thessalonians, Galatians, Romans,
and 1 and 2 Corinthians are dated to this period with practical
unanimity of scholars), their collection, preservation, and expanded
use (beyond the original addressees)—a process that led to their
“canonization”—had only started in the last years of the first century
and had come to conclusion in around hundred years.5 Such activity was aiming at solidifying and formalizing the legacy of the first
apostolic generation for following Christian centuries.
A particular feature of this process was the production of “pseudepigraphical” works, books attached to more ancient writings of apostolic
origin. In the formation of the New Testament canon, pseudepigraphy
meant the creation of additional written documents under the names of
the major figures of the apostolic era, mostly epistles attributed to Paul
or Peter, but also James and Jude.
Today’s biblical scholarship offers a wide variety of opinions on
the subject.There is, however, a sufficiently broad consensus on a few
5 The first canonical list of the New Testament, preserved in the “Muratorian

Fragment” is to be dated (in spite of some recent challenges) to about A.D. 200.

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main issues. On one side, the pastoral letters (1 and 2 Timothy,Titus)
and 2 Peter are usually regarded as written by disciples of the apostles with an “attributed authorship” to the apostolic master. Speaking
of “pseudepigraphy” is ultimately misleading, because such an
expression assumes that these works were falsely attributed to the
apostles and that the literary authors aimed at misleading or deceiving their readers. A good case can be made for the position that the
authors of these documents intended to put into written form
authentic apostolic traditions. As a result, the claim to authenticity
could be verified by an extended concept of authorship
The attachment of titles to the gospels (“according to Matthew,”
“according to Mark,” “according to Luke,” and “according to John”)
is an issue often discussed in recent decades. Some scholars assume
that all four gospels were originally anonymous works, but quite soon
after, around the turn of the century, the plurality of gospels in use
made it necessary to distinguish among gospels by naming them after
fictitious authors, usually prominent apostolic personalities who were
popular in a given local church.Theories on this matter usually lend
support to doubts about the correctness of these attributions. But they
all break down over the fact that, from the perspective of the early
second century, the names “Mark” and “Luke” would be ill-chosen, as
these persons have never been considered to be eyewitnesses of Jesus’
ministry. And there are other problems. Most important, the concept
of “authorship” in antiquity does not agree with what we mean by it
today. Authorship may mean the designation of the authority that
covers the content of a book and does not necessarily refer to the
literary author who wrote it. Just as the concept of a ghostwriter
continues to exist in modern times, in antiquity commissioning the
writing of a book was quite common (cf. 1 Pet 5:12).
Neither pseudepigraphy nor the identification of authorship,
witnessed to by Church writers and early manuscripts, should be
judged in a global way.The question of authorship comes with many
nuances, and each case must be judged individually. Where there is
the high degree of probability for “Mark” and “Luke” to be, in fact,
the authors of the respective gospels, there is solid tradition for some
substantial connection between the authority of the apostolic figure
“Matthew” and the first gospel. But there remains a very elusive issue
with regard to the identity of the author, or rather, authors, of the
Johannine writings and—quite far toward the other end of the spectrum—almost total obscurity about the authorship of the letter to
the Hebrews.

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Denis Farkasfalvy, OCist.

What is, nonetheless, quite unique in the history of the New
Testament canon is the restraint that accompanied pseudepigraphy
and the remarkable results of the process by which new works have
been produced under old names.While the authenticity of 1 Peter is
under debate (we should not treat that question here), it is quite clear
that 2 Peter, written after Peter’s death, was not only written with
clear indications of rating 1 Peter as authentically Petrine, but also
with an effort of discrediting any other attempt of producing further
pseudepigraphical works under the name of Peter. Similarly, an
appendix attached to the gospel of John (that is, chapter 21), makes
it impossible to produce any further document attributed to the
author of the fourth gospel. This appendix even declares futile any
further proliferation of gospel literature. Furthermore, it is clear that
the letter of James aims at building links between Paul, especially
Romans, and the Jewish-Christian heritage enshrined in the gospel
of Matthew and, thus, has a balancing role between these traditions,
rather than an innovative one. Even if contemporary exegesis of the
pastoral letters tends to see emphasis on increasing institutionalization in these three documents, one cannot deny that what the
Pastorals ultimately accomplish is an effective closure of the Pauline
corpus. After 2 Timothy, further Pauline pseudepigraphy becomes
virtually impossible. From the fact that the Pastorals are presented as
the last Pauline letters, we must conclude that this pseudepigraphy
seeks to preserve, and obtain closure for, a body of normative documents, rather than to promote further production of such writings.
2. Each of the four gospels demonstrably carries in its title and content
conscious attachment to the apostolic preaching. Each is linked to a
name that, in the context of the canon, is connected with a major
apostolic figure of the first proclamation of the Christian faith.
I am aware that contemporary gospel exegesis would challenge
this statement with weighty objections.We can list the most important ones as follows.
• The term “apostle” (as applied to the Twelve) is missing from John.
• In the original text of Mark, there are no resurrection appearances.
• In Matthew, there is only one appearance of the risen Christ.
• From among the Twelve Apostles, only Peter left behind some
historical individuality. Besides him, the person whom the sources
mention as a main leader is James,“the brother of the Lord,” who

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was not an apostle, while Paul never saw the earthly Jesus.Thus,
the persons who in reality had important leadership roles in the
early Church are Peter, James, John, and Paul, and of these only
Peter is named as a major figure in the gospels.To make matters
worse, some will say, Mark and Luke did not see Jesus, the authorship of John is based on tenuous grounds, and the identity of the
converted tax collector with Matthew is fictitious.
However, a careful evaluation of the perspective in which each canonical gospel presents its material can show that for each composition
the organic ties of its content with the first apostolic preaching as
well as guarantees coming from linkage to eyewitnesses are of capital importance.
In the gospel of Matthew, the close of the book explains most
explicitly the linkage of its content with the apostolic preaching. In
the final scene, when appearing to the eleven, Jesus declares the
beginning of his messianic reign (“all power has been given to me in
heaven and earth”) and entrusts to their care his whole teaching and
all the precepts he has given them. Their task is to turn all nations
into disciples of Jesus and promulgate the divine commands—a new
legislation—that he has provided for them (Mt 28:16–20).What this
scene really tells the reader is that the content of the book has been,
by the will of the risen Christ, the material of continued preaching
destined to all peoples of all times. This preaching, which is to be
begun by the eleven, has preceded the composition of the book and
continues concurrently with the use of Matthew’s gospel.The book
is secondary to the preaching, and yet it obtains its importance and
authority from that empowerment given to the eleven as Christ
sends them out into the whole wide world.The last sentence of the
book is of extraordinary importance: “Behold I am with you until
the consummation of the world.” The reigning Christ, when
commissioning the eleven, guarantees his abiding presence with
them until their task is completed. Here the book points beyond
itself and declares the ongoing presence of the enthroned Messiah
with his messengers, assuring also in this way authenticity, normative
authority, and never-ending trustworthiness to the preaching that
begins under his command. The self-understanding of Matthew’s
gospel is clearly part of a larger context that is the self-understanding
of the Matthean church, not only holding in possession the historical memory of Jesus’ deeds and teaching but having the effective
presence of Jesus himself, as the ultimate guarantee of truth and

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Denis Farkasfalvy, OCist.

authority. This consciousness of authenticity cannot be assailed by
inspecting the material exactness of the book’s content in terms of
human record-keeping.The author is fully aware that the guarantee
of truth is the actual presence of the risen Christ in the Church. If
we consider this awareness, we see right away that enumerating
several more episodic encounters between the disciples and the risen
Christ is of no consequence for the Matthean author.The book aptly
concludes by declaring the ongoing presence of Christ to his disciples as the solid basis for all ecclesial activities, including the creation
of an authentic record of Jesus’ deeds and teaching.
In Mark’s gospel, a different self-understanding of the Church
and of the author comes to expression. Most important is the title of
the work: “The beginning of the gospel about Jesus Christ, the Son
of God” (1:1). The Greek word euangelion is a key Christian term
used for designating the Christian message. From the opening of
Paul’s letter to the Romans (1:1–4), a document dated with certainty
(A.D. 56–58), we know that this word was closely associated with the
self-understanding of the first Christian missionaries. Paul himself
declares that he has been “segregated for the euangelion,” that is, his
whole life has been put into its service by divine election and call (cf.
also Rom 1:16; Gal 1:11–12; 1 Cor 9:16–18). But it is also quite
important to see that this understanding of the rapport between
“apostleship” and euangelion is not a Pauline specialty, nor is it derived
from an idiosyncratic Pauline self-concept. Paul’s words explaining
the content of the euangelion in Romans 1:1–4 have been widely
recognized as reporting significant pre-Pauline formulas. Both the
style and the vocabulary reveal that he is drawing from previous
tradition.This is, of course, quite understandable since he is addressing a Christian community that he has never visited before. Romans
is the only Pauline letter written to a non-Pauline Church community; we can naturally expect that he begins speaking to them in the
language and idiom widely used by the earliest Christian missionaries. Moreover, Paul makes it quite clear that, in his self-understanding as an apostle, he compares himself with the chief eyewitnesses of
Jesus’ earthly life (1 Cor 9:1–5; cf. Gal 2:9). Paradoxically, even his
claim of a direct call and personal vision of the risen Christ (Gal 1:1,
1:15–16) is patterned upon what constitutes the authority of the original
Twelve : their personal call and firsthand experience of the resurrection (cf. 1 Cor 15:5–9).Thus, there can be no doubt that when Mark
gives his composition the title of euangelion, he ties it not only to the
apostolic preaching but to the apostles who spread the Christian

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message with special qualifications and authority. This title also ties
his book to the witnesses of the resurrection, so that the fact that the
original ending of Mark contains no stories of encounters of the
apostles with the risen Christ is of little importance. The Roman
community had possessed by then, for about a decade, Paul’s epistle
written to them and, in all probability, a copy of 1 Corinthians in
which a traditional list of Resurrection appearances is found (1 Cor
15:1–8, esp. v. 3). In general, at the time the gospels were written, the
experience of the risen Christ was recognized as a presupposition for
both Christian faith and Christian preaching and belongs topically to
the conclusion of the documents describing the Lord’s deeds and
doctrine. What characterizes Mark’s concept of apostolic preaching
is, quite interestingly, an effort to anchor it in the actual participation
of the Twelve, in Jesus’ own preaching of the gospel. Repeatedly (cf.
3:14–15, 6:7–13, 30–32) he pictures how already in Jesus’ lifetime the
Twelve are being sent to do what Jesus does, in his name and with
his power.6 If we look at all these elements of Mark’s gospel, there is
certainly enough evidence for concluding that the book is consciously
exhibiting ties with the “apostolic twelve” and cannot be understood
without the claim of continuity between the activities of Jesus and
the ongoing work by his chosen disciples.
Such an awareness of connection between “gospel writing” and
apostolic preaching is most acute in Luke’s gospel. The main reason
seems to be the simple fact that Luke alone wrote a two-volume
composition, describing Christian origins not only by a narration of
Jesus’ “deeds and words” (Acts 1:1), but reporting in a volume of
equal length the history of the apostolic preaching, mostly the activities of Peter and Paul. In any case, the preface of the gospel (Lk
1:1–4) presents carefully and concisely the ties Luke sees between his
role and that of the “eyewitnesses and ministers of the word” who
spread the Christian message by preaching. He speaks of the role of
tradition, the task of collecting information from eyewitness sources,
going back to the origins, obtaining completeness of information,
6 In this regard, the compact sentence introducing the selection of the Twelve is

quite remarkable: “[H]e chose Twelve so that they might be with him and that
he might send them to preach and that they might have power of expelling
demons” (3:14–15).This statement levels off considerably the differences in the
role of the Twelve before and after the Resurrection. It is surprisingly close to
what is read in Matthew’s last verses: The preaching, the power, and the “being
with Jesus” constitute practically the same concept of apostleship but with the
difference of making these functions appear as rooted in their original election
not an empowerment following the Resurrection.

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providing an ordered narration with accuracy. We see here for the
first time the self-concept of a historian and a writer, combined with
that of a believer and servant of the Church community, who aims at
providing “solidity to the words” of preaching by using the methods
of ancient historiography. Dealing with his task as a qualified “professional,” Luke is the first to realize that he can achieve his goal of laying solid
foundations for the preaching of the Church only if his work encompasses both
the history of Jesus and the history of the early Church as two consecutive
phases of one single divine intervention in human history. What appears at
the end of Matthew only as a rather vague projection—the sendingoff of the disciples into the totality of space and time—takes concrete
shape in Luke’s work. His book’s structure exhibits in geographic
terms the expansion of the Christian movement. The beginnings in
Galilee lead to the peak events of crucifixion and Resurrection in
Jerusalem; then the beginnings of the Jerusalem church lead through
numerous meandering developments, to a final transfer of the gospel
to the Gentiles, symbolized by the arrival of Paul in Rome—Paul,
who, in spite of being a prisoner destined for martyrdom (the
farewell of Paul in Acts 20:32–38 leaves no doubt), announces the
message and teaching “about the Lord Jesus Christ with full confidence and unhindered.” (Acts 28:31)
The author of John’s gospel also expresses much awareness of
purpose and motivation, and, specifically, of his work’s relationship to
the preaching and teaching functions of the Church.There is much to
be said about the close relationship between the prologue of the gospel
and the first Johannine letter, especially its first chapter. The central
topic of both texts is the Eternal Word who appears in the realm of
flesh and thus becomes the object of sense experience: what we have
seen, heard and touched by hand.The “we” in both texts (1 Jn 1:1–3
and Jn 1:14) is an “apostolic” we, with reference to a special group as
privileged eyewitnesses with a task of witnessing. By their testimony,
these witnesses extend their communion (koinonia) with the Word of
God to all men who are willing to receive their preaching with faith.
The Johannine writings, and especially the gospel, have the task of
helping to extend this communion of life with God achieved through
the Incarnate Son. Such insistence on the function of writing in service of this communion is typical of the Johannine works in which the
Greek verb graphein has its highest occurrence among all books of the
New Testament.“This I write to you so that you do not sin” (1 Jn 2:1;
emphasis added);“I write to you, children. . . . I write to you, fathers. . . .
I write to you, young men . . .” (1 Jn 2:12–14; emphasis added; “I

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write” is repeated here six times). The so-called first ending of the
gospel of John, which is the literary conclusion of the whole work
(chapter 21 being structurally an “appendix”), functions as a written
testimony to the author’s faith in Christ, aiming to help the reader
reach the same life-giving faith: “These have been written so that
you might believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and by
this faith you might have life” ( Jn 20:30–31). This conclusion has a
striking resemblance to Mark 1:1 speaking of the gospel “of the
Messiah, the Son of God.” Nonetheless, John’s gospel makes it very
clear that it contains only an “anthology” of the Jesus tradition:“Jesus
performed many more signs in the sight of his disciples which are
not written in this book” ( Jn 20:30).The written work originated in
preaching but the writings make no claim of completeness in
comparison with the reality to which they give witness.
3. Dependence on apostolic preaching is of capital importance not only
for the gospels, but also for the rest of the books of the New Testament.Those letters of Paul whose authenticity is in no doubt (Rom,
1 Cor, Gal, Phil, 1 Thes, Phlm) obviously became part of the New
Testament canon because of their Pauline origin. But Colossians and
Ephesians are also depositories of Pauline teaching, even if their
actual literary form does not come from Paul himself. The strong
Pauline tradition in Asia Minor, which survived beyond the lifetime
of the apostle and led to its blossoming Church life, is attested in
many independent ways. Paul’s three years of continued teaching in
Ephesus, the capital of the province of Asia Minor, are recorded in
Acts, and there is no basis for questioning the reliability of this information. The letters of both Ignatius of Antioch addressed to the
churches of the region around the year 115, as well as the extant texts
of St. Polycarp, Bishop of Smyrna, the leading Church figure of the
region shortly after, explicitly mention and quote Paul and refer to
his letters. Consequently, the collection of the Pauline letters must
have been made in Asia Minor at a rather early point.
The most significant witness to the process by which the Pauline
corpus was formed is the brief private letter to Philemon: It is the
only authentic private letter (addressed to an individual on account
of an individual affair) that survived in the collection, and this fact
leaves little doubt that people in possession of this private letter have
played an important role in the gathering of Paul’s letters.
2 Peter, which is most reasonably dated around A.D. 125, not only
testifies to the existence of a Pauline collection of letters, but also

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Denis Farkasfalvy, OCist.

manifests that, at a very early phase, controversies arose about the
correct interpretation of Paul’s letter. This “hermeneutical controversy” seems to explain sufficiently, at least in basic outline, why Paul’s
disciples continued the literary process of enshrining the teaching of
the apostle (as well as its earliest understanding) in the same literary
form that comes from Paul: the letter. Moreover, the preceding seems
to explain why the “Pastorals,” three pseudepigraphic letters addressed
to Timothy and Titus, were constructed to include the most important elements about Pauline Church order and why, in this way the
main ideas about tradition were conveniently attached to Paul’s literary figure and the written teaching. It was in these Pastoral letters that
Paul obtained the title of “the Apostle,” a title that he has retained
throughout the rest of the Church’s history in both the East and the
West. Of course the rest of the books of the New Testament are also
attached, in various ways and often for reasons that we cannot fully
identify with certainty, to different “apostolic figures.”The first epistle
of Peter, which claims to be of Roman origin and is addressed to the
churches of Asia Minor, might well be authentically Petrine, in the
sense in which its conclusion seems to claim it: It is a letter written in
Peter’s name by a disciple, Silas or Silvanus, whose name we know
from other sources. Accordingly it contains doctrine sanctioned by
Peter and could have been written in his lifetime. 2 Peter completes
1 Peter, testifies to the authenticity of its teaching, and, at the same
time, coordinates the theological and literary legacy of the two apostles in a manner that is balanced and should have appeared satisfactory
to the Pauline communities.Thus, given the image cast of Peter in 2
Peter, both Peter and Paul are portrayed as recipients of supernatural
revelation, both are preachers and authors of letters, originators of
doctrinal traditions, and, finally, holy martyrs of blessed memory.The
two letters of Peter with the Pauline corpus form the bulk of the
apostolic letters of the New Testament.
Clearly, as was mentioned above, the Letter of James aims at solving problems of interpreting Pauline theology for those steeped in
the theological tradition of the Matthean gospel, and the author
knows about the legitimacy of Jewish-Christian tradition in the
Church. James, the “brother of the Lord,” might not have been one
of the Twelve, yet his figure is numbered among the original apostles
already in Paul’s lifetime (Gal 2:9; 1 Cor 15), so that a letter attributed to him was legitimately seen by the early Church as “an apostolic writing.”The letter of Jude is a special case. It seems to be one
of the authoritative sources of 2 Peter. By both its attribution to

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“Jude, the brother of James,” an original disciple, and its relationship
to 2 Peter as a major source, it was easily seen as invested, according
to the categories of the early Church, with apostolic authority. The
Johannine letters obtained their canonical status by their connection
to the fourth gospel and the self-identification of the “presbyter” (3
Jn 1:1), who is the author of both the second and the third letters,
with the Apostle John. This identification was debated in one form
or another for a long time.Yet the Church settled for the authority
of the writings whose pertinence to the tradition of the fourth
gospel remains unchallenged, without ever forcing on the faithful a
dogmatic decision about the identification of the author as John, the
son of Zebedee. In a similar way, the authority of the Book of Revelation is due to a number of factors. Its apocalyptic style, its claim of
being revealed by heavenly angels to a visionary who calls himself
John, and its demand to be considered as an inspired book (cf. Rev
1:3, 19; 22:8, 18–19) are quite significant. But ultimately it found
acceptance into the canon as a book pertaining to the apostolic
heritage of the Church.The identification of the seer with the Apostle John goes back to Justin Martyr and Papias. This conviction has
pervaded the ecclesial “public opinion” for most of the history of the
Church. On the other hand, its belonging to “Johannine writings” is
a critically verifiable proposition even if as a piece of literature it is
of a different genre, style, and quite possibly by a different literary
redactor—maybe also by another author—than John’s gospel or the
three Johannine letters.The statements of Church teaching demanding the admission of these books into the New Testament canon are
of a theological, and not a literary or historical-critical nature. The
apostolicity of a book entails its authenticity, by which it represents
original or foundational teaching for the Church. But the term does
not prejudice the exact historical process by which such books found
their literary form and shape. In the case of the Book of Revelation,
the Church has provided the survival of a block of New Testament
prophecy and apocalyptic thought, asserting its derivation from and
conformity with the original presentation of the Christian message.
It can be demonstrated that all controversies concerning the canonicity of the Book of Revelation have been attached to problems of
its interpretation and that the objection against its apostolic authority made in the early Church was the consequence of a millenarian
interpretation of some parts of the book rather than of objections
raised on historical or critical grounds against the Johannine authorship of the book.

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Denis Farkasfalvy, OCist.

We see, thus far, that the concept of apostolicity is what German
theology calls with predilection a theologoumenon, a theological construct whose conceptual ingredients are theological but that is, at the
same time, superimposed on some rudimentary facts of historical
tradition. The theological content alone cannot be asserted without
signifying in some sense also historical connotations, but the exact way
in which the historical meaning of apostolic origin can be verified
for one book or another is not defined with authority. For the magisterium of the Church it has always been sufficient that the apostolicity of all canonical books be verifiable in some analogous sense of
the word.
4. In a full and technical sense of the term, we cannot speak about the
“Scripture of the New Testament” as something existing in the second
century, at least not before Irenaeus (for example, around A.D. 150)
and certainly not in the consciousness of contemporary Christians.
Not only did the propagation of these books take a certain amount
of time—more time then than in our days—but also the historical
and sociological process that brought about the New Testament did
not come to its conclusion until the end of the second century.This
process had several phases.
At first, the role and importance of oral tradition did not cease
but maintained its vigor concurrent with the production of written
texts for at least another generation.The quotations of Jesus’ sayings
in Clement of Rome, Ignatius, Polycarp, and Justin Martyr are oftentimes pieced together from memory, and the variants are due to the
multiplicity of forms of oral traditions. At the same time, there is still
a great deal of activity by which the apostolic tradition obtains
further written form: gospels, “acts” of different apostolic figures,
apocalyptic books, letters by individual or several apostles are written
time and again. However, it must be said right away that as far as literary forms are concerned an overwhelming part of this continued
literature, with pretension of authenticity and normative character, is
patterned according to the earlier compositions that became part of
the canon. But the motivation and purpose for producing such new
works is evidently multiple and ever-increasing: devotion; satisfaction
of curiosity; support for doctrinal needs; innovations; new trends;
ecclesial groups, some remaining in communion with mainstream
Christianity and some receding into isolation or appearing isolated
in the eyes of the rest; aberrant practices—all these dilemmas demand
the production of further “sacred writings.” Most important are those

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739

attempts that try to establish harmony between the fundamental tenets
of the Christian tradition and the different streams of philosophical
and religious movements of late Hellenistic society.
While this activity was growing and bearing fruit with an everincreasing fecundity, the problem of authenticity became more and
more acute. By what method can authentic and non-authentic traditions be distinguished? True and pseudo-apostolic writings need to
be sifted out and separated:What are the criteria? There were all sorts
of efforts, rooted in more or less good faith, to enshrine one’s own
tradition in literary documents endowed with apostolic authority by
their titles or by fictitious settings. From the Didache or “Teaching of
the Twelve Apostles” to the Epistula apostolorum, we see a copious
number of documents trying to solidify liturgical and ecclesial legislation or custom in fixed literary forms. By the end of the second
century, the question pervades all parts of the Church:Which documents contain truly and especially, with independent authority and
normativity, the teaching inherited from the first Christian generation and, ultimately, through the apostles, from Christ himself?
By the nature of the matter, it is with the third or fourth Christian generation that canonicity—the authentic and normative character of allegedly apostolic writings—becomes a problem in the Church
at large. On all fronts the Church had to engage in a battle to obtain
its own self-concept and so to define what is authentically Christian,
as opposed to what is distorted, transformed, and falsified.This process
took place largely in terms of making decisions about literary documents: Certain writings were collected and approved for public reading in the churches, and, in addition, the core of this collection was
declared authentically “apostolic” in the sense explained above.
In fact, we are talking about two organically connected phases.
In both the Church has looked at its past and at itself. In the former,
it tried to determine what it had received as original and normative
material from the preaching and teaching of Christ’s first missionaries. In the latter, it tried to identify those literary works in which this
authentic teaching is fixed in such a way that the writings themselves
are bearers of the divine word that constitutes the foundation of the
Church: They are “holy Scripture” by being constitutive for the
Church, in the sense of containing guaranteed divine truth upon
which the faith life of the community can be built, questions can be
decided, regulations may be based, and certainty about authentic
tradition may be assured.

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Denis Farkasfalvy, OCist.

Part III: Theology of Inspiration in the New Testament
1. When the nascent Church began to use the Scriptures of Judaism, it
also adopted a certain way of looking at them and speaking of them,
both of these ways having their origin in the Old Testament. In other
words, the Church’s faith in the Christian Bible resumes and further
develops the faith the Jews had in their Scriptures.The earliest Christian texts contain the same formulas of quotation and reference that
can be found in contemporary Jewish documents:“for it is written,”
“as Scripture says.”These formulas not only mean that the texts that
follow are part of the Scriptures, but that what is being quoted
exhibits a conclusive proof of divine authority to be accepted with
faith and reverence. Such an attitude is found on almost every page
of the New Testament and proves that the early Church taught without hesitation or ambiguity the divine authority of the Old Testament. Scripture is the word of God, and thus it “cannot lose its
validity” ( Jn 10:35). Such an attitude surrounds not only the Mosaic
books, but also texts in which a prophet speaks as God’s “mouthpiece” (cf.Acts 4:25). Even narrative texts of the Old Testament come
to be quoted as “God’s word.” So, for example, in Matthew 19:4–5,
a narrative passage from Genesis (2:24) is cited with the words, “He
[the Creator] said.” Here the biblical text is quoted in this way in
spite of the fact that, formally, it is not a divine saying, but a statement
of the human narrator speaking in his own name.
In another typical locution, New Testament authors refer to
words or statements from the Old Testament as “by the Holy Spirit.”
So, for example, in Acts 4:25 the Apostle Peter quotes Psalm 2 in the
following way: “You [God] have spoken in this way by the Holy
Spirit through the mouth of David.” Elsewhere, when Paul is quoting Isaiah, he says: “Rightly did the Holy Spirit speak when saying
the following through Isaiah to our fathers” (Acts 28: 25).The epistle to the Hebrews repeatedly quotes Scripture as text spoken by the
Spirit (3:7, 10:15). According to the gospels of Matthew and Mark,
Jesus quotes the Psalms as what “the Holy Spirit said through David”
(Mt 22:43 = Mk 12:36).
2. Two passages—2 Timothy 3:16 and 2 Peter 1:21—are of special
importance.These are not referring to some specific scriptural quotations but to “the Scriptures” in general. In 2 Timothy 3:16,Timothy is
encouraged to remain faithful to the true teaching he received and to
follow the Scriptures that he has known since childhood. The text
expresses the conviction that the knowledge and understanding of the

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741

Scriptures (= the Old Testament) lead to faith in Christ and a correct
interpretation of that faith. It is in this context that the statement is
made of verse 16: “all Scripture is divinely inspired and useful for
teaching.”The Greek expression for “divinely inspired” is the composite word theopneustos, made up from the noun theos (God) and the verb
pneuein (“to blow” or “to breathe”). Grammatically, it would be possible to attribute to it an active meaning: “every Scripture is breathing
God.” However, such words made up with the noun theos and a
participle derived from a noun would have usually a passive meaning:
every Scripture “breathed by” or “inspired by God.” Thus the word
refers to some divine activity of “breathing” (= God transmitting his
spirit), with reference to the noun pneuma, which should mean here
not some spirit but the Holy Spirit of God. Since, according to the
text, every Scripture is the product of such activity by the divine Spirit,
every Scripture is “useful” for teaching. Thus every Scripture can be
successfully used to provide instruction in the Christian faith.
It is worth noticing that 2 Timothy 3:16 makes no reference to the
human authors of the Scriptures, nor does it provide any indication
about how God “inspires” them. It speaks of the scriptural texts as products of divine inspiration. Later theological terminology has called this
“objective inspiration,” that is, the inspired character of the biblical text.
The context of 2 Peter 1:21 speaks in general terms about the
prophetic texts of the Old Testament: “No scriptural prophecy comes
from individual understanding. For no prophecy was ever issued from
human decision, but under the influence of the Holy Spirit by God’s
commission did holy men speak.”What the exact connotation of scriptural prophecy may be has been disputed. Does it refer only to a part of
Scriptures, texts that are “prophecy” in a stricter sense, that is, the second
part of the Hebrew Bible called “Prophets” or even only parts of these
books, namely the passages that begin with the formula “thus says the
Lord”? Much more probably, this expression refers to all texts of the
Old Testament, considering them as “prophecy,” that is, texts to be interpreted about Christ. Such interpretation is much more in conformity
with the Christocentric interpretation of the Old Testament, characteristic of 2 Peter (and also 1 Peter, to which this writing is linked in many
ways). In any case, this verse does not speak so much about the scriptural texts as about their authors and, in general, the “holy men” of old.
These were “moved by the Holy Spirit”—stood under his influence—
when they expressed themselves in the Scriptures.
Thus this second passage, although referring to written biblical
texts, paints the model of the biblical author as a prophetic person

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Denis Farkasfalvy, OCist.

who “speaks” through the text. But it is certainly not coincidence that
references to the image of the holy man transmitting God’s word by
speech and references to the authors of “the holy writings” are fully
merged in this passage. For long centuries before, Jewish tradition
attributed all scriptural books to the great teachers and leaders of the
past as their authors. All five books of the Law have been attributed
to Moses (including Deuteronomy, in which Moses’ death is
described!), the Psalms in their totality to King David, the collection
of all wisdom books to Solomon, and so on. But these attributions are
no mere fictions or historical errors or pious exaggerations. They
express a form of thought according to which God’s (biblical) word
came first to his people by live teaching and was combined with acts
of leadership and marvelous deeds, not merely through individuals
“pushing a pen” or dictating. It was important to emphasize the
meaning of the Pentateuch’s authority by referring a passage to
Moses. When the Psalms are quoted as sayings of David, or the
wisdom books are attributed to King Solomon, whose request for
wisdom was a celebrated feature of Israelite history, an important
connection is made between text and history.This “form of thought”
might be seen as much too “global” or inexact or even “non-historical,” yet one must not forget that it was developed and left consciously
intact in the service of a theological message. This form of thought
obviously attributes the text to an author without care for historical
precision. Nor does it explain how or why oral communication was
committed to writing or what specific divine activity accompanied
the work of the writer in distinction from what “the holy men” were
orally expressing under the influence of the Spirit. In this perspective,
“the divine word” comes in a global sense, as if distilled from divine
action exercised upon salvific history, a history in which chosen men
serve as intermediaries between God and his people. God’s word is
considered “prophetic” because mediated through chosen inspired persons.
The faith of the early Church, therefore, took hold of the Old
Testament in the context of two basic convictions: (a) the scriptural
texts anticipate “in various and many ways” (cf. Heb 1:1) the arrival
of Christ; and (b) the people who formed and composed them were
“the holy men” of salvation history, standing under special influence
of the Spirit.
We must realize that such an approach to Scripture in the early
Church has determined the way in which the Bible was treated for
most of Christian history.Twelve centuries after the biblical passages
examined above were written, St.Thomas Aquinas still treated scrip-

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743

tural inspiration in his Summa under the heading of Prophecy. In fact,
until most recent times, all efforts of making clean-cut conceptual
distinctions between “prophetic” and “biblical” inspiration remained
elusive or, at least, very imperfect.
There is one more important feature that characterizes 2 Peter
1:21.The text reveals a line of reasoning that can be reconstructed as
follows. Since Scripture is prophetic, because divinely inspired, it
cannot be interpreted by personal interpretation, but rather by the
apostolic teaching based on the revelation of Christ. This follows
because prophecy is not a result of human effort but the fruit of
inspiration by the Holy Spirit. Just as the text was produced under divine
influence, its understanding requires enlightenment by the same Spirit. This
principle was commonly held by the Church Fathers and medieval
theologians and rightly became part of the Second Vatican Council’s
Dei verbum (no. 12). Nonetheless, while speaking about “inspired”
interpretation of the Scriptures, ancient authors use the concept of
inspiration in a broader (and analogous) sense so that until the end of
the Middle Ages the word “inspiration” never means specifically the
activity of the Holy Spirit by which “Scripture” came about, but any
influence by which one is divinely moved to act, especially to speak
or write.
3. What has been discussed thus far shows that the first Christian generation was familiar with the basic issues of biblical inspiration. These
may be summarized as follows:
a. Holy Scripture is of divine origin and of divine authority; it is
God’s word, and it is the work of the Holy Spirit;
b. The human authors of the Bible stood under divine inspiration.
They are ultimately linked with the great figures of salvation
history through whom God communicated his thought and
will to his people; and
c. The main topic of the Bible is the revelation of Christ; Scripture
has been produced within the framework of an economy of
salvation for which Christ is the center and the peak.
While the issues summarized here stand in focus in the ancient
Church, the written word as such draws little attention in that context.
No matter which part of the Pentateuch is being quoted, we find
expressions such as “it is written in Moses” or “Moses said.” Similarly,

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Denis Farkasfalvy, OCist.

whatever comes from a prophetic book (for that matter, from any
part of the Old Testament) is susceptible to quotation with the
accompanying tag: “God said by the mouth of his prophet.” Ancient
Christian authors pay little attention to the process by which a teaching was first delivered orally, then became oral tradition, then a written text, and how at last the written work obtained its final redacted
form. Of course, this process shapes the text and chisels the wording:
Some elements fade into the background or disappear, new ones
emerge or get emphasized and demand changes on the literary level.
Only after a period of fluctuation does the text get its finalized form
and become a sacred text to be transmitted without further
allowance for change. At the end of the process, textual changes are
only those occasioned by the mistakes of copyists or by the attempts
of textual critics, old and new, to improve on the text, but only in an
attempt of re-creating its most original form.
It is interesting to observe that the age that witnessed the consolidation of oral traditions into written documents paid little attention
to explaining why and in what sense we may say that “Isaiah said” or
“David declared” those words quoted in written documents. We
must not think that in ancient times people were unaware of the
essential differences between oral and written sources. But they are
more interested in a theological scheme by which they may identify
the written word available now with its original proclamation. For
this reason they are willing to put into parentheses the chain of intermediary steps that brought the first divine communication from the
live message to its written recording.
Moreover, it is also worth noticing that the two most important
New Testament passages about inspiration, discussed above, both
belong to pseudepigraphic apostolic letters (2 Pet and 2 Tim). The
writers of these texts consciously use literary fiction to enshrine apostolic traditions in written documents.7 Their work is undertaken not
for the purpose of promoting some new teaching, but in effort to close
the canon of apostolic writings, or more correctly, to make the canon
appear to be a closed entity.The Pastoral Letters speak of Pauline tradition as a deposit entrusted to Paul’s disciples, and 2 Timothy, in particular, depicts the apostle as he states his imminent martyrdom:“the time
7 Both 2 Timothy and 2 Peter depict the two apostles as martyrs. While this is

clearer in 2 Tim, it is present also in 2 Pet 1:15 referring to the apostle’s exodos,
a term that is found in reference to foreseen death in Lk 9:31, and also in
Irenaeus (Adv Haer 3.1.1), who definitely knew 2 Peter. Cf. Denis Farkasfalvy,
“Theology of Scripture in Saint Irenaeus,” Revue Bénédictine 78 (1968): 319–33.

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745

of my death [analyseos, meaning “dissolving”] is at hand” (2 Tim 4:6).
Similarly, in 2 Peter the Apostle states that he is writing a reminder
while “in this tent,” but, as the Lord Jesus Christ has revealed it to him,
he will soon have to leave this life (2 Pet 1:13–14). Moreover, 2 Peter
speaks of “all letters” written by “our beloved brother Paul according
to the wisdom given to him” (2 Pet 3:15).These passages witness to a
remarkably conscious agenda, intent on sealing the apostolic deposit of
teaching in vessels which posterity must be able to recognize as
inspired and, therefore, not to be tampered with.8
Conclusions
1. We must correct the current way in which we speak about the
formation of the Christian Bible. The Church did not simply “take
over” the Jewish Scriptures and add to them another set of writings.
2. Inspiration of Scripture means subjectively “prophets and apostles,” that
is, the authors of the sacred books. But this expression is a technical
one by which the early Church refered to those who first preached
the Word of God. Only secondarily did the Word become Scripture,
but in that process the “prophets and apostles” had a crucial role.The
“human authors” meant first and foremost these prophetic and apostolic figures through which the written text is divinely guaranteed.
3. Inspiration means objectively the inspired character of the texts, their
link with a spiritual—Spirit-given—meaning. The Spirit is Christ’s,
the Gift coming from his risen body. Such meaning is to be found in
the sacred text on account of the prophetic character of the Old
Testament and on account of apostolicity in the New Testament.
Inspiration cannot be explained unless we first study the role of
“prophets and apostles” in the economy of salvation.
4. Both prophecy and apostolicity are verified analogously in the origin
of the texts of the two Testaments, according to the way the charisms
of prophets and apostles are linked to Christ, that radical incarnation
of the Word, from which all other mediations of the Logos through
N&V
the flesh receive their value and authenticity.

8 By referring to the imminent death of the apostles, 2 Tim and 2 Pet effectively

provide that no letter of a later make could be recognized as authentic.

Nova et Vetera, English Edition,Vol. 4, No. 4 (2006): 747–760

747

Inspired Authors and Their Speech Acts:
A Philosophical Commentary on the
Essay by Denis Farkasfalvy
M ICHAEL G ORMAN
The Catholic University of America
Washington, DC

D ENIS FARKASFALVY ’ S paper contributes to the large task of
understanding the Bible in light of modern approaches. Painting with a
broad brush, we can say that modernity is a challenge because the scientific modes of understanding it has given rise to are often, at least apparently, in conflict with prescientific practice and intuition, much more so
than were the scientific modes of understanding characteristic of ancient
and medieval times. It seems to me that the conflicts are the result of
mistaking abstractions, that is, partial views, for accounts of the whole.This
suggests that we need to mount up to a higher perspective from which
the correct place for modern scientific modes of understanding can be
seen.Thus our task is not to stifle the modern spirit but instead, patiently,
to think through it, testing everything and holding fast to what is good.
Having begun with that rather grandiose remark, I intend in what
follows to focus on two smaller and more concrete issues, both of which
are related to Farkasfalvy’s concern with Biblical inspiration. The first
issue is inspiration itself and its relation to the idea that the human
authors of the Bible are true authors.The second concerns the fact that
the Bible contains different types of speech act: to understand inspired
speech fully, we must grasp that it comes in various types, types that in
turn require various responses.
But first I feel compelled to comment on the rhetorical and intellectual
situation in which I find myself. A philosopher speaking among theologians is in danger of acting like a bull in a china shop. Underinformed and

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Michael Gorman

overconfident, he arrives on the scene with the intention of straightening out everyone else’s ideas without feeling the need to know in any
detail what those ideas are. Famous philosophers have acted this part
before me, but I would rather not emulate them. For that reason, you will
see that I raise questions more often than I offer answers. For much the
same reason, I will have little to say about the theological literature,
restricting myself instead to little more than a few references to relevant
discussions in analytic philosophy. Even there I will not try for anything
like comprehensiveness; my goal is really only to offer a few lines of
thought that might be profitably pursued by people qualified in the field
of biblical interpretation.
The first issue is inspired authorship. Denis Farkasfalvy mentions the
distinction between objective inspiration—the inspiration of the text
itself—and subjective inspiration—the inspiration of the mind of the scriptural author. Instead of commenting on what he says ad litteram, I will
approach things from a different perspective, but my ultimate aim will be to
buttress his concern to uphold both senses of inspiration. My strategy will
be to imagine why someone might hold for objective interpretation over
and against subjective inspiration and then to note the unfortunate consequences of so proceeding.1
I accept as my starting point the following two theses: (1) God is the
ultimate author of Scripture and speaks through it; and (2) the human
authors of Scripture are also true authors.2 Next, I note that authorship
is not just a matter of producing a text;3 it is a matter of producing a text
with a characteristic sort of intention, whether it be the intention to
communicate, the intention to command, the intention to exhort, or
something else along those lines. From these remarks it follows that for
every passage in Scripture there is a meaning in the mind of the divine
author and also a meaning in the mind of the human author.4
1 I will “imagine” such a procedure because, in accordance with the limitation

announced in the previous paragraph, I will be discussing an idealized foil of my
own devising—without attempting to say where in the literature that sort of
viewpoint might be advocated.
2 See Vatican Council II, Dei verbum, nos. 11–13.
3 To be sure, the ways in which the human authors of Scripture produced texts
differ from the way in which God produced them. As will be mentioned below,
Nicholas Wolterstorff ’s way of thinking about divine authorship as textual appropriation allows us, if desired, to minimize the sense in which God produces a text.
See Nicholas Wolterstorff, Divine Discourse: Philosophical Reflections on the Claim
That God Speaks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), chs. 3 and 7.
4 It would be better to say that there is at least one meaning in the mind of the
divine author and at least one meaning in the mind of the human author, but

Inspired Authors and Their Speech Acts

749

Now, if the divine and human meanings of a given scriptural passage
match up in an obvious way, all is well. But sometimes they do not. For
example, if we say that the divine meaning of a certain Old Testament
passage has to do with Christ and if we also say (on historical grounds)
that the human author cannot possibly have been thinking of Christ, then
there is going to be a considerable gap between the human and the divine
meanings.To be sure, a gap of this sort need not amount to a contradiction.To shift to a slightly different example, suppose a certain Old Testament passage is talking about how God saves his servants and suppose it
seems to us that the human author is thinking that God saves his servants
by protecting them from physical death. If someone wants to argue that
the ultimate divine meaning of the passage concerns God’s saving people
from hell after death, it is possible to see the latter sort of salvation as a
fulfillment of the former sort in such a way that there is no head-on collision between the two meanings. But at the same time, it appears that the
latter sort of salvation is not what the human author meant.
Another case, a more difficult one, arises when the divine and human
meanings seem to be truly opposed. Consider the worrisome last verse
of Psalm 137: It appears that the human meaning of this text is a blessing
on those who kill the children of the Babylonians. One traditional
understanding of the divine meaning of this text is that it is an injunction to kill off temptations before they become sins, or to kill off little
sins before they become big ones. How can we avoid seeing the human
and divine meanings as being quite different and even opposed? Only, it
seems, by reconsidering our original views of what those meanings were,
bringing one of them closer to the other. Presumably we are not going
to say that God blesses infanticides, so instead we will have to say that the
human author was not really talking about smashing babies and was
instead talking about something else—perhaps about how to handle
temptations! Here anyone with a historical sense is going to start feeling
nervous. It is hard to avoid thinking that we really do have an opposition
between what the human author intended and what God intended.
Cases like these suggest that we shift from attending to the human
author’s intention to the meaning of the humanly produced text itself.
Let the human author’s intention be as limited or wrongheaded as may
adverting to that additional complexity is not necessary for the argument I am
making. I do not have space here to argue against the view that authors’ intentions are unknowable or irrelevant to textual interpretation. Suffice it to say that
I am sympathetic to the line of thought found in Wolterstorff ’s Divine Discourse,
especially ch. 11.

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750

be; the real point of biblical inspiration, one might argue, is that the text
is inspired. As long as there is no gap, or not too much of one, between
the divine meaning and the text’s meaning, it does not matter whether
there is a gap between the divine meaning and the human author’s meaning. Once this point has been accepted, it is fairly short work to argue
that, in the overall context of the Bible, references to salvation have to do
with the afterlife or that, in the overall context of the Bible, references to
babies smashed on rocks are really discussions of how Christ helps us
conquer sin.The fact is that texts are a lot more flexible than authors.
Now of course this shift makes sense only if there can be a gap between
the human author’s meaning and the text’s meaning, but defending the
possibility of such a gap is not so hard. Languages have a common social
reality that is independent of individual language-users, which allows texts
to have meanings that diverge from, or even oppose, what their human
authors intended to convey. Suppose we are talking about Avicenna and
suppose I suggest that he was influenced by Anselm, and you respond,
“Impossible! Augustine was only a few years old when Avicenna died!”
Clearly what you are intending to communicate is that Anselm was only
a few years old then—your saying “Augustine” is just a slip of the tongue,
so much so that I might not even notice it. But your sentence, the text you
produced, did refer to Augustine. Exploiting this sort of fact, one can say
that a biblical text has a meaning independent of what was in the mind of
the human author who created it.
I noted above that texts are more flexible than authors, and perhaps
one might fear that they are too flexible.Without controls, it becomes all
too easy to make problems go away.Thus the Pontifical Biblical Commission, in its “Interpretation of the Bible in the Church,” warned against
straying too far from the meanings in the minds of human authors:
It does not follow from this that we can attribute to a biblical text
whatever meaning we like, interpreting it in a wholly subjective way.
On the contrary, one must reject as unauthentic every interpretation
alien to the meaning expressed by the human authors in their written
text.To admit the possibility of such alien meanings would be equivalent to cutting off the biblical message from its root, which is the word
of God in its historical communication; it would also mean opening the
door to interpretations of a wildly subjective nature.5

The upshot is that there are serious limits to the usefulness of shifting from
intention to text in order to explain a problematic passage. The more
5 Origins 23 (1994): 512.

Inspired Authors and Their Speech Acts

751

objectionable the authorial intention seems to be, the more one will want
to assign to the text a meaning alien to that intention; but the more alien
the proposed textual meaning is, the more questionable it becomes to
assign it. In short, the greater the need to shift to textual meaning, the less
legitimate it is to do so.
Be that as it may, I would like to raise a different sort of concern about
focusing on the text as opposed to the human author’s intention. It is a
cliché to mock the dove-perched-on-the-shoulder theory of inspiration,
and rightly so: It would be very strange for God to write the Bible that
way. If he were of a mind to dictate, why would he not just write out the
book himself, the way he did for Joseph Smith?—and on much nicer
stationery, too! If God is going to bother using secondary causes at all, he
is going to use them in accord with their natures. But that means that if
God is going to use human beings as authors, he is going to make use of,
and work through, whatever it is that goes on when human beings write.
But since, as we have already seen, writing is not merely producing a text
but doing so with a certain sort of intention, it follows that God is going
to be working through the human authors’ attempts to communicate
their thoughts.Taking authorship seriously means more than taking textproduction seriously; it means taking authorial intention seriously.
The point should be stated more carefully. An approach to Scripture
that privileges textual meaning at the expense of human authorial meaning need not altogether deny that the human authors of Scripture had
authorial intentions—it need not make them into dictation machines.All
that is required for this approach is that human authorial intentions be
irrelevant to God’s intention in authoring Scripture.Thus one could hold
that God used true authors with true authorial intentions but also that he
bypassed those intentions, using the authors only as scribes. God’s goal
was to get a certain text written; the scriptural author’s reasons for writing that text, and hence his status as a true author, was accidental.
This, I suggest, is inadequate. The claim that the human authors of
Scripture were true authors is not rightly understood merely as the claim
that the people who wrote the books of the Bible had authorial intentions—it is also a claim that those intentions are themselves part of what
God was trying to bring about and that they are somehow relevant to,
and in the service of, the divine meaning of Scripture. Once that is said,
two things happen: First, the problem of the gap between the human and
the divine meaning re-emerges; second, a way of closing the gap suggests
itself, as follows. If the human author’s intention, and not just the text he
writes, is part of God’s plan for the Scriptures, then it is plausible to think

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Michael Gorman

that the human author’s intended meaning would include ideas specially
revealed to him by God. (God also, to be sure, would inspire him to
choose especially fitting words to express those ideas, but since choice of
wording is itself a mental operation, the crucial point is that God inspires
his mind.) This is not just the ordinary divine concurrence with all
created operations, but a special act on God’s part to give the scriptural
authors insight into, and firm grasp of, matters ordinarily unavailable to
the human mind.6 Such inspiration would make it possible for the
human author’s intended meaning to be closer to the divine meaning
than we might have thought.To put the argument in a nutshell, then: (1)
the worry was that there is too large a gap between the divine intention
and the human intention; (2) one proposed solution was to sideline the
human intention and focus instead on the gap between divine intention
and the meaning of the text, the advantage being that this gap is much
smaller; (3) I raised a doubt about that solution on the ground that it does
not take human authorship seriously enough; and (4) I am now proposing that we bring back the human author’s intention but close the gap by
thinking of that intention as divinely inspired.
No one who accepts divine intervention in the first place will find
subjective inspiration objectionable just because it involves divine intervention.7 Why swallow the camel of the Incarnation but strain at the gnat
of subjective inspiration? But other, more specific objections could be
adduced.
First, it might be objected that only some scriptural authors give
evidence of having had visions and the like. My response is that subjective inspiration and unusual experiences need not coincide. God can give
extraordinary insight without using pyrotechnics. Perhaps Luke is a good
example. He is working hard to get the story right, and he need not
know that God is granting him extraordinary insights.
Second, it might be objected that believing in subjective inspiration
means thinking of the biblical authors as having superhuman knowledge,
which in turn would undermine the claim that they are human authors.The
way to answer this objection is to clarify the notion of subjective inspiration. Subjective inspiration gives rise to extraordinary insights, but not to
superhuman insights; if the insights were superhuman, then human authors
6 Of course, care must be taken, because we do not want to fall uncritically into

saying that all the biblical authors had detailed insights into the fullness of Christian revelation.This point will return below.
7 Arguments for the compatibility of divine intervention and modern science can
be found in Wolterstorff, Divine Discourse, ch. 7.

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753

could not have them! To think that anything other than ordinary, experience-based knowledge is superhuman is to fall into the same error as that
of thinking that Christ could not have had the beatific vision in his earthly
sojourn because he was human—whether or not Christ had the beatific
vision then, you cannot argue against it merely on the basis of his being
human, because the beatific vision is a human mode of knowing.8 So it is
not convincing to argue that the human authors of Scripture could not have
had special knowledge on the grounds that then they would not have been
true human authors. The sort of knowledge possessed by the scriptural
authors was a human way of knowing—extraordinary, but still human.
A third objection is a more nuanced version of the second. Let it be
granted that inspired authors are not working on a superhuman level; still
it seems mistaken to think of them as so thoroughly lifted out of their
historical and cultural contexts.To put the point sharply, isn’t it crazy to
say that Moses and the prophets were not really Jews? Doesn’t that undercut the whole idea that revelation unfolds over a long period of time?
This last objection is the really good one. I have argued, on essentially
philosophical grounds, that taking the human intentions of the scriptural
authors seriously is important for taking them seriously as authors, and I
have suggested, in a more theological vein, that this pushes us to acknowledge subjective inspiration. But we want that inspiration to be consistent
with the historical embeddedness of the human authors. Attributing to
them a degree of knowledge that makes them more or less incapable of
living as men of their times goes too far—it does not make the biblical
authors non-human, strictly speaking, but it isolates them too far from
their historical settings and communities.9 As an additional point, if their
historical situation does not shape their knowledge at all, then there are
too few controls on interpreting what they wrote.
I do not think any a priori formula is available.We need to hold that
the human authors of Scripture had extra insight but that they were still
8 Scriptural inspiration and Christ’s knowledge are treated in parallel by Sandra

Schneiders, The Revelatory Text: Interpreting the New Testament as Sacred Scripture (San
Francisco: Harper, 1991), 54. She appears to be making the type of mistake I am
warning against here, but her remarks are somewhat casual, so it is hard to be sure.
9 Does accepting this claim require us also to accept, in accordance with a parallelism noted above, that Christ cannot have had the beatific vision in his earthly
sojourn? It does not, because Christ’s salvific role is so different from that of a
scriptural author that the issue cannot be settled in that way. For a look at how
medieval authors understood the connection between Christ’s “job description”
and what we ought to think about his knowledge, see Marilyn McCord Adams,
What Kind of Human Nature? (Milwaukee,WI: Marquette University Press, 1999).

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Michael Gorman

somewhat in the dark.We need to say that the inspired human meaning
falls short of the presumed divine meaning;10 we also need to say that the
two meanings are close enough that there are no contradictions or problematic gaps. But each case has to be decided on an individual basis.The
idea of subjective inspiration will license a certain boldness in attributing
insights and intentions to the human authors; the idea that those authors
were men of their times, as best we can understand those times through
the historical sciences, will temper that boldness. To return to an example given above, we might hold that Old Testament passages that talk
about God’s salvation from death are, in the first instance, just about
protection from ordinary death, but we might also note that the texts can
bear a larger meaning.The idea of subjective inspiration will allow us to
suppose that the human authors might have had some version of that
larger meaning in mind, but our historical sense will keep us from
attributing to them a full and explicit grasp of the Church’s teaching on
salvation. To put the point in a somewhat Newmanesque fashion, then,
we will hold that in the minds of the Old Testament authors there are
seedlings that will grow into large trees in the minds of later readers.
There are, obviously, a large number of issues that I have not addressed.
One of them is whether we should restrict inspiration to only some
aspects of the Bible—for example, whether we should feel free to say that
the human authors’ ideas on astronomy or the details of military history
are not inspired and can therefore safely be judged to be contrary to
whatever God might intend to communicate on those topics. I raise this
question only to set it aside.
Another important issue that can only be mentioned here concerns
the unity of Scripture. If we focus on authorial intention and subjective
10 I say presumed divine meaning to acknowledge the fact that, throughout, I have

been proceeding as if we already knew the divine intention identified with the
textual meaning. It is a presupposition of my discussion that we can, at least to
some extent, know that intention apart from our knowledge of the humanly
intended meaning—at the very least, we can thus know what the divine intention could not be—because otherwise there could not be any question of an
apparent gap between them. But limitations of space prevent me from explaining how we know the divine meaning in a way that is both tied up with, yet not
utterly dependent on, our knowledge of the human meaning. I will say only that
I find helpful the approach found in Wolterstorff, Divine Discourse, ch. 12, and that
found in Jorge J. E. Gracia, How Can We Know What God Means? (New York:
Palgrave, 2001), ch. 6. Notwithstanding the differences between them (one
thinks in terms of authorial intention while the other does not), they share the
view that one must have recourse to extratextual ideas on theological issues,
especially the nature of God, to guide one’s interpretation.

Inspired Authors and Their Speech Acts

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inspiration, then since the Bible as a whole does not have a unitary human
author in any straightforward sense, it looks as if the Bible as a whole will
not have a humanly intended meaning.The several books of Scripture, it
seems, are inspired and authoritative taken one by one, and they have
meaning individually, but that is all; and indeed even that is too optimistic
insofar as some biblical books appear not to have just one author in any
straightforward sense.Two basic solutions suggest themselves. One is that
there is not an overall human meaning, but that there is an overall divine
meaning. The other is that, in addition to the overall divine meaning,
there is also an overall human meaning because there is an over-arching
human author or authorial committee after all, namely, the Church that
selected the scriptural books for canonization.
To conclude my first topic:What I have proposed is that the view that
the human authors are true authors leads to the view that they were
inspired, that is, given insights or awareness beyond the grasp of ordinary
human cognition. If they were not, then either (a) their communicative
intentions were accidental to God’s intention in authoring Scripture, or (b)
it is essential to God’s communicative intentions that there be huge gaps and
contradictions between the Bible’s human meaning and its divine meaning.
The idea of subjective inspiration seems better than either of these.
Now let us turn to speech acts. Although philosophers before the
twentieth century were aware that language had many uses, overall they
tended to think of language almost exclusively as assertive, as something
we use to say how things are: that the cat is on the mat, for example.
Speech-act theory, which came to full flower among analytic philosophers in the middle of the twentieth century, is concerned with bringing
out the wide variety of ways in which language can be put to use.11 In
what follows I want to indicate how the distinctions that speech-act
theorists have drawn can be useful in understanding Scripture.

11 The locus classicus for analytic speech-act theory is J. L. Austin’s 1955 William

James lectures, published as How to Do Things With Words, ed. Marina Sbisa and J.
O. Urmson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975).A leading developer of
the theory is John R. Searle, and it is his terminology, as well as his taxonomy of
illocutionary acts, that I will be deploying; see his Speech Acts (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1969); and also his Mind, Language, and Society (New
York: Basic Books, 1998), where he presents his views in light of his overall
philosophy. For discussion of some precursors, see Barry Smith, “Towards a
History of Speech-Act Theory,” in Speech Acts, Meanings, and Intention: Critical
Approaches to the Philosophy of John R. Searle, ed. A. Burkhardt, (Berlin/New York:
de Gruyter, 1990), 29–61.

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First, let us distinguish locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary
acts. The locutionary act is the uttering or writing of words. Illocutionary acts, such as asserting, promising, and so on, are performed by way of
performing locutionary acts. Illocutionary acts are our main focus, so I
will say no more about them until the next paragraph, but it is worth
noting that one can perform locutionary acts without performing illocutionary ones (for example, when one is practicing one’s pronunciation)
and also that one can perform illocutionary acts without performing
locutionary ones (for example, when one “says” something through an
ambassador).12 Perlocutionary acts, finally, are attempts to bring about
effects in the world by performing locutionary and illocutionary acts:
getting someone to shut the door, for example. Hence, I can perform the
locutionary act of saying “Shut the door,” thereby performing the illocutionary act of ordering you to shut the door, thereby performing the
perlocutionary act of getting you to shut the door.
Now let us focus on illocutionary acts.These have force and content. I
can, for instance, order you to go to the store or order you to sit in a chair.
These have the same force, ordering, but different contents. Likewise, I can
order you to go to the store or assert that you are going to the store.These
have the same content, your going to the store, but different forces.
Finally, and this is the main point for us here, there are different types
of illocutionary acts. These types are, in a sense, broad types of illocutionary force: assertives, by which the speaker asserts or claims that things
are, have been, or will be a certain way (“Paul is a tent-maker”); directives,
by which the speaker tries to get someone to do something (“Please
make me one large tent”); commissives, by which the speaker commits
himself to doing something (“I will have the tent ready by Thursday”);
expressives, by which the speaker makes known his feelings or attitudes (“I
just love this tent!”); and declaratives, by which the speaker makes something happen (“I hereby declare you a full member of the Tent-Makers
Guild of Lower Asia Minor”).13
Now let us note first of all that theologians and philosophers, and
others too, of course, are subject to the occupational hazard of paying so
12 According to Wolterstorff, God can “speak” without producing words because he

can appropriate someone else’s locutionary act in order to perform his own illocutionary act; see Nicholas Wolterstorff, Divine Discourse, esp. chs. 3 and 7; see
also his “The Promise of Speech-Act Theory,” in After Pentecost: Language and
Biblical Interpretation, ed. Craig Bartholomew, Colin Greene, and Karl Möller
(Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2001), 83.
13 I note in passing that it is possible to perform a speech act indirectly, by performing another one: Asserting that the floor needs sweeping might be a way of ordering

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much attention to assertion that they fail to notice that this is only one
kind of illocutionary act. After all, assertions are—or should be!—what
make up the bulk of their work. Hand-in-hand with the overemphasis on
assertives is a temptation to look in Scripture for its assertives and to turn
whatever is not an assertive into one. “The Word became flesh” is a nice
assertion, very helpful to a theologian, as it can become part of a scriptural argument for the divinity of Christ. “Incline thy ear, O LORD, and
answer me, for I am poor and needy” is not an assertive but a directive, a
human attempt to get God to listen and lend a hand. It cannot become
the premise of an argument, because it does not assert anything at all. But
you can turn it into an assertive, or rather draw an assertive from it:The
LORD is someone who can help the poor and needy.
I want to make it perfectly clear that I have no problem with theologians making assertions. Nor do I have a problem with finding assertions
in the Bible (with due regard to context, of course). Nor in fact do I
object to drawing assertives from non-assertives, as in the example just
given. My point, rather, is that if we take the inspiration of the Bible seriously and if many of the passages in the Bible are not assertives, but instead
speech acts of other sorts, then surely there has to be more for us to do
with the non-assertives in the Bible than derive assertives from them.
These non-assertives presumably have inspired status as non-assertives—as
directives, commissives, or whatever.
Inspired assertives are, for the interpreter, relatively straightforward.
They tell us things we might otherwise never know. The proper way of
responding to them is by accepting as true what they assert. But what
about inspired non-assertives? On this I can offer only a few speculative
remarks. It will become clear that Christians have always attended to the
non-assertive aspect of Scripture, but also that there is work to be done in
spelling out a systematic approach to the non-assertive aspects of the
Bible. It will also become clear that interpreting the Bible and using it in
religious life go together. I will go through the four kinds of non-assertive
speech acts in order, each time considering the case in which God
addresses the speech act to us and the case in which humans address the
one’s children to do their chores. Discussing this matter would add a layer of
complexity without sufficient compensating advantages.Another point that cannot
be developed here has to do with the fact that a large and complex text can be
thought of as one large speech act that contains many embedded speech acts. It is
not easy to work out the various levels in a way that respects both the text’s
complexity and its unity. I am grateful to Francis Martin for bringing this point to
my attention.

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speech act to God.14 I will say that when the non-assertives come from
God to us, our task is to find and enact the correct response, where that
response is something other than accepting asserted truth.15 When, by
contrast, the non-assertives found in Scripture go from humans to God,
our task is to adopt them for our own, that is, we should ourselves undertake to address such illocutionary acts to God, knowing (on the basis of
the fact that Scripture is inspired) that this cannot fail to be a good idea.
The Bible contains many directives that come from God to us, although of
course it is not always clear what they mean or whether they are still in
force (here one thinks of Old Testament ritual laws). The response to a
directive is not assent but obedience.The Bible also contains directives that
go from us to God:“Preserve my life, O God!”The way to deal with these,
I suggest, is to adopt them for our own use.We model our own activity
of addressing directives to God on what is in the Bible—and in fact we
can adopt the very locutionary acts found there, at least in translation. If
it is really the case that these illocutionary acts, performed through these
locutionary acts, were inspired by God in their utterance/inscription and
canonization, then our use of them allows us, by participation you might
say, to have an extraordinary and inspired way of asking God for help or
otherwise addressing directives to God. Even better than talking to God,
we can talk to God in a way that has been inspired by God! This explains,
for example, the importance of the Psalms in the Church’s prayer.
Commissives from God to us are also to be found in the Bible, in the form
of promises of salvation and the like.The way to respond to a promise is
not just to assent to the fact that a promise has been made but to act on
the promise in hope. Commissives from us to God can be adopted by us
more or less as discussed in the previous paragraph on directives. In other
words, we ought to commit ourselves to God in ways we see depicted in
Scripture, and we can, to boot, do this in language chosen by God as especially apt.
Expressives from God to us are found in Scripture—the prophetic books
are a gold mine. We respond by rejoicing in them, taking fright at them,
14 What about when humans aim them at each other (“Use a little wine for the sake

of your stomach.”)? Often enough, I believe, the right stance is to treat the speaker
as somehow speaking to us on God’s behalf, but I do not have time to work that
out here.
15 At least ordinarily, our thus responding constitutes the accomplishing of the
perlocutionary intention tied up with the divine speech act. On perlocutionary
acts and the role of the Holy Spirit in their accomplishment, see Kevin J.
Vanhoozer, “From Speech Acts to Scripture Acts,” in Bartholomew, Greene, and
Möller, After Pentecost, 1–49, 43–44.

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and so on, as appropriate.They inspire emotions in us, and reading/hearing them correctly involves allowing this to happen in a way that cultivates
appropriate attitudes toward God. Expressives from us to God can be adopted
for our own use on the model mentioned previously: Scripture shows us
appropriate emotions and gives us a model of how to express them.
Declaratives from God to us are best exemplified in the making of
covenants, for example, when God declares Israel to be his people. We
respond to these by hope, but also by shouldering the responsibilities they
entail, making the fact of our election a ground for action. Another way
to respond would be with a declarative from us to God.These are subordinated to the previous sort of declarative, because God always takes the
initiative, but once he has done so, we can make ourselves parties to the
bargain by responding with our own declaratives.
Again, I am not suggesting that no one has ever treated scriptural
language in this way before. What I am doing instead is trying to show
how things look if we spell it all out in a systematic way. One point especially worth mentioning is that distinguishing kinds of illocutionary force
can make apparent conflicts between the human and the divine meanings
go away without any need to discuss the issue of inspiration. I avoided
mentioning it earlier precisely because it allows us to avoid the issue of
inspiration, but here it is altogether to the point. Interpreting Scripture
properly requires knowing which illocutionary acts are being performed
when. Consider again the last verse of Psalm 137. It looks like a blessing,
which is a kind of declarative, but perhaps it is really an expressive, a cry
of anger in the outward form of a blessing. (A non-biblical example:“I’m
going to kill you!” is not necessarily a threat.) If so, then that verse is nothing more worrisome than an over-the-top way of expressing anger, something akin to the use of foul language. Critical scholarship is indispensable
here; speech acts are highly conventional, and knowing the conventions at
work in an ancient text clearly requires historical knowledge.16
Philosophy cannot replace theology, but it can serve it. I hope that
these remarks have indicated ways in which themes drawn from recent
analytic philosophy can deepen and clarify issues of importance for the
N&V
understanding of Scripture.17
16 Careful distinctions must be observed even within the category of assertion; see

Wolterstorff, Divine Discourse, ch. 14, for interesting remarks on the illocutionary
stance of biblical narrative.
17 I would like to thank William Kinsley, Jody Vaccaro Lewis, and David Williams for
their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. I would also like to thank
the other participants of the session in which this paper was presented. Finally, I
would like to thank Teresa and Sophie Gorman for help with the proofs.

Nova et Vetera, English Edition,Vol. 4, No. 4 (2006): 761–786

761

Literary Mediation of Knowledge
and Biblical Studies
O LIVIER -T HOMAS V ENARD, OP
École Biblique
Jerusalem, Israel

PARADOXICALLY, the most critical biblical scholars who deal with
history, as well as rather conservative theologians who defend the theory
of “subjective inspiration,” share the same prejudice about the “extrinsic”
relationship of signification among language, thought, and reality. They
assume plainly that language represents thought, just as thought represents reality. As “Aristotelian” as it may seem, such an understanding of
the relations between language, thought, and reality in terms of representation falls away from the balance produced by Aristotle’s vigorous
taking into account of the doxa, on the one hand, and of the senses, on
the other, in the very “fabric” of knowledge.
However, this assumption allows critical historians to distinguish
between historical facts and the (hagiographic, nationalistic, poetic, mythic,
epic, etc.) way in which they are told and written, while it lets theologians imagine they can construe divine inspiration in terms of superior
knowledge (“meaning” or “information”) directly infused into the human
mind as if it were utterly deprived of language (and of cultural features
inherent in it).
Now, this account of human knowing is not only simplistic—which
has been very well established by philosophers and theologians, since H.G. Gadamer denounced the “oblivion of language” in western thought;1
1 Cf. J. Grondin, “L’universalité de l’herméneutique et de ma rhétorique: Ses

sources dans le passage de Platon à Augustin dans Vérité et méthode,” Revue internationale de philosophie 54 (2000): 469–85; and, obviously, H.-G. Gadamer, Vérité
et méthode, rev. ed. (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1965, 1990), French
trans. Pierre Fruchon, Jean Grondin, and P. Merlo (Paris: Seuil, 1996).

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it is also unrealistic (and finally wrong):The “incarnation” of thought in
words necessarily accompanies the beginning of all human knowledge in
the senses. In the following pages, I would like to suggest that, surprising
as it may seem—dealing with such a “postmodern” theme—the “linguistic turn” of contemporary thought could allow a deep renewal of biblical studies—theology as well as exegesis.
1. The “Oblivion of Language” in Biblical Studies
A strong criticism of historicism was already proposed a long time ago; it
would be useless to repeat here what others have better said before.2 One
could just add that the (Kantian?) dualism between historical fact and its
biblical account may be analyzed as an expansion of a deeper dichotomy
between things and words3 spread in all fields of knowledge since the beginnings of nominalism. One cannot be more unfaithful to the biblical way of
thinking, which usually supposes a continuum between word, actions, and
μ in the New Testament).
things (from da bμ arμ in the Hebrew Bible, to rhema
I would like to focus here on linguistic and literary lacunae in the
meditation of the theologians who try to revive the theme of subjective
inspiration. Over and against those defending the idea of an “objective
inspiration,” namely an inspiration of the text as text whatever its historical producers might have had in mind as they wrote or transmitted it,
the main point of these theologians is that to be a true human author
(and not only the producer of a text), one should act in order to communicate a meaning, and that there should not be too large a gap between
the human meaning intended by the human author and the inspired,
divine one. Would I dare note that even official documents such as the
Pontifical Biblical Commission’s “Interpretation of the Bible in the
Church” (1994) are imbued with far too simple (and rather rationalist)
conceptions of what “to be an author” means? One has rightly expressed
that “God speaks in Sacred Scriptures through men in human fashion,”
but so far as one’s anthropology is influenced by modern subjectivism
(and its rather “angelic” reduction of humanity to the pure alliance of
reason and will), one does not draw all the consequences of this statement
in terms of culture.That is why I would like to focus on that theme.
2 I think here of the brilliant essay by J. Ratzinger, Schriftauslegung in Widerstreit,

Quaestiones disputatae, 17, Herausgegeben von Joseph Ratzinger (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1989), 15–44; in French, “L’exégèse biblique en conflit,” trans. and
ed. Cl. Barthes, L’exégèse chrétienne aujourd’hui (Paris: Fayard, 2000), 65–109.
3 Cf. my “Esquisse d’une critique des méthodes littéraires,” in L’autorité des Ecritures,
ed. J.-M. Poffet (Paris: Le Cerf, 2002), 259–98.

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But before I begin, it is important to recall that the study of objective
inspiration is not a mere exegetical trend. It is required by the Tradition
and the Bible themselves.As Denis Farkasfalvy is so right to remind us in
his contribution, inspiration at its first appearance as a theological theme
was more a matter of reception (precisely, the result of regressive analyses
concerning the condition of exegesis) than of production. We have but
few examples of texts that would have been reputedly inspired straight
from their composition (prophetic oracles?—note that judging from the
very fate of the prophets themselves, these texts, as inspired as they
claimed to be, rarely raised great enthusiasm). On the contrary, whereas
the author of one very “Jewish” book, namely Sirach, shows several signs
of a pretension to be inspired (or to be considered as such),4 the Jewish
rabbinic tradition has excluded it from the scriptural canon; nevertheless
the rabbis loved it greatly (the Talmud quotes it several times). One of the
best hypotheses to explain this paradoxical decision is that in the first
leading milieux of the reorganized Judaism, one was shocked by any
pretence of direct inspiration, by any claim to have a personal and privileged relation to God.5
Let us go back to what authorship really is.To compose or to write a
text does not mean simply to try to communicate one’s thoughts; what
goes on when human beings write is not only a sort of translation of pure,
preceding thought into words for at least two reasons. First, thought is
formed only once it has been worded.6 Second, in the very act of speaking or writing lies an implicit assent to the general rules of human communication—including its difficulties, impossibilities, and other phenomena
related to a “murkiness” of human relationships.To speak, and even more
to write, is to accept that one’s words will be misunderstood, or understood
4 Cf. Sir 1–14 and the constant tendency of Ben Sira to involve himself in the

series of ancient heroes and fathers he praises (compare Sir 46–48 and Sir
51:1–12).
5 I owe this opinion to M. Gilbert, S.J., in a seminar on Sir 51:1–12 he led in 2005
at the Ecole Biblique, Jerusalem. I wonder if the use of Sirach by minim, especially by nozerim, and the social exchanges between Jews of diverse beliefs it
supposes, did not as well play a part in the exclusion.
6 German Romantics and later French Surrealists were fond of these kinds of
phenomena; even Thomas Aquinas confides this here and there. Cf. Sermo in I
Dominica post Epiphaniam:“Puer Jesus” (Paris:Vivès, 1889), XXII, 668–69, quoted,
translated, and commented on in my Littérature et théologie, une saison en enfer, vol.
1, Thomas d’Aquin, poète théologien (Geneva: Ad solem, 2003), ch. 8,“ ‘Transmettre
à d’autres ce qu’on a contemplé’: la dramatique littéraire de la vocation du
théologien,” esp. 286–87. All of us who are not only researchers but also teachers have experienced the inventiveness of speaking as such!

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in a way other than that which one intended.7 Thus, to speak means to
yield to all sorts of anti-communicational hindrances, and to yield to
linguistic conventions more or less related to death.That is the reason why
Northrop Frye, in a sublime sentence, said that as soon as God agrees to
speak, he somehow condemns himself to death.8
Ongoing research, like that of John Milbank—very much inspired by
G.Vico—lets us better understand that, insofar as they are expressed, one’s
ideas are always more than one’s ideas, and that it is possible to think this
without necessarily subscribing to any (post)modern materialistic theory
of the “dissolution of the subject” (whether into psychological impulses
or into sociological features).The linguistic ground for this would be the
very structure of linguistic signification: The meaning of one word is
determined by that of all other words in the language in question; to
speak is also to yield to those connotations. To think, as well, is to forge
concepts out of originally linguistic materials. Thus authorship, even in
the modern acceptation of the term, implies a sort of dispossession of the
eventual meaning of one’s text in the very effort to communicate.9
This was more true in the time of oral and semi-oral civilization,
before the invention of printing: At that time, to write seldom meant to
address one’s contemporaries as such. Rather, the very medium one used
implied a desire to transcend time and space and an (implicit) contention
to get rid of all relative conditions determining one’s words, to reach a
more universal level of assertion and truth.10 Here one sees how narrow
the definition of the literal meaning can be, as “what the author wanted
7 Cf. the famous article Paul Valéry wrote after he had followed a lecture about his

poem “Le cimetière marin” given by G. Cohen, Essai d’explication du Cimetière
Marin suivi d’une glose analogue sur La Jeune Parque précédée d’un avant-propos de Paul
Valéry au sujet du Cimetière Marin (Paris: N.R.F., 1946).
8 Cf. N. Frye, The Great Code, the Bible, and Literature (New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1981), as found in Le Grand Code, la Bible et la littérature, “Poétique,”
trans. C. Malamoud (Paris: Seuil, 1984), 168:“Parler, c’est entrer dans les conventions du langage, qui font partie de la conscience humaine de la mort; ainsi, si
nous poussons cette image assez loin, nous arrivons à la possibilité qu’aussitôt que
Dieu parle et se transforme en Parole de Dieu, il s’est condamné à mort.”
9 See John Milbank, The Word Made Strange: Theology, Language, Culture (London:
Blackwell, 1997), ch. 3, “Pleonasm, Speech and Writing,” 55–83.
10 Surely Israel’s prophets intended to make use of such properties of writing when
they decided to write down some of their oracles (cf. Ez 37:16; Hb 2:2; Is 8:1,
30:8; Jer 30; and the fate of Jeremiah’s scroll in the intriguing narrative of Jer 36
and the prophet’s decision to dictate another one). In the New Testament, Paul
exploits the resources of writing in the same way: He is fully aware of the possibility letters offer him to reach many readers beyond the original addressees (cf.
1 Thes 5:27; 2 Cor 1:1; Col 4:16).

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to communicate to his contemporaries.” Ought not one to think that
God, without reducing the human (that is, rational and free) way of
composing, used this human wish to transcend the space and time manifest in the cultural device of writing to deliver his own Word through the
human words of this precise person? This harmonizes with the Augustinian “Deus intimior intimo meo” in the economy of creation and with
the Johannine “Ego sum vitis et vos palmites”11 in that of redemption.
Moreover, authorship in ancient times was not understood in the quite
subjective way it is today. Rather than a personal, original, skillful, or gifted
individual succeeding in setting forth his own ideas, the author of a book
was first and foremost the public warrant of it as a whole, however much
work he had actually done on it. This allowed the so-called “pseudepigraphic” books to enter the biblical canon without any intention to
deceive anyone. One must also take into better account the different roles
of the composer, the redactor, the publisher, and the author of a book in
antiquity. In the precise case of biblical literature, which is very much an
ethnic one, one could say that a book has several authors (in the modern
sense of the term): Compilers and redactors added their intentions to that
of the primary composer (when they did not substitute them for it). Sometimes, their intention may well have been closer to the divine one, as far as
we know it after the story of Redemption has taken place—the Hebraic
rewritings of some Sumerian myths or hymns are certainly closer to God’s
intentions than the original pagan prayers they imitate. Sometimes the
publishing phase (its inclusion into a canonical book) may have been more
important than the compositional one, by way of thinking about the text
as inspired. At least it might be assumed that the inspired meaning of a
biblical text results from the providential guiding of the cultural succession
of human intentions and from the “sublation” of the former by the latter
rather than from their merely chronological heaping up.
What was called the “grindings” (bruissements) of the text by the French
literary theorists in the 1960s and 1970s12 —from the mere lacuna to the
most illogical passage, passing through all kinds of textual corruptions and
other accidents in the oral or written handing over of the text—do belong
to “the Word of God in its historical communication,” to speak in the
magisterial way, and one should strive to get rid of an overly romantic
vision of inspiration as a psychological or noetic phenomenon. Besides,
even those who insist on subjective inspiration are eventually bound to
admit that, gifted as they may have been with extra insights, the human
11 John 15:5.
12 Cf. R. Barthes, Le bruissement de la langue, “Points Essais no. 258” (Paris: Seuil,

1984, 1993).

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authors of the Bible “were still somewhat in the dark,”13 which may simply
be a way of evoking the irreducible “murkiness” of human communication
in its (necessarily) cultural condition recalled here above.
Among all other literary phenomena flowing from this complex
human authorship of biblical texts, special mention should be made of
the literal play on the enunciative framing of words and discourses, which
enables authors or redactors to disentangle pieces of words from any
specific intention of their original speakers. As it usually deals with literary-theological issues, John’s Gospel expressly mentions that possibility,14
and further examples may easily be found.15 Whatever the enunciative
framing of a word may originally have been, as soon as it has entered the
canon, it is in the way of being said “by the Holy Spirit,” as the redactor
of Acts usually makes explicit. Direct shift, without any transition, from
an “I-you” to an “I-he” enunciative structure is a massive phenomenon
in the Psalms as well as in many prophetic passages, so that the reader is
sometimes not able to say who is speaking to whom; rather than the
defective result of textual transmission one could interpret these facts as
a strong poetic principle working throughout the entire Bible and
preparing Jesus’ unique manner of speaking. This could perhaps offer a
useful distinction between a generic intention (to utter an inspired
message) and specific intentions (a message destined to such-and-such
people) to conciliate the theories of subjective and objective inspirations.
Beyond this peculiar point, let us conclude that only a careful consideration of what to think or to write really means will allow theologians
to hinge the divine and human authorships of the Bible upon one
another.To grant the cultural “murkiness” all its bearing in the process of
human communication could bring about a new cultural understanding
of the traditional account of oeconomia revelationis taking place “gestis
verbisque intrinsece inter se connexis.”16 The gesta in question might
refer to the literary pragmatic bearing and shaping of the verba throughout time, as well as to the events told in these texts.These cultural events,
13 M. Gorman,“Inspired Authors and their Speech-Acts:A Philosophical Commen-

tary on Papers by Denis Farkasfalvy and Gary A. Anderson,” in this volume.
14 Cf. Jn 11:51, 19:19–22 deals also with the problem of enunciation, enhancing the

point that those who require factual exactitude are Jesus’ enemies. (It is commented
on beautifully in that way by Thomas Aquinas, especially in his Lectura super Johannem, XIX, l.4.)
15 Cf. Mt 18:4–5, quoting Gn 2:24 as if it were a divine saying, though it is a narrative comment on the preceding story: The whole of the narrative, diegesis and
metadiegetic comments is considered as worded by God. I am indebted here to D.
Farkasfalvy,“Biblical Foundations for a Theology of Inspiration,” in this volume.
16 Vatican Council II, Dei Verbum, no. 2.

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taken over by God when he inspires authors and texts, are also part of the
historical communication of God’s Word. But even this divine overtaking has to be described in cultural terms. Let us now come to this point.
2. The “Fulfilment of Scriptures” as a Practice—
Not a Theme—in an Oral Civilization,
and Its Hermeneutical Consequences
Not just any word allows God to speak through human speeches. In
order to reveal himself to the extent he wishes, God coins specific
language. This is “the language of the Scriptures.” I would like to stress
here the decisive importance of the fulfillment of the Scriptures and
relate it not so much to precise theological aims one can attribute to
specific authors as to cultural conditions shared by a whole society.
For too long this has been considered one theme among others in
biblical studies. Much theological work has been achieved concerning
the importance of events happening “according to the Scriptures” in the
Credo as well as in the Gospel. Exegetical research has also dealt with the
“quotations of fulfillment,” for example in Matthew and the other
Gospels. But the present-day literary theory of “dialogism” and “intertextuality,”17 which has drawn our attention to the fact that each of our
words is made up of a lot of words already said by others, could help us
to understand better that such explicit quotations are only the tip of the
iceberg. Moreover, in modern times, to quote the Scriptures means to
open books and concordances to make an erudite composition. Such was
not the case in the culture of Jesus, for example. In those times, one was
taught to read and sometimes to write with (and within) the Bible, so
that the Bible itself became a sort of language.
How many people were actually literate in first-century Palestine is a
disputed issue; however, for those who were, this was realized through
several social institutions, especially schools (to say nothing of the religious dealings with texts in the bet ha midrash). One learned to read by
means of biblical texts, and probably one of the first to be learned was
Deuteronomy 6:4–7.
Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD: And thou shalt love
the LORD thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with
all thy might.And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be
in thine heart: And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children,
17 I would mention especially M. Bakhtin, Le principe dialogique, ed.T.Todorov (Paris:

Éditions du Seuil, 1981); O. Ducrot, Le Dire et le dit (Paris: Éditions de Minuit,
1984); P. Ricoeur, Soi-même comme un autre (Paris: Edition du Seuil, 1990).

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768

and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou
walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up.

Rather than “talk of them,” one should understand “we-dibbarta bam” as
“and you will speak in them,” or even better (be- with the agentive meaning), “so that they will be your language.”18 The Hebrew boy was given,
at one time, a fixed corpus of special texts to be learned by heart, and an
actual linguistic competence.To this competence the first psalm probably
alludes. It is superbly illustrated as well by the longest of our psalms, Psalm
119, a poem that exhausts the whole alphabet—symbolically, all possible
words—only to tell how wonderful the word of God is for those who
agree to speak and live in it.
Specific religious institutions, like those one can imagine thrived in
Qumran, elaborated on this common canvas. According to Essene rules,
for example, one was reputed to be gifted with the Holy Spirit at the
same time as one was definitively admitted into the community; this
Spirit was not construed as anything other than a special ability to interpret the Scriptures anew, to interpret times and events according to
Scripture (collections of relevant passages were probably worked out
therefore, in order to boost one’s memory and skillfulness, and these are
probably the ancestors of the later Christian “testimonia”) and, even
more, to compose fresh “inspired” texts.19
Finally, in a way that could remind us of the influence of trends diffused
by contemporary mass media on our very own manners of thinking or of
speaking (in fact, in a much stronger way, because at that time of papyri
and parchments, there was obviously less competition than in modern
times between what one was taught and foreign information), the Bible
happened to frame not only the overall expression of human thought, but
also to imbue the very perception of reality. Holy Scripture eventually
brought forth all the linguistic material necessary to signify one’s feelings,
memories, or stories. Scripture was not so much read as enacted.
This passage of perception through words (which is in fact a shaping
by them), modern as it may seem, is of pure biblical vein: From Exodus
20:18 onward, the Israelite story is that of a People who “sees voices.”20
18 Cf. E. Nodet, Histoire de Jésus? Nécessités et limites d’une enquête (Paris: Le Cerf,

2003), 35.
19 Cf. E. Nodet and J.Taylor, Essai sur les origines du christianisme, une secte éclatée (Paris:

Cerf, 1998) 20–23.
20:18: “w´kol-ha’am ro’im ‘et-haqqolot [w´et-hallappîdim],” usually
translated in a soft way: “and all the people saw the thunderings [and the lightnings].” In fact,“pas d’oralité sans voracité. On n’accède au sens qu’en mangeant
du signifiant. Il faut en passer par la guerre des signes et des sens pour connaître

20 Cf. Ex

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This constant synesthesia of hearing, seeing, and reading in the Bible
should be related to the oral tradition that has been bearing it for
centuries, for the features listed just above point toward institutions bearing an oral literature and, more generally, toward oral civilization. In a
recent contribution, J. Dunn has listed some of their main characteristics,
and stressed the major methodological consequences a new appreciation
of this fact should have in biblical studies.What is required is nothing less
than “re-altering the default setting” of biblical exegesis.21 I would like
to stress here an issue he has not addressed directly in this article, namely
that of our access to history.
In oral civilization, to keep the memory of an event or of a person does
not mean simply to let one’s memory be printed by mental traces that—
maybe, maybe not—will be recalled afterward and transformed into materials for narrative-buildings. Straight from the outset, unusual events are
being committed to memory; they trigger a cultural process of memorizing-through-telling. They are carefully worded; words are shared with
other witnesses or with different hearers among institutional audiences,
who contribute to choose, hone, and fix them (nevertheless, one should
not exaggerate the fixity of oral traditions22 that convey as well a conception of understanding events or words as the possibility to retell them
afresh). Obviously a good means to agree about the way you should
express something with other hearers or tellers (who would then share in
that oral tradition) is to use preexisting patterns that are already “telling”
for the people—as well as being told to them. For that reason,“scriptural”
narratives or poems played a great role, through quotations or allusions, as
soon as the composition of an oral text began in the “biblical civilization.”
One’s skill in referring to Scriptures was boosted by the fact that in the
reception of Scripture itself, the principle of commenting on Scripture
according to Scripture reigned. Subtle techniques were elaborated among
prerabbinical circles, the most famous and refined of which was probably
the remez (or “wink”)—that is, echoing discreetly but systematically in
que le cosmos est serein.” [no orality without voracity. One cannot arrive at the
meaning but by eating some signifier. One must proceed by way of a struggle
between signs and meanings in order to understand that the cosmos is serene] J.L. Evrard, preface, in Franz Rosenzweig, L’écriture, le verbe et autres essais, trans. J.-L.
Evrard, (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1998), 6–7.
21 J. D. G. Dunn, “Altering the Default Setting: Re-envisaging the Early Transmission of the Jesus Tradition,” New Testament Studies 49 (2003): 139–75.
22 Cf. H.Wansbrough, ed., Jesus and the Oral Gospel Tradition (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1991), 12: “We have been unable to deduce or derive any marks which
distinguish clearly between an oral and a written transmission process. Each can
show a similar degree of fixity and variability.”

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one text many former texts.The understatement inherent in this kind of
literature was obviously a source of aesthetic pleasure as well as a means
to let the reader experience for himself the deepest meaning of the text,
rather than provide him with a ready-made teaching, as if teaching meant
delivering a “fast thought.”23
The reference to Scripture was certainly of paramount importance in
Jesus’ word as far as he obviously intended to transmit a religious knowing. One fact relevant to this point should be understood: John tells us
several times about the disciples eventually believing “in the word of Jesus
and in Scripture,”24 and he enjoys contrasting the theme of “believing in
Scripture” with that of “knowing Scripture.”25 One must precisely study
the different theologies of (inspiration of) the Word in the Jewish parties
of the first century to be able to appreciate these expressions: Clearly,
there were different stances about the openness of Scripture to actual,
present realization; and not less clearly Jesus claimed to be the principal
referent of all former Scriptures, whether explicitly26 or not.27 I am not
convinced that one can assume that the Church’s faith in the Christian
Bible resumes and develops the Jewish faith in Scripture. For Christians,
belief in the Scriptures did not only become an integral part of their faith
in Christ, it is because of Christ that they had to believe in the Scriptures
(and not simply know them); even more, it is because of their belief in
the incarnation of the Word that they eventually came to determine a
canon. Origen did not hesitate to affirm that before Jesus Christ, it was
difficult to think about most passages in the Scriptures as inspired!28
23 Notice that this is nothing but an expansion of the phenomenology of the very

reading of the Hebrew text, wherein the lack of vowels requires an inventive
posture from the reader. Cf. David Banon, La lecture infinie, les voies de l’interprétation midrachique (Paris: Seuil, 1987), 188–215.
24 Jn 2:22: “When therefore he was risen from the dead, his disciples remembered
that he had said this unto them; and they believed the Scripture, and the word
which Jesus had said.”
25 Cf. Jn 3:2–3, 10–11; 5:39–40.
26 Cf Jn 5:39, 46.
27 Cf. his use of ancient narratives from the Torah, of metaphors from the Nebi’im, or
of sayings from the Ketubim in his very own linguistic productions (the parables).
28 “The divine inspiration of prophetic words and the spiritual dimension of Moses’
Law appeared in full light as Jesus came. It was not really possible to put forward
clear examples of the divine inspiration of the ancient Scriptures before the coming
of Christ; but the coming of Jesus led all those who might have supposed the Law
and the Prophets not to be divine to state definitely that they had been written
with the help of a celestial grace.” Cf. Origen, De principiis, IV, 1, 6–7, quoted
according to Sources Chrétiennes, 252: Henri Crouzel and M. Simonetti, eds.,
Origène.Traité des Principes, 4 vols. (Paris: Cerf, 1978, 1980), SC 252–53 and 268–69.

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Thus, we are led up to methodology. Let me stress two consequences
of what has just been said, one negative and the other positive. Reference
to former “Scripture” was neither decorative nor first and foremost linked
to a theological agenda: It was a foundation of the mental building itself,
so that when one dealt with historical deeds (as in the evangelical traditions), the fact itself and the scriptural references were mixed in the very
manner of narrating. So, to try to distinguish between the two afterward,
without sharing in that cultural tradition, seems quite a delicate task.To be
able to establish any kind of “parallel narrative” supposes that one is in
possession of textual sources other than the biblical text. And for sure, to
argue from the presence of scriptural reminiscences or quotations to call
the historicity of the narrated facts into question is not far from the mere
countersense.29 In fact these texts challenge our way of hearing, reading,
thinking, and studying. Shouldn’t they lead us to renew our hearing faculties, rather than to superimpose scholarly prejudices on them?
Used as it is in oral civilization, language is not reduced to the mere
instrument our modern western thought has construed: For speakers or
hearers of oral circles, language reveals rather than represents.The linguistic practice in the Bible is not the objective application of “signifier/signified” or “word/thing” to which we have been accustomed by the dualist
ontology of sign promoted since the beginnings of modern linguistics—an
application today severely criticized by philosophers and linguists. The
world of Scripture is made up neither of texts referring to other texts nor
of objective events that would have confirmed texts foretelling them: It is
a world in which events, undetectable without former texts that beforehand sharpen the attention of those who live them, come to enlighten
these very texts; a world in which its inhabitants experience the mutual
illuminations of the reality and the letter. It draws a logical circle:You must
have already understood to be able to understand. But is this circle of
preknowledge and knowledge really different from the hermeneutic circle
of the most commonplace knowledge? One has to make efforts to recover
at least a little of the ancient sense of language so that it should be no more
against, but through, the cultural mediation that we will be detecting and
finding historical effectiveness.
29 Cf. the study of the narratives of Jesus’ childhood by V. Fusco,“Il messagio e il segno.

Riflessioni esegetiche sul racconto lucano della natività (Lc 2:1–20),” in C. Casale
Marcheselli, ed., Parola e Spirito, Studi in onore du Settimio Cipriani, vol. 1 (Brescia:
Paideia, 1982), 293–333; cf. the very interesting debate between J. Murphy-O’Connor and Steve Mason, “Where Was Jesus Born?” Bible Review 16 (2000): Steve
Mason, “O Little Town of . . . Nazareth?” 31–39 and 51–53; Jerome MurphyO’Connor,“Bethlehem . . . of Course,” 40–45, with reciprocal answers 46, 54.

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This last point brings about the positive consequence announced
above. In the present situation of biblical scholarship, between the crisis
of historical reason and the invasion of literary thought, a rigorous study
of the practice of the fulfillment of Scriptures may open paths for new
“scientific” inquiries to theologians who do not agree with any reduction of Revelation to anything immanent, be it historical or literary. I
would like to bring into light just one of them. The mnemotechnical
devices required by oral literacy imply a systematic “doubling” of what is
told by a reflection about the very act of speaking: Sometimes tiny
thematic or enunciative indices, sometimes clear metaphors of the very
act of telling are spread by the storyteller all along his speech, in the very
knitting of his discourses or narratives, which enable him (and those who
will learn the text after him) to know exactly where he finds himself in
the mental architecture of the text he is performing.30
So, to search for meta-literary teachings in our texts, from the most
explicit statements to the most implicit narrative hints, is probably not as
anachronistic as it might have seemed at first glance. A threefold inquiry
could be made in the evangelical narratives. First, at the evangelist’s level:
What is his discourse about speaking in general and telling the story of
Jesus in particular? What is his position about the word and the Word?
Second, at Jesus’ level: How is he introduced or depicted as a speaker, a
teacher, and a storyteller by each evangelist? Which stance is attributed to
him, concerning the relationship between his own word and that of God?
Third, how can one describe the relationships between those two
“levels”? How does every evangelist envisage the relationship between
his own word and that of Jesus? What do the Gospels provide for an overall conception of language? After some attempts to answer these questions in John and in Matthew, I suggest that such a quest might well
restore the legitimacy of a unified Christology of the four Gospels.31
30 Here is a suggestion rather than an example: Writing these pages during the

liturgical time of Christmas, I am struck by the proportional importance of the
theme of the word in Luke’s narratives about Jesus’ conception, birth, and childhood; only in the account of the birth is the word heard (Lk 2:10) and reheard
(2:18), told (2:17) and retold (2:20), believed and memorized (2:19)—all this
being accompanied by the stylistic effects of repetition and symmetries.Would it
be pure fantasy to think that such an insistence is not only the result of Luke’s
personal interest in a theology of the Word (which has been studied for a long
time), but also the trace of an oral transmission of (parts of) these narratives
before Luke inquired, understood, and wrote everything in order (Lk 1:1–3)?
31 As I prepare a course about Mt 13, I am led to the conclusion that the narrative
(synoptic Gospels) or discursive ( John) enlarging upon the theme of the Word as
a seed, which is usually considered as a theologoumenon (cf. M. E. Boismard, review

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3. The Biblical Ontology of the Text and the
Primacy of Language over History
All this has amazing hermeneutical consequences. I wish now to look at
two that are closely linked to one another: the conception of history and
the concrete status bestowed on the text as text.
According to the vision of the world implied in (and brought about by)
the very practice of orality, history is dependent on word, rather than the
reverse. In the civilizations that produced the Bible and handed it over to
us, there was no such thing as a “historical reality” conceived of as something objective, independent of the interests or goals of the narrator.
Whatever the modern pretensions of scholars, isn’t this still the case? As far
as history is told, the difference between the ancient and modern ways is
a matter of degree, not of essence.As regards history, the main teaching of
the Bible is probably more a historiographic than a historical one. The
Holy Spirit does not seem to be as interested in setting up any chronological sequence of positive (past) facts as in teaching the hearer (and eventually the reader) how to receive actual (future) events. Here ought to be
mentioned recent attempts at rereading some of the texts that have been
the most disputed for the past two centuries in historical perspectives.32
Given the results of historical science about the so-called biblical
history of the last two centuries, I would propose to distinguish between
different degrees of “historicity” or, to put it better, to distinguish different ways of referring to historical events. Obviously, the oral tradition
factor does not function exactly the same way in the case of patriarchal
legends, fixed centuries after things happened, as in that of the memory
of Jesus’ ministry, written down not later than fifty years after the fact. On
one hand, we deal with popular sayings, folkloric tales, epic cycles, with
probably real facts grounding them, but definitely escaping any “scientific” grasp; on the other hand, with testimonies—and even eyewitness
accounts, as regards their oldest “layers”—clearly brought about as such.
Curiously enough, recent books with historical bases, such as Maccabees
or Sirach, were eventually pushed out of the Jewish canon of the Scriptures, as if it were necessary to keep God far away from human contingencies, or as if God’s presence in history had only to be celebrated in the
of Siegfried Schulz, Komposition und Herkunft der Johanneischen Reden [Stuttgart:
Kolhammer, 1960], RB, t. LXIX, 1962, 421–24, here 422) present a rather unified
theory of word and theology of Word in the earliest apostolic traditions.
32 Cf. J.-L. Ska, Les énigmes du passé, Histoire d’Israël et récit biblique, trans. E. Di Pede
(Assise: Cittadella Editrice, 1999), no. 14 of Le livre et le rouleau (Brussels: Lessius,
2001); or the well-known M. Quesnel and Ph. Gruson, dir., La Bible et sa culture,
2 vols. (Paris: Desclées de Brouwer, 2000).

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past or hoped for in the future—but could in no case become a matter
of actual, present experience.
Many of the Old Testament “stories” appear to represent as much a
reservoir of narrative tools, plot situations, stylistic framings, and character types aimed at allowing an ongoing prophetic and spiritual creativity
in scribal schools or oral literary circles, as an account of what really
happened “in those times.” As much as historical facts, “the wars and
actions of Israel” are historical texts. And no doubt the patristic idea that
the deeds of Israel share prophetically and metaphysically in the ontological reality of the Word coming into flesh, suffering, dying, and rising up
again remains for modern minds a theological thesis.What is difficult to
deny is that the very texts (re)telling these deeds—and sometimes forging them, one might say—share in the linguistic competence of Christ:
his manner of speaking and teaching, his quite refined relationship to the
Scriptures before him, his organizing the word about himself and, so to
speak, foreseeing the way it should be spread.
Here we come to the second point. Not the least interesting of the
consequences of oral practices is the fact that the biblical Tradition often
presents a reversal of the common, daily order that we usually establish
between reality and texts. For example, as Gary Anderson tells it in his
book, the editorial decision to close the canon of the Torah “with Israel
poised to enter the Promised Land but not yet there” has had great theological consequences.33 “It meant that every subsequent generation
would place themselves in that wilderness moment”34 and go on praying for the end of Exile and the liberation of Israel. Historically speaking, the Jews did enter the Holy Land indeed, but the literary (textual)
fact was of heavier weight, in the Jewish (religious) destiny, than the
historical (“real”) one. This is only one example of a constant fact in
Judaism: The logic of text seems stronger than that of reality. Such a
“reversal” may be found in the early Christian literature: For example, in
the famous passages about Melchizedek, the author of Hebrews is indeed
more interested to comment on the fact that no genealogy of the priest
is to be found in the text, than to imagine what kind of real parents he
(obviously) had. Even more, for the sake of his theological disputation, he
33 Gary A. Anderson, “Adam and Eve in Judaism and Christianity,” the last chapter

of The Genesis of Perfection: Adam and Eve in Jewish and Christian Imagination
(Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001). Anderson’s study in the
present volume, “Afterword: Adam, Eve, and Us,” is a slightly modified version
of this chapter.
34 Gary A. Anderson, “Afterword: Adam, Eve, and Us,” in this volume, quoted on
preliminary draft, 2–3.

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projects the ontology of the text (the lack of genealogy) onto that of reality, concluding that Melchizedek in fact had no parents!35 One could find
other appearances of this reversal between text and reality in the Byzantine invention of some holy places: When one drives from Jerusalem
down to the Dead Sea, one can still be shown the place where the
compassionate Samaritan found the wounded man in Jesus’ parable.36
The rocks on each side of the road are still reddish from blood!
Scripture was eventually conceived of as being not so much in the
world, as the world itself was understood as a component of the Scriptures. There is an old rabbinic saying claiming that God at first created
the Torah—and the world only after it. At the end of the fourth Gospel,
John hints at something similar when he explains:“[T]here are also many
other things that Jesus did, which if they were written one by one, I
suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that
would be written” ( Jn 21:25). In other words, an exhaustive account of
all the deeds of Jesus would constitute a library bigger than the cosmos.
Here, Jesus’ story clearly shares in the same privilege as the Torah! The
point is that such a sentence is not a mere hyperbole; the text deals here
with a precise, actual experience (that of the composition and transmission of the sacred text), as well as with an implicit theological confession
(that of the identity of Jesus with the divine Logos). The world is in the
Bible because the kosmos actually (efficiently) depends on the Logos.
Passages such as these bring to light the special status given to the text
in the inspired literature:With its words and sentences, it seems to knit a
specific “world” more real than the real one! Two questions arise then:
How and why is such a reversal achieved?
To answer the question how, one could remember the midrashic
accounts of creation as having begun with the Torah: It is not only the text
as such, but the very book of Torah that came before the cosmos. Now,
everything did not begin with the Torah, but with the alphabet: The
Jewish mythographic imagination tends to describe a special relationship
between God and the Hebrew language as such.37 Nevertheless, nowadays
no serious Jewish thinker would be satisfied with those old narratives.38
35 Cf. Heb 5:10–11, 7:1–17.
36 Cf. Lk 10:30.
37 Cf the cabalist idea of a special relationship between God and the Hebrew

language: Isaiah Halévi Horovitz (“Shla”), Shné Louh’ot Habrit (Amsterdam,
1651), commented on in Banon, La lecture infinie, 181–82.
38 For example, see Banon, “Structure commune des langues,” in idem, La lecture
infinie, 179–87, esp. the conclusion, 187. (Nevertheless, the next chapter of this
book is titled “Spécificité de l’hébreu.”)

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Hebrew is a particular language indeed, very much imbued with the
impressive progresses of revelation in the People who spoke and wrote it,
but it shares the peculiarities and limits of all human languages.
Here the question why may be addressed. Why is the reversal of text
and reality possible in inspired books? My opinion is that these imaginary
stories were coined and continuously retold in order to fill the gap one
feels between God’s absolute and the quite relativistic essence of human
words. Phenomenologically speaking, this gap is a fact.And this fact is the
first problem that has to be addressed in modern times, if we really intend
to go on contending that we know God’s intentions, insofar as we are
better aware of the linguistic condition of thinking: How is a semantic
and phonetic community between God and human beings possible?39
Certainly, many early Christian texts and liturgies plainly took over
the Jewish understanding of time and space induced by Torah and
projected it on the events of the life of Christ.“Just as Torah giving is not
a one-time event, so the passion is not a singular moment, limited to the
figure of Jesus of Nazareth;” furthermore, “at baptism the entire cosmic
cycle of redemption is compressed within the individual life of the catechumen.”40 Eventually some of the Christian traditions seem even to
have been constructed by taking seriously fictional/poetic developments
of scriptural narratives in the same way as the Jewish midrashim or
haggadoth.41 It is not surprising that many rabbinic legends about Torah
were applied by early Christians to Christ. Gary Anderson provides us
with a beautiful example: “Torah study, the rabbis say, is both the way to
the Tree of Life and the enjoyment of the Tree itself.”42 Jesus declares that
he is “the way, the truth, and the life” ( Jn 14:6); could not all this be read
39 Cf. L. Brunschvicg, Le progrès de la conscience dans la philosophie occidentale (Paris:

Presses universitaires de France, 1953). I elaborate on that in the whole third part
of La langue de l’ineffable, le fondement théologique de la métaphysique, vol. 2 of
Thomas d’Aquin, poète-théologien (Geneva: Ad solem, 2004).
40 Cf. G. Anderson, “Afterword: Adam, Eve, and Us,” quoted on preliminary draft,
6; what is reenacted is the very drama of origins (the devil’s envy and tricks
against human beings; cf. ibid, 7–8).
41 To say nothing about the part played by apocryphal works in the liturgical cycles,
one could evoke here the case of the Orthodox canonization of the icon of Anastasis: In this classic picture, promoted by tradition to the status of a witness to the
work of Christ, Jesus is depicted stretching a saving hand to Adam and Eve who
are quite in the bottom of Hades. “What the Gospels passed over in silence, the
iconographer filled in. But this story of Adam and Eve was never narrated as a
simple objective account of human beginnings, as though the story could take
its place alongside modern theories of the ‘Big Bang’ or evolution.” Ibid., 10.
42 Ibid., 5.

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as a narrative expansion of the realistic (and indeed holistic) ontology of
linguistic sign, Jesus (or the Torah) being considered as the signifier, the
meaning, and the referent itself?43
Now there is a question that we are bound to ask as Christian theologians: Even if Christianity takes its ontology of text from Judaism—a
thesis I believe is true, but still has to be firmly established by an exhaustive account of the approaches of speaking, writing, and text in the very
canon of the New Testament—should not its confidence in biblical texts
be better grounded than in narratives such as those developed by the
rabbinic tradition, which are obviously questioned by historical knowledge, linguistic analysis, and philosophical deconstruction? For reasons
we do not have to recall here, Judaism is satisfied with haggadic/
midrashic fictional filling in of the (logical, verisimilar, historical) gaps of
the biblical narratives,44 but Christianity believes in the historical effectiveness of God’s Incarnation. Its faith is first of all a belief in the actual
embodiment of God who became a single man in a precise country, in a
specific culture, and at a certain time.To make this even more clear, one
could remark that with the historical coming of Christ, many phrases or
locutions that were understood beforehand in a purely metaphorical way
came to be endowed with a proper meaning—in Jesus, yes, God does
have arms and legs, for example.45
Before indicating some tracks that could be followed to try to answer
such questions, let us enlarge a little bit upon the “postmodern” challenge: Rather than looking immediately for metaphysical or theological
solutions,46 one should elaborate on the problem in the very area in
which it is raised, namely the linguistic one.
43 Cf. my Theorie du langage et théologie du Verbe dans le quatrième évangile, to come.

Some insights will be available in my Pages sacrées: de l’écriture sainte à l’écriture
théologique, vol. 3 of Thomas d’Aquin, poète-théologien, forthcoming (Geneva: Ad
solem, 2006).
44 It is a striking fact that even David Banon, a Jewish thinker really interested in
the relationship between text and history, goes on speaking about Moses in a
“psychologizing” way, from inside the biblical narrative, without questioning his
yet highly questionable historicity! Cf. Banon, La lecture infinie, 30:“Tout se passe
comme si Moïse craignait qu’avec lui,” etc.
45 To the point that theologians like Thomas Aquinas could only understand a
literal Christological meaning in some Old Testament passages: cf. Quodlibet,VII,
q. 6, a. 2; Comm. in Psalmis, Ps 29, v. 4. I comment a little bit on this, after J.-P.
Torrell and G. Dahan in “Croire en savant, saint Thomas bibliste,” in Thomistes ou
de l’actualité de saint Thomas d’Aquin, ed. S.-T. Bonino (Paris: Parole et Silence,
2003), 37–47, esp. 41–42.
46 Anderson looks for a first answer in the doctrine of creation ex nihilo (“In the
liturgy, God’s creative task is never at an end”;“Afterword:Adam, Eve, and Us,” 9).

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4. The Postmodern Challenge and
the Traditional Reply to It
Some contemporary thinkers seem to reduce revelation to a sort of mental
effect produced by (written) language as such, so that most of the midrashic
stories are opened to any “deconstructivist” enterprise. As a matter of fact,
the “linguistic turn” of western philosophy has often been associated with
a materialistic vision of things. Apparently, defending the place and function of language (and more generally, of culture) in the very process of
conceptualization was only one way to enhance the material conditioning
of our thinking—making immaterial, spiritual truths relative to physical
elements, at a time when intellectuals wished to recover a humble way of
dealing with great issues, after the modern ideals of pure reason had
prepared for the worst of the twentieth century’s atrocities. Every proposition, straight from the instant it is uttered, is limited by the human, all too
human, language and cannot pretend to free itself from its particular
cultural and material setting: For reasons of that sort, the belief in religious
absolute truths seems to have become as impossible as the rationalist ideals.
Yes, one would observe, the religious tradition of Israel has undoubtedly deepened its reflection about the text to the point of seeing in it an
astounding symbol of God’s presence among his People.An episode such
as that of the burning bush and the paradoxical revelation of God’s Name
to Moses (Ex 3:14) has been brilliantly construed as a narrative way to
construct a theology of text.47 The permanent presence of meaning in
the text, as in a sealed spring flowing out each time one begins to read,
He then evokes the rabbinic angelology, according to which Israel—humankind
when it is taken over by Christianity—is preferred by God to the angels and thus
arises their envy, an envy never at an end as long as the present aevum goes on. But
these solutions are theological, whereas the problem to solve is first and foremost
a literary one—namely that of the true correspondence between words and things,
language and reality.
47 Cf. M.-A. Ouaknin, Bibliothérapie, lire c’est guérir (Paris: Edition du Seuil, 1994):
“Trois voyages au coeur du nom,” 94–98; “éclats de lire,” 223 ff. It is about this
that Gary Anderson writes beautifully: “[W]hen one treads the path of Torahstudy, one embarks not so much on a trip to the past but enters the dwelling of
an eternal and sacramental present” (“Afterword: Adam, Eve, and Us,” 4). In the
same respect, F. Martin pointed out on the first day of our meeting the beautiful
feminine form of the complement pronoun in Gn 2:15 (“wayyiqqach yhwh
‘elohim ‘et-ha-’adam wayyannichehu be-gan-’eden le-’obdah u-le-shomrah”),
when God sets man in the Garden so that he would cultivate her.This apparent
mistake—garden (gan) is typically masculine—obviously means, according to
rabbinic reading, the Torah: as if the sacred text were not so much concerned in
telling history as in presenting itself as a place to live in.

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eventually appeared not only as a symbol of God’s everlasting presenceabsence, but also—as far as it is taken over by God’s Word in revelation—
as a real place to experience it. But this present, postmodern philosophers
would say, is not so much a mysterious, sacramental one—even less a
metaphysical one—as the very present of enunciation, or of re-enunciation through the reading, inherent in the text as text.
Such an ambiguous interpretation may be given the intriguing Pauline
sentence usually translated as follows:“All Scripture is divinely inspired, and
is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in
righteousness” (2 Tim 3:16; emphasis added).As Denis Farkarsfalvy notices
in his study, the Greek word translated “divinely inspired,” theopneustos,
which is a hapax legomenon in the New Testament, indeed has an ambiguous meaning, either a passive (“inspired by God”) or an active one (“spiring God”). The first one envisages an action of God on Scripture (God
inspired his Scriptures, that is, he breathed into them his Holy Spirit),
whereas the second one refers more to the effect the Scriptures have on
their hearers (in whose souls Scripture breathes God’s Spirit). According
to the second line of interpretation, which is usually despised, the
sentence could be understood in two ways. On one hand, all Scripture as
Scripture is quite appropriate to symbolize God, because of its ability to
suspend the stream of time as well as to transcend the limits of space. On
the other hand, there is congruence between the social handing over of
writings—depending upon the transmission of language itself—and the
filial vocation of every human being displayed by Christian Revelation.48
However, these features themselves might be construed either in a believing way (do they not convey a sort of presacramentality of the very writing? One begins to wonder if the passage through writing was not part of
the historical conditions thanks to which the Word of God eventually

48 Cf. amazing passages in François Martin, Pour une théologie de la lettre, L’inspira-

tion des Écritures, “Cogitatio fidei,” no. 196 (Paris: Cerf, 1996), such as the
following, coming after very detailed psycho-socio-linguistic analyses: “[Le
Texte] est bien l’œuvre d’écrivains historiquement constitués mais, plus fondamentalement, il transmet depuis son commencement ce qui institue ce sujet
dont chaque auteur particulier témoigne: le sujet humain de l’énonciation.
Soutenir que le Texte est inspiré, c’est donc soutenir que le Texte renvoie à cette
instance originelle dont dépend la capacité humaine de parler et dont aucun
auteur, auditeur ou lecteur ne peut occuper le lieu. Les sciences humaines qui
soulèvent une telle problématique remplissent cette instance par la fonction
symbolique. La Révélation lui donne une autre consistance, elle y dévoile plus
qu’une fonction, plus aussi que le seul fondement symbolique: l’être parlant,
Père, Fils et Esprit, de qui tout humain tient d’être et de parler” (445).

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appeared in human words)49 or in the skeptical one mentioned in the
previous paragraph!
Likewise, postmodern deconstructivism may diagnose in the sociolinguistic structures and speaking practices induced by oral civilization that
were described above a mere self-conditioning, and denounce them as an
illusion (even if it were to qualify that statement afterward in a positive
way, inspired by the Hegelian “cunning of reason”). As if to give weight
to these objections, the defenders of objective inspiration, to promote
their point of view, allude very often to purely immanent processes such
as the juridical approach of the legislator’s intention, which is an a posteriori fiction rather than a realistic rendering of what the actual people in
charge of producing the laws had in mind as they produced this precise
one. (Incidentally, I wonder if the theological reaction against the present-day focus of biblical scholars on objective inspiration is not triggered,
among other motives, by a hidden fear of this relativist argument.)
After all, could not all the theological ideas about the Word be construed
as mere amplifications of the material conditions of the speakers? In fact,
what Jews and Christians believe to be “supernatural,”“divine” revelation
could well be reduced to purely immanent effects of cultural phenomena. For example, just a few years ago, Jacques Derrida noticed a sort of
“messianic” appeal inherent in the word and wondered, in a Heideggerian way, whether “revelability” (Offenbarkeit conceived of as a property of
language) was not more originary than revelation (Offenbarung) and hence
than religion.50
When one reads carefully the texts proposing these linguistic-materialist reductions of religion, one is nonetheless struck by the permanence of
theological metaphors or patterns in them. Moreover, even if it is in denials,
the Judaeo-Christian theology seems to be necessary to the development of
the theories, one tries to oppose to it.51 And if they succeed in persuading
49 In that respect, might not pseudepigraphic attributions of books to one single

symbolical hero despite their complex literary genesis through several stages of
writing that tend to blur or to forget the identities of the first speakers and put
their words in other characters’ mouths (thus,“Moses said” . . . the whole Torah!),
be understood as signs of a deep prophetical desire for the incarnation of the
Word inherent in the very writing, rather than as naive belief in psychological
inspiration?
50 Jacques Derrida, “Foi et savoir,” in La religion, ed. Jacques Derrida and Gianni
Vatimo (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1996), 26.
51 Incidentally, this should probably be interpreted as a particular case of all relativisms: You may say that “no truth is really true”—you cannot really think it,
unless with an “idea from behind your head.” Cf. B. Pascal, Pensées,V: La justice et
la Raison des Effets, fragment 336 (231): “idée de derrière la tête.”

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people that they are right, they are exactly like an ivy boasting about its size
and majesty while it holds all its beautiful qualities from the oak whose sap
it is drawing. To give only one example, let us remark that the Jewish
Kabbalah (George Steiner), the biblical messianism (Pierre Gardeil), as well
as the Valentinian gnosis (Milbank) have already been detected behind the
work of Derrida.52 The most accurate among those thinkers were eventually bound to recognize the (a)theological dimension of their undertaking.
Derrida, to continue with him, did not hesitate to write that God and the
signifying sign were born at the same time and in the same place.53 If I may
use a rough analogy, the glove is inside out; you need only reverse it to find
yourself in possession of a wonderful theological project; yes, Christian
dogmas are closely linked to a theory of language, but no, they are not identifiable with mere effects derived from language by itself. Rather, they may
endow human reason with the deepest grounds for understanding the existence and functioning of language. As Francis Martin put it in a recent
study,“by positing a Divine Person within the limits of historical existence,
Christianity necessarily claims that all history ultimately finds its meaning
in relation to him.”54 As a constitutive element of history (and perhaps its
very foundation), language should also be related to Christ.
Before briefly discussing this last point, let us remind ourselves of the
traditional response to relativist attempts like the one just evoked. It would
probably address the postmodern criticisms in a threefold way, namely a
metaphysical, theological, and aesthetic one.
Metaphysically speaking, indeed, one should recall here for our contemporaries a more correct view on the organization of causes: God, as the
first “Cause” is in no case in competition with any kind of “secondary
cause”: As some philosophers have put it, never (or seldom) do God and
the creature play on the same stage! Miracles are always possible indeed,
but to be miraculous, they must be precisely distinguished from a more
52 Cf. G. Steiner, Réelles présences, les arts du sens, trans. M. R. de Pauw (Paris: Galli-

mard, 1991), 271–72 (in English, Real Presences: Is There Anything in What We Say?
[London: Faber and Faber, 1989]); P. Gardeil, Quinze regards sur le corps livré,
(Geneva: Ad solem, 1997), 25 note 2; John Milbank, The Word Made Strange:
Theology, Language, Culture (London: Blackwell, 1997), 61. One may also find
analyses of the biblical intertext of some of Roland Barthes’s “Essais critiques,”
in my Littérature et théologie, une saison en enfer, vol. 1 of Thomas d’Aquin, poètethéologien (Geneva: Ad solem, 2003).
53 J. Derrida, quoted in Steiner, Réelles présences, 148–49.
54 I am grateful to F. Martin for having let me read his forthcoming study “The
Influence of Biblical Studies on Ecclesial Self-Awareness since Vatican II: A
Contribution of Dei Verbum,” draft, 12.

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usual divine guiding of things. Here one has to show one’s “esprit de
finesse,” as well as one’s “esprit de géométrie,”55 and envisage the analogy
of causality to think of both the divine cause of inspiration of authors and
Scriptures, and the human, cultural opportunity in which the former is (so
to speak) “cast.”
Obviously, this metaphysical view is rendered possible only by the
Christian56 revelation of the true transcendence of God; here we come
to the theological perspective. Before the Incarnation of the Word,
human minds could only think of God’s transcendence in terms of “alterity,” conceived of as the greatest degree of otherness as we know it in this
world: From this view sprang probably most of the beautiful names of
God praising him as the Most High, the Almighty, and so forth. But once
God became flesh, human minds who agreed to believe in that mystery
were given a glimpse of a much deeper sense of divine “alterity.” God is
not simply “other” than man; he is in fact other in another way: So other
indeed, that he can be the “same.”To put it in paradoxical (and also patristic) words, God is divine enough to be able to be human.That is to say that
the Incarnation of God has permitted a unique deepening of the concept
of otherness, transcending any kind of earthly, natural dialectics between
“the same” and “the other.”
The perception of such a progress is utterly dependent on one’s faith
in the mystery of Christ! Believing opens up the opportunity of being
given a sixth sense for dealing with divine actions, a sense eventually
reshaping our very ability to perceive beings.57 Here intervenes the third
dimension I mentioned above, namely the aesthetic one (the reader may
have understood that I use this word in a rather Balthasarian way):Without an experience of the mystery, you cannot reach the deepest concept
of “alterity” or transcendence. As we know, faith is both a divine grace
(principally a proposal coming from God) and a human work (one’s
answer to it). So that—let us note this in passing—there is no contradiction in saying that divine inspiration could be both a grace and a study,
the result of a human, cultural process, even that of the acquisition of
intellectual skills to study the Scriptures.

55 Cf. Pascal, Pensées, fragments 305–8.
56 Muslim authors of the falsafa, in contrast, were not able to escape fully from the

occasionalist accounts of the connection between the Creator and his creatures.
See nuances in Majid Fakhry, Islamic Occasionalism and Its Critique by Averroes and
Aquinas (London: George, Allen & Unwin, 1958).
57 Cf. P. Blond, “Theology and Perception,” Modern Theology 14 (1999): 523–35;
idem, The Eyes of Faith (London/New York: Routledge, forthcoming).

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5. The Exegetical and Theological Task
of Building a “Christography”
Jerome said that “ignoratio scripturarum est ignoratio Christi.”58 To address
the challenge of postmodern deconstruction—which is the new face of
the old positivist challenge—theologians should try to substitute a “Christography” for all kinds of former mythographies, including the clever
Jewish narrative accounts of what speaking or writing means.
To synthesize this undertaking, I would like to evoke here what Francis Martin has proposed to call “economic participation”: “[J]ust as transcendental participation is an ontological reality now seen because of the
revelation of creation, so economic participation is an ontological reality
because of the Incarnation.”59 So for Christian thought, the relative and
the absolute do meet one another in the Christological economy, as
much as time and eternity, human speaking and divine Word. To the
alliance between matter and spirit (signifier and signified), the text adds
one between duration and word (which is only transient in its oral condition). All these themes were deeply treated in the first four centuries of
Christianity; Providence decreed that the first giant among Christian
Latin theologians, St. Augustine, was the greatest rhetorician of the
Empire in his time: Indeed, he knew what it meant to speak and to write!
Though I come from a (neo-)Thomist background, I would insist on the
appropriateness to our time of an Augustinian revival such as the one
proposed by Matthew Lamb in this volume.60 Even “metaphysical”
participation rests upon an experience of B/being, in the building of
which (biblical) texts, as much as things one can perceive, play a great
part.61 The only difference is perhaps that in the case of ontological
participation, a few pre-Christian (pagan) philosophers were assumed for
a long time to have had at least a foretaste of the truth; but even this may
be a “retrospective illusion,” as recent non-Christian interpretations of
Aristotle in the light of the Sophists could show.62
58 Jerome, Commentarii in Isaiam, “Prologus,” CCL 73, 1, or PL 24, 17.
59 Martin, “The Influence of Biblical Studies,” 12.
60 Lamb,“Reflections from St.Augustine and Bernard Lonergan,” 815–50 in this issue.
61 Cf. my La langue de l’ineffable, essai sur le fondement théologique de la métaphysique,

vol. 2 of Thomas d’Aquin, poète-théologien (Geneva: Ad solem, 2004).
62 Cf. R. B. Onians,The Origins of European Thought about the Body, the Mind, the Soul,

the World,Time, and Fate: New Interpretations of Greek, Roman, and Kindred Evidence
Also of Some Basic Jewish and Christian Beliefs (Cambridge: The University Press,
1954). Cf also, more recently, B. Cassin, L’effet sophistique, “Nrf Essais” (Paris: Gallimard, 1998); Aristotle, La décision du sens: le livre Gamma de la Métaphysique d’Aristote, trans. B. Cassin and M. Narcy (Paris:Vrin, 1998); B. Cassin, Aristote et le logos:
contes de la phénoménologie ordinaire (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1997).

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Now, what do I mean by the name “Christography”? I intend—or
dream of—a theory of language as a gift of God to humankind, fully
unified by the figure of Jesus Christ.A clue leading up to this is the rather
early designation of Jesus, his words and deeds, as well as the words telling
them, as Logos63—thus concentrating on Jesus the entire devotion to the
Word characteristic of the Old Testament. We may infer from this an
extension of “sacramentality” to language. Here I define sacramentality as
the power of relative, sensible things to signify and provide absolute, spiritual ones, a power rooted in the very incarnation of the Word. At the
same time, Jesus delivered a new, supernatural message; he unveiled the
deepest (namely divine) reasons for which usual, natural language works
as it does.
An implicit theology of language is present in the (confession and
celebration of the) Incarnation of the Word, in the Passion, death, and
resurrection of the Word made flesh. In the very hearing of the Gospel,
there is a practical foundation of language:Together with Jesus Christ, the
aptitude for words to receive full meaning has risen again (for example,
the narrative strategy displayed by the “messianic secret” in Mark aims at
postponing the revelation of meaning until the effective resurrection of
Christ).This foundation is, so to speak, staged and performed in the liturgical life of the Church.64
As regards enunciation itself, the figure is quite interesting. On the
diegetic level, Jesus is narrated by the evangelists, who on the metadiegetic level claim to have been endowed by Jesus not only with a story
to tell (both teachings and deeds), but also with the ability to tell it
(thinking about his word as a seed, Jesus somehow planned its very reception).65 In John as well as in the Synoptic Gospels, the enunciative frame
of the narration is bent like a Moebius strip.66 What is told is indeed what
63 For Christ’s words, see Mk 2:2; 4:14, 33; Mt 13:19, 21–23; Lk 5:1; 9:28; Acts

10:36; for words about Christ’s words and deeds, see Mk 16:20; Acts 4:29, 31;
6:2, 4, 7; 8:4, 14, 25; 10:36, 44; 11:1, 19; 13:5–7, 49; 16:6, 32; 19:20; for both these
first two meanings, see Mk 8:32; 1 Tm 1:15; 3:1; 4:9; 2 Tm 2:2;Ti 3:8; for Jesus
himself, see Jn 1:14, 17; Lk 1:2.
64 For example, it has been brilliantly proposed, in recent years, that one may attend
the very foundation of language in the celebration of Eucharist. See C. Pickstock, “Thomas Aquinas and the Quest for the Eucharist,” Modern Theology 15
(1999): 159–80.
65 Cf. explicit statements in Mk 14:9, Jn 16:4, 17:20, 20:29; and the narrative theology of the Word implied in Mt 13 and parallels.
66 Whereas an ordinary sheet of paper has two sides, a Moebius strip is a one-sided
surface: Something moving on its surface could reach all points of the surface
without crossing over any edge.

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permits to tell at all, because actually, in the unique case of Jesus, the
person with whom the book deals comes to be identified as God’s Word!
Even at the natural level, one cannot think about the word without
using it, so that no thinking about language can be fully demonstrative
(insofar as it will necessarily make use of what it claims to explain). If
Jesus is the Word made flesh par excellence, if he is the very Word in
which any created ability to think/speak participates, then one can definitely not speak about him “from the outside.” As much as—and even
more than—any other word about the word, the word about Jesus is
always preceded by its Object—far from being the cause of its being
brought forward. The whole poetics of the New Testament is imbued
with this ability of the embodied Word to be both outside and inside any
word or thought about him.67 Therefore, in Jesus’ words, the commonplace dialectics between the same and the other is overwhelmed by a
theological experience of Presence, which transcends all usual standards
of identity.
For these theological, philosophical, and historical reasons, the relationship between Jesus and the books telling his story is not that of an
exterior referent to a purely representative word:Through several devices,
words themselves share in Jesus’ identity.These devices (all of them sharing in the meta-literary dimension of the New Testament) could provide
the coming generation of exegetes with an amazing field of research, if
only they agree in wisely combining historical-critical, rhetorical, semiotic, ethnological, and theological approaches to the text.
6. Conclusion: The “Linguistic Turn” of Thought as
an Opportunity to Restore Biblical Ways of Thinking
From a mere rational viewpoint, there is something tautological in our
proposal. But since the very first time God agreed to unveil his Name
precisely by using a tautology (“I am Who I am,” Ex 3:14), this might have
stopped being a decisive objection. Since the “linguistic turn” of philosophy, everyone should be more aware that every act of referring to a reality
starts from a tautology (and in fact includes it): An implicit act of faith is
intrinsic in every word purporting to be true.68 To be telling at all, language
cannot but refer to reality, and paradoxically, the best way to make people
67 For example, quiproquos (misunderstandings) and other ironical devices in John

spring often from the fact that Jesus knows what is in man’s heart and responds
not to the very question he is asked, but to the motives for which one is asking
such a question.
68 Cf. the deep insights on this in Steiner, Réelles présences, 116, 127; and my Littérature et théologie, ch. 12, “De la Bible à la littérature et retour,” 373–96.

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perform this act of reference within their very uttering or hearing is to bring
about a verbal “short circuit” such as a tautology.69 Every being, like the
Being, asks to be met, experienced, more than named.Thus, obviously, one
shall not attain to demonstrated certainties.There will nonetheless be nothing fideistic in the undertaking:As far as faith is presupposed, one shall find
reasons, a posteriori reasons de convenientia (appropriatenesses). Now, should
one reasonably expect something like demonstrations? If divine revelation
did take place in the human world—a proposition scholars must admit at
least as a methodological hypothesis, inasmuch as the Bible tells us nothing, if not about this!—it is quite reasonable to foresee that a purely human
logic is inadequate.The object to be thought is both necessary (as far as it
is decided by God’s will) and contingent (as far as it happened in the unpredictable weft of human things). At the intersection of the divine intelligence and the human mind, discourse about God can only try to manifest
a posteriori an intelligible light that precedes it, which is given to man at
the same time as the event to decipher. As Balthasar puts it, all along the
historical manifestations of God, there is no definite border between the
event and the vision.70
Such a character should not frighten thinkers of “postmodern” times.
First, because a similar “softening” of epistemology has already taken
place in the “exact” sciences, where one has learned to think simultaneously of the object and the observer.After all, biblical sciences find themselves in the same situation as all other sciences:The “observer” interacts
with the object he purposes to study. Second, because present-day
philosophers are fond of a narrative way of knowing, of a penser that
would never pretend to be more than a phraser ( Jean-François Lyotard).71
In other words, such an epistemological approach takes into account the
fact that any acquisition of knowledge by human beings includes a
rhetorical aspect.The contention of Christianity is that it knows the very
reason for such a necessity of rhetoric in any scientific knowledge: The
Logos is not an anonymous, abstract principle of intelligibility—He is a
N&V
loving Person.
69 On all these points, cf. my La langue de l’ineffable, ch. 6: “Irréductibilité du

langage.”
70 H. U. von Balthasar, “Révélation et beauté,” trans. a team of the “Faculté de

théologie de Lille,” Mélanges de science religieuse (Lille: Université Catholique de
Lille) 55 (1998): 23 (in German, “Offenbarung und Schönheit,” in Verbum Caro.
Skizzen zur Theologie I [Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1960], 100–34).
71 See J.-F. Lyotard, “Discussions, ou: phraser ‘après Auschwitz,’ ” in Ph. LacoueLabarthe and J.-L. Nancy, dir., Les fins de l’homme, à partir du travail de Jacques
Derrida (Paris: Galilée, 1981).

Nova et Vetera, English Edition,Vol. 4, No. 4 (2006): 787–798

787

Israel’s Participation in the Prayer of Christ:
A Response to Olivier-Thomas Venard, OP
G REGORY VALL
Ave Maria University
Naples, Florida

I N THIS RESPONSE to Olivier-Thomas Venard’s richly insightful
essay, “Literary Mediation of Knowledge and Biblical Studies,” I shall
attempt: (1) a brief summary of Fr.Venard’s central thesis; (2) a critique of
some of his arguments against a subjective view of inspiration; and (3) a
small contribution to his important project of developing a “Christography.” My goal in studying Fr.Venard’s text has been one that postmodernists
regard as unattainable but about which I am more sanguine, namely, to
discover the author’s intended meaning. All the same, I found the essay
challenging and therefore draw some reassurance from the thought that by
setting down his ideas on biblical inspiration Fr.Venard has already accepted
the fact that his words “will be misunderstood, or understood in a way
other than that which [he] intended” (763–64). I trust that he will pardon
any “murkiness” in the following pages.
Summary
According to Fr. Venard, the “linguistic turn” in twentieth-century
thought provides us with the occasion for a “deep renewal of biblical
studies” (762).With respect to the doctrine of inspiration,“only a careful
consideration of what to think or to write really means” will elucidate
the precise relationship between divine and human authorship of the
Scriptures (766). To begin with, we must overcome modernity’s representational and instrumental view of language, with its “dichotomy
between things and words” (762), and recognize that in the “oral civilization” that produced the Bible “language reveals rather than represents.” The “world” of Scripture is one in which text and reality are

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mutually illuminating (771). Fr.Venard goes as far as to say that in the case
of biblical narrative language has a certain primacy over history. The
inspired text presents a world that is “more real than the real one” (775).
By overcoming modernity’s dichotomy between signifier and signified,
the linguistic turn in contemporary thought may even contribute to the
recovery of an authentically biblical “ontology of text.”When the incarnate Logos says,“I am the way, the truth, and the life” ( Jn 14:6), we may
be permitted to extrapolate that he is therefore “the signifier, the meaning, and the referent itself ” (777).
While Fr. Venard obviously finds promise in the horizon opened by
postmodernism, he is not willing to exchange one reductionism for
another.Whereas modernity tended to reduce revelation to historical fact,
there is the real danger that postmodernity will reduce it to a “mental
effect” of written language (778).Where postmodern philosophers might
see a non-metaphysical “present” immanent in the text and accessed
through “re-enunciation” (that is, reading), we must look for a mysterious
and sacramental presence of God’s Word in Scripture and must view the
inspired text as the “real place” to experience revelation (779). What
Christians take to be divine revelation, deconstructionists will reduce to
“purely immanent” and thus illusory effects of language and culture, but
according to Venard, by such “linguistic-materialist reductions of religion”
deconstructionists saw off the limb on which they sit (780).This is the case
not merely in the general manner by which all assertions that “it is true
that there is no truth” are self-undermining, but more specifically in that
whereas deconstructionism provides no real explanation for the linguistic
and cultural phenomena to which it appeals, the Christian dogma of the
Word Incarnate presents us with “the deepest grounds for understanding
the existence and functioning of language” (781).
This last consideration is not merely an apologetic argument, however.
It presents us with a vital exegetical and theological task, namely, the
development of what Fr. Venard calls a “Christography”—that is, “a
theory of language as a gift of God to humankind, fully unified by the
figure of Jesus Christ” (784). This will involve extending the notion of
sacramentality to language. In the process of proclaiming “a new, supernatural message,” Jesus also “unveiled the deepest (namely divine) reasons
for which usual, natural language works as it does” (784).With respect to
the New Testament, “what is told is indeed what permits to tell at all,
because actually, in the unique case of Jesus, the person with whom the
book deals comes to be identified as God’s Word!” (784–85).

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789

Critique
Thus far I have attempted to summarize what I take to be Fr. Venard’s
central thesis or proposal, with which I find myself almost entirely in agreement. (I have some reservations about saying that the world of the biblical
text is “more real” than the real world, but that is too involved a matter to
be dealt with satisfactorily in a short response.) As a corollary to this thesis,
Fr.Venard argues against a “subjective” view of inspiration (inspired authors)
and in favor of an “objective” view (inspired text). On this issue I am only
partially in agreement with him, and I find several points in his presentation
vulnerable to criticism. It is to a discussion of these that I now turn.
Fr.Venard laudably wishes to root his view of inspiration inductively
in Scripture itself, but occasionally he indulges in sweeping generalizations about the biblical text, some of which admit so many exceptions as
to be more problematic than helpful. For instance, one should be wary of
generalizing about the sort of “oral literacy” reflected in the biblical text.
Not only must we allow for large scale differences in texts from different
periods or different major sections of the canon—as Fr.Venard does in
contrasting Genesis with the Gospels (773)—but there may be significant
differences in this regard even within a single book or passage. For example, within the Elisha cycle, the short pericopes of 2 Kings 4:38–41 (the
harmful pottage) and 4:42–44 (the twenty barley loaves) may indeed
reflect some of the conventions of oral performance, but note that these
stories are nestled between two highly elaborate and sophisticated narratives (the Shunemmite woman, 4:1–37, and the healing of Naaman,
5:1–27).These latter are clearly products of a high level of (written) literacy and literary artistry and betray no hint of an oral mode of composition. Any oral traditions that might lie behind them have been taken up
into a literary mode of composition (one comparable in some respects to
modern fiction) and completely transfigured.
In a similar manner, in order to emphasize the communal or social
dimension of inspiration, Fr. Venard appeals to the complex processes by
which the biblical books were composed and then canonized, but here too
some of his assumptions should be challenged. First, it is far from clear that
ancient pseudepigraphists did not intend to deceive (765). This point is
debated in recent scholarship, and one particularly careful examination of
the evidence concludes:“It seems difficult to dismiss completely the idea of
deception and forgery from the production of pseudonymous literature.”1
1 Kent D. Clarke, “The Problem of Pseudonymity in Biblical Literature and Its

Implications for Canon Formation,” in The Canon Debate, ed. Lee Martin
McDonald and James A. Sanders (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2002), 445. The

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Gregory Vall

Second, while Fr.Venard plausibly suggests that in some cases the meaning
intended by compilers and redactors may actually be closer to the divinely
intended meaning than is that of the primary author, the example he cites
is not well-suited to the argument: “[T]he Hebraic re-writings of some
Sumerian myths or hymns are certainly closer to God’s intentions than the
original pagan prayers they imitate” (765). If the authors of Genesis have
adapted motifs and plot features from Mesopotamian myth, does this justify
referring to them in this capacity as “compilers and redactors” and to pagans
as the “primary authors” of Genesis?
There is a huge difference between such a case and, for example, that
of a seventh-century Judean redactor adding his own intention to the
oracles of the eighth-century northern Israelite prophet Hosea. Here we
are dealing with more or less subtle modulations of the prophet’s words
in order to actualize them in a new but analogous historical context.We
ought not to speak simplistically of Hosea as the author of the book that
bears his name, but neither should we underestimate his central role.
There would seem to be a seamless connection between his prophetic
ministry and the book’s inspiration, however many authors may have
been involved.The creedal formulation “locutus est per prophetas” need
not restrict us to the traditional tendency to ascribe the human authorship of the forty-six Old Testament books to a small handful of famous
prophetic personalities—clearly many anonymous authors and redactors
have contributed to the biblical texts—but it should prevent us from
severing inspiration from prophecy and/or uprooting the notion of
subjective inspiration altogether. Whether that is quite the intention of
Fr.Venard or not, I am not sure. He is, in any case, anxious “to get rid of
an overly romantic vision of inspiration as a psychological or noetic
phenomenon” (765). I simply wish to ask whether we really want to
eliminate this dimension of inspiration altogether.
Third, in my opinion Fr. Venard probably overstates the human
authors’ apparent lack of conscious awareness of being divinely inspired.
The authors of Isaiah 40–66, for example, seem keenly aware that
Yahweh’s Spirit enables them and other Israelites to speak prophetically
(cf. Is 40:6, 42:1–4, 44:3, 48:16, 49:2, 50:4, 54:13, 59:21, 61:1–2). But
even apart from these and other such explicit statements (for example, Mi
3:8), it is certainly possible, even probable, that many biblical authors
consciously experienced the charism of inspiration without explicitly
referring to it in their texts.The Apostle Paul is a good example. It is someessay by William Adler, “The Pseudepigrapha in the Early Church,” in ibid.
(211–28), is also relevant here.

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times claimed (though not by Fr. Venard) that because Paul expressed
hesitation or a momentary memory lapse about which Corinthians he
himself had baptized (1 Cor 1:14–16), he could not have been aware that
he was under inspiration at the time. I do not see how this follows, unless
we assume that Paul himself had a rather simplistic view of inspiration.
But in fact, in the same letter, Paul expresses the conviction that he “has
the Spirit” (7:40) and that he imparts the gospel “in words not taught by
human wisdom but taught by the Spirit” (2:13).
What we know of Paul suggests the likelihood that he would have
prayed for (and experienced) the Spirit’s guidance when he set to
composing an important letter to one of his beloved communities. If the
prayerful reader of Paul’s letters may readily experience a certain elevation of vision above the mundane perception of reality and above the
“murkiness” of human communication, it seems unlikely that their
author did not have an even more powerful conscious experience in
composing them. Such an assumption seems to harmonize better with
Fr.Venard’s own assertion that “thought is formed only once it has been
worded” (763). One can easily imagine Paul coining a particularly apt
turn of phrase and simultaneously rising to a new level of understanding
of the gospel he has preached for so many years. Would he not have
ascribed such an achievement to the action of the Holy Spirit?
Next, I wish briefly to consider whether Fr. Venard, in his sharp
condemnation of “historicism” in biblical studies, has perhaps allowed the
pendulum to swing a bit too far in a postmodern direction.According to
him,“one cannot be more unfaithful to the biblical way of thinking” than
to distinguish between “historical fact and its biblical account” (762). But
what other choice do biblical scholars have? Is it not necessary to make
some such distinction in order to appreciate what the biblical authors are
doing and how revealed truth is incarnated in and mediated through
their words? Most will agree that we can distinguish between the historical figure of Richard III and the Shakespearean tragic villain. Can we not
in a similar fashion distinguish between certain historically established
facts about the reign of King Ahab (for example, his involvement in the
Battle of Qarqar in 853 B.C., which is never mentioned in the Bible) and
the highly selective and humorously polemical account of his reign that
we find in 1 Kings?
To sight another example, to interpret the biblical accounts of exodus
and conquest found in the Hexateuch, it is helpful to distinguish between
this artificial literary schematization of the event (every ancestor of biblical Israel descends into Egypt—“seventy souls”—and 360 years later
every ancestor departs Egypt on a single day—603,550 men of fighting

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age, plus women and children) and the far more complex historical reality that must lie behind the account. In such a case we can achieve only
a very imperfect reconstruction of this complex reality, and we may readily grant that the distinction between biblical account and historical
reconstruction is not so much between language and reality (word and
thing) as between two different sorts of language, two different incarnations of the event. When we distinguish between biblical account and
historical “fact” we are actually “translating” biblical language into modern
language.There is certainly the danger that something will be lost in the
process, but something is also gained, namely, a certain intelligibility, or at
least an important ingredient in intelligibility.
Of course, it is naive to think that we can ever dig down to the bedrock
of “objective historical fact,” but certain dimensions of the historical reality not accessible through the biblical mode of narration as such may be
made accessible to modern minds through a critical analysis of biblical and
extra-biblical texts and archaeological data. And it is largely from the
vantage point thus achieved that we can then reflect back on the biblical
account, appreciate its particular human mode of communication, and
benefit from its divinely inspired incarnation of salvific events. I agree that
this process must be purified of historicist presuppositions and that the
linguistic turn of contemporary thought will be immensely helpful in this
regard, but I do not see how the distinction between biblical account and
historical fact can be given up altogether. Like it or not, we postmoderns
are children of modernity. Postmodernity offers no direct route back to a
biblical mode of knowledge. How can we be “faithful to the biblical way
of thinking” if we are not also true to our own way of thinking?
Contribution
In this last section, I wish to offer a small contribution toward Fr.Venard’s
goal of developing a “Christography.” My suggestion is that since prayer
played a decisive role in the process by which ancient Israel composed
the Scriptures under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, and continues to
play a vital role in the Church’s interpretation of Scripture under a corollary activity of the Spirit, we may gain insight into the way in which the
words of Scripture and the reading of Scripture constitute an “economic
participation” in the Incarnate Word, through a careful consideration of
biblical prayers as witnesses to the act of prayer as a distinctive mode of
linguistic utterance and communication. The point is not, of course, to
reduce the mysterious and multi-faceted reality of prayer to its linguistic
dimension, but rather to broaden and deepen the way we look at the
linguistic phenomenon called Sacred Scripture.

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Here the linguistic turn comes immediately to our service. For, while
traditional and dogmatic formulations tend to speak of inspiration in
terms of what has been “asserted” by the human authors and therefore by
the divine author,2 we are now in a position to appreciate that “assertion”
is only one of a wide variety of linguistic modes or functions found in
Scripture. There are also exhortation, commandment, and beatitude, to
name but a few. Prayer itself is not a single linguistic mode but a combination of several (praise, expression of trust, confession of sin, plea for
deliverance, etc.). The notion of “assertion” might be stretched to cover
most of these but by itself hardly does justice to such a complex reality.
One sort of assertion is involved in a narrative, another in a prophetic
oracle, and still another in a proverb.The very attempt to apply the term
“assertion” so broadly raises many interesting questions. For example,
what exactly is being “asserted” in a legendary or fictional narrative?
For the present, let us focus on some distinctive features of prayer within
the biblical canon. According to an ancient axiom, whereas in the rest of
Scripture God speaks to man, in the Psalms man is given words by which
to address God.3 There is more to this statement than meets the eye.
Consider how it applies to a single line of the Psalter: “To you,Yahweh, I
lift up my soul [nephesh]!” (Ps 25:1). In taking up these inspired words, the
ancient Israelite worshiper (as also the modern Jew or Christian) was
drawn into an act of prayer, invited to make the conscious and free interior
decision that is at the heart of true worship. In other words, “To you,
Yahweh, I lift up my soul” is performative speech, inasmuch as an authentic re-enunciation of this line will embody a free human act of prayer.
The nephesh (“soul”) is the seat of human vitality and desire.The human
person (except perhaps in a state of deep depression) is always lifting up his
or her nephesh to something, that is, directing his or her desire and energy
toward some object perceived to be good. And the act of lifting up the
nephesh will be more or less fully voluntary, depending on whether it is
prompted by instinct, habit, or fully conscious intentionality.The psalmists
recognized the deeply habitual tendency in human beings to lift up the
nephesh to lesser goods or even to “what is worthless” (Ps 24:4), whether
that be vain idols, unjust gain, or the object of some other disordered desire.
2 Vatican Council II, Dei Verbum, no. 11.
3 In his polemic against the Karaites, Saadiah Gaon (882–942) denies this emphat-

ically, insisting that the Psalter, like the rest of Scripture, consists of commandment
and admonition and only appears to be prayer, but he is able to maintain such a
view only by means of hermeneutical contortionism. Cf. Uriel Simon, Four
Approaches to the Book of Psalms: From Saadiah Gaon to Abraham Ibn Ezra, trans.
Lenn J. Schramm (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 1–57.

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They thus perceived an aspect of the reality that would much later be
termed the wound of original sin (peccatum originale originatum).
St. Gregory of Nyssa teaches that the telos of praying the Psalter is
contained in its first word—makarios (“happy, blessed”) in the LXX—and
St. Athanasius explains that the Psalter contains all the emotions of the
soul and that praying the Psalter is a sort of therapy for our disordered
affections.4 Combining these insights, we can see that man is “un-happy”
because he is habitually turned away from God and that the words of
Psalm 25:1 draw the one who prays them into a truly therapeutic act.
Lifting up one’s nephesh to Yahweh is tremendously difficult precisely
because it goes against the grain of sin, but repeated conscious acts of
prayer gradually “re-form” the habits of the soul. Each such act makes us
a little more God-like and thus a little more makarios.
Before moving on from this example, let us note how even formal
grammatical features of morphology and syntax play a vital role here.The
Psalms and other biblical prayers (for example, the Magnificat) often
speak of God in the third person, but those passages in which he is
addressed directly (second-person discourse) draw us into an even greater
intimacy. They embody prayer in the strict sense of the word: “To you,
Yahweh, I lift up my soul!” This has a special pertinence in the case of
Psalm 25:1, for how can one fully lift up the nephesh to God without
actually addressing God? Psalm 25 would be somewhat less effective if it
began simply, “To Yahweh I lift up my soul.” Even the word order is not
without significance. “To you” (Hebrew ‘ele[y]ka) is placed at the beginning of the sentence to indicate that one is consciously choosing Yahweh
over all other possible objects to which one might lift up the nephesh.
The main point I have attempted to illustrate through a consideration
of Psalm 25:1 is that in the case of inspired prayers words are not simply
vectors of meaning. They are efficacious signs of communio. This may be
an instance of what Fr.Venard has in mind when he speaks of extending
the notion of sacramentality to include language. But what do the above
observations have to do with the specific goal of developing a “Christography”? In the remaining paragraphs of this response, I shall attempt
4 Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory of Nyssa’s Treatise on the Inscriptions of the Psalms: Intro-

duction,Translation, and Notes, trans. R. E. Heine (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995),
12, 84–85;Athanasius,The Life of Anthony and the Letter to Marcellinus, trans. Robert
C. Gregg (New York: Paulist, 1980), 108.The notion of the Psalms as therapy for
the soul’s disordered affections is also prominent in Augustine’s Enarrationes in
Psalmos. See Michael Fiedrowicz, general introduction, in Expositions of the Psalms
1–32,The Works of Saint Augustine:A Translation for the 21st Century, vol. III, no. 15,
ed. John E. Rotelle, OSA (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2000), 37–43.

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to answer this question within the framework supplied by Francis Martin’s
notion of “economic participation” (touched upon by Fr.Venard on page
783). If I am not mistaken, by coining this term Fr. Martin wishes to build
upon “the patristic idea that the deeds of Israel share prophetically and
metaphysically in the ontological reality of the Word coming into flesh,
suffering, dying, and rising,” to which Fr. Venard very briefly alludes
earlier in the essay (774). Let us, then, consider the role that scriptural
prayer plays as Israel and the Church participate in the mystery of Christ
within the economy of salvation.
The Babylonian captivity of the sixth century B.C. seems to have
played a decisive role both in Israel’s spiritual development and in the
production of the Old Testament. It is no accident, for example, that
ancient Israel has left us a “Grand Narrative” stretching from creation to
exile (Genesis through Kings) but no similar comprehensive account of
the postexilic period. After 586 B.C., Israel’s history is “on hold,” and
God’s plan for them seems to unfold less coherently, in fits and starts.
Even after the initial waves of the gôlah had returned to Jerusalem and
rebuilt the temple, Israel continued to view herself as, in a sense, still in
exile.This is evident, for example, in the final lines of the great narrativeprayer of Nehemiah 9:6–37. Here Ezra confesses the historical sins that
led to the exile but says nothing of the return. (This is all the more
surprising since the prayer is filled with references to Yahweh’s earlier
deeds of mercy.) Instead he closes by lamenting the fact that, though the
children of Israel find themselves once again in the promised land, they
are for all intents and purposes “slaves” to the Persians (vv 36–37).
This is one of several exilic or postexilic prayers in which Israel
“confesses” two things: the faithful and merciful acts of Yahweh throughout history, and Israel’s many infidelities throughout that same history.
Though the Grand Narrative is not itself a prayer, the same spiritual and
theological impulse of twofold “confession” led to its composition and
compilation. It begins with creation and ends with exile, because
precisely that stretch of history is coherent and comprehensible.That the
postexilic period was far more difficult to get a handle on is reflected by
the fragmentary and badly disordered account we find in the books of
Ezra and Nehemiah, the closest thing we get to a sequel to the Grand
Narrative.5 To a certain extent the Priestly and Deuteronomic theological
perspectives enshrined in the Grand Narrative (drawing much from the
5 Genesis to Kings is sometimes called the “Primary History,” to which 1–2

Chronicles and Ezra-Nehemiah together form a parallel “Secondary History”
that, like the Primary History, begins with creation (cf. 1 Chr 1:1) but extends
the story into the postexilic period. Cf. Joseph Blenkinsopp, The Pentateuch: An

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prophets) are even able to make some sense of the exile itself (as punishment for Israel’s sins) and to offer hints of hope for restoration. But before
even such limited clarity could be attained, the exile must first have been
profoundly disorienting. This is particularly clear in the exilic prayer of
confession found in Isaiah 63:7–64:12. Israel has been so disfigured by
the events of 586 B.C. (clearly referred to in 64:10–11) that even Abraham and Jacob would not recognize them (63:16).6
This remarkable text, which might be called the “Old Testament Paternoster,” provides a unique insight into Israel’s spiritual condition and the
grace given to her at this critical juncture in salvation history. Having
forfeited the “sacraments” of her pre-exilic life—the promised land, the
Davidic dynasty, the holy city, and the temple—and convinced of her utter
lack of righteousness before Yahweh (64:5–6), Israel is able to do no more
than cast herself upon Yahweh in a naked act of faith.And yet this is to do
very much! The author diagnoses Israel’s debilitating malady to be spiritual lethargy, confessing that “there is no one who calls upon your name,
who rouses himself to lay hold of you” (64:7). But, ironically, this is exactly
what Israel is doing in this prayer.Through the composition of this text—
a moment of inspiration!—Israel is being granted a grace of true repentance and of spiritual clarity, and her prayer attains a new purity. Faced
with the destruction of that which had seemed unshakable (“our holy and
beautiful house, where our ancestors praised you, has been burned in fire,”
64:10), Israel raises her sights to that which is truly immutable (Yahweh’s
“holy and beautiful palace” in heaven, 63:15). At this moment of utter
desolation she rises to a new level of intimacy and knowledge in her relationship with Yahweh, invoking him three times with the words,“You are
our Father!” (63:16 bis; 64:7). Moreover, this prayer does not simply record
one graced moment in Israel’s history. Finding a place in the canonical
Book of Isaiah, it remains among Israel’s treasures throughout the postexilic period and beyond, a sacrament of authentic prayer for any and every
Israelite willing to take it up and submit to its discipline.7
Introduction to the First Five Books of the Bible (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 34. In
the Leningrad Codex and some other MT manuscripts (though not in BHS),
1–2 Chronicles is placed at the head of the Writings and Ezra-Nehemiah at their
end, thus giving at least the impression of a coherent narrative framework to this
rather miscellaneous collection of mostly non-narrative books, all of which were
composed, or at least compiled, during the post-exilic period.
6 According to Eric Voegelin, Israel had thus completed a spiritually necessary
“exodus from itself.” Israel and Revelation, vol. 1 of Order and History (Baton
Rouge/London: Louisiana State University, 1956), 494–515.
7 Is 63:7–64:12 is embedded within a collection of prophetic oracles, but its isolation is not simply a result of modern form criticism.The Karaite Daniel al-Kumissi

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It is no accident that, along with its three invocations of “our Father”
μ
(‘abînû),
the Old Testament Paternoster three times refers to Yahweh’s
μ
“holy Spirit” (rûah qodesh).
The author is acutely aware that Yahweh has
“placed his holy Spirit in [Israel’s] midst” (63:11) in order to “lead them
to [a place of ] rest” (63:14) but that Israel in its rebellion has “grieved his
holy Spirit” (63:10). Is it a stretch to suggest that he was aware of the
Spirit’s presence and guidance as he composed this prayer? Be that as it
may, the author’s subjective consciousness is not the real issue here. From
the perspective of “economic participation,” and following the lead of 1
Peter 1:11, we may recognize that it was “the Spirit of Christ” that was
present to ancient Israel, including the Old Testament authors. In Isaiah
63:7–64:12 we see the pre-Incarnate Son teaching Israel to pray “Our
Father . . .” centuries before the Incarnate Son does the same thing in the
villages of Galilee. Most profoundly, we see the Spirit of the Son already
during the Old Testament period revealing to Israel its true identity as
God’s “son” (cf. Ex 4:22; Hos 11:1; Jer 31:9) by drawing Israel into the
Son’s own eternal filial relationship with the Father.
If space permitted, many other texts from both Testaments might be
brought into this investigation, but let us be content to conclude with a few
general remarks about the Book of Psalms. Although the Psalter contains
texts from various periods, it is fundamentally a postexilic compilation that
seems to have been expanded with new compositions several times during
the Persian period. Ultimately, as is well-known, it evolved into a five-book
“Torah of Prayer”—a postexilic counterpart to the Pentateuch.The Psalter
thus bears witness to the fact that during the postexilic period Israel was
drawn (by the Spirit of Christ) more and more to compose prayers and to
become a people of prayer. Prayer was the appropriate mode of existence
and a significant means of spiritual progress for the faithful remnant during
this protracted period of waiting upon Yahweh for the promised restoration.
St. Augustine teaches that in the Psalms we hear the vox Christi. The
Greek tradition of “prosopological” exegesis (an ancient methodology that,
in its attempt to identify the various voices in a complex text, anticipates
an important component of modern form criticism), enabled Augustine to
distinguish between passages in which Christ speaks for himself (ex persona
sua) and those in which he speaks for the Church (ex persona nostra, ex
persona corporis, or ex membris), and thus to read the entire Psalter as the
prayer of Christ.8 This is far more than a clever hermeneutical device
of Jerusalem (fl. c. 900) refers to it by its opening words (hasde yhwh ‘azkir),
mentioning it as a suitable prayer for Yom Kippur. Cf. Simon, Four Approaches, 8.
8 See the excellent discussion in Fiedrowicz, general introduction, in Expositions of
the Psalms, 50–60.

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whereby the Church might expropriate Israel’s prayer book. As Michael
Fiedrowicz explains, by this profound interpretive insight Augustine’s
exegesis of the Psalms complements the Gospel narratives with “a view
from within” the person and saving action of Christ, thus rendering the
Psalter and the mystery of Christ mutually illuminating.9 Through the
Incarnation Christ enters so deeply into the human condition that he is
able not only to speak to the Father on behalf of fallen humanity (ex
persona Adae) in the very human language of the Psalms, but in these same
prayers gives us words by which we may, conversely, enter into the mystery
of his person.10 In praying the Psalter we are able to “insert” ourselves into
Christ’s “perfect act of prayer” and be “conformed to Christ.”11
Augustine’s method of interpreting the Psalms had a massive influence
on later exegesis and on the liturgical use of the Psalter, but the brilliance
and profundity of the Enarrationes has perhaps never been equaled, much
less surpassed. In the popular Psalms commentary of Cassiodorus (c.
490–c. 580), for example, a decadent version of vox Christi exegesis functions as a mere device for the manufacture of Christological readings,
some of which are rather farfetched. It may be that this hermeneutic
never bore its best fruit because it was increasingly divorced from any
serious concern with Israel’s historical existence and spiritual development prior to the Incarnation. Even in the Enarrationes this is hardly a
major focus. In our own day, however, the Church, aided by centuries of
historical-critical scholarship and by the linguistic turn, is in a position to
remedy that situation and thus recover Augustine’s insight at a new level.
If we read the Psalms as linguistic sacraments of communio bestowed upon
Israel, we can appreciate in a new way how they are at the same time the
vox Christi and a means by which the Church may enter more deeply
into the mystery of the Incarnate Word.
N&V

9 Ibid., 52.
10 Ibid., 54.
11 Ibid., 57–58.

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799

The Ingathering of Being, Time, and Word
and the Inbreaking of a Transcendent Word
K ENNETH S CHMITZ
John Paul II Institute for Marriage and the Family
Washington, DC

N OW THE BOY Samuel was ministering to Yahweh in the presence
of Eli; it was rare for Yahweh to speak in those days; visions were
uncommon. One day, it happened that Eli was lying down in his room.
His eyes were beginning to grow dim; he could no longer see. The
lamp of God had not yet gone out, and Samuel was lying in the sanctuary of Yahweh where the ark of God was, when Yahweh called,
“Samuel! Samuel!” He answered, “Here I am.”Then he ran to Eli and
said,“Here I am, since you called me.” Eli said,“I did not call. Go back
and lie down.” So he went and lay down. Once again Yahweh called,
“Samuel! Samuel!” Samuel got up and went to Eli and said,“Here I am,
since you called me.” He replied, “I did not call you, my son; go back
and lie down.” Samuel had as yet no knowledge of Yahweh and the
word of Yahweh had not yet been revealed to him. Once again Yahweh
called, the third time. He got up and went to Eli and said, “Here I am,
since you called me.” Eli then understood that it was Yahweh who was
calling the boy, and he said to Samuel,“Go and lie down, and if someone calls say, ‘Speak, Lord, for thy servant hears.’ ”1

It is not so wondrous that God—being God—speaks, but that man hears.
How is it that human language can serve as a vehicle for the communication between God and man? To this question philosophy can offer only
a modest contribution, but perhaps an illuminating one. For it leads us to
a reflection upon the relation between human language and the impact of
the revealed Word upon such language. That in turn calls for a visitation
1 1 Sam 3:1–9, The Jerusalem Bible (New York: Doubleday, 1966); the last sentence

is from the Revised Standard Version (Oxford, 1965).

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to and integration of a special understanding of language that is available
to us. Therefore, most of the present reflection will be given over to
suggesting an integrated understanding of language that has been pursued
in fragmentary fashion throughout the more than two thousand years of
what is known as western culture and that only awaits integration. If I am
to be clear, however, I need to set forth several specifications in regard to
the present reflection on language, specifications that both narrow the
horizon of these reflections while at the same time adding a certain
concentrated depth to them.
No doubt, these philosophical reflections will be placed in a larger
context through subsequent interactive discussion. This is especially so
because my remarks have been shaped by a particular role that a certain
use of language has played in what has been called western culture.This
cultural “bias” is the first specification. I might well say: a specification of
“so-called” western culture, since its roots lie mostly elsewhere—in
ancient Egypt and among the Indo-European-speaking peoples of Persia,
Greece, and Rome, as well as among the Semitic-speaking peoples of the
Hebrew lands and the territories of Islam—and eventually serve as the
learned discourse of medieval and modern Europe.
The principal agency of my story, then, in personified form, is this
manifold western culture, which in its contemporary form is largely EuroAmerican and which now exerts increasing global impact. It passes under
the somewhat pretentious name of “modern” culture or “modernity”; but
then other present-day cultures are modern, too. Obviously, the choice of
this term is not simply chronological, but implies a set of values among
which novelty and a certain understanding of freedom are cherished.
Human language, taken broadly and in its bewildering variety of
cultural expressions and applied uses, is a versatile instrument of expression and communication. For it serves the aims of description and
proscription, of praise and blame, joy and sorrow, love and hate, prose and
poetry, memory and hope.And so we arrive at a second specification. For
within this so-called western culture, I will focus upon what I take to be
its understanding of the role of learned language. Now, learned language
is a special modification of language. It does not enjoy the geniality of
casual conversation, but is a more distilled mode of discourse, high in
epistemic values. So, from the manifold of linguistic uses, I have selected
for consideration the theoretical use of language, by means of which we
strive to understand our world and ourselves through explanation and
interpretation, that is, by giving an account.
With this I arrive at a final specification, which in the prominence we
give to it today is a relatively recent modification of theoretical discourse;

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it is that of dialogue. Now dialogue differs from debate in that it hopes for
eventual mutual understanding shared by both parties, rather than the
pursuit of an argumentative victory of one over the other. In this dialogue,
we are called to bring certain dispositions of respect and willingness to
listen and to learn, and to better understand each other. But, even beyond
that, we also seek something more: As we hope to grow in our mutual
understanding of one another and through that of ourselves, we hope also
to advance toward a better understanding of how we understand our relation to one another.This is no easy task, since the modes of discourse, for
example, those in use in the Catholic Christian tradition and those in
Rabbinic Judaism, take different forms. It will be my argument, however,
that—whatever the reshaping that occurs in and through our dialogue—
something like “giving an account” of that relation (in this thematic, the
relation of the two Covenants) will in some degree retain the features of
the theoretical modality of giving an account.To sum up:The horizon of
the present reflection is that of so-called western culture, its manifold
usage of language, and within language the development of theoretical
discourse and its interplay in dialogue.
The reflection proceeds in three steps: I will begin by setting forth the
context that I think is helpful in understanding the evolution of learned
language. That done, I will pass on to what I have called the “ingathering” of three aspects of language that have been explored in western
culture and that only stand in need of integration.Through such an integration they can be brought into play with one another in such a way as
to form a very rich understanding of the use of language—not in all
respects, of course, but insofar as language is put to the theoretical or
speculative aim of understanding the reality that surrounds us and our
situation in it. Finally, in a brief coda I will suggest how such an integrated philosophical understanding of language lies open to the “inbreaking” of the sacred Word.
The Context
It is important to make clear, once again, that what follows is not a
general theory of language—whatever that might be! Rather, it is an
attempt to set forth the essential character of the special use of language
that seeks to serve the theoretical or speculative aim, that seeks to provide
an intelligible account of the way things are.
In the struggle to understand itself and the world, the polyglot
complex that has become western culture has traveled down four paths.
It is significant that all but one of these four bear Greek names, and the
subordinate members of the fourth bear Greek names as well: for it was

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the ancient Greeks who first discovered these paths and set us on their
way. Indeed, we retain the marks of their birth in the recall we make of
their names.These four paths of understanding do not exhaust the vocabulary and range of language, since words serve a manifold of other functions besides that of providing an explanation—as when poets celebrate,
lovers sing, sufferers beseech, penitents pray, merchants bargain, generals
command, and councilors advise. But these four modes of expression
serve the hunger to understand reality and our place in it by providing
an explanatory account of ourselves and the way things are. Such use of
language is, first of all, a theoretical enterprise, provided that we understand the term “theory” in its original sense. We tend to use the term
theory more abstractly today to mean the application of a coherent
system of ideas to selected data. But if we are to recover the original sense
of theôria we need to understand it as the disposition whereby we place
ourselves at the deepest source of the reality that embraces us and erupts
within us. It is in this sense that these four modes of understanding serve
the theoretical aim of awakening us to and within reality.
What are they, these four modes of understanding? Let me give them
names appropriate to our current understanding of them, for they are very
much with us today.They have served us, and continue to serve us well in
our search for understanding.The mother of this family of modes is grammar—another Greek name! Now, grammar does not stand for the
eloquent use of language, since every culture, literate and preliterate, can
boast of masters of fluency. Grammar is a specific attitude toward language
that emerged in the eighth century B.C. out of the Greek appropriation
and transformation of the Phoenician alphabet. It contains within it a
simplification of the elements of language, and attaches these elements—
vocables and letters—to acoustic rather than visual correlates.2 But more
important by far is this: By freeing the elements of language from visual
imagery—as they were confined in hieroglyphics and pictographs—grammar freed the mind and its language to take up a new attitude toward itself
and the way it addresses reality.
This new attitude bears yet another Greek name “analysis,” and
precisely, conceptual analysis, that is, the distinction of elements or facets by
means of concepts (analusis: to unloose, separate, distinguish, and by extension, to set free in the domain of thought). It ought to be said, however,
2 Simplification:The Greek alphabet was reduced to twenty-four letters; acoustic:

the letters, alpha, beta, gamma, etc. matched the sounds of the spoken words but
bore no connection with pictorial imagery—or quickly lost what minimal
connection some letters may have had. This development was attended by the
formation of concepts, preparatory to conceptual analysis in the four modes.

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that concepts are not simply ideas; presumably the mark of being human is
to entertain ideas, and many cultures (such as the symbolisms of the
Chinese and the systems of Hindu and Buddhist thought) have developed
extremely sophisticated systems of meaning, to say nothing of preliterate
myths. But concepts are a particular way of forming ideas, and they are an
invention of the Greeks.Also, by analysis I do not mean the highly abstract
precision of modern logical or linguistic analysis that is characteristic of
certain present-day systems: Such systems are a special modern development of analysis. I mean, rather, the more robust and direct engagement
with reality as the Greek thinker encountered it.
It is not insignificant to our topic that the Greek term theôria is associated in its origins with unaltered religious reportage; and that the attitude and practice of theôria had its origins in the reception of religious
oracles.3 But the Greeks took the notion in a new direction. Theôria now
unfurled itself before the Greek in a fourfold discursive manner. (I must
concede that it is not clear why it should have uncoiled in this fourfold
way or why these four modes have been the only modes of understanding, that is, of giving a theoretical account of a situation, though I can be
pressed to speculate about it.) It is time, however, to name these four
modes of understanding, in no particular order, however, since we are
ignorant of that order.
In taking up these modes of understanding the mind removed itself a
half-step from its immediate, ordinary, and largely pragmatic involvement
with lived reality. This half-step back into the mind freed it to reflect in
a fresh way upon that immediate involvement and to initiate an articulate development along one or another path (met’hodos, along the way,
that is, the path toward). Because this development occurred in close
association with their lived situation, the Greek returned to reality with
a fresh and invigorating understanding of it.
This is what happened as the Greeks transformed Egyptian land-measurement (geômetria) into mathematics, that is, into learned enquiry within the
field of numbers and numerical relations.The original meaning of the verb
(manthanô) points to the activity of second-order reflective thought and
enquiry:4 the desire to learn and to know, mathêsis. Among the Greeks, of
course, one thinks of Pythagoras and his followers as representative of this
3 Cf. theôros, a designated officer to the religious festivals, appointed to witness and

faithfully report the words of the priestess, or again, in a not wholly dissimilar
atmosphere, the results of the athletic games.
4 Second-order reflective thought:The analytical half-step back out of the immediacy of lived encounter set the elements of meaning free to be understood both in
and for themselves, but also as embedded in the complex realities of experience.

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modality. But the disclosure of zero in India and, later still, a better notational system permitted the original intuition to develop still further in
remarkable ways. This mathematical path demonstrated the illuminative
power of numbers to shed meaning on the human situation. In the earlier
centuries this mode paid dividends of understanding especially in astronomy. More recently, in modern western culture, it has come to represent
the model and paradigm of exact and progressive reasoning.
A second mode of understanding bears the name “history” (‘istoria),
and is associated with Herodotus and Thucydides. If number is the focus
of the mathematical mode, time or temporality is the avenue along which
history defines its units of meaning as events and provides an explanation
in terms of such units.
A third mode is that of language itself. Beginning in grammar, it exfoliated into the organon, comprising logic, rhetoric, topics, and (in the Arabic
tradition) poetics,5 though—unlike the other modes—this mode now
bears the Latin name linguistics. The earliest document we have is that of
Prodicus in the fifth century B.C., but grammatical analysis itself undoubtedly already had a considerable past.
We come at last to philosophy. Originally, among the earliest philosophers, this mode took form as fundamental enquiry. It is important that we
retain this understanding of philosophy, since in its actual career—in
distinction from what one or another philosopher has thought philosophy
should be—philosophical enquiry has undergone a shifting—if not a
shifty—career, adopting now one form or mode, now another. Nevertheless, it has always done so in the interest of arriving at an understanding of
the fundamental nature of reality, knowledge, and action. It is remarkable
that we still honor these pioneers of reflective thought for their spirit of
comprehensive enquiry, since their answers have not passed the test of
time: for example, water, air, the boundless, fire—although it is significant
that something of Heraclitus’s logos still prevails. It is not, however, until the
term being (ôn, ontos) was taken up by Parmenides and enriched by Plato
and Aristotle that philosophy found one of its preferred modes of expression: ontology.6 No doubt the comprehensive range and the intensive and
5 The modern edition by Bekker excludes both poetics and rhetoric from the canon of

the Organon.This exclusion is followed in modern western culture and rests upon
a largely unexamined presupposition regarding the nature and role of language.
6 I say “one of its modes,” since if one follows the actual career of philosophy in
its historical embodiment, it is best to recognize that its abiding concern is fundamental enquiry. Like a chameleon or camp follower, it has adopted the coloration
of the several eras it has passed through. If we attend to the principal forms that
philosophy has assumed, without denying a continuing complexity, we can say
that for almost two millennia its preponderant, though not exclusive, modality

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intimate presence of the term “being” recommended it as providing an
open horizon and an inner depth to all that is.7
So far, then, we’ve examined the four explanatory and interpretive
modes.
In terms of the attempt to understand ourselves and the reality that
surrounds us, western culture has developed these modes in sophisticated
ways, often forming hybrids out of them. Thus, sociology employs both
statistics and history (that is, both number and time); while psychology
uses both statistical tests and developmental therapy; and some versions of
hermeneutics combine both ontology and history. Nevertheless, in entering into alliance with one another, each mode preserves its fundamental
integrity, anchored in one of the four aspects, either in number, event,
word, or being.These seem fundamental.Wisdom in our present culture
entails the discretion to know when and in what way and to what degree
one or another modality is properly and fruitfully to be used in illuminating the increasingly complex Sitz im Leben that has become the heritage
of modern western culture.
The Ingathering
I turn now to the way in which these fragmented modalities offer an
integrated understanding of language that suggests new possibilities both
within language and in the relation of language to Revelation.As we turn
to the theme of our dialogue, these modes play out their roles in western
culture in a significant way that provides the ground for the interplay
within the language of philosophy and also for the interplay between the
language of philosophy and the use Revelation makes of language.
So first, we need to clarify the interplay of being, time, and word within
human language, and especially as they can shape an integrated learned
discourse. I have called this interplay “ingathering,” insofar as that term
represents an integration of the modes within learned language, modes
that have developed often in separation from one another through the
long history of western culture. This constitutes the second and central
was ontological or metaphysical. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in
modern western culture, however, it took on a largely mathematical form, while
in the nineteenth it took up an historical interest, and in the twentieth a linguistic and hermeneutical turn. It is my conviction that it is time for philosophy to
return to its ontological origins, renewed and transformed by what it has gained
through collaboration with the other modes throughout these later adventures.
If I am right, then Dame Philosophia is meant to return to her early love.
7 In his commentary on Aristotle’s Peri Hermeneias, St. Thomas refers to esse as
intimius within each being.

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part of my reflection. Only then, in a brief indicator (looking toward a
proper theological reflection on the language of Revelation, from a
theologian I might say!) dare I offer some remarks in this context about
the interplay between human language and its appropriation, transformation, and elevation by Revelation.
Considered from the vantage point of philosophy, we can only say that
neither interplay is predetermined—neither the interplay within human
language among the modes, nor between human language and the use
Revelation makes of it.8 The twofold interplay happens in time where all
is at root contingent, but nothing is without meaning.
As we look at the struggle of Plato and Aristotle seeking to disclose
the inherent intelligibility of being (to ôn, ousia), we see their desire to
know leaping ahead of the capacities of their language. For, like all IndoEuropean languages, Greek uses a single verbal stem to give expression to
both attributive and absolute predication. By attributive predication, I
mean attributing a property or quality to something, as when I say that
the table is brown or wooden; and by absolute predication, I mean asserting unqualifiedly that the table exists.This undifferentiated double use of
the single verbal stem in Greek was by no means helpful in the effort to
recognize the absolute value of existence as such, and thereby benefit
from the range and power of being as such.9
You can watch Aristotle struggle with the question: ti esti? No doubt,
there was operative an implicit sense of the actuality of existence, already
in Parmenides’s rigorous separation of being from non-being, in Plato’s
contrast of forms, and in Aristotle’s eliciting of relative non-being (mê ôn)
from absolute non-being (ouk ôn). It seems, however, that the clear endorsement of the absolute assertion of existence awaited the firm disclosure of
creatio ex nihilo, which was given emphatic expression in early Christianity,
although already articulated in the Hebrew Scriptures. I am inclined to
speculate that the clarification, already implicit in the absolute Lordship of
God celebrated in the Hebrew Scriptures, received fuller clarity with the
experience of new life in the Risen Lord. It is a disclosure that simultaneously gives insight not only into the actuality of existence but also into
the radical non-existence at the root of contingency so that this claim of
8 I am aware that there are no unforeseen coincidences from God’s point of view!
9 See the comparative linguistic studies in the volumes on the verb “to be” in

Foundations of Language: Supplementary Series, ed. Morris Halle and Benson Mates
(Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company). Of especial interest are the volumes
by Charles H. Kahn on ancient Greek and James Barr on biblical Hebrew and
biblical Greek. See also Charles Ferguson, vol. 14, 78–79; and Peri Bhaskararao,
204–5, 226–27.

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contingency—insofar as the claim is taken as a factual assertion in history
(without reference to its deeper truth-value)—highlighted the primary
value of existence. It did this through the revealed understanding of God
as the Source of created being, Who in the Fullness of his Being is both
present in the world yet not of it.10
But in history thought took another longer and slower route to the
disclosure of the absolute actuality of existence (esse actu). For as philosophy left Athens with the closure of the schools (A.D. 527), fundamental
reflection passed over from Greek into Syriac and then into Arabic, that
is, into Semitic languages that have separate verbal stems for attributive
and absolute predication.As the medieval Latins learned from their more
sophisticated Arabic neighbors, and in particular St.Thomas Aquinas from
Avicenna (Ibn Sina), Latin found a way, often awkward11—a way for
giving mind and voice to that toward which Aristotle had struggled,
namely, to the absolute value of existence at the heart of being itself.12
This learned acquisition was passed on from medieval technical Latin
to the vernacular languages of western culture. As a result of the dynamics of the verbs and the relationality of the prepositions and adverbs operative in these languages, our present-day learned discourse in them can
10 We see a glimpse of this radical notion of creation ex nihilo in 2 Mc (7:28: ex ouk

onton), derived from the absolute Lordship of the God of Israel (cf. Is 44:24). For
further discussion, see K. L. Schmitz, The Gift: Creation (Milwaukee: Marquette
University Press, 1982), 15–31; also cf. Philo (Quod deter., 44, 160), as cited in
F. E. Peters, Greek Philosophical Terms (New York: New York University Press,
1967), 142; Philo,Works, ed. and trans. F. H. Colson et al., 10 vols. (London: Loeb
Classical Library, 1929– ).The insight received explicit attention in and through
Christian thinkers of the first and second centuries. But this was a gift of Revelation. The philosophical development of the insight took further centuries,
coming to a decisive fruition in the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas (Summa
theologiae I, q. 44, a. 2), though principally through the mediation of Avicenna, or
precisely through his language.
11 Thus, how clumsy it is in English to speak of “the to-be” (esse) of something!
Instead we substitute the word “exist,” but that has a different root sense, namely,
that of standing “outside of its causes” (as in Suarez: extra causas), or, as in
Kierkegaard’s use of the term, to indicate the process of becoming or emerging
out of a prior condition. Neither of these notions grasps the actuality in being as
such; for esse is not merely a state of factuality nor an emergent process, but the
most dynamic principle in being (actus essendi).We have acquired this insight into
the primacy of actuality (esse actu) from medieval technical Latin, but not the ease
of language with which to express it.
12 Cf. ST I, q. 44, a. 2; but also Summa contra Gentiles II, 52–54, in which the term
praeter esse refers to “everything else” in the being except its actuality; the praeter
highlights esse as the first intrinsic, constitutive principle of a being.

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now carry along both the actuality and the intelligibility (both the existential and the essential significance) of its expressive encounters with
reality and with ourselves.
But this occurs more fully and concretely only insofar as we recognize
the interplay and integration of the historical and the ontological modes
of understanding—only insofar as being itself is grasped historically, and
history is grasped ontologically; in other words, only insofar as being itself
is understood to be immersed in time—swimming, so to speak, in and
through time itself and thereby endowing time with ontological values.
It is false to conceive of being as some static, unchanging, and empty
concept. Rather, every finite thing that happens comes into being or
passes out of being as part of the history of being. In that history are
included both transient and stable, both evanescent and permanent realizations of being. History, as a distinct mode insofar as it is an account in
terms of time, is nonetheless immersed in ontology.The modern appreciation of history as an explanatory mode is associated with Vico in the
early eighteenth century and comes to prominence in the various disciplines of the nineteenth century.13 But this new appreciation of time and
history offers a contribution to a new way of understanding ontology as
well. For the temporal events accounted for by history are permeated by
and grounded in the historicity of (created) being itself.
Against the background of this new consciousness it is possible, therefore, to benefit from the inroads made by phenomenology at the dawn of
the last century—whether in Husserl, Heidegger, Pfänder, or others—and
to develop an integrated mode of discourse that permits us to revisit
language and find in it the interplay of word, time, and being (of language,
history, and ontology), so that three of the four modes are integrated into
a fruitful, threefold mode of understanding.14 What is most significant for
our theme, it seems to me, is the way in which temporality is placed in
the context of being and given ontological value. It is Husserl who has
shown us the way through his analysis of time.
If Aristotle, despite his struggles, never arrived at a philosophical appropriation of the absolute value of existence, so too, his theory of time, while
effective—even indispensable—for his causal analysis of change, was also
13 I refer to geology, biology, and the human sciences, including even the history of

religion and of mathematics, and by no means least the development of the
historical-critical method.
14 It is not entirely irrelevant that Husserl’s earlier work was in the philosophy of
arithmetic, a discipline that undoubtedly heightened the clarity and precision of
his analyses.We may acknowledge, therefore, that the mathematical mode made
its contribution, if only indirectly.

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relatively impotent in illuminating the relation of being to time. It is this
that Husserl accomplished in his account of time—I might say, without
some of the inconveniences of Heidegger’s analysis. He opened up our
understanding of time to its interior complexity, and offered us a look into
its inner character and constitution (Wesenschau, eidetic intuition of the
essential nature of time).
It is paradoxical that Husserl, not known for his interest in the history
of philosophy,15 should unleash the inner structure of time. For time is
more than the measure (arithmos) of successive nows. Rather each moment,
each now, embraces within itself the wholeness of time, though not the
whole of time—that is, not in the perfectly complete manner in which
eternity does, but rather in a manner that—dare I say it?—participates in
eternity and foreshadows it. Each passing moment, each now, is situated
within the whole essence of duration and is not merely a discrete and
isolated moment. In and through its complex transience, time participates
in the fullness of duration, even as it imperfectly adumbrates it. For each
now is not a non-complex atomic moment, analytically distinct from all
others, simply coming into being and passing away in the flow of successive measurable moments.Time is more than clock time.
That “more” constitutes the very essence of the moment. For each
now, while it does pass away, carries with it what Husserl notices as retention and protention. It is sometimes objected that this adds too much
consciousness to the mere physical passing of measured moments, but
time is not simply a physical phenomenon. Even according to the Aristotelian definition, consciousness is present as that which measures the
successive flow of events and requires both memory and expectation.
What Husserl’s analysis comprehends is the inner connection within this
flow. For retention is not quite the same as memory, nor is protention
quite the same as expectation. Retention is the immediate passage of the
living past into the present, contributing to the constitution of the present moment, whereas memory is the conscious retrieval of the past as an
absence in the present. Protention is the immediate intrusion of the
future into the constitution of the present now, whereas expectation is
the prefiguration of a future happening that is as yet absent in the present.With Husserl’s insight into the manifold interior constitution of time,
15 Except, of course, for intensive study of Hume and critical studies of selected

philosophers, mostly contemporary.There is a story that upon greeting his teacher
on arrival from Paris after giving the Paris Lectures, Heidegger reminded Husserl
that he had left out one consideration in his lectures: historicity. His last work,
The Crisis of European Sciences, however, is sensitive to the historical condition of
present-day knowledge.

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we see that both past and future are carried as factors, along with presence, to constitute the complex moment that is the transient now.
What needs to be added to integrate this understanding of time with
traditional metaphysics is to grasp this constitution in terms of its ontological character.This is accomplished through the recognition of duration as
a mode of being at the heart of eternity. Eternity is often understood as
timeless and, indeed, it is not to be confused with the evanescent character
of temporal succession; but this does not imply the mere absence of duration, for eternity is, above all, the fullness of time as the indwelling “measure” of the Fullness of Being. St.Thomas puts it well enough in speaking
of three modes of duration, each resident in its own mode of being: Time
is the transient mode of that which comes into being and passes away; aeviternity is that mode of duration proper to purely spiritual beings who
receive their being and retain it without end; and sempiternity is that Fullness of duration that simultaneously embraces and is present to and within
all being.16
Now Husserl’s threefold interior constitution of time foreshadows,
adumbrates, and participates in the fullness of time, though in an imperfect way. Each now actualizes the wholeness of time as duration, though
not the whole of time, and this wholeness is important for the reception
of the transcendent Word. Each passing moment is an image of eternity;
and in the incomplete richness of its interior constitution, each now
adumbrates and participates in the fullness of its Source and the wholeness of eternity. Each moment is so constituted as to be open to the fresh
advent of eternity. Each word lies open to the incoming of the Eternal
Word by framing an abode in which the eternal Word can dwell. It is this
that makes the integration of being, time, and word preparatory soil for
the gratuity of a quite different Word. So far, then, this is an account of
language that provides a receptive human basis for Samuel—and in
different direct and indirect ways, for us—to hear the Word.
The Inbreaking
Yet, as we turn from the immanent ingathering of being, time, and word
in human language to the interplay between such a philosophical understanding of language and the use Revelation makes of language, we must
16 See his discussion at ST I, q. 10.The designation I have given of aeviternity is an

accidental, but not incorrect, characteristic of this mode of duration; as he says
(ST I, q. 10, a. 5, c.): “aeviternity has [a possible] before and after without innovation and veteration,” in today’s English we might say: “without aging.”—Also,
that eternity is not simply to be conceived as timeless but rather as fully durational is true of God Whose eternity “includes all times.” ST I, q. 10, a. 2, ad 4.

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be cautious. For the Revealed Word is an eruption of light, judgment, and
love that obeys its own directive and follows its sometimes surprising, and
even unsettling, rhythms.When Revelation comes to dwell in language,
it outstrips anything philosophy may have dreamed of. Still, because the
inner complexity of being, time, and word, of which we have been speaking, has been created by the same Revelatory Source, human language
has been so made that language as worded-being-in-time is already gifted
to receive the transcendent Word as a grace that forever overflows it on
all sides and to immeasurable depths and heights.
In acknowledging the eruption of Revelation into and within human
language, we may well ask: How can the transient fragility of the moment
be invested with a lasting significance, with a meaning and value that
outstrips finitude and time, with a word that gives new life for all time,
and—to speak to our present theme—to Covenants that still covenant?
Faced with such questions, we need to recall our origins as well as our
destiny.We might begin by recalling that in being created, man—his mind,
spirit, and language—is already constituted as one who, having received
being through an original and originating gift, is thereby open to further
receptivity, to gifts that are not his to demand. The initial receptive
creation (disclosed in Genesis, but also in other ways in the myths of
origin) already provides an opening for a transcendent Word. God has so
created man—his being, time, and language—that he is able to receive the
Word to which he has by nature no right or even any innate possibility.
It is this Word of which Gaudium et spes, number 22, speaks, when it
affirms that it is through the Word who is the Christ that the true nature
and destiny of man is revealed. This disclosure comes about through the
open horizon and inner depth of man’s being, which is disclosed in the
incomplete wholeness of its existential duration. That wholeness is the
measured unit of the moving integrity of each human being, for each
human person is a unitary flow of events, a life being lived. This wholeness is
embodied in the gifted constitution of each momentary now that comes
to expression in human language. Being, time, and human words serve each
other in preparing for the reception of the transcendent Word. This
antecedent receptivity preserves the distinctive autonomy of grace, because
this original receptivity does not give to human language or human nature
the possession of a potentiality or capability to receive a transcendent and
utterly gratuitous Revelation. It is not as though we could receive it as a
right by virtue of our given nature. Still, that initial created receptivity does
remove the impossibility or absurdity of such a reception. For a creature is,
from its beginning, a received receptivity, that is, an original receptivity
open to further receptivity.

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However “inconvenient” and extraordinary the revealed Word may
sometimes be, Revelation does not demand an absurdity. But Revelation is
so freely given that, having said so much, I even hesitate to say that the creature holds within himself or herself the inborn or native possibility to receive
such a Word, except perhaps insofar as his created origin is joined with his
gifted destiny. It is enough perhaps to preserve the transcendence of the
Revealed Word to say that hearing the Word does not amount to an impossibility, does not commit us to an absurdity. (Tertullian wrote: “credo quia
ineptum” not “credo quia absurdum.”)17 I ndeed, to the contrary, the
revealed Word sheds an ecstatic light that makes everything that seemed
ordinary into something wondrous and more deeply intelligible than
philosophical insight has direct access to.The Word spoken to Samuel, and
indeed to the whole of Israel, vindicates this in an exemplary way.
But, if I have read Dominus Iesus and the documents of Vatican II
correctly, the Word has manifested its presence in ways other than the
Scriptures recorded in biblical religion, and it has done this without prejudice to the privi-leged18 gift of those Scriptures.That is, the Source has not
withheld its voice or hand from what the document refers to as the Kingdom of God. Indeed, the preliterate myths of the Urzeit symbolize eternity
in and through the past, and the preliterate myths of the Endzeit prefigure
eternity in and through the future. So, too, the symbolisms of the sacred in
the variety of cultures also adumbrate eternity, however mixed with other
elements they may be. Indeed, metaphysics with its emphasis on actuality
also participates in eternity in and through the actuality of the present.
Revelation, then, is an “inbreaking” originating from the fullness of
Being, an inbreaking that endows the human word with a duration that
raises language to the values of eternal truth, to that Truth that is identical with the Fullness of Being (Ipsum Esse Subsistens). Such “inbreaking”
redeems the negativity inherent in transience and endows the moment
and the human word with the promised fullness that points to the eschaton and the parousia. This energy of love is the signifying power of the
Revealed Word and of Sacrament. We are pilgrims on the road to
Emmaus, and the narrative we hear is not ordinary discourse, like sand
running through the fingers, nor even the deeper human ingathering of
being, time, and word. Rather, this extraordinary language gives forth
revelatory iconic glances of the sacred, glimpsed through the adumbrated
imperfect fullness that is held in the human words and in the temporal
moments that serve as vessels of grace.
17 Tertullian, On the Flesh of Christ, ch. 5.
18 The hyphen is meant to preserve the normative aspect of law (lex, legis) that is

inseparable from the language of Divine love.

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What can a philosopher think of this ecstatic revelatory language? So
far I have referred to the integrated complex of human discourse as an
ingathering of being, time, and word. This speaks to the integrated
discourse that is now available to us over the more than two thousand
years of adventure through which the polyglot western culture has lived.
In that adventure, if I have understood its career, the several modes are
ready to come together in the harmonious interplay of being, time, and
word, of philosophy, history, and linguistics to form the richness of an
integrated language. At the same time, that richness is open to a quite
different Word.
Speaking as a philosopher but also as a Christian, I am aware of the
language of Revelation as a fact in history.This leads me to speak also of
the “inbreaking”—not the “ingathering,” but the “inbreaking”—of the
Revealed Word—in Word, in Time, and in Being, as it is expressed in
Christian revelation. In this way, the human word that plays out its role
in the ingathering is called into service to bear a quite other Word: to bear
a burden in both the sense of a weighty lightness and the theme of an
eternal song of praise—a burthen. Such words give voice to the loving
disclosure spoken from the very Source of all that is real, true, and good.
That Word, too, is an ingathering, but of quite another sort; for it is an
ingathering of peoples on the heights of the Holy Place and in the presence of a Truth that overflows human words on all sides.The philosopher
can stand in wonder at the inexhaustible mystery that unfolds, and be
astonished at how the very meaning of meaning itself undergoes more
than a transformation. For the Revealed Word lays claim to the radical,
yet gentle, power of a love of life that overcomes the darkness of death
and of a weakness that is more powerful than any other power we know.
Language takes on new properties that disclose unexpected paradoxes,
such as the rescue of good out of evil, the simultaneous wedding of judgment and mercy, the wholeness of unitary simplicity and radical diversity,
and finally, the reconciliation of death arising to new life. The philosopher can learn from these paradoxes, while he yet remains true to his
humbler task of gathering in the moments of being, time—yes, and
N&V
number too—into an enriched and open human word.

Nova et Vetera, English Edition,Vol. 4, No. 4 (2006): 815–850

815

Temporality and History:
Reflections from St. Augustine
and Bernard Lonergan
MATTHEW L. LAMB
Ave Maria University
Naples, Florida

Introduction
CONTEMPORARY DISCUSSIONS of the relations between God’s
covenant with Israel and the new covenant in Christ Jesus tend to occur
within a context that does not question the modern and postmodern
preconceptions of temporality and history. Generally, as Josef Pieper,
Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, and Johann Baptist Metz have pointed out,
there is a widespread cultural presupposition from the Enlightenment
that time inexorably moves from an unknown past into an unknown
future.There is an ideology of history being a progressive continuum that
in effect, as Metz indicates, really negates time and history in a modern
and postmodern “Zeitlosigkeit.”1 What is this “Zeitlosigkeit”—this loss
of time as symptom and system? It is a loss of time as real presence.Time
is devalued into a mechanical process, a continuum inexorably moving
from past into future. All of human history, with countless histories of
1 Josef Pieper raised the issue of the end of time in his 1948 lectures; he also

contrasted Christian martyrdom with evolutionary hope in a purely innerworldly
goal of history, what Metz would later call an “evolutionary softened eschatology,”
see Pieper’s “Über das Ende der Zeit: Eine geschichtsphilosophische Betractung”
in his Werke, Band 6 Kulturphilosophische Schriften (Hamburg: Meiner Verlag, 1999),
286–374. Also the essays of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger and Johann Baptist Metz
in Ende der Zeit: Die Provokation der Rede von Gott, ed.Tiemo R. Peters and Claus
Urban (Mainz: Grünewald Verlag, 1999), 13–55; and Johann B. Metz, Glaube in
Geschichte und Gesellschaft (Mainz: Grünewald, 1977). The English translation of
this, as with some other works of Metz, is generally very poor.

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suffering, is stuck on this endless, evolutionary continuum like so many
dead butterflies on an endless, black board.2 Mankind is condemned to
die in the waiting room of the future.This loss of time as presence coincides with the Enlightenment substitution of material progress for divine
providence.3 It is my contention that the use of “supersessionism” in
describing the relations between the Old and New Covenants is precisely
a modern and postmodern failure to understand how all time, past—
present—future, is present in the Eternal Triune Divine Presence.When
the genial intellectual achievements in understanding eternity and time
by Augustine, Boethius, and Aquinas are neglected, the Enlightenment
notion of progress tends toward negating the past, even when, with
Hegel, it attempts to preserve and sublate it. It is the premodern grasp of
time as being created and redeemed by Divine Eternity that underlies the
Christian, theological notion of fulfillment.4 As James T. Burtchaell has
demonstrated, there has been a paradigm consensus operative from the
Reformation down to contemporary theologians that has failed to do
justice to historical developments in the early Church.5
In this essay, I shall first indicate the relevance of returning to St.
Augustine in regard to a proper theological understanding of the history
of suffering. There will then be a brief sketch of Augustine’s ascent of
mind and heart as the context for his masterful understanding of time as
presence and eternity. In conclusion, I shall sketch how Bernard Lonergan transposes Augustine’s perspectives in his methodological reflections
on historicity and historical knowledge.
Time as Productive Progress and the Holocaust
Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, along with Professors Metz and Josef Pieper,
identifies this “Zeitlosigkeit” with the fixation of modernity upon
productivity (“Machbarkeit”).This goes to the heart of modern and postmodern deformations. Modernity broke with the past. Progress would no
2 Metz, Glaube in Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 149–58; for a less penetrating theolog-

ical discussion of time, see Jürgen Moltmann, Science and Wisdom, trans. Margaret
Kohl (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003), 85–110.
3 Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 20–21, 197–294, 666–83.
4 Matthew Lamb,“Eternity and Time,” in Gladly to Learn and Gladly to Teach: Essays
on Religion and Political Philosophy in Honor of Ernest L. Fortin, A.A., ed. Michael
P. Foley and Douglas Kries (New York: Lexington Books, 2002), 195–214; also
Matthew Levering, Christ’s Fulfillment of Torah and Temple: Salvation According to
Thomas Aquinas (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002).
5 James T. Burtchaell, From Synagogue to Church: Public Services and Offices in the Earliest Christian Communities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

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817

longer be in terms of human excellence, whether intellectual, moral, or
religious. Political life would no longer be defined by the praxis of
virtues, as it was from Plato and Aristotle to Aquinas and Bonaventure.
The moderns, from Machiavelli through Hobbes and Locke to Kant and
Marx would assimilate the political to the productive. The political way
of living has become totally subordinated to the productive way of living.
Praxis has been reduced to technique; doing is just another variation of
making. In this, modernity has fallen into a form of idolatry.6
For, as the ancients and medievals remind us, the good in the productive way of life resides not in the producers but in the things made. Skills
(whether in business, crafts, or arts) can produce goods but they do not
require any virtue or excellence beyond the excellence of the skills themselves. Murderers and thieves and generally vicious people can be very
skillful. A politics built upon productive skills, with little or no attention
paid to intellectual and moral virtues, is a politics of power where justice
is subservient to winning and maintaining power through economic
and/or political techniques.
To rescue praxis from its instrumentalization into technique, it is
important to recognize how genuine praxis demands theory.The system
of a timeless continuum of evolutionary progress is one that can be
recognized and criticized only by those who know the second-order
theories determining modern and postmodern cultures and societies.The
priority of praxis to technique and systems of instrumental reason, does
not mean that intelligence, along with wisdom and science, is subordinated to immediate practical purposes. That would be an instrumentalization of theory that would be in no position to differentiate clearly
praxis from technique.The theoretical way of living, with a cultivation of
wisdom and contemplation, is especially needed in contemporary multiversities so that science and scholarship not be distorted by the passions
of the day.The criterion of truth is not to be subordinated to any shortterm “relevance” that would cut short the universality of truth for all the
dead and victims of history.7
The prejudices that are criticized so strongly in Enlightenment and
post-Enlightenment societies—racism, sexism, ageism, exploitation of the
6 Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, “Das Ende der Zeit,” in Ende der Zeit? Die Provoka-

tion der Rede von Gott, ed.Tiemo R. Peters and Claus Urban, 13–31.
7 On the personalization of truth in Jesus Christ, see Michel Henry, C’est moi la

vérité (Paris: Seuil, 1998). For how this relates to all humans, including the dead
and those yet unborn, see Matthew Lamb,“Apokalyptische Unterbrechung und
Politische Theologie,” in Befristete Zeit: Jahrbuch Politische Theologie, ed. Jürgen
Manemann (Münster: Lit Verlag, 1999), 232–40.

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poor, of children, of the environment—are all rooted in failures to cultivate the intellectual and moral virtues or excellence.8 Plato, Aristotle,
Augustine, and Aquinas, along with others, emphasized that these virtues
or excellence are needed in any just political order. Racism, as we know
it, is an invention of the seventeenth century. The task of recovering
wisdom traditions of the past is not a task of an archaism, a mere restoration of some past epoch. Quite the contrary, a genuine dialectic requires
that the recovery of past and repressed wisdom traditions be transposed
into very different contexts in order, for example, to counteract the baneful effects of their loss. The reduction of progress to technological
advance is a case in point. Now that the twentieth-century book of the
dead has received its final chapter, the murderous use of technology is
painfully evident, especially in the Holocaust with its chilling “Arbeit
Macht Frei.”9 As Zygmunt Bauman indicates, the horrors of the Holocaust could only occur in modern technological cultures that had
replaced theological categories of sin with the medical and botanical
categories of virus and weed. Sinners can be converted, but technological progress demands that viruses and weeds be annihilated.10
The Enlightenment philosophes took the wrong path in their reaction
to the European wars of religion.They kept the bath water and threw out
the baby. They concentrated their criticisms on religion and then
proceeded to link human nature inexorably with violence and war. Little
wonder, then, that the twentieth century would witness more human
beings slaughtered by their fellow humans than any other of the bloody
centuries.11 Productivity and its skills are not enough.The openness of the
past to recovery is not a romantic return to some past era, but an effort to
do justice to the intellectual and moral demands of our present time.The
era of modern specialization in the sciences is calling forth the need to
integrate these vastly expanding special disciplines by initiating a new
movement toward a wise integration in interdisciplinary collaboration. So
8 Matthew Lamb, Solidarity with Victims (New York: Crossroads, 1982); also idem,

“The Transcultural in Bernard Lonergan’s Theology,” Method: Journal of Lonergan
Studies 8 (1990): 48–73; and idem,“The Social and Political Dimensions of Lonergan’s Theology,” in The Desires of the Human Heart: An Introduction to the Theology
of Bernard Lonergan, ed.Vernon Gregson (New York: Paulist, 1988), 255–84.
9 Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialektik der Aufklarung (Amsterdam:
Social Sciences Association, 1944); Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989); Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American
Life (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1999).
10 Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 1–82.
11 Gil Elliot, Twentieth-Century Book of the Dead (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons,
1972).

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819

the premodern quest for wisdom, with its concerns for a heuristic appreciation of the whole, can offer important contributions to the intellectual
and moral integration of the sciences and other scholarly disciplines.12
The Greek and Latin Fathers were keenly aware of the limitations of a
political order based only on productive skills.They had seen the collapse
of any genuine philosophy, or love of wisdom, in the decline of the Greek
and Roman empires. In the Cynics and Epicureans, they had witnessed the
postimperial resignation of the intellectuals to nothing but fragmentation;
indeed, as St. Augustine saw, even the Stoics were retreating into a privatized reservation of the spirit. The philosophical quest for intellectual and
moral excellence or virtues retreated before the initial success and achievements of productive skills, from military prowess through business and
construction to crafts and arts.Wisdom and justice gave way to power and
cunning. The Church Fathers shunned the many political theologies of
empire in the first three centuries. They usually avoided “theologia” and
preferred “philosophia” to designate their reflections on the Gospel, thereby
linking themselves with the philosophical critiques of the many mythological theologies legitimating the political and social corruptions of empire.13
So, in his political theology, St. Augustine spelled out how the fullness
of justice and peace is not a skilled achievement of the earthly cities, but
only comes about in the gifted friendship with the Triune God and the
kingdom incarnate in Christ Jesus.14 In his monumental City of God,
Augustine provides a devastating criticism of Roman political theologies
legitimating the disordered desire for domination (“libido dominandi”).15
A major theme of the work is precisely how the productive skills (“artes”)
were deformed into a demonic and idolatrous legitimating of imperial
domination and injustice.16 Only Christ can bring about full and
complete justice in the City of God, because he renounces domination on
the cross and redeems humankind, not by removing evil through power,
but by taking into himself all the evil of the universe, all the powers of
death. Only the Word Incarnate could suffer so profoundly and transform
evil and death into justice and eternal life, rising from the dead.17
12 Matthew Lamb, “The Challenge of Graduate Theological Education,” in Theo-

logical Education in the Catholic Tradition, ed. Patrick Carey and Earl Müller (New
York: Crossroad-Herder, 1997), 108–30.
13 Robin Darling Young, “Theologia in the Early Church,” Communio 24 (1997):
681–90.
14 Michael P. Foley,“The Other Happy Life:The Political Dimensions to St.Augustine’s Cassiciacum Dialogues,” Review of Politics 65 (2003): 165–83.
15 City of God, I, 30; III, 14; XIV, 15, 28; XV, 23.
16 Ibid.,VI–VIII.
17 Ibid., XX–XXII.

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Matthew L. Lamb

It is the presence of Christ in history, Truth and Justice incarnate,
recognized and responded to by the theological virtues of faith, hope, and
agapic love of even enemies, that breaks the cycles of domination and
power. Where all the cities of men rely upon the ultimate sanction of
death to enforce laws, Christ overcomes the power of death and brings
about the apocalyptic realization of the eternal City of God. It is the
gifted friendship with the Triune God that enables Christians to engage
in the praxis of the intellectual and moral virtues, just as it had with
Augustine himself.
Augustine’s Ascent of Mind and Heart
Recently Robert Crouse reflected on St. Augustine’s Platonism, wisely
concluding that the monumental task of understanding how profoundly
Augustine transformed philosophical theology has only begun.18 He had
earlier contributed to this task.19 Even John Rist’s Augustine: Ancient
Thought Baptized acknowledges that a “book of reasonable length can do
little more than scratch the surface of such a topic.”20
A major danger facing such a task is historicism. By that I mean a
tendency to reduce philosophical and/or theological writings to so many
“ideas” or “schools” arranged in chronological order without engaging in
the realities referenced in the writings. Philosophical works, like those of
Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, or Cicero lose their inner meaning and truth
when they are denigrated to no more than conceptual and cultural
constructs with little or no reference to material and/or spiritual realities.
Historicism drains real life from the great classics, leaving nothing but
libraries of dead texts to be viewed extrinsically, like so many dated and
dissected corpses. Postmodernist deconstruction may be historicism’s
final funeral dirge.
Crouse indicates the inadequacy of those philosophical and theological
trends that set Augustinian and philosophical texts in extrinsic opposition.21
18 Robert Crouse, “Paucis mutatis verbis: St. Augustine’s Platonism,” in Augustine and

His Critics: Essays in Honor of Gerald Bonner, ed. Robert Dodaro and George Lawless
(London: Routledge, 2000), 37–50.
19 R. Crouse, “In aenigmate Trinitatis (Confessions, bk. 13, 5, 6): The Conversion of
Philosophy in St. Augustine’s Confessions,” Dionysius 11 (1987): 53–62. On the
importance of Cicero’s transposition of Plato, see Michael Foley,“Cicero,Augustine, and the Philosophical Roots of the Cassiciacum Dialogues,” Revue des
Études Augustiniennes 45 (1999): 51–77.
20 John M. Rist, Augustine:Ancient Thought Baptized (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 2.
21 See R. Crouse, “Paucis Mutatis Verbis: St.Augustine’s Platonism,” Augustine and His
Critics (New York: Routledge, 2000) 38–42, for an excellent summary of the

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821

As he remarks: “Thus, faith is, for Augustine, not a distinct faculty, nor a
substitute for intellect, but the salvation of intellect. It is not the contradiction or the destruction of Platonism, but its conversion and redemption.”22
The salvation of intellect was a fundamental element of Augustine’s religious
conversion. Far from blinding his mind, faith in Jesus Christ assisted Augustine in discovering the higher, more sublime dimensions of his mind.23 This
is illustrated in the early dialogues after his conversion and before his
baptism, culminating in the Soliloquia in which he explores how intertwined
knowledge of God and self-knowledge are, as well as how truth both
embraces and transcends his senses and imagination. In this, as well as the
companion De immortalitate animae,Augustine reflects upon how his love of
intelligibility and truth requires a way of life patterned on the intelligibility
and truth of reason itself. This requires purification, a turning away from
disordered desires and acts that cloud the mind. Such a turning or conversion is made possible, reason shows Augustine, by faith, hope, and love.24
The theological is the salvation of the intellectual. A life dedicated to
the love of wisdom, philosophy, becomes a theological life.25 Because of
God’s revelation in and through the Word Incarnate, death and evil are
overcome.The philosophical agnosticism stated by Socrates at the end of
The Apology:—”I go to die, you to live; but which of us goes to a better
reality is unknown to all but God”—was no match for the disorder and
evil of human history and of Augustine’s own wayward living. In the
covenant with Israel and the new covenant in Jesus Christ, God has made
known to us how death and evil are overcome. Reason is enlightened
and strengthened by faith in service of a full understanding and knowledge in God.26
Augustine describes the needed conversion of the mind as involving a
realization that the intelligible differs from the sensible. Similar to philosophical sources,Augustine refers to geometry and mathematics to illustrate
inadequacies of those who accuse Augustine of either Hellenizing Christian faith
or Christianizing Hellenic philosophy. See also Rist, Augustine, 5–12.
22 Crouse, “Paucis Mutatis Verbis,” 42.
23 See De Trinitate, 12, 2, on the “ratio sublimior”; on the subsequent importance of
Augustine’s distinction between lower and higher dimensions of reason, see
Robert Mulligan, “Ratio superior and Ratio inferior : the Historical Background,”
New Scholasticism 29 (1955): 1–32.
24 Soliloquia, I, 12–15, note how Augustine identifies knowing the truth with judging in II, 35.
25 Foley, “Cicero, Augustine.”
26 See Eugene TeSelle, “Faith,” in Augustine Through the Ages: An Encyclopedia, ed.
Alan D. Fitzgerald (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing
Company, 1999), 347–50 and references there.

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Matthew L. Lamb

the difference.27 This is as relevant today as then. There is no perfect
material instantiation of the intelligibility of the perfect point, line,
sphere, and so on. If anything, the development of non-Euclidean
geometries only accentuates the difference between the sensible and the
intelligible. But difference is not separation and opposition.And it is here
that moderns and postmoderns have much to learn from the ancient
differentiations of reason. Specifically, Augustine’s long struggle to overcome a Manichean opposition between body and mind led him to the
profound realization of how such dualisms sprung from a failure to
appreciate the differentiation of the mind attending to the senses and
imagination, on the one hand, and the mind attending to its own nature
and its knowledge of immaterial realities, on the other hand. All truth,
even the most empirical, such as “This is a tree,” is known by intelligence
judging correctly, not by the senses alone.28
Augustine’s discovery of the difference between the sensible and the
intelligible was not, after his conversion from Manichaeism, a rejection of
the physical and sensible.The material universe, along with human beings
as a unity of body and soul, are God’s good creation. The activities of
human intelligence, when properly ordered toward truth, goodness, and
the holy, enable the senses and imagination to flourish in a reasonable way.
In ascending to the intelligible truth and goodness of God, one does not
abandon God’s good creation. It was through fallen and disordered desires
rooted in pride that Augustine failed to acknowledge the goodness and
harmony of all corporeal and artistic beauty as created and normed by the
infinite beauty of the Creator God.29 Living a disordered and sinful life
blinds one to the higher aspects of one’s reason, to the wisdom needed to
order one’s senses, imagination, and actions toward the truly good.Augustine could fully appropriate the classical importance of the intellectual and
moral virtues only in the context of his own religious conversion to Jesus
Christ with the attendant theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity.
Augustine developed aspects of a natural knowledge of God and of
human reason that transformed what he had learned from philosophers.
27 Soliloquia, I, 9; 2, 32–35; also De immortalitate animae, 1.
28 As Augustine puts it in the Soliloquia I, 28:“Tamen illud non negabis, ut opinor,

veram esse arborem, si arbor est: non enim hoc sensu, sed intelligentia judicatur.”
29 See Augustine’s Confessions, bk. 10, chs. 27, 34. See also bk. 13, ch. 28:“Et vidisti,

Deus, omnia quae fecisti, et ecce bona valde, quia et nos videmus ea, et ecce
omnia bona valde. . . . Hoc dicunt etiam quaeque pulchra corpora, quia longe
multo pulchrius est corpus, quod ex membris pulchris omnibus constat, quam
ipsa membra singula, quorum ordinatissimo conventu conpletur universum,
quamvis et illa etiam singillatim pulchra sint.”

Temporality and History

823

His reflections on the contingency of the universe led him to transcend
pagan cosmogonies and cosmologies. The philosophical appreciation of
intelligence and reason was strengthened by Augustine’s faith in the revelation of God creating all things as good and redeeming sinful human
history through the suffering, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Material creation was not the source of evil or suffering, as in dualistic
cosmologies. It is precisely this theological context that frames his
profound reflections on eternity and time. Augustine thus serves as a
good example of how Jewish and Christian theologians developed an
understanding of nature and history, under the aegis of revelation, which
would not otherwise have been accessible.30
The intellectual aspects of Augustine’s conversion are especially present in books 5 through 9 of his Confessions. His ascent to God was
accompanied by an awareness of the importance, not only of understanding (intellectus) but also of judging that the understanding is true, of
Veritas. The nature of the human mind for Augustine is given and to be
discovered: It is not self-constructed, as for many moderns.31 Augustine
narrates his conversion to Christ as integral to his quest for intellectual
and moral excellence.Truth is divine, and truth beckons intelligence to a
love and understanding that both confirms and elevates human knowing
and loving. So, at the beginning of book 7 of the Confessions, Augustine
mentions how he was so “gross of mind” (incrassatus corde) that he had not
come to the realization of how the mind, while it generates all images, is
not itself an image “but altogether different than such images.”32 Augustine uses “cor” or heart to designate the mind with its orienting desire or
will.33 Here he is, of course, echoing Matthew 13:15 to indicate how his
own attentive consciousness (intentionem) has been so dulled by his disordered desires and sinful living that he cannot grasp that the mind both
30 Ernest Fortin, The Birth of Philosophic Christianity: Studies in Early Christian and

Medieval Thought, ed. J. Brian Benestad (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield,
1996), 21–122.
31 Ibid., 10–11.
32 Confessions, bk. 7, ch. 1: “Ego itaque incrassatus corde, nec mihimet ipsi vel ipse
conspicuus, quidquid non per aliquanta spatia tenderetur, vel diffunderetur vel
conglobaretur vel tumeret, vel tale aliquid caperet aut capere posset, nihil prorsus esse arbitrabar. per quales enim formas ire solent oculi mei, per tales imagines
ibat cor meum, nec videbam hanc eandem intentionem, qua illas ipsas imagines
formabam, non esse tale aliquid: quae tamen ipsas non formaret, nisi esset
magnum aliquid.”
33 Edgardo de la Peza, El significado de “cor” en San Agustín (Paris: Études augustiniennes, 1962). So, for example, the monastic notion of purity of heart refers to
both the intellectual and affective aspects of conversion to Christ Jesus.

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Matthew L. Lamb

forms all images and transcends them. This twofold aspect of the mind,
both forming all images and yet not itself a material image, is developed
in the De Trinitate, where Augustine explores the human mind as an
immaterial “imago Dei.”34
In Confessions, book 7, chapter 17, Augustine reflects on the nature of
human intelligence as it judges something to be true and another thing
false.“So, as I reflected on how it was that I came to make these judgments
which I did make, I discovered above my changing mind an unchanging
and true eternity of truth.” He then recounts how he ascended from sensible and corporeal things to the faculty of reason and the intelligible and
intelligent light by which he is led to prefer the true and eternal to the
changeable. That this was neither Cartesian nor Kantian-Heideggerian is
clear when Augustine narrates that this intellectual conversion to truth is
a discovery of Being: “And in the flash of a trembling glance my mind came to
That Which Is. I understood the invisible through those things that were created.”35
But he immediately adds that this discovery was not yet habitual. For he
could not live the theoretic or contemplative life demanded by the discovery until Christ gave him the strength to do so.36 As Ernest Fortin remarks,
the difference between Augustine and many present-day thinkers lies in
the fact “that Augustine was intent on preserving and restoring human
wholeness by directing all of the individual’s activities to the goal or goals
to which they are intrinsically ordered.”37
In this Augustine was putting in narrative form an intellectual ascent to
a proper order in which a true self-knowledge acknowledged his own
mind and heart as truly created as an “imago Dei.” True knowledge of the
soul and of God involves the whole of the created universe, a conversion
to love wisdom truly, in the fullness of its reality.
As God is simple, infinite understanding and loving, so God is eternal.
There is no extension or duration in God.This divine eternity, as divine
34 On Augustine, see D. J. Merriell, To The Image of the Trinity: A Study in the Devel-

opment of Aquinas’s Teaching (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies,
1990), 13–35, 98–110. Also, on Augustine’s non-Platonic understanding of body,
soul, and mind, see Rist, Augustine, 92–147.
35 Confessions, bk. 7, ch. 17, emphasis added: “Et pervenit ad id, quod est, in ictu
trepidantis aspectus. tunc vero invisibilia tua per ea quae facta sunt intellecta
conspexi.” All translations are mine.
36 See Confessions where, at the end of book 8, he converts to Christ.That enables
him to live morally and intellectually.This is a classic expression of the ascent to
truth as God that Augustine shares with his mother—to illustrate how the light
of faith enables souls to enjoy a contemplation of the divine even if they lack
formal intellectual training. See ibid., bk. 9, ch. 10.
37 Fortin, The Birth of Philosophic Christianity, 10.

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825

infinity and simplicity, cannot be imagined, nor can it be understood and
conceived, except by God.We can, however, affirm that God is eternal and
understand analogically that affirmation. There are major breakthroughs
in the philosophical and theological grasp of this analogical understanding of the affirmation that God is eternal.Those breakthroughs are in the
works of Augustine, and further developed in the writings of Boethius
and Thomas Aquinas. Unfortunately, subsequent philosophers and theologians often failed to measure up to their achievements on this issue.Without a clear attainment of judgment as affirming and denying being, positing
instead the mere synthesis of subject and predicate, lesser philosophers and
theologians attempt to understand the divine either as Absolute Idea, the
transcendence of which is its separation from all finite beings, or else they
make the divine into an Absolute Intelligence which somehow informs the
whole universe, immanent in all that is. A contrast with one of the greatest philosophers on this theme might highlight Augustine’s achievement.
An apogee of philosophical speculation on divine eternity is attained
in the seventh chapter of Plotinus’s Third Ennead.The divine eternal selfsame is the whole as present without extension or duration. This is
contrasted with the mutability of time. Similar to Plato and Aristotle,
Plotinus could only treat judgment as a synthesis of subjects and predicates, so that the notion of being was a conceptual content to be known
by a direct act of understanding (ennoein), rather than by the indirect,
analogical way of understanding through judgment. The divine eternal
being is that which “always exists” beyond all extension and duration.The
eternal and the temporal are opposites, and the task of the true philosopher or mystic is to leave behind all the temporal for the superintuition
of the eternal. Eternity is “intelligible nature” (physis noetike)μ contrasted
with and transcending the temporal as the whole order of the heavens
and earth. An antithesis between understanding and what is understood
is heightened into one between the eternal and the temporal.38 Plotinus
did not overcome but only intensified the contrast between the eternal
and the temporal in Plato.39
To understand eternity required both an appropriation of intelligence as
not intrinsically conditioned by space or time and a grasp of the concreteness
38 Pierre Hadot, Plotinus and the Simplicity of Vision, trans. Michael Chase (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1993).
39 On the consequences for political philosophy, see Fortin, The Birth of Philosophic

Christianity, 181–87. For a fine sketch of Augustine’s reflections on God, see
Lewis Ayres and Michel R. Barnes’s article on “God,” in Fitzgerald, Augustine
Through the Ages, 384–90.

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Matthew L. Lamb

of being known by judgment.40 Both elements are in the narratives of
Augustine’s ascent to the intelligible and that-which-is (ad id quod est).The
spiritual nature of intelligence together with the Veritas of true judgment
is the ground for understanding God as the Eternal, creating and redeeming the temporal.The transcendence by truth of space and time does not
negate space and time, but affirms them.The contrast with Plotinus could
not be more graphically illustrated than the two places in the Confessions
where Augustine narrates an ascent to the eternal God. In both places, at
the very apogee of his mind’s union with the Divine, Augustine writes of
“visible things,” “fragrance,” and the wealth of an eternal wisdom “where
You feed Israel forever with the food of truth.”41
The revelation of God’s covenant with Israel, and the universality of the
new covenant in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, evoked both
these differentiations.The judgments of faith were affirmations of a loving
God acting in history, which judgments were indeed inspired by supernatural faith and so called forth an ongoing effort to understand, however
imperfectly and analogically.42 Only by attention to the transcending activity of true judgments does the mind know what transcends space and time
in concrete things and events in time. Contingent things and events that
occur only at specific places and times are all present in the Divine Presence
creating the entire spatio-temporal universe.True judgments of reason and
of faith occur because the human mind attains truth.The concrete events of
redemption in the Jewish covenant and the new covenant in Christ Jesus are

40 See Confessions, bk. 7, ch. 17:“Hoc ergo quaerens, unde iudicarem, cum ita iudi-

carem, inveneram incommutabilem et veram veritatis aeternitatem supra
mentemmeam conmutabilem. atque ita gradatim a corporibus ad sentientem per
corpus animam, atque inde ad eius interiorem vim, cui sensus corporis exteriora
nuntiaret, et quousque possunt bestiae, atque inde rursus ad ratiocinantem potentiam, ad quam refertur iudicandum, quod sumitur a sensibus corporis. quae se
quoque in me comperiens mutabilem, erexit se ad intellegentiam suam, et
abduxit cogitationem a consuetudine, subtrahens se contradicentibus turbis
phantasmatum, ut inveniret, quo lumine aspargeretur; cum sine ulla dubitatione
clamaret incommutabile praeferendum esse mutabili, unde nosset ipsum incommutabile—quod nisi aliquo modo nosset, nullo modo illud mutabili certa praeponeret—et pervenit ad id, quod est, in ictu trepidantis aspectus. tunc vero
invisibilia tua per ea quae facta sunt intellecta conspexi, sed aciem figere non
evalui, et repercussa infirmitate redditus solitis, non mecum ferebam nisi amantem memoriam et quasi olefacta desiderantem, quae comedere nondum
possem.”
41 See ibid., ch. 17; bk. 9, ch. 10.
42 See De Trinitate, 4, preface, 1–3, 18.

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revelatory of the eternal plan of the Triune God. So Augustine defines analogy in terms of this unity of redemptive history.43
Augustine’s extensive reflections on the Old Testament, especially in
De civitate Dei, show an ever-deepening understanding of God from the
tribal through the liberating warrior and the protector of the nation to
the mysteriously transcendent God of the prophets and wisdom literature. The transcendent God is immanent in the messianic longing of
Israel. This process of graced differentiation included both serene
contemplation and the intense and passionate questioning of itself and
God in psalm, prayer, sacrifice, and suffering—the entire concrete history
of a people covenanted with the mysterious and loving God that is fully
revealed only in the suffering, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.44
The incarnation of the Word revealed God’s absolutely supernatural
and definitive redemption of the human race, not by removing evil and
sin through power, but by transforming evil into good through the life,
death, and resurrection of Jesus.45 The covenant is now friendship with
God the Father through incorporation into Christ and the gift of God’s
own Love flooding human hearts by the Holy Spirit.The temporal manifestation of the Triune God’s redemptive presence in the words and deeds
of Jesus Christ became the outer words—living on in Church, Scripture,
and sacraments—which can only be recognized as true in the light of
faith. The true judgments of faith are grounded in the graced real presence of the Triune God elevating human knowing and loving into a
participation of their own Infinite Understanding generating Infinite
Truth spirating Infinite Love.46 In the incarnation of the Word, who
enlightens every human being coming into this world, the eternal is
incarnate in the temporal.Triune absolute transcendence is invisibly and
visibly immanent in human history. The visible mediations of the word
of God as true are the divinely gifted intelligibility of history.47 Christian theologians were challenged to go beyond the antinomies of Platonic,
Plotinian, or Aristotelian conceptions of the eternal and temporal.
43 See De Genesi ad litteram imperfectus liber (Cl. 0268, par. 2): “Historia est, cum

sive divinitus sive humanitus res gesta commemoratur; allegoria, cum figurate
dicta intelleguntur; analogia, cum veteris et novi testamentorum congruentia
demonstratur; aetiologia, cum causae dictorum factorum que redduntur.”
44 See De civitate Dei, bks. 14–17; esp. bk. 14, 3–4, 7, 11–17, 21, 27–28; bk. 15, 22;
bk. 16, 12 to bk. 17, 24.
45 Ibid., bk. 9, 15; bk. 18, 46–54; also Confessions, bk. 5, ch. 9; bk. 9, ch. 13; bk. 10,
ch. 43.
46 De Trinitate, 9, 1–12
47 See De civitate Dei, bk. 9, 5–6, 22, 2; De Trinitate, 4 and 13.

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Divine Eternity Creates and Redeems Time
Augustine initiated a major breakthrough. His own discovery of intelligence was marked by both the Platonic concern for the spiritual nature
of human intelligence and the Christian insistence upon the word of
God as known in true judgments of faith. The light of reason and the
light of faith both come together in the life praxis of intellectual, moral,
and religious conversion narrated in books 5 through 9 of his Confessions.48 The importance of this threefold dimension of Augustine’s
conversion is paramount. The intellectual dimension enabled Augustine
to attend to human intelligence in its spiritual and rational reality—the
“ratio sublimior” of the human mind wisely knowing its own spiritual
nature and loving those spiritual realities transcending it. The moral
dimension enabled Augustine to experience the intrinsic relation of
goodness to truth.When it comes to wisdom, one has to live wisely and
well if one is going to know the truth in all its goodness and beauty. In
the final chapter of Confessions, book 8,Augustine affirms this integration
of intelligence and goodness, of intellectual and moral excellence, in the
gift of his religious conversion to the Word Incarnate, Jesus Christ. It is
his grace that enabled Augustine to live in wise and good ways.
For Augustine the graced turning to divine revelation enabled him to
understand the intrinsic goodness of the whole of creation. Evil results
only from the free disordered acts of intelligent creatures rejecting divine
friendship. Both faith and reason prompted Augustine to inquire into the
wonders of the world and human nature in order to understand the
wonders of God’s creative and redemptive presence. In his writings,
Augustine narrates the ongoing mutual self-mediations of Jesus Christ and
Christians constituting the Church in the kingdom or City of God, who,
in their many conscious acts and decisions, are in conversation with the
Triune God who is infinite transcendence and the most intimate immanence.49 Augustine’s inquiry into the nature of intelligence is always in the
interpersonal context of this ongoing mutual self-mediation of his friendship with God. The analogue for understanding God’s eternal present is
the intelligent human experience of knowing that I know myself to be
now present to myself. The movement of time does not intrinsically
48 On philosophy as a way of life, a spiritual exercise or praxis of theoretical reflec-

tion on wisdom, See Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, trans. Michael Case
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1995); on the confluence of knowing and loving in Augustine, see Fortin’s “Augustine and the Hermeneutics of Love,” in idem., The Birth
of Philosophic Christianity, 1–19.
49 Confessions, bk. 3, ch. 6; De Trinitate, 4, 3; 15, 27.

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condition or constitute who I am, for the past exists only in my present
memory and the future exists only in my present expectation.50
To know the reality of the divine friendship Augustine narrates, one
must, like him, undergo a process of intellectual, moral, and religious
conversion.A dialectical discernment is needed, therefore, whereby Augustine’s achievement is not simply reduced to textual comparisons. The
records of his experiences and struggles should not be made paper-thin by
treating them as texts without references to a very real way of living. A
major criterion for the intellectual dimension of Augustine’s conversion is
his overcoming the limitations of materialism and its naive realism. It would
be a mistake, in my judgment, to reduce this intellectual way of life, and the
conversion to the wisdom dimensions of mind, to no more than a career
change that “everyone could understand.”51
By adverting to the nature of intelligently knowing the truth, Augustine was able to bring together the eternal divine presence and the totality of time in all its concrete universality. Eternity does not denigrate
time, but creates time in order, through intelligent creatures, to invite a
return. Augustine presents God as “totum esse praesens,” the fullness of
Being as Presence freely creating, sustaining, and redeeming the universe
and all of human history in the Triune Presence.All extensions and durations, all past, present, and future events, are present in the immutable and
eternal understanding, knowing, and loving who are Father, Word, and
Spirit. The eternal God creates the universe in the totality of its spatiotemporal reality.There is no before or after in God’s eternal presence.52

50 Matthew Lamb,“Divine Transcendence and Eternity,” in Continuity and Plurality

in Catholic Theology, ed. Anthony J. Cernera (Fairfield, CT: Sacred Heart University Press, 1998), 77–106; idem, “The Resurrection and Christian Identity as
Conversatio Dei,” Concilium 249 (1993): 12–23.
51 This is the approach in Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1967), 101–14. Brown writes on 101: “Augustine’s
reading of the Platonic books had done one thing which everyone could understand: they had brought Augustine to a final and definitive ‘conversion’ from a literary career to a life ‘in Philosophy.’ ”This tends to reduce intellectual conversion to
no more than a career change. It is unfortunate that so influential a biography could
miss the depths of what was so central to Augustine’s life. Only those who similarly
undergo an intellectual conversion can understand what it means. Note Fortin’s
similar criticism of Brown’s biography in The Birth of Philosophic Christianity, 307–9.
52 See Augustine, Confessions, bk. 11, chs. 10–13; also Frederick Crowe,“Rethinking
Eternal Life: Philosophical Notions from Lonergan,” Science et Esprit 45 (1993):
25–39; idem, “Rethinking Eternal Life: Theological Notions from Lonergan,”
Science et Esprit 45 (1993): 145–59.

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For Augustine eternity is not a pale abstraction. Eternity is the Triune
God. Eternity is Triune-personal. Rather than the conceptualist strategies
of defining eternity as negating time, the Greek and Latin Fathers developed the revelation of Genesis as eternity creating time. Evil is identified
with neither material nor temporal creatures, but with a proud refusal of
the goodness of the Creator and his covenants. Augustine may well have
been initiated into this interpersonal understanding of eternity and time
by Ambrose. In his De fuga saeculi, Ambrose depicts a flight from the
distortions of worldly evil and domination to that hidden eternal city
“that embraces the whole world, because all things are within God.”53
The flight from sin and evil is not a negation of the world but a finding
of the world as it was created in the embrace of God. In the fourteenth
sermon on Psalm 118, Ambrose indicates how the eternal God not only
creates all time, but also redeems time through his covenant with Israel
and now, in the fullness of time, in the Incarnate Word, who as true God
and true man bestows the fullness of beatitude and grace by embracing
the whole of humankind in his ascension through suffering into eternal
glory.54 As branches on one vine, so all the people of God are incorporated into the embrace of Christ’s love.55
In book 11 of the Confessions,Augustine responds to those who would
maintain that an eternal God would have nothing to do with temporal
matters. Augustine knows that all such objections come from a mind
clouded by a failure to attain the wisdom needed to know the true and
eternal.The whole of reality, including all past, present, and future events,
are present in the Divine Presence as “totum esse praesens.”56 The Divine
Presence embraces the whole of reality, including the whole of history.
In the final book of De Trinitate, Augustine presents this succinctly:

53 Ambrose, De fuga saeculi, no. 53:“Susanna ergo fugit saeculum, et se Deo credidit,

ad illam arcem civitatis aeternae fugiens, quae totum mundum complectitur,
quoniam intra Deum sunt omnia.” Reading this treatise of Ambrose raises a
question about whether or not Augustine’s decision to leave the centers of
worldly power in Milan and Rome for Hippo was inspired by this perspective.
54 See Ambrose, Expositio in Psalmum 118, Sermo Quartus Decimus, esp. nos. 33–34.
55 See Ambrose, De Isaac et anima, no. 29: “Etenim sicut vineam suam vitis, ita
Dominus Jesus populum suum quasi vitis aeterna quibusdam brachiis charitatis
amplectitur.”
56 Confessions, bk. 11, ch. 11: “Non autem praeterire quidquam in aeterno, sed
totum esse praesens; nullum vero tempus totum esse praesens: et videat omne
praeteritum propelli ex futuro, et omne futurum ex praeterito consequi; et omne
praeteritum ac futurum ab eo quod semper est praesens.”

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that wisdom by which God knows all things, in such a way that neither
what are called things past are past for Him, nor does He await the
coming of what are called future things as though they were absent, but
both past and future with things present are all present; nor yet are
things known severally, so that thought passes from one to another, but
all things simultaneously are present to Him in a single glance.57

It is in this context that Augustine sets the mystery of God’s providence
that “embraces all that He knows in one eternal, unchangeable, and ineffable vision.”58 Thus Eternity creates and redeems time. This provides a
central key to understanding the unity of Augustine’s Confessions, his
analogical and allegorical interpretations of Sacred Scripture, and his
theology of history.
Robert McMahon has put forward an understanding of the unity of
the Confessions in the light of Augustine’s allegorical interpretation of
the individual days of creation, Genesis 1:1–14, in book 13.59 From a
literary perspective McMahon shows how the narrative of Augustine’s
life in books 1 through 9 is enfolded within the creation/redemption
narrative of the days of creation as Augustine develops it allegorically in
book 13, chapters 12 through 38. From philosophical and theological
perspectives, what is important is to realize how this literary analysis is
prepared by Augustine’s analysis of memory in book 10, time and eternity in book 11, and the heaven of heavens in book 12.Augustine had to
establish that it is not human memory alone that defines human identity.
The Truth of the Divine Presence, while infinitely transcendent, defines
who we are inasmuch as the Trinity is more intimate to each and every
human person than they are to themselves.60 As the entire Confessions
make abundantly clear, Augustine’s own identity is constituted in the
interpersonal relation between his own self and God. The desires of his
57 De Trinitate, 15, 7, 13:“Istam sapientiam qua novit Deus omnia, ita ut nec ea quae

dicuntur praeterita, ibi praetereant, nec ea quae dicuntur futura, quasi desintexspectentur ut veniant, sed et praeterita et futura cum praesentibus sint cuncta
praesentia; nec singula cogitentur, et ab aliis ad alia cogitando transeatur, sed in
uno conspectu simul praesto sint universa:”
58 De Trinitate, 15, 7, 13:“Dei providentia . . . non singula cogitando aspicit, sed una,
aeterna et immutabili atque ineffabili visione complectitur cuncta quae novit.”
59 Robert McMahon, Augustine’s Prayerful Ascent:An Essay on the Literary Form of the
Confessions (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1989). I am indebted to
Michael Foley, who is working on a study dealing with the unity of the Confessions, for this reference.
60 Confessions, bk. 3, ch. 6: “O veritas, veritas, quam intime etiam tum medullae
animi mei suspirabant tibi. . . . Tu autem eras interior intimo meo et superior
summo meo.”

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Matthew L. Lamb

heart, the longings and actions of each and every day of his life are either
in accord with a friendship with God or against it. Ordered and disordered living and loving is defined in relation to God. So, the narration of
his descent into disordered living in the first four books of the Confessions
indicates how he is losing himself as well as God.Those “friends” he had
in disordered ways are given no name, for his disordered love for them
depersonalized them as he himself was depersonalized.61
Having completed the narration of his life, Augustine then indicates
how even human memory, as vast and wonderful as it is, does not create
human identity. He opens book 10 with a prayer that he might know
God and so know himself. The subtle explorations of the vastness of
memory (chapters 7 to 25) illustrate how God both transcends memory
and creates both the whole of all that is and Augustine’s own soul,
memory, and mind. He then indicates, quoting 1 John 2:16, how he lost
himself through disordered desires of the flesh, disordered desires of the
eyes, and the pride of life (chapters 30 to 41). Frederick J. Crosson has
sketched how these threefold disorders, and his turning away from them
by God’s grace, structure the first nine books.62 Augustine ends book 10
with a twofold realization. First, a truthful exploration of his own
memory, mind, and life is possible only by attending to God as interior
teacher, for “I find no sure place for my soul except in You, in whom all
that is scattered in me is gathered together and nothing from me would
vanish from You.”63 Second, while there are moments when Augustine
experiences an intense closeness to God, the book ends with a confession of Jesus Christ, true God and true man, as the historical mediator
whose sacrifice on the Cross has redeemed Augustine from the manifold
disorders of his sins.
Book 11 opens with Augustine invoking the Lord as “Your Eternity”
(“tua sit aeternitas”) who knows all that occurs in time. Augustine seeks
to understand Genesis 1:1 on how God creates the entire universe in the
Word. Delving into acts of knowing truth and immaterial inner words,
Augustine reflects on the Father eternally uttering the Divine Word and,
by the Word, everything else. While the Word is eternal, “not all things
61 Ibid., bk. 4, 9. Note how Augustine’s not naming of those whom he loved in a

disordered way contrasts with the names of the patriarchs and prophets who
responded to God’s call and covenant.
62 See Frederick J. Crosson, “Structure and Meaning in St. Augustine’s Confessions,” in The Ethics of Having Children, ed. Lawrence P. Schrenk (Washington,
DC: American Catholic Philosophical Association, 1990), 84–97.
63 Confessions, bk. 10, ch. 40: “Neque in his omnibus, quae percurro consulens te,
invenio tutum locum animae meae nisi in te, quo colligantur sparsa mea nec a
te quicquam recedat ex me.”

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833

that You make by speaking exist simultaneously and eternally.”64 If eternity is God “in whom nothing passes and all is present,” then the created
universe is time that “cannot be present all at once.”65 Indeed, “no time
is co-eternal with You, since You are permanent, and if they were permanent they would not be time.”66 Augustine develops an analogy of the
Divine Eternal Presence as pure and total “Esse, Intelligere, Amare” infinitely transcending all changes, all extensions and durations.The created
analogue is the immaterial “imago Dei” of human intelligence attending
to its own conscious intentionality or presence that cannot be captured
in its immeasurable “now” that yet measures other finite things in the
material world. The temporal present is a reflection of this immaterial
intelligent presence. And so Augustine draws the attentive reader into a
meditation leading to a realization that memory is the present of times
past, and expectation is the present of times future.67 The human present
“is,” and the past is only in memory, while the future is only in expectation. Because finite minds cannot grasp the whole of time, they cannot
know the intelligibility of the whole, the “ordo temporarum,” except
through faith in the revelation of the mediator, the Word Incarnate.68 As
Frederick Crowe indicates, the theology of creation means that we have
a four-dimensional universe, all of space and all of time is created by the
eternal Word.69
Having explored memory and the relation of time to eternity, Augustine had one more element to put in place in order to show how his life
is enfolded within the creating and redeeming revelation of creation in
Scripture. Book 12 offers Augustine’s solution to a most important question resulting from his understanding of eternity and time. If God is eternal, with no hint of a “before” or “after” or any extension at all, and He
creates the spatio-temporal universe in its totality with an eternal act that
is one with his eternal being, then what is the eternal life to which Jesus
Christ calls us in his kingdom with the communion of saints? This,
64 Ibid., bk. 11, ch. 7: “Novimus enim, domine, novimus, quoniam in quantum

quidque non est quod erat et est quod non erat, in tantum moritur et oritur. non
ergo quicquam verbi tui cedit atque succedit, quoniam vere inmortale atque
aeternum est. Et ideo verbo tibi coaeterno simul et sempiterne dicis omnia, quae
dicis, et fit, quidquid dicis ut fiat; nec aliter quam dicendo facis: nec tamen simul
et sempiterna fiunt omnia, quae dicendo facis.”
65 Ibid., ch. 11.
66 Ibid., ch. 14.
67 Ibid., chs. 14–30.
68 Ibid., chs. 28–31.
69 Crowe,“Rethinking Eternal Life: Philosophical,” 25–39; and idem,“Rethinking
Eternal Life:Theological,” 145–59.

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Augustine responds, is the “heaven of heavens” as the totally good and
just telos of all life in time and space. Already at the end of book 11,
Augustine remarks that there can be “a creature above time.”70 While the
visible universe unfolds in time and space “in the mutability by which
time can be perceived and measured,” the heaven of heavens, the “domus
Dei” or “civitas Dei,” is also created in the Word as “an intellectual creature; although in no way co-eternal with You, the Trinity, it does participate in Your eternity.”71
In this “caelum intellectuale,” the mind will “know all totally and
simultaneously without any succession of time.”72 Thus created minds
will participate in God’s eternal wisdom and justice with a created
wisdom and justice, and these minds will rejoice in their created participation in the total simultaneity of God’s knowing and willing.73 Divine
Truth, therefore, embraces the totality of the whole of creation, both spiritual creation and material creation. The Divine act of creation and
redemption embraces the whole of space and time, the whole of history.
The missions of the Word Incarnate, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit are
carried forward in the apostles and their successors down the ages.74
The sacraments continue the union of the visible and invisible
missions, as do the Sacred Scriptures as integral to the ecclesial and sacramental missions. Not only does God inspire each and every author and
event in the composition of Sacred Scripture, God embraces in the same
redemptive act each and every human being who hears or reads the
Scriptures until the end of time. No thing or event, no matter how apparently small or insignificant, is absent from the Divine creating and
redeeming act. As Jesus Christ is the Word made visible in the world of
time and space, so the Church with her sacraments and Scriptures
continue this visible mission of redemption.75 Thus at the end of book
12 of the Confessions,Augustine can offer varied interpretations of Genesis 1:1 while insisting that the “truth of the realities themselves” can be
known only with the attunement of the mind and heart gifted by God’s
love bestowed on us.76 This is further explored in the first three books of
70 Confessions, bk. 11, ch. 30:“Extendantur etiam in ea, quae ante sunt, et intellegant

te ante omnia tempora aeternum creatorem omnium temporum, neque ulla
tempora tibi esse coaeterna, nec ullam creaturam, etiamsi est aliqua supra tempora.”
71 Ibid., bk. 12, chs. 8–9.The “coelum coeli” is “domus Dei” in bk. 12, ch. 15, and
is “civitas Dei” in De civitate Dei, bk. 1, praef. 5, 19; bk. 11, 1.
72 Confessions, bk. 12, ch. 13.
73 Ibid., ch. 15.
74 De Trinitate, 4, 1–5.
75 De civitate Dei, bk. 15, 1–6; bk. 18, 49–54; bks. 20–22.
76 Confessions, bk. 12, chs. 23–25, 30–32.

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his De doctrina christiana, where he stresses the importance of the theological virtues, along with the intellectual and moral virtues, in order to
discover and be in tune with the sacred realities revealed in Scripture and
Christian teachings. Modern critical methods assist greatly in establishing
the texts, what Augustine calls the “signs” or “symbols.” But without an
attunement of wisdom, justice, and charity, the reader or listener will not
know the sacred realities to which those signs and texts refer.77
To criticize Augustine’s emphasis upon the virtue of charity as if it
were an arbitrary hermeneutical dodge is to ignore its context in Augustine’s ascent through conversion to the spiritual realities attained only by
the “ratio sublimior” enlightened by faith. It is also to ignore the spiritual
exercises needed in order to understand, however analogously and imperfectly, Divine Triune Presence creating and redeeming the whole of the
universe and history. Augustine’s ascent from disordered and distracted
living to the highest dimensions of his own mind and heart was possible
only because of the Word’s descent in the Incarnation.78 What is at stake
in the attunement of the soul to God through charity is precisely the truth
of the Scriptures. That truth is not relevant only to the times that Jesus
Christ walked the earth with his apostles. It is just as relevant to the
whole of human history. So Augustine can close book 12 of his Confessions acknowledging that in his meditation upon Genesis he has chosen
one of many valid meanings, and the meaning he found is “true, certain,
and good” to the extent that it is inspired by God’s friendship with
Augustine.79 He acknowledges that if his interpretation is what Moses,
the author, intended, then that would be “truest and best, and for that I
must strive.”Yet, if he did not succeed in attaining that historical meaning, still Divine Truth did communicate with Augustine through the
biblical words. For the whole purpose of the inspired Word of God is to
invite humankind into an ever-deeper friendship with the Father,
through the Son, and in the Holy Spirit. Allegory is not arbitrary; it is
carefully guided by the light of faith, hope, and agapic love.
This is why Augustine begins the final book of the Confessions with a
Trinitarian confession.Augustine’s own life, as well as the lives of all faithful Christians, are involved in an ongoing conversation and friendship
with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as “the Creator of the whole of
77 Fortin, “Augustine and the Hermeneutics of Love,” 1–19; also Brian Stock,

Augustine the Reader: Meditation, Self-Knowledge, and the Ethics of Interpretation
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 190–206.
78 See Robert Crouse, “In aenigmate Trinitatis,” 61.
79 Confessions, bk. 12, ch. 30.

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836

creation.”80 Robert McMahon has provided a detailed literary analysis of
the Confessions as Augustine offering books 1 through 9 as a microcosm of
God’s creating/redeeming act.81 Augustine’s life “recapitulates the scope of
the whole cosmos, the sweep of all time, the substance of all Scripture, and
the meaning of history, salvation in God’s Church. Autobiography and
allegory prove carefully paralleled and, thus, deeply integrated.”82
Self-knowledge in Augustine is by no means a Rousseau-like solipsism. No created self can be known apart from the whole of creation in
which he or she has being. So it is not surprising that the eternal God
embracing the entire spatio-temporal universe is central, not only to
Augustine’s Confessions but also to his theology of history. The opening
sentence of the City of God affirms how he will treat of that most glorious city “both as it exists in the course of time, living by faith as it
wanders among the ungodly, and as it is established firmly in its eternal
seat.”83 The Genesis creation account leads off book 11 of the City of
God, which deals with the origin of the city.The beginning of time is the
beginning of the world, and “God, in whose eternity there is no change
whatsoever, is the creator and director of time.” So “the world was not
created in time but with time.”84
Augustine calls attention to an allegorical meaning of Genesis that
directs the mind beyond the scope of sense experience and material light
to a spiritual light of the mind as an intelligible reflection from the light
enjoyed by the blessed in the eternal city of God.85 In this context, the six
days of creation are six steps in the ascent of knowledge up to knowledge
of all animals and man on the sixth day.86 It was such an ascent that
Augustine illustrates in his Confessions, as McMahon’s Augustine’s Prayerful
Ascent has shown. God created the universe by an intelligible and ever80 Ibid., bk. 13, ch. 5: “Ecce trinitas deus meus, pater et filius et spiritus sanctus,

creator universae creaturae.”
81 Augustine’s Prayerful Ascent. The analyses I have given of books 10 through 12

indicate that they are integral to Augustine’s allegorical reading of Genesis.
82 See Robert McMahon, Augustine’s Prayerful Ascent, 114–15.
83 De civitate Dei, bk. 1, 1: “Gloriosissimam civitatem Dei sive in hoc temporum

cursu, cum inter impios peregrinator ex fide vivens, sive in illa stabilitate sedis
aeternae, quam nunc expectat per patientiam.”
84 Ibid., bk. 11, 6:“Cum igitur Deus, in cuius aeternitate nulla est omnino mutatio,
creator sit temporum et ordinator . . . procul dubio non est mundus factus in
tempore, sed cum tempore.”
85 Ibid., bk. 11, 7: “Aut lucis nomine significata est sancta civitas in sanctis angelis
et spiritibus beatis, de qua dicit apostolus: Quae sursum est Hierusalem, mater nostra
aeterna in coelis.”
86 Ibid., bk. 11, 7:“Cum in cognitione omnium animalium terrenorum atque ipsius
hominis, dies sextus.”

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lasting word, not an audible and temporal word. In his theology of history,
it is important for Augustine that one moves beyond the notion that the
human mind is locked within an inexorable continuum of time, as if reality could only be extended in space and time. Such materialism is a dark
prison that hinders the mind from discovering its own nature as an immaterial “imago Dei Trinitatis” and thereby its own participation, eternally in
the beatific City of God in heaven and through the illumination of faith
and reason by an intelligible light while still in time.87
Finally, as the world and all of human history originates from the eternal God, so the end or telos of the world, along with all time and history,
is to return to the eternal and immutable Triune God in the joy of the
everlasting City of God. All of the past, present, and future are present in
this Divine Presence freely creating and redeeming humankind.The evil
and sin of intelligent creatures cannot thwart the divine purpose. The
City of God reveals through the visible mission of the Word Incarnate and
his sacramental and biblical Church a divine intelligibility that guides all
the ages of the world to its God-gifted end.88 Thus in the last book of
the City of God, Augustine begins with the creation of angels and
mankind and the eternal Divine Wisdom ordering all things according to
his purpose. Suffering and evil brought about by sin is overcome, not by
removing them through power, but by the wisdom of the Cross whereon
the Word Incarnate takes into himself all the evil and powers of death and
transforms evil into good, sinners into saints, and death into eternal life
in the resurrection. Christians witness to this wisdom by martyrdom and
taking up the cross of Christ in hope of eternal life.89
Jesus Christ as the Word Incarnate knew what faithful Christians
believe because of his teachings. The more we love someone, the more
we suffer in his or her sufferings.The more we love someone, the more
our hearts are broken when they offend us. Divine Wisdom chose to
redeem us, not by removing evil through power, but by transforming evil
into good through suffering. So the Word became incarnate. He whose
infinite love creates all things, loving them into existence, becomes man
to redeem sinful humans through his passion and death.90
87 Ibid., bk. 11, 26–27, also 10:“Anima quoque ipsa, etiamsi semper sit sapiens, sicut

erit cum liberabitur in aeternum, participatione tamen incommutabilis sapientiae
sapiens erit, quae non est quod ipsa. . . . Non inconuenienter dicatur sic inluminari animam incorpoream luce incorporea simplicis sapientiae Dei.”
88 Ibid., bk. 12, 20–30.
89 Ibid., bk. 22, 1–7, 9–11, 18, 29–30.
90 See Augustine, Enchiridion, 11:“God is so powerful that He can even make good
out of evil”; also see Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae III, q. 9, a. 2; and Guy

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Let us spring ahead to Thomas Aquinas, who, I maintain, was the best
Augustinian in the thirteenth century. He takes Augustine’s reflections on
eternity creating and redeeming time and works out the Christological
and soteriological consequences.The fact that Jesus Christ in his human
consciousness had not the light of faith, as we do, but the light of glory,
in no way dulled his pain, suffering, and sorrow. Since he was not yet
glorified in his humanity, the light of glory did the opposite.The higher
the created consciousness, the greater will be the suffering. As a weak
analogy might put it, someone with a finely tuned ear for music will
suffer more intensely when someone sings off key. Knowing and loving
the Triune God both divinely and humanly, only Christ’s human nature
united hypostatically to the Word could take up into his human mind and
heart each and every human being with all his and her sins and sufferings. Jesus Christ, the divine Person of the Word incarnate suffered more
than all the sufferings of human beings throughout history put together.
Indeed, he gathered into his heart each and every human being in all
the uniqueness of each and every one of us. Every human being is present in Christ’s human mind and heart, as the beloved is present in the
lover, the known present in the knower. The concrete universality of all
the uniquely individual and most painful histories of suffering are present in Christ’s love for each and every one of us on the Cross.91 So it is
that we are baptized into Christ’s death.And so it is that we fill up in our
own lives what is wanting in the sufferings of Christ, for as disciples of
Christ the Church carries forward the visible mission of the Word Incarnate in her rendering present Christ in his paschal mystery.92 This is
indeed a fulfillment beyond any human expectation of the Messiah as the
suffering servant.
Conclusion: Historicity and Historical Knowledge
Bernard Lonergan drew upon Augustine for his fundamental notions of
intellectual, moral, and religious conversion. Indeed, his notion of history
also emphasizes the notion of time as presence.93 Historicity, as Lonergan
Mansini, “Understanding St. Thomas on Christ’s Immediate Knowledge of
God,” Thomist 59 (1995): 91–124.
91 See ST III, q. 10, a. 2; q. 46, aa. 5–8. Note the importance of the highest Christology possible, as it is defined by the great councils, if one is going to take the
concrete histories of suffering seriously. Only God Incarnate can redeem a
human history, each page of which is stained with so much suffering and blood.
92 See ST III, q. 66, a. 2.
93 See Bernard Lonergan, Insight:A Study of Human Understanding (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), 15, 703, 764; also idem, Method in Theology (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1992), 175–80.

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uses the term, has at least three elements: (1) empirically, it is a massive
variable which applies to each and every aspect of human, historical existence; (2) formally, historicity is the realm of human ontology, the world
constituted by meaning and motivated by value; and (3) methodologically, it involves not only continuous change, as studied by genetic methods, but also discrete change or “reversals,” which require, in a way that
nature does not, the development of dialectical methods. Historicity
evokes the high and very distant goal of the German Historical School
to reconstruct interpretatively all the cultures of the human race as
humankind’s ongoing self-realization.94
Historicism claims that historicity leaves us only with incommensurable series of conventions, and so without culture transcending norms.
Such a historicism, however, only attends to the empirical element in
historicity. It holds up historicity as a variable, but does not go on to ask
of what it is a variable. Historicism limits the empirical to data of sense
and, in its misconstrual of nature as conceived by modern naturalism, fails
to acknowledge the human nature verified in what the ancients called
the self-knowledge of the soul, which Lonergan transposes into rational
self-appropriation.95
What is the reality of history? If historical consciousness and critical
history are discoveries of modern culture, we moderns are far from
having understood adequately just what it is we have discovered. Insofar
as historians date events, the use of time as movement is relatively
unproblematic. History raises more questions as we explore just what real
history is and what it is not. The point of Augustine’s eleventh book of
his Confessions, contrary to Paul Ricoeur, is not that measurement runs
up against a neo-Kantian aporia or dilemma, but that measurement is
simply unable to ground the reality of time-as-presence.96
The reality of history is known, for Augustine, in human presence.The
reality of history is known in an ongoing conversation, a dialogue down
the ages, in which the time-span embraces all of humankind. Of course,
neither Augustine nor any other premodern, knew of critical history as
it developed in the modern period. They did not move from history as
presence to the many self-correcting processes of learning that make up
94 See Lonergan’s “Natural Right and Historical Mindedness,” in A Third Collection:

Papers, ed. Fredrick Crowe (New York: Paulist Press, 1985), 169–83.
95 See Ernest Troeltsch, Der Historismus und seine Probleme (Tübingen: JCB Mohr,

1922).
96 See previous sections on this. For Ricoeur’s neo-Kantian misreading of Augus-

tine, cf. Matthew Lamb’s forthcoming Time, Eternity, and the Life of Wisdom
(Naples, FL: Sapientia Press, 2006).

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critical historical knowledge. But by the mind Augustine does not mean
a monadic mind (we humans are not angelic, each in her own species),
but the species-being of humans (anima), which includes all human minds.
When we say that such and such a human event happened in 1274, we
are making a historical judgment. But the past event no longer exists: It
did or did not exist. And our judgment is based, not on our own verification of the event itself, but on a complex nest of beliefs and judgments
that constitute historical experience and historical knowledge.
The reality of the past, as of the future, is experienced, understood, and
known in the ongoing time-span of human presence. This is not idealism, for the present of the past is a series of sequential operations of
historical experience, through historical understanding to historical judgment. In judgment the historian is not “reenacting” the past (à la Collingwood), she or he is grasping that there is sufficient evidence to state that
such and such did or did not occur.There are differences in determining
the object or process going on.When historical judgments require close
attention to empirical data of sense, as in the first phase of critical history,
the status of historical judgments will be the same as that of the empirical sciences. When second-phase critical historical judgments require
attention to the data of consciousness, then it is possible to attain more
than “the best available opinion.”
The presence of the past is “memoria,” the presence of the future is
“expectatio”; both are “praesens” in the present of the “attentive reflection” constitutive of the human present. The notion of presence as
memory, attention, and expectation is not simply that of only one person,
but, as just mentioned, of all concrete patterns of personal and communal and human species-wide operations down the ages.
Lonergan’s two chapters on history and historians in Method in Theology, in my opinion, set up the terms and relations that can transpose and
differentiate for our times the insights of an Augustine into time as presence.97 Indeed, I would say that only by understanding the realities Lonergan is grappling with in those chapters will someone be in a position to
understand adequately Augustine’s meditations on time. In an early
unpublished manuscript, Lonergan speaks of the development of human
intelligence as embracing the totality of the history of humankind.98
97 See Salvio Biolo, La Coscienza nel “De Trinitate” di S. Agostino (Rome: Gregorian

University Press, 1969); also Richard M. Liddy, Transforming Light: Intellectual
Conversion in the Early Lonergan (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1993),
50–73.
98 Bernard Lonergan’s as yet unpublished early Philosophy of History.

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Method in Theology begins a discussion of history by distinguishing
history from nature, and transposing Augustine’s insights into a reflection
on the psychological presence of human awareness as a “now” that is
distinct from time as the measure of motion. Lonergan shows how just as
the “now” of conscious attention is qualitatively different from any measured instant, so anticipation and memory are modes of human presence
and conscious operation that include and go beyond individuals.99 Writing, building, and so on are all acts of constitutive and effective meaning
that others can understand, thereby continuing the presence of the past.
Memory is rendering the past present as past in human history. It is not
confusing the past and the present: Memory is neither archaism nor
anachronism. It would be mistaken to hold that the totality of human
history is present to any one or group of human beings on this earth.
Lonergan is careful to distinguish interpreting the meaning of a text and
knowing historical process. The meaning of a text relates to intentional
acts of communication; the meaning of historical events might well not
have been intended by any of the actors in the events at all.The drama of
human life, while embracing concretely all human actors, is not something
intended by any finite intelligence, least of all by a Hegelian Weltgeist.
This does not infringe on Augustine’s understanding of history as presence, nor does it mean that one has quickly to jump to the Divine Presence. Human consciousness is not exhausted in human intentionality.The
conscious human presence of each and every member of the human race
constitutes what Lonergan terms “historical experience.” Historical experience embraces not only the existential history expressed in ongoing
autobiographies, but also the living traditions by which humans cooperate down the ages in maintaining and changing languages, customs, institutional conversations, and the like. The process from historical
experience to historical knowledge is one of objectification, especially in
critical history, which aims at discovering what had been historically
experienced but not properly known.100
Historical experience does not occur when humans are in a deep and
dreamless sleep. All human acts are conscious acts, but we are conscious
of much more than we know or than we intend. From autobiographies
there is a shift to biographies, in which the “times” in which a particular
“life” was lived receive much more attention than an autobiographer
could have given them in her own self-reflection.The “times” are social
and cultural processes, which are
99 See Lonergan, Method in Theology, 177.
100 Ibid., 195.

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842

not just a sum of individual words and deeds.There exists a developing
and/or deteriorating unity constituted by cooperations, by institutions,
by personal relations, by a functioning and/or malfunctioning good of
order, by a communal realization of originating and terminal values and
disvalues.Within such processes we live out our lives.About them each
of us ordinarily is content to learn enough to attend to his own affairs
and perform his public duties.To seek a view of the actual functioning
of the whole or of a notable part over a significant period of time is the
task of the historian.101

The move from precritical history to critical history, the discovery of
the modern age, set up self-correcting processes of historical learning and
judgment by which the precritical historical knowledge that aimed at
communicating the meanings and values of a particular group or institution, was displaced (not replaced) by an effort to know historical events
as they actually occurred or failed to occur. That is, the functional
specialty of history was established, and it aimed at the development of
historical judgment and knowledge, rather than aiming at communicating or edifying others. The establishment of critical history gives rise to
historians as a profession dedicated to accurate historical knowledge, with
all the manifold modes of institutional patterns of cooperation in faculties, publications, and reviews.
I mentioned above that we have not yet adequately understood just
what it is that was discovered, just what the reality of history is. This is
especially true in regard to theology. I should like to single out three
issues by way of conclusion. First, Lonergan indicates that the process of
critical history, of progressing from historical experience to historical
knowledge, should occur twice. “In the first instance, one is coming to
understand one’s sources. In the second instance, one is using one’s
understood sources intelligently to come to understand the object to
which they are relevant.”102 The first phase of critical history is the very
familiar one of identifying authors or historical agents, situating their
actions and/or works in time and place, studying their historical contexts
and sources, and so on. But all of this is only in order to direct attention
to what should be the critical historian’s main objective—a second phase,
aimed at “understanding the process referred to in one’s sources.”
While a critical historian might not need to know faith, the spiritual
life, or the Mystery of the Trinity to do textual criticism, establish sources,
or compare one set of texts with another set of texts (after all, anyone
101 Ibid., 184.
102 Ibid., 189; on objects, see also 156–58, 161–62.

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who can read can do that!), it is something else if he or she is going to
engage in a history of faith, prayer, or theology as an intellectus fidei. If the
critical historian has no knowledge of God, no familiarity with faith or
prayer, then the critical historian is anything but “critical” in the full sense
of that word.
The so-called critical historian is in fact an ignorant historian when it
comes to the second phase.Then he or she is like a historian of mathematics who knows little about mathematics. Such a person might well be
able to do a smash-up job at comparing various mathematical texts, at
dating and placing them more or less precisely, at working out certain
social and/or cultural processes that were going on at the time the mathematical texts were being produced, at determining who used which text
to get what advantage in this or that situation, how such a text was used
in the production of weapons, or what the weapons did. Undoubtedly,
such a history would be very readable for those who are not interested
in knowing the history of mathematics so much as in knowing what else
was going on when such and such a mathematics was being done. But
no one would claim that such a history would merit the name of a
genuinely critical history of mathematics.
I am afraid that not many genuinely critical histories of theology have
been done yet. And the sad thing is that what passes for critical histories
are usually histories that are critical of theology, that simply assume that
what is really real is a secular horizon in which theology is, at best, a
private opinion and, at worst, a neurotic or psychotic delusion that an
Augustine or a Teresa were caught up in an ever-deepening friendship
with Father, Son, and Spirit.Why is it that theology and religious studies
are so lacking in self-knowledge that they alone, of all the disciplines,
now seem so ready to mistake ignorant histories for critical histories?
This is hardly a docta ignorantia!
I am not stating that one must be moral or holy to write a critical
history of morality or of the saints, any more than I am saying that one
must be an alcoholic to write a critical history of alcoholism. I am saying
one must know the realities operative, the processes occurring, in morality, holiness, or alcoholism. Similarly, if one is going to do a critical history
of faith, prayer, or theology, one had best know something about the realities of faith, prayer, or theology. Instead, what we have is a widespread
conceptualism and what I would call “comparative textology.” Is there not
a very urbane, academic milieu established that studiously avoids moving
from first-phase to second-phase critical history in things religious?
This leads us to a second question regarding history and theology—the
realization that historians are always revealing things about themselves as

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they write their critical histories. If one reflects on the many communities
of critical historians of religion and theology today, it is their knowledge,
their expertise, that is supposed to be up to the task of knowing what has
been going on in the histories of religions, in the histories of theologies
down to the present. The concrete combination of all their expert
knowledge is “the present of the past in memory” as far as critical history
is concerned.
This is why Lonergan, I believe, singled out the functional specialty
history with two chapters.The second chapter is concerned with historians. It seeks to sort out how naive realism, empiricism, and idealism
cannot account for what critical historians are doing when they do good
critical history. Historical understanding does not admit of systematic
objectification, so historians cannot fully abstract from their own
personal, social, and cultural histories. While Lonergan fully acknowledges that critical histories are “ecstatic” in the sense of the good historian’s ability to move out of the viewpoints common to her time and
place in order to understand another, he emphasizes that the specific
difference of historical knowledge from mathematical, scientific, and
philosophic knowledge is that the very complexity of the human history
written about always implicates the historian’s perspective.
Perspectivism is not another name for relativism. Concretely, only God
knows each and every event that occurs in the whole of human history.
Historians are not out for an explanatory understanding in the manner of
mathematicians and natural scientists and philosophers. Historians are
developing within the vast descriptive worlds of common-sense narratives.
Historians are finite, so they select, and what they select is as variable as they
and their own development is variable.103 The errors of historicism and
relativism are a consequence of historians and cultures with widely shared
but mistaken notions about what knowing and objectivity and reality are.
Relativism and historicism result from such cognitional myths.
Lonergan adverts to “the historian’s own self-revelation” in whatever
the historian writes. He calls attention to the way historians, however
admirable in their willingness to correct and change, still “are not detached
from the dominant ideas of their own age.”104 The key is not, however, to
impose some grand theory upon historians but to encourage the selfcorrecting process of learning.This is what history as a functional specialty
is about.There is the ongoing refinement of a historian’s judgments.What

103 Ibid., 216–18.
104 Ibid., 222.

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Lonergan is doing is transposing and differentiating Newman’s illative sense
μ into contemporary critical historical scholarship.
and Aristotle’s phronesis
So it is not surprising that Lonergan ends up repeating himself. He has
a section on “horizons” in the chapter on historians (220–24), and then
has another section “horizons” beginning the next chapter on dialectics
a few pages later (235–37). The horizons of historians are important
precisely in the fields of religion in the twentieth century. The Enlightenment and Romantic ideals of “presuppositionless history” were nothing more than myths meant to feed the many biases operative within
post-Enlightenment cultures.
It was the myth of the Cartesian universal doubt—applied so quickly to
matters Medieval and religious—that promoted the notion that we
moderns are obviously in a position to know reality so much more
adequately than our predecessors. Indeed, in matters theological, it was “the
principle of the empty head,” as Lonergan phrases it, that seems to have
inspired the widespread acceptance of very ignorant historical critiques of
religion.105 Marx hardly did criticism a favor when he remarked that the
presupposition of all criticism is the critique of religion.There was simply
nothing to know about religion except that it was some sort of superstition. Faith was “obviously” opposed to all intelligent, free-thinking men.
We humans can think about salvation and God, just as we can think about
a lot of ideas that do not exist. If idealists thought that God exists, it was
because they thought ideas were more or less real (more if one was an
absolute idealist, like Hegel, less if one was a critical idealist like Kant).
Materialists and empiricists believed that modern sciences had established
that movement was a necessary property of the really real. So it is hardly
surprising that some earnest theologians in an empiricist culture would
affirm that God exists and is real because God eminently moves.
For critical historians to begin to become real theologians, and not just
comparative textologists, they are going to have to develop personally and
communally against the drift of many Enlightenment presuppositions still
biasing modern and postmodern cultures. The dominant ideas of our
cultures, perhaps especially in the academy, are hardly conducive to overcoming the situation in which conservatives do not conserve the traditions
nor the liberals advance the traditions, because neither genuinely know
their traditions.The so-called wars of religion, the religious inauthenticity
of so many who called themselves Christians and religious, evoked, not an
intellectual authenticity but an intellectual laziness in matters religious.The
critical memory of humankind is suffering amnesia in many subjects due
105 Ibid. 156–73.

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to the lack of second phase critical historical knowledge. A genuine critical history of religion has not developed as fully as the critical histories of
other fields.
Third, critical, historical knowing involves analogies between the present
and the past insofar as they are partly similar and partly dissimilar.The differences between past and present might well block an adequate understanding of the past, as in modern rejections of God and revelation based upon a
determinist and materialist misreading of science and the universe. Paul
Ricoeur inquired into The Reality of the Historical Past, indicating how similarity and dissimilarity, the Same and the Other, lead to a notion of “the
Analogue.”106 Analogy involves what he terms a dialectic of identity (Same)
and distancing (Other). Lonergan is especially wary of too quickly affirming similarity between cultures.Transcendental method is anything but the
proverbial Hegelian idealism in which everything is gray. Lonergan warns:
Insofar as evidence is produced for dissimilarity, the historian is talking
history; but in so far as he asserts that there must be similarity or that there
cannot be dissimilarity, then he is drawing upon the climate of opinion in
which he lives or else he is representing some philosophic position.107

Because of the role of analogy in historical knowledge, Lonergan also
adverts to how ideal types do not describe reality, they are theoretical
constructs aimed at making a mass of possible events into a coherent, intelligible system. Because of the rather heavy dose of conceptualism in
modern and postmodern cultures, note the two warnings: (1) even if an
ideal type does hit off the main features of historical reality, there are all
kinds of events and persons it does not explain; there is a danger of reducing history “to what essentially is an abstract scheme”; and (2) the richer and
more illuminating the ideal type, the greater the difficulty of applying it.108
A theory of history needs to be judged, not only on its explanatory power,
but also its scientific, philosophic, or theological basis. Insofar as they understand the dangers of conceptualism and all of the wrong-headed efforts to
produce “big anti-comprehension machines,” historians will, through selfcorrecting processes of learning, come to discern how much “the dominant
ideas of our times” may have distorted their understanding of the past.
As always, when we read historical reconstructions, we are also reading
the historian’s self-revelation. We are not monads peering out at other
monads, sublimely unaffected by the dead.Whenever we study history, we
106 Paul Ricoeur, The Reality of the Historical Past (Milwaukee: Marquette University

Press, 1984).
107 Lonergan, Method in Theology, 225–226.
108 Ibid., 228.

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847

are also studying some aspects of our human existence. Good critical historians welcome us to the real condition of historical inquiry:The historical
presence constitutive of humankind’s historical experience.The analogy of
historical knowledge also makes very clear how we cannot now live in the
past. Archaism, as well as anachronism, fails to do justice to both the past
and the present. If we fail in our conversations with the dead who lived
before us, we shall have only disjunctive and distorted conversations with
our contemporaries and threaten the very existence of our progeny.
The categories of conservative and liberal, reactionary and progressive
are not transcendentals. The transition from classicism to modernism is
sometimes misunderstood as a dismissal of the classics. In fact, classicism
does not do justice to the great classics. Classicism refers to cultural horizons that make normative what is not normative. Classicism misplaced
normativity by locating it in terminology, in languages, in texts, in conceptualism.The classics transcend such misplaced normativity by inviting us to
experience the wonder of intelligence and wisdom in act. Instead of
understanding all cultural achievements as expressions of cooperative
human intelligence in act, a classicist fixes upon either the externals of
language, texts, monuments (if the classicist has an empiricist bent), or upon
the logic of the ideas and concepts (if she or he has an idealist bent).109
We moderns can just as easily fall into the fallacy of misplaced normativity. There is the widespread phenomena of reification: We humans by
our intelligence make things that we then take as more intelligent and/or
normative than intelligence itself.Think of the debates on computers and
“artificial intelligence.” So Lonergan, for example, coupled his critique of
classicism with a strong affirmation of the classics.110 The classics are such
109 See Matthew L. Lamb, “The Notion of the Transcultural in Bernard Lonergan’s

Theology,” Method: A Journal of Lonergan Studies 8 (1990): 48–73.
110 See Lonergan, Method in Theology, 161–62:“The classics ground a tradition.They

create the milieu in which they are studied and interpreted.They produce in the
reader through the cultural tradition the mentality, the Vorverständnis, from which
they will be read, studied, interpreted. Now such a tradition may be genuine,
authentic, a long accumulation of insights, adjustments, re-interpretations, that
repeats the original message afresh for each age. In that case the reader will
exclaim, as did the disciples on the way to Emmaus: ‘Did not our hearts burn
within us, when he spoke on the way and opened to us the Scriptures?’ (Lk
24:32). On the other hand, the tradition may be unauthentic. It may consist in a
watering-down of the original message, in recasting it into terms and meanings
that fit into the assumptions and convictions of those that have dodged the issue
of radical conversion. In that case a genuine interpretation will be met with
incredulity and ridicule, as was St. Paul when he preached in Rome and was led
to quote Isaiah: ‘Go to this people and say: you will hear and hear and never
understand; you will look and look, but never see’ (Acts 28:26).”

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because they invite us to intellectual, moral, and religious conversion.The
reader response is crucial, for if such conversions do not occur, then the
tradition cannot be made genuine just by repeating the texts.The classics
are such because they mediate far more than words, ideas, propositions,
models, paradigms, or worldviews. When correctly understood, they
mediate the realities of ongoing discoveries of nature, of mind, of God.
Christian and Catholic classics insist that the discovery of nature and of
mind is the discovery of the very image of God in us.
It is no surprise, then, that our Catholic classics abound with critiques of
the fallacies of misplaced normativity. For example,Athanasius has Anthony
pose the question to the Greek philosophers:Which is greater, mind (nous)
or letters (grammata)? When they reply that obviously mind is greater since
it creates letters, Anthony symbolically narrates how the Greeks fail to live
this in the idolatry of a culture now decadent and distracted from both
mind and faith in the living God.111 Or take Augustine’s achievements in
stressing the need for agapic love (caritas) in order to know the realities
communicated in the signs of Scripture and holy teachings.There is also his
monumental transposition of Trinitarian theology from the sensible images
of Father generating Son to analogies drawn from the intelligible activities
of understanding, knowing, and loving.The Triune God is Infinite Understanding generating Infinite Truth spirating Infinite Love.112 Or take
Thomas Aquinas who discovered that Aristotle’s “lumen intellectus agentis” or light of active intelligence was the same reality Augustine wrote of
as the illumination of the mind or “desiderium animi intelligendi,” the
desire of the mind to understand. The light of reason is only healed and
intensified by the light of faith and the light of glory. Hence the whole of
theology can be architectonically structured as ongoing questions.113
111 See Athanasius, The Life of Anthony, trans. Robert C. Gregg (New York: Paulist

Press, 1980), 84–99. The Greek title is “The Life and Political Constitution or
Citizenship [politeia] of Our Holy Father Anthony.” On the recent question of
authorship, see Andrew Louth, “St. Athanasius and the Greek Life of Anthony,”
Journal of Theological Studies (1988): 504–9.
112 See books 1 and 2 of Augustine’s De doctrina christiana and books 8 through 10
of his De Trinitate. Concerning the need for spiritual exercises to understand both
the philosophers who taught Augustine to search for mind, as well as the further
spiritual exercises so well narrated in books 5 through 9 of Augustine’s Confessions, see Pierre Hadot, Exercises spirituels et philosophie antique, 2nd ed. (Paris:
Etudes Augustiniennes, 1987); and Pierre Paul Courcelle, Connais toi-meme de
Socrate a Saint Bernard (Paris: Etudes Augustiniennes, 1974).
113 Bernard Lonergan, Verbum:Word and Idea in Aquinas (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1995). It was Lonergan’s second-phase critical-historical retrieval of Aquinas
that enabled him to transpose his “reaching up to the mind of Aquinas” into his
invitation to intellectual self-appropriation in Insight.

Temporality and History

849

Our minds are the very image of God in us, the God who enlightens
every human being who ever has, is, and will come into this world. We
need cathedrals of the mind wherein we can be forgiven by God and one
another as we deepen our intellectual, moral, religious reorientations
toward truth, goodness, holiness. We need cathedrals of the mind in
which we can address the massive injustices of our times, not with mere
moralisms that hurl invectives, but with intellectually sound alternatives
that address the short-sighted stupidity that grounds the injustice. For
justice to flourish, practical wisdom is needed. To bind up the massive
wounds of injustice requires both the compassion of the corporal works
of mercy and the enlightenment of the spiritual works of mercy.
Finally, we need cathedrals of the mind wherein we can experience how
our own most intimately personal questions, insights, and orientations are
intrinsically communal and interpersonal with both the concrete universality of the community of the entire human race and with the Three
Persons who are more intimate to each of us than even we are to ourselves.
All understanding involves a suffering, a pati, and it is only when the light
of our minds is healed and intensified by the light of faith that we can avoid
the temptations to cynicism, skepticism, and despairing nihilism when,
from all around us and deep within us, come the cries of the victims.
Only with the strength of the Spirit can the extended passion narratives of all human history narrated in the new covenant be accepted as
Gospel, as good news of salvation in the glory of the resurrection. Incorporated within the Paschal Victim are all the victims of history, some of
whose stories grace us from the opening pages of Genesis to the last
pages of Revelation.They teach us a wisdom that is of God, a wisdom of
the Blessed “who have come out of great suffering and been washed in
the blood of the Lamb.They shall neither hunger nor thirst nor suffer any
more, for God shall wipe away every tear from their eyes.” (Rev 7:14, 17).
If the depth of human suffering is to birth understanding, it is because of
the kenosis of the Divine Wisdom who alone can bring good out of evil,
grace out of sin, life out of death.
This is why the dialogue between Judaism and Catholicism is so important. Catholicism cannot remain true to the reality of all history redeemed
by Jesus Christ in his Cross and Resurrection, if it caves in to the relativist pluralism too evident in the document “Reflections on Covenant
and Mission.”114 Indeed, it would be my contention that Judaism could
not remain true to the reality of her covenant either. What both Jewish
114 See Avery Cardinal Dulles’s criticisms of the document “Covenant and Mission

Falsely Ascribed to the Office of Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs of the
National Conference of Catholic Bishops,” America 187 (October 21, 2002).

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Matthew L. Lamb

and Catholic theologians need to do is to explore the wisdom of their
premodern traditions to come to an understanding no longer distorted
by the modern and postmodern lenses provided by our post-EnlightenN&V
ment cultures.

Nova et Vetera, English Edition,Vol. 4, No. 4 (2006): 851–856

851

Worship, the Bond Between Time/Space
and Eternity: A Reflection on the Essays
of Kenneth Schmitz and Matthew Lamb
L AWRENCE E. F RIZZELL
Seton Hall University
South Orange, New Jersey

Introduction
T HESE PAPERS contain the fruit of scholarship that has matured
over decades, quite clearly wedding intellectual pursuits with a faith
expressing itself in prayer. Only this combination of reasoning and reflection on the Word can produce theology. Kenneth Schmitz’s review of
philosophical insights into language and writing is necessarily focused on
the world of Greece and Rome. It would be valuable to have scholars
immersed in the Hebrew language and traditional Jewish culture to reflect
upon the same issues. At a conference on the trivium and quadrivium in
medieval Europe, Dean Arthur Hyman of Yeshiva University was asked to
comment. His response was brief:“This was not the Jewish approach.”
Recalling the genius and limitations of a language to convey insights
into the meaning of life and its mysteries, we acknowledge the role of
translation in conveying insights between people of different cultures.
With the tools of modern scholarship, quite precise translations are
placed at the service of philosopher and theologian, yet further discourse
and dialogue will enrich the ways to serve those striving to penetrate the
revealed Word. Jewish scholars immersed in the millennial traditions of
their communities can make a valuable contribution to this task.
Preambles to Worship
Before reflecting on the Word in worship, it may be helpful to touch on
the human dilemma of misplaced relationships that thwart an authentic
relationship with God, that is, the problem of idolatry.

Lawrence E. Frizzell

852

Three major areas of the human experience involve temptations to
substitute creatures (and especially self) for God at the core of our existence. These are possessions, pleasure (intellectual and sensual), and
power.The antidotes to these dangers are a spirit of poverty (self-control
regarding possessions), temperance, and obedience.These attitudes toward
the various aspects of the created world may be acquired through mature
human insight, but are greatly enhanced by the theological virtues.
Potential idols

Response

Strength provided by

Possessions
Pleasure—intellectual or sensual
Power

Poverty
Temperance
Obedience

Faith
Hope
Charity

The evangelical counsels make sense within a context of faith, orienting the community and its members to the richer experience of life as
communion, now and forever, with the living God. Listening to the Word
of God and to the real needs of fellow creatures, the potential leader
aspires to serve the Creator and to exercise the role of viceroy and steward in regard to others.1
The theological virtues provide the strength required to be consistent
in placing God at the center of daily life.Through the community experience of worship, the individual can order the details whereby one fulfils
an adult vocation, open to the wider experience of cooperation with
others in a mission aimed toward common goals.
The theological vision of the biblically oriented community can be
described as a relationship with the one God as Creator and Judge, with
neighbor, self, and the natural world.2
Earthly Correspondence to the Heavenly Model
Unique to the biblical heritage is the belief that God, who created
human beings in the divine image and likeness, also revealed aspects of
the divine Mystery, the plan whereby creation will come to its fulfillment
through human cooperation.
Israel’s neighbors believed in a cyclical view of history replicating the
natural pattern of the seasons. Rejecting idolatrous implications of nature
1 This chart and comments are taken from my essay, “Mary’s Magnificat: Sources

and Themes,” Marian Studies 50 (1999): 55.
2 See Asher Finkel,“Biblical, Rabbinic, and Early Christian Ethics,” in Jewish-Christian

Encounters over the Centuries: Symbiosis, Prejudice, Holocaust, Dialogue, ed. Marvin Perry
and Frederick M. Schweitzer (New York: Peter Lang, 1994), 63.

Worship, the Bond Between Time/Space and Eternity

853

worship, Moses and other prophets proclaimed a linear interpretation of
creation and history, moving from Aleph to Tav (from Alpha to Omega).
This thrust of history toward the final days is balanced by the belief in
a correspondence between this world and the celestial order. Moses was
instructed to build the tent of meeting, the ark of the Covenant, and so
on (Ex 25–29) according to the pattern (tabnît) that was shown to him
on the Mountain (Ex 25:40, 26:30, etc.). The only other reality created
after the heavenly model is the human being (Gen 1:26–28, 5:1, 9:6, Ps 8).
The experience of worship in front of the Tabernacle and later in the
Jerusalem Temple drew people’s attention to the mysterium tremendum et
fascinans, introducing them in some way into communion with the heavenly court (see Is 6:1–8).This drama of worship should lead to an appreciation of every human being, created in the divine image and challenged
to activate this reality through the exercise of human dignity. Essential to
this vocation and mission is the challenge to imitate God (see Lev 19:2;
Ex 34:6–7; 1 Jn 4:8–16).The call to develop this correspondence to the
heavenly model begins with the Temple and the city of Jerusalem
(“city/vision of peace” in popular etymology). Because the rabbinic
pronunciation of the city is Yerushlaim (in the dual), the call to imitate the
heavenly model is clear.The dictum “Pray for the peace of Jerusalem” (Ps
122:6) draws attention to the essential divine dimension of peacemaking,
that aspect of the human vocation that reveals people to be the sons of
God. An integral aspect of developing the expression of divine charity in
the human order is the act of forgiveness. Jesus drew attention to the
movement from prayer into the fabric of daily life by a call to correspond
to the divine Model. “Forgive us . . . as we forgive . . .” is the only petition of the Lord’s Prayer that has both a commentary and a parable to
illustrate its importance (Matt 6:12, 14; 18:23–35).
From this Age/World to the Age/World to Come
μ can mean “permanent” (for example, a permaThe Hebrew term ‘ôlam
nent blemish renders a lamb unfit for sacrifice) but in certain texts the
context conveys the idea of eternity (for example, Ps 41:14). Qumran
μ
documents use the plural ‘ôlamîm
to designate eternity. Sometime in the
first century, Pharisees and Christians conveyed the ideas of time and
μ (and its Greek equivalent) to embrace the concept
space by using ‘ôlam
“world” as well as “time in orientation toward eternity.” This inclusiveness/ambiguity came to be conveyed by the Latin saeculum as well.3
3 See Anthony Tomasino,“ ‘olam,” New International Dictionary of Old Testament Theol-

ogy and Exegesis, vol. 3, ed.Willem A.Van Gemeren (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1997), 345–51.

Lawrence E. Frizzell

854

The biblical experience of pilgrimage exemplified the realization of
Israel’s teachers that time is moving toward a sacred goal.4 After the establishment of Jerusalem as David’s capital and God’s chosen place for the
divine Name/Presence to dwell, this city and its Temple were the focus
for both pilgrimage and all prayer (Dn 6:10). At some point the Temple
mount came to be associated with the place of Abraham’s sacrifice of
Isaac (Gn 22; 2 Chr 3:1). Later legend described the place of the Temple
as omphalos mundi, the rock underneath sealed with the divine Name as a
“stopper” to keep the waters of the abyss from inundating the earth.5
Standing thus over the center of the earth, the Temple, focus of Israelite
worship, was linked to the creation of the world and became as well the
context for Israel to experience the heavenly court.
Through spiritual preparation and a journey of a group living simply
in community while enduring hardship and possible dangers, pilgrims
were disposed to beg for forgiveness and to ask for direction in order to
live the covenant/commandments more adequately.They would return to
the ordinary responsibilities of life with a renewed sense of their service
to God and neighbor. At some point before the time of Jesus, the Sacred
Scriptures were proclaimed weekly in a three-year cycle, often in houses
of prayer. The Pharisees aspired to teach the laity to imitate the ways of
priests in the Temple. Certain practices made the home a small sanctuary
so that daily life would be imbued with a realization of God’s presence.
The following chart expresses the “parallels” between Temple and home
with an emphasis on the dignity of the human person in God’s image.6
Place
Agents
Focus

Temple
Priest-People
Altar

Field-Kitchen
Farmer-Homemaker
Table-Bed

Home
Husband-Wife

Emphasizing the doctrine of resurrection, the Pharisees expressed faith
in the unity of the human person, body and soul sharing an eternal destiny.
Death was not “shedding this mortal coil” but a temporary separation until
the Day of Judgment.This respect for the human person was rooted in the
creative work of God, who saw that it was good, very good (Gn 1:10, 18,
25, 31). In a discussion of the serious responsibility of judges when the
penalty for a crime was death, the sages remarked: “A king stamps many
coins with one seal, and they are all alike; but the King of Kings, the Holy
4 See my essay “Pilgrimage: A Study of the Biblical Experience,” Jeevadhara 71

(1982): 358–67.
5 Daniel Sperber,“On Sealing the Abyss,” Journal of Semitic Studies 11 (1966): 168–74.
6 See my essay “Mary and the Biblical Heritage,” Marian Studies 46 (1995): 32.

Worship, the Bond Between Time/Space and Eternity

855

One blessed be He, has stamped each human being with the seal of the first
man, yet not one is like his fellow” (Mishnah Sanhedrin IV:5).
The sabbath is understood as an anticipation of the eternal reward of
the righteous, seen as an experience of rest in the divine Presence.7
The New Testament conveys a message that draws major themes from
these liturgical and domestic experiences. The Sadducees ridiculed the
doctrine of resurrection because they could not discern it in the Torah of
Moses. Jesus responded by referring to the passage about the burning
bush (Mt 22:23–33), implying that in the revelation of the divine Name
and of God’s relationship with the Patriarchs one can find hints of basic
teachings about human destiny. Life as communion with God transcends
the mystery of death.8
Past, Present, and Future in Worship
The intersection of space and time is expressed in pilgrimage to
Jerusalem for the three great feasts (Passover, Weeks, and Booths; Dt
16:1–17).The agricultural/pastoral origins of these harvest festivals were
taken into the Israelite commemoration of the departure from Egypt, the
giving of Covenant/Torah at Mount Sinai, and the wandering in the
desert. Grateful recollection of God’s mighty deeds involved a narration
of the past with gestures and symbols that permitted each generation to
declare to the next: “This is what the Lord did for me when I departed
from Egypt” (Ex 13:8). The efficacy of prayerful commemoration is
μ (from zakar,“he
μ
rooted in its sacrificial dimension.The zikkarôn
remembered”) involved sacrifice of animals to be consumed in a feast, for which
the Passover meal was the model. Among the symbolic foods, the lamb,
unleavened bread, and bitter herbs were reminders of past afflictions,
whereas the wine pointed to future joy.The meal prolonged the thanksgiving sacrifice of the Temple and the narration (Haggadah) of the
Exodus enabled people to participate in the benefits experienced by their
ancestors. Historical events are time-bound, yet the divine attributes
manifested in an event like the Exodus transcend time, and God’s
wisdom, power, and mercy touch hearts that are receptive in the contexts
of worship.9
7 See Asher Finkel,“Sabbath as the Way to Shalom in the Biblical Tradition,” Jour-

nal of Dharma 11 (1986): 115–23.
8 See my essay “Religious Experience and Interpretation: A Christian Perspec-

tive,” Journal of Dharma 5 (1980): 82–84.
9 For the application of these liturgical themes to Jesus, see my essay,“Temple and

Community: Foundations for Johannine Spirituality,” Mystics of the Book, ed.
Robert A. Herrera (New York: Peter Lang, 1993), 179–96.

856

Lawrence E. Frizzell

The Last Supper, with the command of Jesus to commemorate his
sacrificial death and triumphant resurrection, is recalled in the narration
–
of key words and actions of Jesus. This zikkarôn,
adapting the language,
gestures, and symbols of the Passover meal to the unique response of Jesus
to the Father’s will, provided the context for Christian faith in the Paschal
mystery, the exodos (Lk 9:31) that he accomplished in Jerusalem.
For Christians, the death and resurrection of Jesus is the “hour,” the
past event through which divine blessings are mediated. The present
moment in any place graced by the presence of the Son of Man is open
to the heavenly court (see Jn 1:51, referring to the dream of Jacob at Beth
El).The Lamb of God, whose self-giving is for the forgiveness of sin ( Jn
1:29), is preparing the Church and her members for the heavenly
nuptials. In each invitation for the faithful to receive Holy Communion
there is an expression of our hope to participate in the Marriage Supper
of the Lamb. “Blessed are those who are called to his Supper” (see Rv
19:9).There is no reason for ad libitum invitations here!
During the course of history the Church brings each generation of
the faithful to the worship that in Christ unites them with the heavenly
Temple (see Is 6:3 and Rv 11:19). However, when history is consummated, and the New Jerusalem comes down from heaven as a Bride
adorned for her husband (Rv 21:2), symbols such as the heavenly Temple
and ark of the covenant will disappear (Rv 21:22). The fullness of
communion with the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb in the Spirit
bring sacramental realities to their completion, because God will be all in
N&V
all (1 Cor 15:28).10

10 For further reflection on themes of this response, see Henry Chadwick, “The

Calendar: Sanctification of Time,” Irish Theological Quarterly 66 (2001): 99–107; F.
Manns, “Liturgia ebraica e liturgia cristiana a confronto: problemi di metodologia,” Ephemerides Liturgicae 116 (2002): 404–18; F. Manzi “Hic veri templi adumbratur mysterium,” Ephemerides Liturgicae 116 (2002): 129–74; A. M. Triacca,
“ ‘L’Hodie’ liturgico tra tempo ed eternità: Contributo per una visuale cristiana
del tempo,” Ephemerides Liturgicae 116 (2002): 376–80; and “Concezione cristiana
del tempo. Il ‘tempo della salvezza,’ ” in Giovanni e tempo:Tra crisi, nostalgie esperanza, ed. R.Tonelli and I. M. Garcia (Rome: L.A. Salesianum, 2000), 141–76.

Nova et Vetera, English Edition,Vol. 4, No. 4 (2006): 857–890

857

Election, Covenant, and Law
F RANCIS M ARTIN
John Paul II Cultural Center
Washington, DC

A New Atmosphere
E VERYONE RECOGNIZES that the Vatican Council II document
Nostra Aetate marked a profoundly new era in Catholic–Jewish relationships. It is one of the few documents from the council that caught the
Catholic Church unprepared. It has been observed that Nostra Aetate
came both too late and too soon. It was too late to change the environment that led to the Shoah. It was too soon because there had not been
that intensity of theological preparation for this turning-point declaration
that had preceded the other documents of Vatican II.1
This is not to say that there was no work being done by Jewish and
Christian scholars before 1965. Many point to the years 1850–1910 as
“the golden age of Jewish studies,” and the names of L. Zunz, A. Geiger,
W. Bacher, S. Schechter, and H. Strack come readily to mind.The following decades produced men such as J. Lauterbach, L. Ginsberg, both I. and
J. Heineman, J. Bonsirven, G. F. Moore, to be followed by an everincreasing number of scholars, both Jewish and Christian, who were
clearly aware of each other and occasionally collaborated. Nevertheless,
the famous number 4 of Nostra Aetate, the pontificate of John Paul II, and
the corresponding reception by the Jewish community along with their
own initiatives have provided a stimulus and created a climate that promises to allow for a depth of mutual respect and collaboration hitherto
unattainable.
1 Cf.Thomas Stransky, “The Declaration on Non-Christian Religions,” in Vatican

II: An Interfaith Appraisal, ed. John Miller (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre
Dame, 1966), 335–48.

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Francis Martin

There is a way in which this new attitude can be summed up in the
famous statement of Pope John Paul II delivered in the synagogue at
Mainz, November 17, 1980:
The first dimension of this dialogue, that is, the meeting between the
people of God of the Old Covenant, never revoked by God, [cf. Rom
11:29], and that of the New Covenant, is at the same time a dialogue
within our Church, that is to say, between the first and second parts of
her Bible. In this connection the directives for the application of the
conciliar document Nostra aetate say: “The effort must be made to
understand better everything in the Old Testament that has its own
permanent value . . . since this value is not wiped out by the later interpretation of the New Testament, which, on the contrary, gave the Old
Testament its full meaning, so that it is a question rather of reciprocal
enlightenment and explanation.”2

From a theological point of view the most challenging and important
phrase in the above statement is the description of the Old Covenant as
“never revoked by God,” and second, the citation of the directives that
speak of the “permanent value” of the Old Testament that “is not wiped
out by the later interpretation of the New Testament.” These statements
challenge Christian theologians to look at the ambiguity in our present
and past positions in this regard, to see and label positions that are supersessionist, but most of all to elaborate a theological position that takes
account of the genuine newness of the New Testament while respecting
the permanent value of the Old Covenant that has never been revoked.
This study is a step in such a theological task. It is a work of retrieval,
that is, it attempts to look with new eyes at the three realities of Election,
Covenant, and Law as they present themselves to a historical-theological
investigation. For the most part I will restrict myself to the biblical text,
though at times I will look at some representatives of the Christian tradition since their views on this particular issue reveal an understanding that
we, at times, have lost. The next step called for in this process is a more
direct reflection on the unrevoked Covenant with the Jewish people. I will
offer some suggestions at the end of this study that may prove useful in
moving ahead with “the meeting between the people of God of the Old
Covenant, never revoked by God, and that of the New Covenant.”
There will be four parts to this investigation. First, I will consider election (part I) and then covenant (part II). In part III I will reflect on Torah
and its capacity in later thought to embrace the previous two realities.
2 Eugene J. Fisher and Leon Klenicki, eds., Spiritual Pilgrimage: Texts on Jews and

Judaism 1979 –1995: Pope John Paul II (New York: Crossroad, 1995), 13.

Election, Covenant, and Law

859

Finally, in part IV, I will reflect briefly on the notion of “new” and offer
some suggestions for moving ahead toward a clarification of Christian
thought on the relation between the Covenant, Old and New.
Part I: Election
Basic Convictions
There are two convictions that permeate the thought of Israel, though
the chronology of their development to full clarity is still debated. The
first is that there is one God and he is responsible for the existence of
everything else. As Claus Westermann has expressed it:
The object of creation is without exception something outside the
divine.The action of God as creator is directed exclusively to the world.
God is outside creation; to be created means to be not—god.3

The second conviction is that this one God has chosen Israel as his
people in a special way. This second tenet would be impossible without
the first. To choose (bh_ r) implies the ability to single out one reality in
preference to others.4 This is an action of the one choosing. For YHWH
to choose a people implies that he has sovereignty enough to effect his
will regarding the people of the earth. This is particularly clear in the
Deuteronomic tradition, but it is expressed elsewhere as well:
Although the heaven and the heaven of heavens belong to YHWH your
God (along with) the earth and all that is on it, yet YHWH set his heart
on your fathers, loving them, and He chose their seed after them, that
is you, from among all the peoples, as it is today. (Dt 10:14–15)
Now, if you really heed my voice and keep my covenant, you shall
be to me a treasured possession out of all the peoples of the earth—for
all the earth is mine. (Ex 19:5)5
Hear this word that YHWH has spoken against you, O people of
Israel, against the whole family which I brought up out of the land of
Egypt: “You only have I known of all the families of the earth; therefore I will punish you for all your iniquities.” (Amos 3:1–2)
3 Claus Westermann, Genesis 1–11, trans. John J. Scullion (Minneapolis: Augsburg,

1984), 26.
4 See Jan Bergman, Helmer Ringgren, and Horst Seebas, “bachar,” in Theological

Dictionary of the Old Testament, vol. 2, ed. G. Johannes Botterweck and Helmer
Ringgren (Grand Rapids, MI:William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1975),
73–87.
5 For the difficulties of assigning a source to this part of the narrative, see John I.
Durham, Exodus (Waco,TX:Word Books, 1987), 260.

Francis Martin

860

These two aspects of Israel’s thought are expressed by Martin Buber in the
following way:
I see the soul of Judaism as turning round two centers like an ellipse.
One center is the fundamental experience that God is wholly
raised above man, that his throne is out of the sight of man, and that yet
He is present with these human beings who are absolutely incommensurable with Him in an immediate relationship, and that He is turned
towards them.To know both at the same time in such a way that they
cannot be divided from each other constitutes the life in the very heart
of every believing Jewish soul.6

The last remark I wish to make here is of a more directly theological
nature.All three of the terms—creation, election, and covenant—describe
a free and unilateral action of God.This is even true, with some nuances,
in regard to the Deuteronomic view that expresses an understanding of
the Sinai Covenant that appears to be reciprocal.7 The unilateral action
of God the Creator presents us with a special theological problem when
we try to consider the manner in which God establishes a special relation
with a people and with individuals within the people such as Abraham
and David. How is it that God can establish a special, historical relation
with some creatures and not with others, even if the relation is destined
to become the means of having others one day share that relation?
The answer lies in understanding the different ways in which God can
be present to his creatures. As Aquinas points out, God is present to his
creation in three ways. He is present as cause of all that is; he is present as
the object of knowledge and love in those human beings whose level of
existence has been raised or intensified by grace; and he is present personally through the grace of union in the covenant between his eternal Word
and the elect humanity of Jesus.8 Thus, the whole economy of salvation,
which began historically in a particular way with the call of Abraham, is
Christological. It is for this reason, as I hope to show, that a supersessionist
view of the relation between the Jewish People and the Christian Church
is theologically untenable. I wish now to develop the notions of election
and covenant and then seek to demonstrate their Christological character.

6 Martin Buber, Mamre: Essays in Religion, trans. Greta Hort (Westport, CT: Green-

wood Press, 1946; reprint, 1970), 20–21.
7 I will treat this below.
8 Summa theologiae I, q. 8, a. 3, co. and ad 4, where he mentions the “singularis

modus essendi Deum in hominine per unionem,” which he will consider in ST
III, q. 2.

Election, Covenant, and Law

861

Election
Two realities stand on either side of covenant. Election is anterior to
covenant, at least logically, and Torah follows from covenant and becomes
in some way the summary of the reality of covenant.Very often, particularly but not exclusively in Jewish eyes, these “sides” of covenant become
covenant itself. The first notion expresses God’s love for his people, and
the second the people’s returning love for God.
In the canonical text, covenant begins with Noah, but election in the
strict sense begins with Abraham—”in the strict sense” because election
refers to God’s choice and formation of a people to be his own.This begins
with the choice of Abraham as the father of the people, continues in the
lives of those who follow him, that is,“the Fathers,” is concretized at Sinai,
and then perpetuated by the prophets and kings who preserved Israel’s
identity as a people constituted by a relation to God.We are dealing here
with events that transpired in history, though their actuality remains quite
impervious to the discipline of modern historiography.We are met with an
action of God in history interpreted by an action of God in the composition of the subsequent tradition and its Scripture.This is what Dei Verbum
(no. 2) meant by describing the “economy of revelation” as taking place
“gestis verbisque intrinsece inter se connexis” so that “the works accomplished by God in the history of salvation manifest and confirm the teaching and the realities signified by the words, while the words proclaim the
works and bring to light the mystery contained in them.”9
The action of God by which he chose to establish and maintain a
particular relation to a particular people manifests itself in a series of
actions that are revealed to us in “words” that have an intrinsic connection with the works and bring to light the mystery contained in these
works.The verb bhr is one of the words that mediate the mystery.There
are other words that mediate this same mystery, which is a mystery
precisely because it pertains to the one plan of salvation whose source
and culmination is Jesus Christ. I would like to illustrate this by looking
at the unique manner in which Israel used the spousal image to mediate
an awareness of being chosen by YHWH to have a unique relationship to
him. I then want to reflect theologically on this mystery of God’s choice.
9 This teaching is admirably summed up by Hans Urs von Balthasar: “The grad-

ual clothing of the events within the folds of Scripture is not only an inevitable
drawback (because the people of the Orient of that time did not know, in fact,
an historiography in the modern understanding of the term), but assuredly also
this corresponds unqualifiedly to a positive intention of the Spirit.” Hans Urs
von Balthasar, “Il Senso Spirituale della Scrittura,” Ricerche Teologiche 5 (1994): 7.

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The Spousal Image10
There is no evidence that any other people ever expressed its relationship
to its gods in terms of a marriage relation.11 No other god demanded
absolute and exclusive fidelity: He was but one power in a large panoply
of forces. No other god chose a people for his own as YHWH did Israel.
The obligation of exclusive fidelity on the part of Israel and the promise
of protection and care on the part of YHWH found its closest human
counterpart in the marriage relation between man and woman. Thus, it
is not surprising that terms that were originally applied to one of these
relationships were easily transposed to apply to the other. I say “easily”
because there is in the nature of the Hebrew language, especially as it
became the vehicle of revelation, an innate capacity to form metaphors
and analogies. It suffices for instance to consider the semantic field of the
root ’hb, which can be translated as “to love,” but which can be found
operative in fields as diverse as romantic love and political alliance.12
The capacity to employ apparently extraneous material and to use
language in this allusive way is well described by W. Norris Clarke:
There is an indispensable role played in our thought and language by
those systematically vague and elastic terms that alone can catch the similarities and affinities running all up and down and across the universe,
especially between the realms of matter and spirit, cosmos and psyche.
This is the secret life of the mind nourishing all metaphor, poetry, and art:
the insight into authentic similarities and affinities across the universe.13

In literary terms we are dealing with an “expansive” or “sunken image,”
that is, an image that is latent and not explicitly articulated even while it
is operative and determines the line of thought.14
10 In the pages which follow I am incorporating material from Francis Martin,

“Israel as the Bride of YHWH: A Story of Sin and Renewed Love,” Anthropotes
16 (2000): 129–54.
11 See, for instance, Elaine June Adler, “The Background for the Metaphor of
Covenant as Marriage in the Hebrew Bible” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, 1990).
12 One may consult, for instance, Luis Alonso Schökel, Diccionario Biblico HebreoEspañol (Madrid:Trotta, 1994); and for a special accent on the political overtones,
William Moran,“The Ancient Near Eastern Background of the Love of God in
Deuteronomy,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 25 (1963): 77–87.
13 William Norris Clarke, The Philosophical Approach to God:A Neo-Thomist Perspective (Winston-Salem, NC:Wake Forest University, 1979), 52.
14 Still valuable for a discussion of the various functions of image is the study by
René Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature (New York: Harcourt, Brace,
1948), esp. ch. 15.

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The remarkable interpenetration of images evoked by the vocabulary of
covenant and marriage points to an intuition, deep in the heart and soul of
Israel, that could discern an analogy between the relation of YHWH and his
people and that of a husband and wife. Both were based on a choice, in
that culture predominantly that of the husband, both demanded exclusive
fidelity on the part of the one chosen. “Love,” as covenant fidelity and as
deep affection, characterizes the relation, and finally, infidelity is “faithlessness,” “treachery,” “adultery,” and “profligacy.” It is impossible for us to
determine when and how this image-analogy first took root in Israel. It
was based on a metaphysical intuition that arose as a metaphor and was
developed by many users of the Hebrew language, some of whom are
represented in the sacred text.Though it is impossible at this point to assess
how explicit the terminological overlap had made the image, it is clear that
the prophesying of Hosea brought this form of discourse to a critical mass
and made of it a privileged symbol of YHWH’s covenant choice and Israel’s
covenant responsibility.
Analogia Entis Historici
I wish here to initiate a discussion based on the insight into God’s relation
with Israel and then with the Church expressed by the general term “election.”This necessitates an exercise in the “philosophy of the concrete.” By
“the concrete” here I mean the actually and uniquely existing individuum.
Consideration of the concretely existing reality means, paradoxically,
moving away from a determinedly anti-transcendent view of reality to
one that is open to the possibility of creation. Only an understanding of
creation can render the actually existing concrete reality intelligible. In
addition such a move is in the direction of biblical thought since it is in
the direction of giving primacy to that revelation of Being that has taken
place in history. As John Paul II expresses it in Fides et ratio (no. 11):
God’s Revelation is therefore immersed in time and history. Jesus
Christ took flesh in the “fullness of time” (Gal 4:4); and two thousand
years later, I feel bound to restate forcefully that “in Christianity time
has a fundamental importance.”15 It is within time that the whole work
of creation and salvation comes to light; and it emerges clearly above all
that, with the Incarnation of the Son of God, our life is even now a
foretaste of the fulfillment of time which is to come (cf. Heb 1:2).

The prime analogate of this revelation of Being is Jesus on the Cross
as he is engaged in giving his life to the Father in an act of love. All the
15 Apostolic letter “Tertio millennio adveniente” (November 10, 1994), Acta Apos-

tolicae Sedis 87 (1995): 11, no. 10.

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saving acts of God participate in this act, not only notionally but also in
the order of being.This, among other things, is the foundation of what is
called the “spiritual sense” of Scripture, which is based on the relation in
being between an act of God in the life of Israel and God’s act in
Christ.16 Jesus’ act of love on the Cross establishes a new order of being,
expressed both seminally, in creation and the covenant, beginning with
the call of Abraham, and eschatologically, in the final consummation
when the plan of the Father to bring all things under Christ as Head
(Eph 1:10) will be completely realized.
In order to try to render this mystery more intelligible it will help to
look briefly at what is meant by participation. Gregory Rocca, paraphrasing Cornelio Fabro, states: “Participation is especially the ontology
of analogy, and analogy is the epistemology and semantics of participation.”17 Participation is usually divided into predicamental and transcendental. In predicamental participation, two realities are said to participate
in the same notion: One may be the exemplar of the other. In transcendental participation, one reality (God) possesses something totaliter
(“Whatever is totally something does not participate in it but is essentially the same as it”),18 while another reality shares in that something but
not essentially. Here there is efficient causality in addition to exemplar
causality. Participation in this case involves a dependence in being between
the first reality and the second. As the phrase cited above indicates, this
second type of participation is the “ontology of analogy,” allowing God’s
being to be correctly though inadequately spoken of on the basis of those
perfections in creatures that participate, through God’s efficient causality,
in something of which he is the ineffable exemplar.

16 While this is not the place to enter into a discussion of this point, it is important

to note that the foremost proponent of the spiritual sense of Scripture in our
time, Henri de Lubac, insisted that the “allegorical” or spiritual sense is found in
the events: “Précisons d’ailleurs aussitôt que cette allégorie à decouvrir, on ne la
trouvera pas à proprement parler dans le texte, mais dans les réalités dont le texte
parle; non pas dans l’histoire en tant que récit, mais dans l’histoire en tant
qu’événement.” Henri de Lubac, Exégèse médiévale: Les quatre sens de l’Écriture
(Paris:Aubier, 1959), 493.This whole passage, with its patristic quotations is well
worth reading.
17 Gregory Rocca, “Analogy as Judgment and Faith in God’s Incomprehensibility:
A Study in the Theological Epistemology of Thomas Aquinas” (Ph.D. diss.,
Catholic University of America, 1989), 537. Rocca is condensing the thought of
Cornelio Fabro, Participation et causalité selon S.Thomas d’Aquin (Louvain: Publications Universitaires de Louvain, 1961), 634–40.
18 Thomas Aquinas, Sententiae libri Metaphysicorum, 1.10.154.

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In the light of the Incarnation a new dimension of reality is made available to humanity. I would wish to call this “economic participation.” Just as
transcendental participation is an ontological reality now seen because of
the revelation of creation, so economic participation is an ontological reality because of that order of being brought about by God in the Incarnation.We have seen that Israel’s possession of a covenantal relation to YHWH
is unique. Though it may not be apparent from certain of the verbal
manners in which the relation is expressed, the use of spousal terms is
inspired by the fact that, in faith, Israel knew itself to have a unique relation to the One who is God.Thus the history of Israel participates in and
realizes in a proleptic manner the mystery of the Incarnation and its own
highpoint in time: the death and resurrection of Jesus. There is thus an
economic participation in which all God’s saving acts in human history are
related to the supreme act, the Cross, which realizes and is totaliter, the
economic action of God, the exemplar and instrumental efficient cause of
all the other acts.19 Israel’s history is unique within world history because
of the way her people relate to the Word Incarnate by anticipation.
The Jewish people were chosen by God that Christ might be born of
them. Consequently, the entire state of that people had to be prophetic
and figurative. . . . Thus too, the wars and deeds of this people are
expounded in the mystical sense [spiritual sense] but not the wars and
deeds of the Assyrians or Romans, although the latter are more famous
in the eyes of men.20

“Shadow, Image, and Truth”
I wish, in this section, to consider how the early Fathers and Doctors of
the Church actually considered Israel. I do not claim that this view was
universal or necessarily consistent, but the clarity and robustness of the
understanding of Israel as a people chosen by God that emerge from the
teaching of Thomas Aquinas, who is at once a disciple and a creative
innovator of the teaching of tradition, can serve as an indication.21
In the introductory question to the Summa theologiae,Aquinas asks the
question:“Whether the Sacred Writings of this doctrine may be interpreted
19 Some of this is treated by Hans Urs von Balthasar in A Theology of History (San

Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1963, 1994).
20 ST I–II, q. 104, a. 2, ad 2, quoted in Matthew Levering, Christ’s Fulfillment of Torah

and Temple (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002).
21 I refer the reader to the study by Matthew Levering just mentioned and to

Stephen Boguslawski, Aquinas’ Commentary on Romans 9–11 (New York: Paulist
Press, forthcoming).

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Francis Martin

according to many meanings?” (“Utrum Scriptura Sacra huius doctrinae
sit secundum plures sensus exponenda?” ST I, q. 1, a. 10).The sed contra of
his reply is taken from Gregory the Great’s Moralia, 20, 1 (PL 76, 135):
“Sacred Scripture, in its very manner of speaking, is above all other
sciences because in one and the same word, while it narrates an event, it
sets forth a mystery” (“Sacra Scriptura omnes scientias ipso locutionis suae
more transcendit, quia uno eodemque sermone dum narrat gestum, prodit
mysterium”). The two words “event” and “mystery” refer in turn to the
literal sense, the event, and then the same event as it is now seen to have
been a participated anticipation of the mystery of Christ. Augustine has
much the same to say;“In ipso facto [the event itself], non solum in dicto [the
text of the Old Testament], mysterium [the plan of God revealed in Christ]
requirere debemus” (On Psalm 68, PL 36, 858).
Aquinas’s own answer is basically the same. He responds that God is
able to have not only words signify, as humans can do, but also “res ipsas,”
which must be taken to mean “events” and not merely “things.” He then
goes on to say that the first signification, that of the words, belongs to the
first meaning (sensum) “which is the historical or literal meaning” (quod est
sensus historicus vel litteralis).The signification by which “the realities signified by the words signify other things” (res [realities] significatae per voces,
iterum alias res significant [the realities of the Christ event]) is called the
“sensus spiritualis” “which is founded upon the literal meaning and
supposes it” (qui super litteralem fundatur et eum supponit; ST I, q. 1, a. 10, c.).
What Aquinas means in this same context by saying that an argumentum in
theology can only be drawn from the literal sense can be grasped only by
an understanding of what the medievals meant by argument and by an
analysis of what Aquinas actually does in his own theological writings.22
It is obvious that the context of the above discussion is that of the relation between the Old Testament and the New Testament, though, for
Aquinas as for the tradition preceding him, the realities of the New Testament have their own way of signifying and containing the eschatological
realities yet to come. The aspect that is highlighted in this latter understanding, what is referred to as the “anagogical” sense, even of New Testament realities, is the fact that what we now experience is a participation
in what is present, though in icon, of what once was present in promise.
This is the meaning of the rhythm expressed in Hebrews 10:1: “For the
22 For a more complete discussion of Aquinas’s views and use of Scripture, see

Wilhemus G. B. M. Valkenberg, Did Not Our Heart Burn? Place and Function of
Holy Scripture in the Theology of St.Thomas Aquinas (The Hague: Gegevens Koninklijke Bibliotheek, 1990).

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law, having a sketch (skia) of the good things to come, and not the image
itself (autenμ tenμ eikona) of the realities.” The law possessed a shadow or
sketch, we possess the realities but “in icon,” that is, we possess them, not
according to their proper mode of existence, but rather in another mode,
in signs and symbols, until we are with Christ in heaven.
This understanding of the Hebrews text was already expressed by
Ambrose who spoke of: “shadow,” “image,” and “truth.”23 Such a view of
history is the common denominator, in the Christian view, between
Sacred Text and Sacrament, particularly the Eucharist. These partially
fulfill the events of the Old Testament in the act by which Christ makes
himself present “in icon,” even as he anticipates the fullness of his presence “in truth.”The theory of the spiritual sense of Scripture is based, not
on a theory of text, but on a theology of history.
In appreciating the figurative role of the realities spoken of in the Old
Testament, however, we must never overlook their intrinsic significance,
what may be called the “religious sense” of the Old Testament. Anyone
who has truly prayed the Psalms or considered the example of the great
saints of the Jewish people appreciates that the more profound the grasp
of these realities, the greater is the understanding of Christ.24 Illustrative
of the seriousness with which Aquinas takes the system of worship in
Israel and the literal sense of the Sacred Text is his answer to the question, “Whether the ceremonial laws of the Old Testament have a literal
cause or only a figural cause?”25 He states:
Just as the ceremonial law prefigured Christ so also did the narratives
[historiae] of the Old Testament; since “all these happened to them as a
figure” (1 Cor 10:11). Yet these had, besides a mystical or figurative
sense, also a literal one.Therefore the ceremonial precepts also had their
literal causes in addition to their figurative ones.

In the body of the article, he states that there were two reasons for the
ceremonial precepts. One, the literal, “in regard to the divine worship to
be observed at the time;” the second, figural as prefiguring Christ,
“whether they concern Christ and the Church, which is the allegorical
sense, or the way of life of the Christian people, which is the moral sense,
23 On Psalm 43 (Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum, 64, 204): “Primum

igitur umbra praecessit, secuta est imago, erit veritas. Umbra in lege, imago vero
in evangelio, veritas in caelestibus.”
24 I am thinking for instance of the work of Paul Beauchamp, L’un et l’autre Testament, vol. 1, Essai de Lecture (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1976); idem, L’un et l’autre
Testament, vol. 2, Accomplir les Écritures (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1990).
25 ST I–II, q. 102, a. 2.

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or the state of future glory to which we are brought through Christ,
which is the anagogical sense.”26
Because of the influence of the Summa fratris Alexandri,Aquinas underwent a change of mind between his earlier work commenting on the
Sentences of Peter Lombard and his own Summa theologiae. In this latter
work can be found an extended Christian reflection on the Torah as well
as on the mysteries of the life of Christ.With the exception of Francisco
Suarez’s work, nearly eight hundred years were to pass before theology
began to concern itself once again with these matters.There is, perhaps,
one text that contains, once its full significance is appreciated, St.
Thomas’s thought on the relation between the Jewish people and the
Christian people. It is to be found in the third part of the Summa theologiae, in his discussion of Christ as the Head of the Church. In article 3 of
question 8, he asks the question: “Is Christ the Head of all human
beings?” Aquinas poses the following objection:
The sacraments of the Old Law [all the liturgical observances] are
compared to Christ as a shadow to “the body” as it says in Colossians
2:17. But the Fathers of the Old Testament used these sacraments in
their time as it says in Hebrews 8:5, “They used an exemplar and
shadow of the heavenly realities.”Therefore they did not belong to the
Body of Christ, and thus Christ is not the Head of all human beings.

Aquinas answers:
It should be said that the holy Fathers did not stop at the sacraments of
the Law as mere things, but as images and shadows of future realities.
For the movement toward an image, in so far as it is an image, is the
same as the movement toward the reality as the Philosopher says in his
work On Memory and Recall. And therefore, the ancient Fathers, by
observing the sacraments of the Law, were brought toward Christ
through the same faith and love by which we are still brought toward
him. For this reason the ancient Fathers belonged to the same Body of
the Church to which we belong.27
26 Ibid., the sed contra and body of the article.
27 I am indebted here to the study by Colman O’Neill, “St. Thomas on the

Membership of the Church,” Thomist 27 (1963): 88–140. The latter part of
Aquinas’s response is his translation.The notion that the Jews of Old Testament
times belonged to the Body of Christ is not peculiar to Aquinas. Augustine says
the same:“Nolite ergo putare, fratres, omnes justos qui passi sunt persecutionem
iniquorum, etiam illos qui venerunt ante Domini adventum praenuntiare
Domini adventum, non pertinuisse ad membra Christi.Absit ut non pertineat ad
membra Christi, qui pertinet ad civitatem quae regem habet Christum.” Enarratio in Ps. LXI, 4 (CCL, XXXIX, 774).

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There are two statements made here. One, that the grace of Christ has
always been available and that it was mediated in a particular way to the
Jewish people through fidelity to the enactments of the Torah. Second,
that we have arrived now at a different stage of the divine economy:
Recall the rhythm of “shadow–image–truth” mentioned above. I wish to
cite some texts that will clarify this position and then move on to reflect
on them in the light of a theology of history.
Aquinas makes a fundamental distinction between the grace of Christ
and the state of the New Covenant. This distinction is implied in the
above citation in which, after speaking of “images” and “shadows,” he
nonetheless says that the “ancient Fathers were brought to Christ by the
same faith and love” that we possess.This is particularly clear, for instance,
in his discussion of the question of whether the liturgical enactments of
the Old Law were figurative (ST I–II, q. 101, a. 2). In his discussion he
first states that liturgical enactments are ordered to the worship of God
and that worship has two dimensions: exterior and interior. Man, who is
made up of soul and body, should worship with both these dimensions as
it says in Psalm 84:3, “My heart and my flesh have exulted in the living
God” (Vulg.). And, just as the body is ordered to God through the soul,
so exterior worship is ordered to interior worship. Interior worship
consists in the union of the soul with God through the mind and spiritual affection.Therefore, according to the manner in which the mind and
affection of the worshipper are rightly joined to God, in that manner are
the exterior acts of man applied to the worship of God.
Aquinas goes on to say:
In the state of future blessedness, the human intellect will gaze upon
the very divine truth in itself. And therefore the exterior dimension of
worship will not consist in any figure but only in the praise of God
which will spring from interior knowledge and affection as it says in
Isaiah 51:3, “Joy and gladness will be found in her [the restored Zion],
thanksgiving and the sound of song.” [Note how Aquinas considers that
the Isaiah text is not yet completely fulfilled.]
In the state of this present life we cannot gaze on the divine truth,
but the rays of divine truth must shine on us through sensible figures
as Dionysius says in chapter 1 of The Celestial Hierarchy.There is a difference, however, according to the state of human knowledge. In the Old
Law the divine truth in itself was not made manifest and neither was
the way to arriving at it yet opened up as the Apostle says in Hebrews
9:8. And therefore it was necessary that the worship of the Old Law be
not only figurative of the future truth to be manifested in our homeland (patria) but also figurative of Christ who is the Way leading to that
truth of the homeland. However, in the state of the New Law, this way

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Francis Martin
is now revealed.Therefore, this way should not be prefigured as though
it were future, but it should be commemorated as something past or
present, because now it is fitting only to prefigure the truth, not yet
revealed, of glory as the Apostle says in Hebrews 10:1, “The Law has
the shadow of good things to come, not the image itself of the realities.” The shadow is less than the image in that the image pertains to
the New Law, the shadow to the Old Law. (ST I–II, q. 101, a. 2, c.)

It is clear for Aquinas that the “state of the New Law” is the Catholic
Church with its sacraments; how he would describe it in the post-Reformation era is another topic.28 Aquinas sees the Church as the Body of
Christ, the Incarnate Word of God, the place where the unrepeatable act
of Christ on the Cross is “repeated” in sacrament and, in another way, in
the life of the Church insofar as it is moved by the Holy Spirit.The Incarnation is the direct presence of God to history and the acts of Christ are
the prime analogate and efficient and formal cause of all God’s saving acts
in Israel, as well as all the grace mediated through the God-given moral,
liturgical, and legal enactments in the life of Israel.29 This, as we have seen,
makes the whole history of Israel a prophetic statement of God’s plan. It
is precisely because this people realizes and anticipates on its level of existence the mystery of the covenant sealed by God in the union of the Word
with the humanity of Christ, that its way of life can mediate the grace of
Christ before the state of the New Law exists historically.
An understanding of God’s providential relation to history, that is, to
the activity of human persons, enables us to grasp the overriding importance of the unique. Jean Lacroix once remarked that there is an interiority to history, a relation to God that is founded on the mystery of
personhood and that makes every event and the whole sweep of human
history only fully intelligible in terms of God’s plan, his disposition or

28 See O’Neill, “St.Thomas on the Membership.”
29 I realize that in perpetuating the classification of moral, legal, and liturgical laws

I am not yet responding to Michael Wyschogrod’s objection that this Thomistic
distinction does not respect the unity of the Mosaic Law (The Body of Faith: God
in the People Israel [Northvale, NJ: First Jason Aronson Inc., 1996]). I can only say
here that the audience indicated by certain laws in the Mosaic legislation is
already a form of classification, perhaps according to importance. It is also possible that the removal of the Decalogue from the phylacteries was due to the fact
that Christians used the practice to point out to the Jews that they had made a
distinction in what is important in the Torah. See Geza Vermes,“The Decalogue
and the Minim,” in Post-Biblical Jewish Studies (Leiden: Brill, 1975), 169–77. See
further the remarks by David Novak cited further on.

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economy within human dimensions.30 I think philosophers such as
Michael Wyschogrod would maintain that the entrance point of God
into this economy is through his choice of a people whom he binds to
himself in covenant in such a way that their acts, and therefore their
history, have a particular exterior and interior relation to God.31 I would
agree with this, and yet I would see this covenant relation, perpetuated as
it is by generation (toledot) and by fidelity, as itself an anticipated and
continued participation in the mysterious union of the Word of God
with the humanity of Jesus Christ, himself a child of the covenant.
Part II: Covenant, The Center Concept
Closely allied to the concept of “choice” in the revelation made to Israel
is the notion of covenant, ber∑ ît.There is scarcely a word more important
in the whole of the Scriptures than is this word “covenant,” and yet there
is scarcely a word more difficult to define.
It has become commonplace in biblical scholarship to point to the
existence of a certain type of treaty or loyalty oath as providing the background category within which Israel understood its covenant relation
with God.32 Research has uncovered what are probably two types of
agreement between a superior ruler and his inferior. The first, made
popular by George Mendenhall, is that of the Hittite Suzerain Treaty in
which the Hittite overlord, after recording his benefactions bestowed
upon his client, lists a series of stipulations with which the client must
comply.33 The second, treated at length by Moshe Weinfeld, is a loyalty
oath exacted by the Assyrian monarch from his successor.34 In both
transactions, but especially in the first, the motive for fidelity is basically
gratitude. It is easy to see how easily this was adapted by the thinkers in
Israel to their situation. Though the stipulations are, in this case, divine
law, they are viewed as being laid down by YHWH on the basis of his
30 Jean Lacroix, Histoire et Mystère (Tournai: Castermann, 1962). I have developed

Lacroix’s thesis beyond his own statements in the light of recent Catholic thinking about the human person. One may consult Kenneth L. Schmitz, At the Center
of the Human Drama:The Philosophical Anthropology of Karol Wojtyla/Pope John Paul
II (Washington, DC:The Catholic University of America Press, 1993).
31 Wyschogrod, The Body of Faith.
32 For a discussion of these, see George E. Mendenhall and Gary A. Herion,
“Covenant,” in The Anchor Bible Dictionary, vol. 1, ed. David Noel Freedman et
al. (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 1179–1202; and Moshe Weinfeld, “Deuteronomy, Book of,” in Anchor Bible Dictionary, ed. Freedman et al., 168–83.
33 See Mendenhall and Herion, “Covenant,” and the literature given there.
34 For the literature, see Weinfeld, “Deuteronomy.”

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saving activity: “I, YHWH [his name], your God [his title], brought you
out of the land of Egypt, that place of slavery [his benefactions].You shall
not have other gods besides me” (the first of the “ten words,” the beginning of the stipulations (Ex 20:2–3).35
The “atmosphere” of the Hittite and Assyrian arrangements pervades
much of the covenant dimension of Israel’s thinking, although this only
became apparent through modern scholarship. It is significant that two of
the most recent authors to have considered the term directly agree,
∑ fundamenthough they differ as to the etymology of the word, that berît
tally implies a “determination” or “obligation” or “pledge” taken upon
oneself (E. Kutsch) or even “imposition” or “liability” in addition to “obligation” (Weinfeld).36
∑ signifies primarily the assumption of an obliAlthough the term berît
gation, we would be mistaken to abstract from it any notion of relationship. The obligations assumed are nearly all in a context of mutuality,
though the level of this mutuality is distinctly asymmetrical. In fact, especially in the Priestly tradition, the notion of election itself, the act by
∑
which a special relation is established, is often expressed in terms of a berît.
Thus, the call of Abraham is presented in terms of both a command and
a promise on the part of God (Gn 12:1–3, Yahwist), and this action of
God, which grounds the whole process of the Christological dispensation
∑ Only YHWH is bound by
mentioned earlier, is often referred to as a berît.
his promise, but he can make it contingent upon Abraham’s obedience. A
classical expression of the unilateral nature of the covenant made with the
Fathers can be found in Psalm 105: 7–11:
He is YHWH our God; his judgments are in all the earth. He is mindful
of his covenant for ever, of the word that He commanded, for a thousand
generations, the covenant which He made with Abraham, his sworn
promise to Isaac, which He confirmed to Jacob as a statute, to Israel as an
35 For

an ample study following this approach, see Mendenhall and Herion,
“Covenant.”
36 See E. Kutsch, “berit, obligation,” in Theological Lexicon of the Old Testament, vol. 1,
ed. Claus Westermann and Ernst Jenni (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1997), 256–66;
Moshe Weinfeld, “berit,” in Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament, vol 2, 253–78.
This accent is not unchallenged: see Jon Levenson, Sinai and Zion:An Entry into the
Hebrew Bible (San Francisco: Harper, 1985), 25 n 10. See, however, Levenson’s more
favorable acceptance of Weinfeld’s notion of a “Grant Covenant.” Moshe Weinfeld,
“The Covenant of Grant in the Old Testament and the Ancient Near East,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 90 (1970): 184–205; Jon D. Levenson, “The
Theologies of Commandment in Biblical Israel,” Harvard Theological Review 73
(1980): 17–33.

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everlasting covenant, saying, “To you I will give the land of Canaan as
your portion for an inheritance.”37

Norbert Lohfink points to the Priestly tradition which effects a theological structuring of Israel’s history through a series of “divine promises
∑ 38 There
that cannot be abrogated” and that are designated by the term berît.
is the promise to the whole human race made to and through Noah (Gn
9:9–17), and the promise made to Abraham (Gn 17:1–22), which also
contains a blessing that affects the whole world: Both of these covenants
have a “sign.” Modeled on these is the covenant made with David, dramatically expressed in Psalm 89:3–4, a statement that includes the expressions
“cut” (make) a covenant, “my chosen one” (be_∑hîrî), and swearing to David
his servant:“You said,‘I have made a covenant with my chosen one, I have
sworn to David my servant: I will establish your descendants for ever, and
build your throne for all generations.’ ” Later, in verse 38, the moon is
mentioned as a “witness” to God’s oath, a sort of “sign.”
∑ in the Priestly tradition describes unilateral promises
Though the berît
that sometimes are contingent upon an action on the part of the recipient of the promise, there are places where this contingency is tantamount
∑ on Israel’s part. Thus we read in Leviticus 26:3–4 a
to a reciprocal berît
line that is close to Deuteronomic thinking: “If you walk in my statutes
and observe my commandments and do them, then I will give you your
rains in their season, and the land shall yield its increase, and the trees of
the field shall yield their fruit.” In Deuteronomic thought it is clearer:
There is something close to a mutual agreement:
This day YHWH your God commands you to do these statutes and ordinances; you shall therefore be careful to do them with all your heart and
with all your soul.You have declared this day, concerning YHWH, that
He is your God, and that you will walk in his ways and keep his statutes
and his commandment and his ordinances and will obey his voice; and
YHWH has declared this day concerning you that you are a people for
his own possession, as He has promised you, and that you are to keep all
his commandments, that He will set you high above all nations that He
37 We may note here the accumulation of words and concepts that, besides the

common “cut a covenant” (karat be r∑ ît), are associated with “covenant”: universal
reign (“his judgments are in all the earth”);“a word commanded” (da μba μr sçiwwah);
“sworn promise” (se̊ ∑bu μ‘a μto )μ ; “confirm as a statute” (ya‘a ∑ mîdeha μ le_∑ho μq).
38 Norbert Lohfink and Erich Zenger, The God of Israel and the Nations: Studies in
Isaiah and the Psalms, trans. Everett R. Kalin (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press,
2000), 18. In the lines that follow I am indebted to this whole chapter, originally
an essay by Lohfink.

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has made, in praise and in fame and in honor, and that you shall be a
people holy to YHWH your God, as He has spoken. (Dt 26: 17–19)

It is this same Deuteronomic tradition, however, that insists on the
unmotivated love by which YHWH chose his people without previous
merit of their own. It should be stated at the outset that this relation to
himself established by God begins with a choice, one that is expressed in
this tradition by combining the two words _hashaq and ba_har. The first
word evokes the notion of an attraction, almost inexplicable, as in the text
that speaks of victory in war, “and you see a beautiful woman and you
become enamored of her [_hashaqta bah] and you want to take her as a
wife” (Dt 21:11), or again when Hamor is explaining to Jacob that his
son is in love with Dinah: “[M]y son Schechem is enamored [_hashaqta
napsho] of your daughter” (Gn 34:8). The second word, ba_har, is also a
theological term characteristic of Deuteronomy, where it retains its
meaning as: to choose out, to prefer. We have already considered
Deuteronomy 10:14–15; we find the same thought in Deuteronomy 7:7:
It was not because you were more in number than any other people
that YHWH set his heart upon you [hashaq bakem] and chose you
[wayib_har bakem], for you were the fewest of all peoples; but it is
because YHWH loves you [mi’ahabat YHWH etkem], and is keeping the
oath which He swore to your fathers, that YHWH has brought you out
with a mighty hand and redeemed you from the house of bondage,
from the hand of Pharaoh, king of Egypt. Know therefore that YHWH
your God is God, the faithful God who keeps covenant and steadfast
love with those who love Him and keep his commandments, to a thousand generations.

If the expression _hashaq leads us into the heart of God and to his inexplicable and particular love, the term ba_
har introduces God and his activity into the very stuff of historical existence as an actor within human
time.These are not merely metaphors, they are symbols embodying and
pointing to a mystery beyond conceptualization but that, however, are
founded on the fact that God is the Creator of the universe and has
chosen to relate to Israel and to us in this way.
Let me conclude this section with a summary by Norbert Lohfink,
whose work has been helpful in this area:
What are all the things that depend thematically on the word be ∑rît,
“covenant”? The word ties together—to say it quite briefly—several
Old Testament decisive themes in the biblical writings. Through the
covenant with Noah and with Abraham, and through the making of

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Old Testament covenants in the course of history, it becomes connected
with the portrayal of the entire course of the history of salvation.Through the
passage about Sinai and through Deuteronomy, it becomes connected
with the entire torah.Through Jeremiah 30–31 and its textual parallels,
it becomes a catchword for the “messianic” promises. As a designation
for the decalogue or its first commandment, it evokes the core of the
relationship with God.39

Part III: Torah
The word “Torah,” which is found approximately 220 times in the Old
∑ namely, that the variTestament, has this in common with the word berît,
ous contexts in which it is found serve to give it complex and multiple
resonances that are in turn exploited by the sacred writers. It is another
instance of the capacity to exploit “systematically vague and elastic terms,”
to employ Clarke’s expression once again, in which there is as well, at
times, a “sunken image.” If we assume that the basic original meaning of
tôrâ is instruction, it is easy to understand how this sense, which could be
applied to a mother’s tôrâ (Prv 1:8) as well as to that of the “teaching of
the wise” (Prv 13:14), could apply as well to the instruction of the priests
derived either from skill in the law or through some form of consulting
God, to the whole of God’s teaching and law-giving, and, even more
broadly, to the whole of God’s activity in regard to Israel as this is mediated to successive generations. Thus, Joseph Jensen can state: “If one
begins with the assumption that tôrâ is basically ‘instruction’ in a fairly
generalized sense, the derivation of the more specific meanings is not
difficult to understand.”40
I wish to present some examples of the ways in which tôrâ is actually
used in the Old Testament. First, I will give examples from the wisdom
usage and from the priestly vocabulary, and then I will look more specifically at the Deuteronomic understanding.This may not always reflect the
chronology of the uses, but it does serve to give a notion of the aura the
word brought with it for those who were familiar with the written tradition both in the later biblical period and in early Judaism.Though I will
return to this point later, it is worth bearing in mind that of the 220
occurrences of the term tôrâh in the Bible, approximately 196 of them

39 Lohfink and Zenger, The God of Israel, 26.
40 Joseph Jensen, The Use of Tôrâ by Isaiah: His Debate With the Wisdom Tradition, ed.

Patrick Skehan et al. (Washington, DC: Catholic Biblical Association of America,
1973), 27.

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876

were rendered as nomos in the Septuagint.This surely expanded the resonances of this term among Greek speaking Jews.41
We have already seen some examples of tôrâh as instruction in the
wisdom tradition. I wish to add just a few more:
My son, keep my words and treasure up my commandments with you;
keep my commandments and live, keep my tôrâh as the apple of your
eye; bind them on your fingers, write them on the tablet of your heart.
(Prv 3:1–3)42
My son, keep your father’s commandment [mis. wah], and forsake
not your mother’s tôrâh. Bind them upon your heart always; tie them
about your neck. When you walk, they will lead you; when you lie
down, they will watch over you; and when you awake, they will talk
with you. (Prv 6:20–22; again the allusion to Dt 6:6–9)

In a legal setting, tôrâh can have the meaning of “regulation,” as when
Leviticus speaks of the tôrâh of the burnt offering, or cereal offering.43
Certainly the communication of tôrâh was considered to be one of the
primary duties of the priests. This could refer to individual regulatory
decisions, such as the ones just mentioned, or concrete decisions regarding the holy and profane, and the like. It seems that when Jeremiah speaks
of the four categories of rebellious leaders, the third category,“those who
dealt with the tôrâh,” refers to a particular division of Levites especially
skilled in legal matters.44 However, when other prophetic condemnations
condemn the priests for having forgotten the tôrâh (in the sense of “ignoring” it: for example, Hos 4:6) or even for having done it violence (Zep
3:4), the reference is to the whole revelation of the will of YHWH and not
merely to particular statutes:“the entire disclosure of YHWH’s will, already
fixed in writing.”45 This latter understanding seems to have been the most
common one even before the advent of Deuteronomic thought, but it was
certainly the enormous influence of the Deuteronomic view of tôrâh that
41 A rapid glance at the targumic usage seems to confirm the same tendency: tôrâh

is rendered ‘wr’yy’.
42 The allusion to Dt 6:6–9 would hardly be missed, nor would the abundance of

“legal” terms in a wisdom setting:This is not uncommon. See the list in Weinfeld, berit.
43 Lv 6:9, 14, etc.This is extended by Ezekiel who speaks of the “law of the temple”
(tôrat haba μyit), meaning the regulations for the new eschatological temple.
44 Jer 2:8. The text is: “The priests asked not, ‘Where is YHWH?’ Those who dealt
with the law knew me not: the shepherds rebelled against me. The prophets
prophesied by Baal and went after useless idols.”
45 Hans Walter Wolff, Hosea:A Commentary on the Book of the Prophet Hosea, trans. Gary
Stansell (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1974), 138; cited in Weinfeld, berit, 1419.

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served to confer on the term for later generations the sense of “the entire
disclosure of YHWH’s will.”
The Deuteronomic viewpoint, which was elaborated by many who
played a part in the construction of the book of Deuteronomy and
supplied Deuteronomistic glosses in the preceding books, marked a turning point in the religious history of Israel. By summing up and furthering
a theological outlook, the book of Deuteronomy was to offer a unified
perspective on the whole of tôrâh and to enable subsequent generations to
view many different aspects of YHWH’s revealed will as, in some sense, a
whole.46 In its present form, Deuteronomy presents Moses in the land of
Moab, able to see the land promised by YHWH but forbidden to enter it,
who now, in a last speech, presents the tôrâh he received from YHWH at
Horeb but has kept until now, when the people are preparing to enter the
land and need to know how to conduct themselves as a sedentary people
with foreign and often hostile neighbors. Thus, at the conclusion of the
statutes and laws enumerated from chapters 5 to 28 of Deuteronomy, we
read:“These are the words of the covenant which Yahweh ordered Moses
to make with the Israelites in Moab, in addition to the covenant which he
had made with them at Horeb” (Dt 28:69). In the view of Deuteronomy,
then, the covenant was first made on the basis of the “ten words”
pronounced on Horeb by YHWH:
He revealed his covenant to you and commanded you to observe it, the
Ten Words which He inscribed on two tablets of stone. (Dt 4:13)
[After the incident of the golden calf,] He inscribed the tablets, as
He had inscribed them before, with the Ten Words which YHWH had
said to you on the mountain, from the heart of the fire, on the day of
the Assembly. YHWH then gave them to me. (Dt 10:4)
YHWH then said to Moses, “Put these words in writing, for they
are the terms of the covenant which I have made with you and with
Israel.” He stayed there with YHWH for forty days and forty nights,
eating and drinking nothing, and on the tablets he wrote the words of
the covenant—the Ten Words. (Ex 34:27–28; a Deuteronomistic gloss
on a text recording the same event of the golden calf)47

46 For a still valuable series of essays, see Gerhard von Rad, Studies in Deuteronomy,

ed. T. W. Manson et al., trans. David Stalker (London: SCM Press, 1953, 1956).
The most adequate study for our purposes is that by Barnabas Lindars,“Torah in
Deuteronomy,” in Words and Meanings, ed. Peter Ackroyd and Barnabas Lindars
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 117–36. For a consideration of
the whole book, one may consult Weinfeld, “Deuteronomy.”
47 The translation of these three texts is from The New Jerusalem Bible.

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In two of the four texts just cited, we find the phrase “the words of the
covenant.” In Deuteronomy 28:69, it refers to the whole of the legislation
recorded in the preceding twenty-four chapters, while in the gloss on
Exodus 34:28 it refers to “the ten words.” In general Deuteronomy tends
to use the term “words” to describe the legislation it contains in order to
give it the same authority as the “ten words.”48 This identification of
“words” and “covenant” is furthered in the Deuteronomistic tradition by
the phrase “the book of the tôrâh” or even “the book of the tôrâh of Moses”:
Do not let this book of the tôrâh depart from your mouth; meditate on
it day and night, so that you may be careful to do everything written
in it.Then you will be prosperous and successful. ( Jos 1:7–8)
Then Joshua built on Mount Ebal an altar to YHWH, the God of
Israel, as Moses the servant of YHWH had commanded the Israelites. He
built it according to what is written in the book of the tôrâh of
Moses—an altar of uncut stones, on which no iron tool had been used.
( Jos 8:30–31)49

Torah and Covenant
The linguistic usage to which I have just pointed lends weight to the
assertion of Norbert Lohfink that in the Deuteronomistic tradition ber̊ ît
becomes connected with the entire tôrâh. Actually the two realities
become aspects of one thing: the relation between YHWH and his people.
Abraham Heschel, one of the most revered of modern Jewish thinkers,
sums up the rabbinic view of the relationship this way:
Saaida Gaon was correct in asserting that Israel is a people only by
virtue of its Torah, that the only assurance for Israel’s peoplehood is the
Torah. On the other hand, Rabbi Halevi reminds us,“If there were not
Jews there would be no Torah.”50

In order to understand how Deuteronomic usage had such an impact
on subsequent Jewish life and piety, we must look first at the manner in
which Deuteronomy uses the covenant formula of “belonging” and then
consider the wisdom overtones in the Deuternomic presentation of tôrâh.
48 See Lindars, “Torah in Deuteronomy.”
49 The prescription that no iron tool touch the stones of the altar is found both in

Ex 20:25 and Dt 27:5–7. It is a good example of the rewriting of the former
material within Deuteronomy; probably for the author in this case, both these
texts belong to the “book of the tôrâ of Moses.”
50 Abraham J. Heschel, “God,Torah, and Israel,” in Theology and Church in Times of
Change, ed. Edward LeRoy Long Jr. and Robert T. Handy (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1970), 71–90.

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The Covenant Formula
In a very valuable study, Rolf Rendtorff has pointed to the fact that the
covenant formula “to be a God/a people” occurs in three different
manners.51
Formula A: “I will be a God for you.”
Formula B: “You shall be a people for me.”
Formula C: The two above statements are combined,
though not always in the same order.52

Formula A characterizes the first four books of the Pentateuch and
belongs to the Priestly tradition;53 formula B is found only in Deuteronomic material, which never has formula A;54 and formula C is found
twice each in the Priestly material and twice in the Deuteronomic material.55 Moreover, the Priestly expression “to be a God for you” most often
serves to express the motive of God’s action when the action is establishing a covenant with Abraham or promising him land (Gn 17:7b, 8) or, as
is most often the case, in rescuing the people from Egypt: “For I am
YHWH who brought you up out of the land of Egypt, to be your God; you
shall therefore be holy, for I am holy” (Lv 11:45, emphasis added; also
22:32–33, 25:38, 26:44–45; and Nm 15:41).
On the other hand, the Deuteronomic phrase places the accent on
election. In one text the rescue from Egypt is motivated by God’s desire
that Israel become his people:“But YHWH has taken you and brought you
forth out of the iron furnace, out of Egypt, to be a people of his own
possession, as at this day” (Dt 4:20). Often the Israelites are told that they
must obey YHWH because they are a people holy to him: “You are the
sons of YHWH your God; you shall not cut yourselves or make any baldness on your foreheads for the dead. For you are a people holy to YHWH
your God, and YHWH has chosen you to be a people for his own possession, out of all the peoples that are on the face of the earth” (Dt 14:1–2).
The other three texts that speak of Israel’s becoming God’s people (Dt 7:6
[see above], 27:9–19, and 28:9–10) also place the accent on Israel’s obligation to obey because they are holy, chosen by God, to be his people.This,
51 Rolf Rendtorff, The Covenant Formula: An Exegetical and Theological Investigation,

ed. David J. Reimer, trans. Margaret Kohl (Edinburgh:T&T Clark, 1998).
52 Ibid.
53 Eight times and Ez 34:24.
54 Five times.
55 Ex 6:7; Lv 26:12, and Dt 26:17, 19; 27:12 (13).

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as Weinfeld points out, reverses the position of the Priestly tradition,
particularly that of the Holiness Code.56 There, the people are told that
they should obey YHWH’s commands in order to “sanctify themselves,”
while Deuteronomy places the accent on obedience to YHWH because
they are holy, already consecrated by YHWH’s choice. Rendtorff makes a
similar observation: “The requirement (in Deuteronomy) to keep the
commandments is therefore also an essential element in the narrower definition of what it means to be a people for God’s possession.”57
With regard to the two-part or reciprocal formulae, we may note with
Rendtorff that the two Priestly formulations serve to include between
them the entire story of God’s intention to save Israel (Ex 6:7) and the
completion of the law-giving on Sinai (Lv 26:45).The two formulae in
Deuteronomy occur in the latter part of the book. In Deuteronomy
26:1–19, we see how closely election and obedience are bound together:
Today you have obtained this declaration from YHWH: that he will be
your God, but only if you follow his ways, keep his statutes, his
commandments, his customs, and listen to his voice. And today YHWH
has obtained this declaration from you: that you will be his own
people—as he has said—but only if you keep all his commandments;
then for praise and renown and honor, He will raise you higher than
every other nation He has made, and you will be a people consecrated
to YHWH, as He has promised.

In Deuteronomy 29:10–15, Moses is addressing “all the Israelites.”
After a brief historical prologue (recall the Hittite Covenants), he says to
them in words that once again closely connect covenant and obedience
to the prescriptions of the tôrâh:
All of you are standing today in the presence of YHWH your God—
your leaders and chief men, your elders and officials, and all the other
men of Israel, together with your children and your wives and the
aliens living in your camps who chop your wood and carry your water.
You are standing here in order to enter into a covenant with YHWH
your God, a covenant that YHWH is making with you this day and sealing with an oath, to confirm you this day as his people, that He may be
your God as He promised you and as He swore to your fathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. I am making this covenant, with its oath, not only
with you who are standing here with us today in the presence of
YHWH our God but also with those who are not here today.
56 Weinfeld, “Deuteronomy,” 181.
57 Rendtorff, The Covenant Formula, 25.

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After having considered the covenant formulae we should turn our attention now to another and different theological aspect of tôrâh, namely, the
consideration of how tôrâh and wisdom relate.
Torah and Wisdom
There is, finally, one other aspect of Deuteronomy’s outlook that is important to understand if we are to appreciate the global impact of this teaching on subsequent biblical thought and beyond. Deuteronomy presents
covenant fidelity (“love”) as the goal of YHWH’s choice and rescue of
Israel to be his people, and it also utilizes the latent potentiality of the
treaty and loyalty-oath mind-set which surrounded Israel to cast its
whole frame of thought in the form of direct address based on gratitude.
This form of address along with the insertion of motivational material
made it all the easier to provide the text with resonances of the Wisdom
tradition and facilitate the intimacy with YHWH that Deuteronomy seeks
to create.We might first note that those who administer law under Moses
are described as “wise, intelligent, and experienced” men (contrast Ex
18:13–27).58 Indeed, the very possession of Torah shows Israel to have
been gifted by God with wisdom:
Behold, I have taught you statutes and ordinances, as YHWH my God
commanded me, that you should do them in the land which you are
entering to take possession of it. Keep them and do them; for that will
be your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the peoples,
who, when they hear all these statutes, will say,“Surely this great nation
is a wise and understanding people.” (Dt 4:5–6)59

We may note as well that in addition to the considerable amount of
ethical material treated only in Deuteronomy and the Wisdom tradition,
there is throughout Deuteronomy the presence of parenetic and didactic
application of laws, that is, places where tôrâh is both promulgated and
taught.60 Take this example from the “law of release” (Dt 15:1–11):
[Law:] At the end of every seven years you must cancel debts. [Explanation:] This is how it is to be done: Every creditor shall cancel the loan
58 For this insight and the remark about ethical material, see Weinfeld, “Deuteron-

omy,” 181–82.
59 Compare Jer 8:7–8:“Even the stork in the air knows its seasons;Turtledove, swal-

low, and thrush observe their time of return, but my people do not know the
ordinance of YHWH. How can you say,‘We are wise, we have the law of YHWH?’
Why, that has been changed into falsehood by the lying pen of the scribes!”
60 See, von Rad, Studies in Deuteronomy, 11–24.

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he has made to his fellow Israelite. He shall not require payment from
his fellow Israelite or brother, because YHWH’s time for canceling debts
has been proclaimed. [Casuistic exception:] You may require payment
from a foreigner, but you must cancel any debt your brother owes you.
[Parenesis and motivation:] However, there should be no poor among
you, for in the land YHWH your God is giving you to possess as your
inheritance, he will richly bless you, if only you fully obey YHWH your
God and are careful to follow all these commands I am giving you
today. . . . If there is among you a poor man, one of your brethren, in
any of your towns within your land which YHWH your God gives you,
you shall not harden your heart or shut your hand against your poor
brother, but you shall open your hand to him and lend him sufficient
for his need, whatever it may be.Take heed lest there be a base thought
in your heart, and you say,“The seventh year, the year of release is near,”
and your eye be hostile to your poor brother, and you give him nothing, and he cry to YHWH against you, and it be sin in you.You shall
give to him freely, and your heart shall not be grudging when you give
to him; because for this YHWH your God will bless you in all your
work and in all that you undertake. There will always be poor people
in the land.Therefore I command you to be openhanded toward your
brothers and toward the poor and needy in your land.

This approach to law, by an appeal to inner motivation and not merely
the recitation of the stipulations, provides an example of tôrâh as instruction even within a legal context that is typical of Deuteronomy and of
much of the tôrâh/instruction that depends upon this tradition. Particularly noteworthy is the accent on the “heart,” a term important in the
Wisdom tradition as well.61 It is likely that the expression “all the heart”
was coined by the Deuteronomist, as well as “all the heart and soul” (Dt
4:29, 6:5, 10:12, 11:13), and that these expressions echoed wherever this
mode of thought exercised influence in the biblical tradition. The same
is true of the expression “circumcise the heart,” which can be found in
several places (Dt 10:16, 30:6; Lv 26:41; Jer 4:4; Ez 44:7, 9). I wish to
consider this matter of the heart more at length, but I would first like to
present some texts that reflect the heartfelt response in gratitude on the
part of Israel for the gift of tôrâh. I will present some texts, particularly
from the psalms, that embody and communicate that love.

61 For references, consult F. Stolz,“Leb, Heart,” in Theological Lexicon of the Old Testa-

ment, ed. Ernst Jenni and Claus Westermann (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1997),
638–42.

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Love of Torah
As is well-known, Psalm 119 is a hymn to God praising the Torah, promising fidelity, and looking for protection because of the tôrâh relationship
initiated by YHWH.62 Here are some of its verses:
I run in the path of your commands, for you have set my heart free. (v. 2.)
Give me understanding, and I will keep your tôrâh and obey it with
all my heart. Direct me in the path of your commands, for there I find
delight. (vv. 34–35)
At night, I remember your name, YHWH, and I keep your torah.
(v. 55)
How I love your tôrâh! I ponder it all day long. (v. 97)
Let your face shine on your servant, teach me your will. (v. 135)
I long for your salvation, YHWH, your tôrâh is my delight. May I
live only to praise you, may your judgments be my help. (vv. 174–175)

In addition, we have the unforgettable opening to the whole Psalter:
Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked nor
stands in the way of sinners nor sits in the seat of scoffers; but his delight
is in the tôrâh of the YHWH, and on his tôrâh, he meditates day and
night. He is like a tree planted by streams of water, that yields its fruit
in its season, and its leaf does not wither. In all that he does, he prospers. (Ps 1:1–3)

Many other biblical texts could be adduced, but allow me to cite a few
rabbinic texts here as well.
Rabbi Simeon bar Yohai of the second century said, “It is written, For
as the days of a tree shall be the days of my people (Isa. 65:22).A ‘tree’ signifies the Torah, as it is stated It (that is, the Torah) is a tree of life to them
that lay hold upon it (Prv 3:18).” Now which was created for the sake of
which? Was the Torah created for Israel or vice versa? Surely the Torah
was created for the sake of Israel.Thus if the Torah endures for all eternity, how much more must Israel for whose sake it was created endure
for all eternity.63

62 For a discussion of this psalm, see Jon D. Levenson,“The Sources of Torah: Psalm

119 and the Modes of Revelation in Second Temple Judaism,” in Ancient Israelite
Religion: Essays in Honor of Frank Moore Cross, ed. Patrick D. Miller Jr., Paul D.
Hanson, and S. Dean McBride (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987), 559–74.
63 Ecclesiastes Rabba, 1:4, 9, quoted in Heschel, “God,Torah, and Israel,” 84–85.

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Francis Martin
Then there is the dramatic statement of R. Ben Azzai: “My soul
clings to the Torah; there is no time for marriage; may the world be
maintained by others.”64
Another saying of Ben Azzai:“The words of the Torah are as joyful
as the day they were given as Sinai. . . . For the essence of their being is
given through fire, because “the mountain burned with fire into the
heart of heaven” (Dt 4:11).65
The Holy One, blessed be He, said to Israel: I sold you my Tora—
it is as though I sold Myself with it.66
[Rabban Yohannan ben Zakkai:] “If you have learned much Tora,
ascribe no merit to yourself; for this you were created.”67

The New Covenant/Torah
Already, toward the end of Deuteronomy (30:1–14), there is a passage
about restoration from exile that speaks of God himself circumcising the
hearts of his people in order to obtain their obedience:“And YHWH your
God will circumcise your heart and the heart of your offspring, so that you
will love YHWH your God with all your heart and with all your soul, that
you may live” (Dt 30:6). Jeremiah, whose teaching was profoundly marked
by the Deuteronomic outlook repeats this prophecy in his own words:
Thus says YHWH, the God of Israel: Like these good figs, so I will
regard as good the exiles from Judah, whom I have sent away from this
place to the land of the Chaldeans. I will set my eyes upon them for
good, and I will bring them back to this land. I will build them up and
not tear them down; I will plant them and not uproot them. I will give
them a heart to know that I am YHWH; and they shall be my people
and I will be their God, for they shall return to me with their whole
heart. ( Jer 24:5–7)

We should note here how profoundly linked together are the actions
of God who will build up and plant in his act of restoration and at the

64 t.Yebam 8, 4, translated in Theological Dictionary of the New Testament 2, 767. B.

Azzai is recorded elsewhere as embracing the traditional teaching on marriage,
though he himself does not seem to have followed it. See also the beautiful
Baraita cited by Ephraim E. Urbach, The Sages:Their Concepts and Beliefs, vol. 1,
trans. Israel Abrahams ( Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1975), 359–60.
65 Leviticus Rabba, 16, quoted in Shmuel Safrai, ed., The Literature of the Sages, vol. 1, Oral
Torah, Halakha, Mishnah,Tosephta, External Tractates, sec. 2, The Literature of the Jewish
People in the Period of the Second Temple and the Talmud (Assen/Maastricht/Philadelphia:
Van Gorcum/Fortress, 1987), 103.
66 Exodus Rabba, 33, quoted in Safrai, The Literature of the Sages, 1.
67 M. Avot 2:8, quoted in Safrai, The Literature of the Sages.

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same time give his people a new heart that they might know him: That
is, they will experience him, recognize his authority, and be able to return
his love with their whole heart.The result is a new, that is, a restored and
interior, covenant sealed by a covenant formula of mutual belonging
(formula C above).68
We have finally the other Jeremian prophecy of a new covenant, one
that figures large in the New Testament and echoes at Qumran:69
See, a time is coming—declares YHWH—when I will make a new
covenant with the House of Israel and the House of Judah. It will not
be like the covenant I made with their fathers, when I took them out
of the land of Egypt, a covenant which they broke, though I espoused
them—declares YHWH. But such is the covenant I will make with the
House of Israel after these days—declares YHWH: I will put my Teaching [tôrâh] into their inmost being and inscribe it upon their hearts.
Then I will be their God, and they will be my people. No longer will
they need to teach one another and say to one another, “Heed [de ∑’u μ]
YHWH”; for all of them, from the least of them to the greatest, shall
heed [ye μdu μ] me—declares YHWH. ( Jer 31:31–4; basically follows the
Jewish Publication Society translation)

Here, in the most explicit terms, we have a prophecy that states clearly
God’s intention to provide his people with the interior principle of
response without which they will be unable to keep his tôrâh.This is seen,
as I have said, as the core of what God will do when he restores his
people to their land. The same theme is repeated by Jeremiah’s younger
contemporary Ezekiel, most particularly in chapter 36:24–27:
I will take you from the nations and gather you from all the countries
and bring you into your own land. I will sprinkle clean water upon
you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, and from all
your idols I will cleanse you. A new heart I will give you, and a new
spirit I will put within you; and I will take out of your flesh the heart
of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my spirit within
you and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to observe my
68 See Francis Martin, “The Humanity of Christian Mysticism,” Cross Currents

(1974): 233–47; Hans Walter Wolff,“ ‘Wissen um Gott’ bei Hosea als Urform von
Theologie,” Evangelische Theologie 12 (1952–1953): 533–54.
69 Cairo Document 20, 12; 6, 19; and perhaps 1QpHab. This was one of several
ways the covenant at Qumran was designated. See Matthew Black, The Scrolls and
Christian Origins: Studies in the Jewish Background of the New Testament, ed. Jacob
Neusner (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1961, 1983), 91–92; J. T. Milik, Ten Years of
Discovery in the Wilderness of Judea, trans. John Strugnell (London: SCM Press,
1959), 113–14.

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886

ordinances.You shall dwell in the land which I gave to your fathers; and
you shall be my people, and I will be your God.70

Though this latter text does not mention Torah explicitly—the word
is rare in Ezekiel—the notion is partially contained in the terms
“statutes” and “ordinances.” Thus, the Deuteronomic accent on the
“heart”71 prepared the way for the word of the Lord to come to Jeremiah and Ezekiel and announce his plans for the restoration of Israel and,
as Christians understand it, the ultimate renewal of humanity. That this
last goal is not foreign to the thinking of Israel herself is evident from the
number of times Israel prays looking forward to the approach of the
nations to YHWH. Let this text suffice:
There is none like you among the gods, my Lord, no deeds like yours.
All the nations whom you have made will come and bow down before
you, my Lord, and glorify your name. For you are great and a worker
of wonders; you are God, you alone. (Ps 86:8–10)72

Part IV: The Covenant Never Revoked
and the Christian Torah
∑ is associated with election and tôrâh and
We have seen how the term berît
thus serves as a mediating concept, even if only implicitly, between these
two. As Christianity and Judaism moved apart, these three terms were
understood very differently. In these concluding reflections, I wish to
consider the meaning of “new” as applied to the Christian understanding of the present dispensation or covenant and then point to some areas
where further reflection is needed.
The first consideration concerns the manner in which the First
Covenant is repeated and raised to a new level. The second is the question of how to describe the relation between what is usually called the
Old Covenant, not revoked, and the New Covenant. The first question
has to do with the “newness” of the Covenant, and the second with the
perdurance of the people Israel.

70 See also Ez 11:19. For the phrase “eternal covenant,” see Jer 32:40; Ez 16:60 and

37:26.
71 In addition to the texts already mentioned, see Jer 32:39–40: “I will give them

one heart and one way, that they may fear me for ever, for their own good and
the good of their children after them. I will make with them an everlasting
covenant, that I will not turn away from doing good to them; and I will put the
fear of Me in their hearts, that they may not turn from Me.”
72 For a complete treatment of this theme, see Lohfink and Zenger, The God of Israel.

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The Meaning of “New”
The early Christian community referred to the dispensation of God under
μ ,μ a “New Testament.”This expreswhich they were living as a kaine μ diatheke
sion is linked to Jesus’ words at the institution of the Eucharist as recorded
in Luke 22:20 and 1 Corinthians 11:25 and is an allusion to the prophecy
of the new covenant in Jeremiah 31:31–34.The same notion is equivalently
present in Matthew 26:28 and Mark 14:24, which allude to Exodus 24:8.
The term “New Covenant” and the concept are repeated elsewhere.73 By
using the term kainos rather than neos, the early Christian community
expressed both continuity and discontinuity in a way adumbrated in Old
Testament writings, which writings were nevertheless transcended by the
event of Christ.74 I would like to search for a way of understanding this
relationship that preserves both continuity and transcendence.
It will help to recall here some of the teachings of Thomas Aquinas in
this regard, first, that of the unique presence of God in Christ which makes
of him the center of all history, second, his reiterated statements that the
just ones in Israel possessed the same faith and love that we do, that they
belong to the Body of Christ, and they are destined for and foretold the
same eternal goal to which we still tend.The best description of the process
by which the state of the New Law relates to the state of the Old Law can,
I think, be found in a discussion of conversion by Bernard Lonergan who
employs the term “sublation” and describes it in this manner:
What sublates goes beyond what is sublated, introduces something new
and distinct, yet so far from interfering with the sublated or destroying
it, on the contrary, needs it, includes it, preserves all its proper features
and properties, and carries them forward to a fuller realization within a
richer context.75

If we accept St.Thomas’s view that there are two “states” of God’s people,
then the question is one of finding a way to describe their relationship. I am
proposing the notion of “sublation” as described by Lonergan.76 It is clear
as well that St. Thomas’s view of the special history of the Jewish people
73 1 Cor 11:25; 2 Cor 3:6,14; Heb 8:6–13; also Heb 7:22.
74 Thus, von Rad can speak of the prophets looking for “a new David, a new

Exodus, a new covenant, a new city of God: the old had thus become a type of
the new and important as pointing forward to it.” Gerhard G. von Rad, Old Testament Theology, vol. 2, The Theology of Israel’s Prophetic Traditions, trans. D. M. G.
Stalker (New York: Harper and Row, 1965).
75 Bernard Lonergan, Method in Theology (New York: Herder & Herder, 1972), 241.
76 For another view, less speculative but very penetrating, see Robert Jensen,
“Toward a Christian Theology of Judaism,” in Jews and Christians, People of God,

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accords well with what I have proposed above regarding “economic participation,” that is, that all the acts of God in history are related in a relation of
dependence upon the Incarnation, with its prior anticipation in the
covenant with Israel and its subsequent continuance on this new level in the
existence of the Church, the Body of Christ.The question still remains as
to how this understanding can be expressed, both philosophically and theologically, in such a way that both Jews and Christians can understand what
is claimed as well as what is not eliminated. This is a task that still needs
completion. I would suggest that Lonergan’s description is apt to describe
the present relation between Covenants, Old and New. This description,
however, must be elaborated into an understanding of history that respects
the sublation or transposition effected by God within it while avoiding the
pitfalls of a Hegelian theorizing.
Freedom, God’s and man’s, makes history. It is not the outworking of
a system, but the mystery of an interaction and a plan that proceeds by
events that are unique and yet related. In the Christian vision, Christ, both
God and man, is source and ultimate consummation of that plan that is
being worked out, first in shadow, now in icon, and finally in truth.The
movement from shadow to icon is the movement from an anticipated
participation in the mystery of Christ and his redemptive act, to the very
historical presence of Christ. He is fixed now in the glory of the act of
love by which he, in his own humanity, passed over to God and reconciled humankind to God and to itself, and yet he is still present to us.We
possess “the very icon of these realities” (Heb 10:1).We possess the realities that are proper to that goal, yet we have them in symbol and word:
the rays of divine truth reach us through sacramental signs.
In the action of God within the history of the people of Israel, as well
as in its laws and liturgy and its great heroes, we see the converging point
of world history. This action is then taken up by Christ in one historical
moment, and the converging point is made irreplaceably and definitively
dense:The act of God in history, in which all other acts find their ultimate
meaning and source, is now itself present in a human being inextricably
joined to God. For the Christian, the principle of economic participation
is now present in time. Christ, the Son of Man, the Servant of God who
“fulfills all justice” by giving flesh in a new way to the way of God with
man, taking upon himself the sins of the people and through them the sins
of the world, becomes Israel in a new and sublated manner. In the
prophecy of Hosea the people, looking forward to restoration after suffered. Carl E. Braaten and Robert Jensen (Grand Rapids, MI:William B. Eerdmans
Publishing Company, 2003), 1–13.

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ing, say:“He will revive us in two days, on the third day he will raise us up
to live in his presence” (Hos 6:2).The New Testament affirms this of the
resurrection of Christ, because when Christ rose, all Israel rose. In Christ
and in the Church all Israel, including its laws and way of life, continues to
exist in a fulfilled, that is, a sublated, manner, and not as replaced.
If we take seriously what has been said about the Torah up to this
point, and if we take seriously the Christian understanding of how the
promise in the prophetic proclamation of the Deuteronomic teaching is
understood to be fulfilled in Jesus and those joined to him, it is clear that
we, both Jews and Christians, are being called to a profound reconsideration of each other, ourselves, and our mutual relationship. It has been my
principal purpose to enter into a Christian rethinking of the role of Torah
to aid in this mutual reconsideration by paying close attention to the text
of the Old Testament.
Let us recall first the well-known words of Nostra Aetate, number 4:
Searching into the mystery of the Church, this sacred synod remembers
the bond by which the People of the New Testament are spiritually
joined with the stock of Abraham.
The Church, therefore, cannot forget that she received the revelation of the Old Testament through the people with whom God in his
inexpressible mercy concluded the Ancient Covenant. Nor can she
forget that she draws sustenance from the root of that well-cultivated
olive tree onto which have been grafted the wild shoots, the Gentiles.
“God does not repent of the gifts He made to the Jews and his
calling of them.They still remain most dear to Him for the sake of their
fathers” (see Rom 11:28–29).

We may also recall some of the words of Pope John Paul II.At the synagogue
in Rome,April 13, 1986, on the occasion of his historic visit there, the pope
first spoke of the millennial presence of Jews in Rome and then mentioned
their sufferings during World War II and the fact of the Holocaust. He then
went on to develop three points that follow from Nostra Aetate:
The first is that the Church of Christ discovers her “bond” with Judaism
“by searching into her own mystery” (cf. Nostra aetate, no. 4).The Jewish
religion is not “extrinsic” to us but in a certain way is “intrinsic” to our
own religion.With Judaism, therefore, we have a relation which we do
not have with any other religion.You are our dearly beloved brothers
and, in a certain way, it could be said that you are our older brothers.77

77 Fisher and Klenicki, eds., Spiritual Pilgrimage, 63.

We should recall here as well the words at the beginning of this essay
that speak of a covenant never revoked and of a “permanent value” of the
Old Testament that “is not wiped out by the later interpretation of the
New Testament.”
But this does not yet answer the question of the continued existence of
Israel. The Church has not replaced Israel; Israel has been fulfilled in the
Church, and yet most of the Jewish people still find their identity relating
to God through their ancient covenant that has never been revoked. From
one point of view the resolution of this tension is eschatological. From
another point of view this same tension is at least partially resolvable
through a new mode of relating that undoes two millennia of fear and
mistrust—an enormous spiritual task—and which, at the same time, forces
us to a deeper discernment into the action of God in history, one faithful
to God’s word and to a more profound and mutual understanding of our
traditions. There are many fine examples of this kind of mutual rethinking, sometimes done jointly, sometimes done by one group or the other,
but always with an awareness of a common task.We must continue to pray
N&V
and to work for this mutual understanding.

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891

Views of the Two Covenants in Medieval Theology
R ICHARD S CHENK , OP
Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology
Berkeley, California

I. The Discipline of Ambiguity
and the Notion of Fulfillment
T HE HISTORY OF THEOLOGY records a number of efforts to
reflect thematically upon the sort of ambiguity characteristic of theological thought. The goal of such reflection tended to be the allowance to
theological language of as much ambiguity as is necessary for theological
objectivity, while restricting theological language to as little ambiguity as
is possible for theological understanding.The desired result of the reflection could be termed the discipline of ambiguity.
This discipline of ambiguity was obvious in Thomas Aquinas’s doctrine
of the analogy of language when speaking about God. For Thomas, there
is a necessary dialectic in the best forms of God-talk between the content
affirmed (significatio) and the denial of the way in which we now conceive
of that content (modus significandi), the imperfect means by which we must
imagine during our lives on earth even the least finite of attributes
together with their relation to their proper subject and to us. In naming
God as best we now can, the dialectic between the significatio affirmed and
the modus significandi denied marks the limit of clear and distinct ideas.
Thomas argued that the greater clarity possible in the univocal affirmation of a given attribute for both God and creation or in the definitive
exclusion of any term applied equivocally to both God and creation had
less epistemological potential than this form of studied ambiguity: The
light of analogy is brighter, if more diffuse. Even the critique of analogous
God-talk developed by John Duns Scotus could admit this point. The
univocity that Scotus claims marks our every description of God in terms
of creation places the seal upon the inadequacy of our attempts to grasp

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the infinite God in necessarily finite words and concepts; for Scotus,
univocity is as regrettable as it is unavoidable.1 Together with its defense
of the fittingness in principle of the use of metaphor encountered so often
in the Bible,2 the Thomistic doctrine of analogy sought to attain the greatest degree of clarity compatible with the matter investigated as well as
with the ideal and de facto powers of knowledge possessed by the humans
of any given epoch and condition. The burden of proof was upon the
tolerance of ambiguity: A reason had to be given for accepting limits to
the clarity of thought.Thomas argued that the ambiguity he accepted in
speaking of God could be justified by the unavoidable finitude of the
knowing and speaking subject in even its best present encounter with its
infinite “object.”
Similar in its structure was the argumentative goal of the classic defense
of the fourfold sense of Sacred Scripture.3 That one and the same text
could be open to or even require several interpretations at once did not
necessarily exclude the primacy of the literal sense.The insistence on the
ambiguity of diverse levels of meaning in one text still allowed for a quest
for the greatest possible literal understanding as the foundation of all allegorical interpretations. Here, too, the goal was a discipline of ambiguity.
Thomas Aquinas saw clearly what underpinned allegorical exegesis: the
commentator can only discover in a text what he already knows, and
in order to know it, he had to find it in the literal sense of another text.
From this Thomas Aquinas drew the conclusion: a valid argument
cannot be constructed from the allegorical sense, it can only be done
from the literal sense.4

This discipline of ambiguity is especially important in the context of
the present reflections, since the comparison between Christianity and
Judaism provided a central impulse to articulate the doctrine of the fourfold sense of Scripture.The transposition of Old Testament texts to New
1 Cf. Rolf Schoenberger, Die Transformation des klassischen Seinsverständnisses: Studien

zur Vorgeschichte des neuzeitlichen Seinsbegriffs im Mittelalter (Berlin and New York:
de Gruyter, 1986), esp. 181–223.
2 Cf.Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae I, q. 1, a. 9.
3 Cf. Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), esp. 214–92; and Henri de Lubac, Medieval Exegesis, vol. 2, The Four
Senses of Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI:William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company;
and Edinburgh: Clark, 2000).
4 The Pontifical Biblical Commission, The Jewish People and their Sacred Scriptures in
the Christian Bible (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2001), no. 20, with
reference to Thomas Aquinas, ST I, q. 1, a. 10, ad 1; and Quaestiones Quodlibetales,
VII, 616 m.

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893

Testament contexts demanded both the awareness of and a qualified
distance from the original context and literal meaning of the text.While
medieval theories of interreligious relationships were less reflective about
their ambiguity than were medieval theories of God-talk, the accentuation or limitation of the diversity of meanings in any shared text could
prove decisive for the stance of the Christian author toward Judaism. As
the Pontifical Biblical Commission put it in its 2001 study of The Jewish
People and their Sacred Scriptures in the Christian Bible :
The notion of fulfilment is an extremely complex one, one that could
easily be distorted if there is a unilateral insistence either on continuity
or discontinuity. Christian faith recognizes the fulfilment, in Christ, of
the Scriptures and the hopes of Israel, but it does not understand this
fulfilment as a literal one. Such a conception would be reductionist. In
reality, in the mystery of Christ crucified and risen, fulfilment is
brought about in a manner unforeseen. It includes transcendence.5

Exploring these conclusions of the Pontifical Biblical Commission, the
following notes will attempt to provide a few brief examples drawn
chiefly from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, illustrating both more
and less successful attempts to prevent distortion of the idea of fulfillment
by avoiding “a unilateral insistence either on continuity or discontinuity.”
In particular, the following reflections will focus on Robert Kilwardby,
Robert Grosseteste, and Thomas Aquinas. By making the structure of the
potential ambiguity involved clearer, the question can be prepared as to
what kind of balance between the continuity and discontinuity of the
two covenants might best be sought by us today.
II. Medieval Controversies
A. Robert Kilwardby and the Affirming Insistence on Discontinuity
Probably already a Dominican master of theology at Oxford, Robert
Kilwardby (d. 1279) published disputed questions on all four books of the
Sentences. Coming to the fourth book (ca. 1260), Robert limited his questions to the first three distinctions of the text, transforming his remarks
into one of the longest and most focused medieval treatises on nonChristian religions.6 The major part of the treatise is devoted to questions
about the rites of the older covenant (especially qq. 15–38); the longest
5 Pontifical Biblical Commission, The Jewish People, no. 21.
6 Robert Kilwardby, Quaestiones in librum IV Sententiarum, ed. Richard Schenk

(Munich: Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1993).

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Richard Schenk, OP

single question is about the cessation of those rites (q. 37).7 While the
evidence suggests but a meager reception of Kilwardby’s Quaestiones by
later theology, their historical value lies in the insight they provide into
the controversies of the hundred years prior to their composition.
Kilwardby manifests here the tension felt between the theological
traditions of Peter Lombard and Hugo of St.Victor, the former more critical of non-Christian religions, the latter friendlier toward them.
Kilwardby shows how the more critical position articulated by Peter
Lombard manifests itself not only in the outright denial of the gracious
efficacy of the pre-Christian rites as such, but already in the inability of
the critical author to acknowledge immanent symbolic meaning to the
details of the rite. The rites, as even this more critical tradition of Peter
Lombard will admit, did somehow make sense and give grace, but only
insofar as they prefigured Christ as confessed by the implicit faith of their
practitioners. In terms commonly used in the last twenty years, the tradition made prominent by Peter Lombard is largely a blend of exclusivist
and inclusivist arguments, reluctant to acknowledge in pre-Christian rites
any grace or meaning not mediated by the prefigurement of Christ.
Lacking an immanent context, these sacraments ceased to be of even
indirect value once Christ had come; here the line goes back behind
Peter Lombard to the position argued by Jerome in his much discussed
debate with Augustine on the cessation of the older covenant.8
Kilwardby strongly favors and develops the alternative tradition developed by Hugh of St.Victor along lines first sketched by Augustine.9 The
rites of the first covenant should not be nullified abruptly, lest they be put
on the same level as the rites of non-covenantal religions; for both Augustine and Robert, the sacraments of the older law fittingly receded only
gradually, in order to show their difference from the idolatry of the noncovenantal religions. Even so, Robert (and to some degree Augustine as
well, from whom Hugo had drawn the salvific historical schema and its
positive reading of the ecclesia ab Abel )10 viewed the pre-Christian rites as
imbedded in the salvific-historical providence guiding each epoch: sub
7 Ibid., 152–86.
8 Cf. Ralph Hennings, Der Briefwechsel zwischen Augustinus und Hieronymus und ihr

Streit um den Kanon des Alten Testaments und die Auslegung von Gal. 2:11–14
(Leiden: Brill, 1994).
9 Cf. Kilwardby, Quaestiones in librum IV Sententiarum, q. 23 (92, l.50–6) and q. 37
(179 ff., l.709–9; and 183, l.801–14).
10 Yves Congar, “Ecclesia ab Abel,” in Abhandlungen über Theologie und Kirche.
Festschrift für Karl Adam, ed. M. Reding (Duesseldorf: Patmos, 1952), 79–108;
reprinted in Y. Congar, Études d’ecclésiologie médiévale (London:Variorum, 1983).

The Two Covenants in Medieval Theology

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lege and even ante legem. The religious rites developed prior to Abraham
had not been idolatrous from the start.11 The affirmation of the mediation of grace by these pre-Christian rites in the context of their own
immanent efficacy matches here the acknowledgment of the immanent
symbolic meaning of the ritual details; the ancient rites, taken even in
their own immediate context, were neither meaningless nor fruitless.
Robert argues that God inspired human beings before Abraham to invent
rites in which they might seek and find divine help;12 just as he inspired
and revealed as the author of a “pactum” the rites of the first covenant.
Kilwardby argues further that it would contradict our notion of God to
imagine that he had inspired, much less designed, empty or useless rituals, not bringing about the grace that they promised to the practitioners
of the rites themselves. Kilwardby stresses the primacy of the immanent
meaning and efficacy of these rites for those who celebrate them, assigning secondary status to the rites’ prophetic ministry of prefiguring
Christ.13 Against Jerome’s contentions, Kilwardby defends Augustine’s
position that the sacraments of the older covenant continued to be meaningful and gracious even after Christ’s passion, until the universal promulgation of the Gospel ended their ministry of prefigurement. Without
this openness of prefiguration, Kilwardby admits in the end, even the
immanent meaning and efficacy of the older rites eventually lose their
vitality. In contemporary terms, Kilwardby weaves largely pluralistic and
inclusivist arguments into the fabric of his theory, confining exclusivist
positions to his acceptance of that cessatio legis, which is almost universally
affirmed by medieval Christian authors. In the terms developed by the
Pontifical Biblical Commission, we can say that Kilwardby develops a
theory of pre-Christian rites partially independent of the idea of the
fulfillment of one dispensation by another; in this sense, Robert seems,
11 On the relevance of the conflicted reference to the idolatry of religions for the

ecumenical quest for genuinely Christian identity, cf. R. Schenk, “Goetzendienst
oder Gottesdienst? Gegenwart und Abwesenheit Gottes in den Religionen im
Lichte des Ersten Gebots,” in Jahrbuch für Philosophie des Forschungsinstituts für
Philosophie Hannover, Band 6, 1995, ed. R. Schenk et al. (Vienna: Passagen, 1994),
169–81.
12 For what follows, cf. Congar,“Ecclesia ab Abel”; and R. Schenk,“Divina simulatio irae et dissimulatio pietatis: Divine Providence and Natural Religion in
Robert Kilwardby’s Quaestiones in Librum IV Sententiarum, in Mensch und Natur im
Mittelalter, ed. A. Zimmermann (Berlin/New York:W. de Gruyter, 1991), 431–55.
13 Cf. R. Schenk, “Covenant Initiation:Thomas Aquinas and Robert Kilwardby on
the Sacrament of Circumcision,” in Ordo sapientiae et amoris. Hommage au Professeur
J.-P.Torrell, ed. Carlos-Josaphat Pinto de Oliveira (Fribourg: Éditions Universitaires
Fribourg Suisse, 1993), 555–93.

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for most of his work, to allow for a liberal portion of “discontinuity” or
merely parallel fulfillments of human hope, situating the “continuity” of
the religions in each of their best epochal dispensations chiefly in their
common dependence on the divine inspiration of their rites and in the
immediate graciousness of God’s working in those rites successfully,14
while allowing for the relative uniqueness or “discontinuity” of the
immediate contexts understood by the practitioners of the diverse rites
in their own diverse epochs.
To the first objection it must be replied that the reality signified in
those rites was twofold: first, a present reality; the other, a future reality; the one, a reality contained in those rites; the other, a reality not
contained; the first, a reality caused by those rites; the other, a reality
not caused by them. The reality then present in and contained and
effected by those rites was the justification of the faithful celebrating
them, the remission of the offense against God, and a faith in final
human liberation, a faith following God obediently, along with similar
things which accompany that justification. The future reality neither
contained nor effected by those rites was final human liberation, the
incarnation and resurrection of the Savior, and other similar articles of
future salvation, as well as those sacraments of grace that are final and
lasting and accompany human liberation.15

Late in his work, Kilwardby identifies a critical weakness in his own position, which had merely tacked on the ministry of prefigurement to the
meaning and efficacy immanent in the older rites; the notion of the fulfill14 Pontifical Biblical Commission, The Jewish People, no. 21: “The basic theological

presupposition is that God’s salvific plan which culminates in Christ (cf. Eph
1:3–14) is a unity, but that it is realized progressively over the course of time. Both
the unity and the gradual realization are important; likewise, continuity in certain
points and discontinuity in others. From the outset, the action of God regarding
human beings has tended toward final fulfilment and, consequently, certain aspects
that remain constant began to appear: God reveals himself, calls, confers a mission,
promises, liberates, makes a covenant.The first realizations, though provisional and
imperfect, already give a glimpse of the final plenitude”; cf. also no. 64 ff.
15 Kilwardby, Quaestiones in librum IV Sententiarum, q. 33 (143, l.9–17):“Ad primum
enim dicendum, quod illorum duplex fuit res significata: una praesens, alia futura;
una contenta, alia non contenta; una effecta, alia non effecta. Res enim tunc praesens eis contenta et effecta fuit iustificatio fidelium ea colentium et remissio
offensae divinae et fides perfectae liberationis humanae oboedienter Deo obsequens et huiusmodi quae illam iustificationem concomitata sunt. Res futura non
contenta neque effecta: liberatio humana, incarnatio et resurrectio salvatoris, et
huiusmodi alii articuli salutis futurae, ipsa etiam sacramenta gratiae perfecta et
mansura et huiusmodi quae circumstant humanam liberationem.”

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ment of the older rites in the prefigured Christ had appeared initially as an
afterthought and of all too secondary significance. Kilwardby seems to
notice only late in the treatise his difficulty in stating why there need be
any newer dispensations, since the older ones seemed so well ordained.16
Simulating anger and distance and hiding his devoted care and affection,
God had merely inspired but not revealed the pre-Abrahamic rites, the rites
de lege naturali, so that the danger of idolatry, perhaps understandably, grew
despite them.17 Following the salvific histories from Philo down to Peter
Comestor and Moses Maimonides, Kilwardby maintains, namely, that just
prior to Abraham the extent of idolatry had reached alarming proportions,
despite the initially effective graciousness of the rites inspired secretly by an
ever merciful God.
Even if these inspired rituals of human invention could lose their initial
blessing, as the treatise had been keen to stress, it is harder for Kilwardby
to make plausible that the rites designed and ordained by God in the
pactum of the older covenant de lege scripta to give grace to those who kept
them would similarly fail their purpose. At the end of his work (from q.
43 on), Kilwardby reverses himself abruptly and lists the pejorative traits
commonly named in anti-Semitic literature as characterizing the Jewish
community of the intertestamental period: Despite the initially effective
blessing brought by the older revealed rites of the covenant, the people
had become superbissimi, invidissimi, avarissimi, infidelissimi, and inclined to
idolatry and luxury.18 Most surprisingly, these vices of the community
suddenly appear as the fruit of a rite that even prior to Christ had been
inferior, more lethal than vivifying, merely signifying and prefiguring, not
sanctifying nor efficacious, purely external and carnal, carried out in servile
fear, hardly deserving the title of sacrament. By shifting to arguments that
we would characterize today as exclusivistic, now denying the very qualities of the older cult stressed programmatically in the body of his text,
Kilwardby’s concluding thoughts contradict the major thrust of his treatise;
16 For Kilwardby’s positive assessment of the pre-Christian rites of sacrifice cf. R.

Schenk,“Opfer und Opferkritik aus der Sicht roemisch-katholischer Theologie,”
in Zur Theorie des Opfers, ed. R. Schenk (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: FrommannHolzboog, 1995), 193–250; and idem, “Die Suche nach dem Bruder Abel. Zum
Streit um das analoge Sakramentsverständnis,” in Jahrbuch für Philosophie des
Forschungsinstituts für Philosophie Hannover, Band 5, 1994, ed. P. Koslowski, R.
Loew, and R. Schenk (Vienna: Passagen, 1993), 69–87.
17 Cf. R. Schenk, “Divina simulatio irae et dissimulatio pietatis.”
18 Cf. Kilwardby, Quaestiones in librum IV Sententiarum, qq. 31 and 35 (115 ff. and
150), but admittedly also already q. 4 (14 ff.), the critical notes of which,
however, were left without development until the end of the treatise.

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they move well beyond ambivalence into self-contradiction. The harsher
view of his concluding questions, however, is in the service of underlining
the Christological “continuity” between the rites prefiguring Christ and
the rites expressing his salvific work.19 It is in order to do justice to the
illusive res significata futura, non contenta et non effecta of the older sacraments
that Kilwardby finally disparages their res significata praesens, contenta et effecta.
Whereas the relative “discontinuity” or independence of the immanent
meaning and purpose of the diverse cultic systems had been in the service
of the “continuity” or similarity of their initially sanctifying effects, now
Kilwardby’s somewhat belated interest in the unilateral “continuity” of
their common Christological focal point starts to exaggerate the “discontinuity” in the blessing and curse of even their original practice.
B. Robert Grosseteste and the Pejorative
Insistence on Continuity
Whereas Kilwardby’s theological work seems to have made little impact,
Robert Grosseteste (d. 1253), the first teacher employed by the Franciscans for their new foundation at Oxford,20 had a considerable influence
on theology in England and Europe, especially among the Franciscans,
well into the fourteenth century. Several of the positions later known as
“Scotist” appear first with Grosseteste; among these, Grosseteste’s doctrine
of the absolute predestination of Christ provides much of the background
for his theology of Judaism.21 Not only his impact but also his novelty on
the issue under discussion exceeded that of Kilwardby: Put briefly, Grosseteste argued that the continued practice of Jewish rites by the Jewish
people was heretical in the theological and juridical meanings of the term.
The difficulty of determining the pragmatic purpose of Grosseteste’s
theological texts and translations can be illustrated by following the shifts
in the views about the suspected context of one of his most widely circulated works, De cessatione legalium (ca. 1234). In the preface to their critical edition of Robert’s work, to which they attribute on the basis of the
great number and the wide dispersion of the manuscripts “a wider and
deeper influence on the subsequent thought of Europe than any of his
19 Cf. ibid., q. 38; and R. Schenk, “Christ, Christianity, and Non-Christian Reli-

gions:Their Relationship in the Thought of Robert Kilwardby,” in Christ among
the Medieval Dominicans: Representations of Christ in the Texts and Images of the Order
of Preachers, ed. K. Emery Jr. and J. Wawrykow (Notre Dame, IN: University of
Notre Dame, 1988), 344–63.
20 Cf. R. Schenk, “Robert Grosseteste,” in Lexikon fuer Theologie und Kirche, vol. 8,
3rd ed. (Freiburg: Herder, 1999), col. 1219 ff.
21 Robert Grosseteste, De complecione universi, ed. Joseph Goering and F. A. C.
Mantello, Medieval Studies 53 (1991): 89–124.

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other writings,”22 Richard C. Dales and Edward B. King review the
numerous attempts of modern scholarship to describe the pragmatic
context for this influential text.23 At least since the end of the eighteenth
century and the appearance of Samuel Pegge’s Life of Robert Grosseteste,
Bishop of Lincoln,24 a twofold conviction had been growing: First, that
King Henry III had launched a comprehensive campaign to convert the
Jews of his land to the Christian faith; after all, his contemporary, the everinformative Matthew Paris, tells us that Henry founded a domus conversorum close by the synagaogue in London.25 The second widespread
conviction was that Robert Grosseteste wrote his treatise De cessatione
legalium to support this royal program of conversion. Both of these convictions have now been called into serious doubt by the editors, who develop
a few critical remarks by Beryl Smalley into convincing counterclaims.
The editors point out that, despite Matthew Paris’s portrayal (“ibidem
conversorum numerus copiosus”), the house for converts was neither wellsubsidized, nor during Grosseteste’s lifetime did it ever house more than fifty
people altogether, including support personnel. “The provision of a single
domus conversorum, insufficiently endowed, hardly constitutes a campaign for
the conversion of the Jews of England.”26 Recalling Henry’s notorious
financial problems and his otherwise frequent and substantial requisitions of
the resources belonging to England’s Jewish population, the editors note:“It
is highly dubious, on pragmatic grounds, that the king would have initiated
a wide-ranging program to convert the Jews of England.”27 Not just for
22 Robert Grosseteste, De cessatione legalium, ed. Richard C. Dales and Edward B.

King (London: Oxford University Press, 1986), ix.
23 Ibid., ix–xxx.
24 Samuel Pegge, Life of Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln (London: J. Nichols,

1793), esp. 28–32.
25 Matthew Paris, Chronica majora, ed. H. R. Luard (London, 1872–84), III, 262, quoted

in the introduction to Grosseteste, De cessatione legalium, x: “Circa idem tempus
(A.D. 1233), rex Angliae Henricus quondam decentem ecclesiam et congregationi
conventuali sufficientem cum quibusdam aedificiis adjacentibus propriis sumptibus
fabricavit, in loco ubi domum conversorum pro redemptione animae suae et regis
Johannis patris sui et omnium antecessorum suorum constituit, anno regni sui
decimo septimo; viz. Londoniis, haud procul a Veteri Templo. Ad quam domum
confugientes Judei conversi, relicta Judaismi caecitate, sub quadam honesta vivendi
regula certum haberent in tota vita sua domicilium, tutum, refugium, et sufficiens
vitae sustentamentum, sine servili labore et foenoris emolumento. Unde factum
est, quod in brevi congregatus est ibidem conversorum numerus copiosus; et
ibidem baptizati et Christianorum lege instructi, vivunt laudabiliter, perito rectore
ad hoc specialiter deputando gubernati.”
26 Grosseteste, De cessatione legalium, xi.
27 Ibid.

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900

Christianity, the restraint from missionizing can be as malicious as an aggressive mission. While the editors note that the situation of the English Jews
grew progressively worse in the course of the thirteenth century, they
provide good reasons for rejecting the assumption that there were any
substantial, royal programs aiming at the conversion of the Jewish community.The Crown was steadily developing alternative ways to achieve those
advantages for the sake of which it had first been willing to “protect” (and
to utilize with an exclusive right of access) Jewish resources and services:
As alternative means of meeting financial needs arose (for example, Italian merchant/banking families) and public hostility to the Jews
mounted, the Crown took increasingly stern measures against the Jews
and assumed a more rigid stance with regard to them.This resulted ultimately in their expulsion from the kingdom in 1290.28

The perceived loss of any need for peculiarly Jewish services could be
expected to lessen royal interest in the theory of the servitus Judaeorum,29
which the Fourth Lateran Council had done so much to propagate, while
not ceasing to share “the growing concern of the Church over the relapse
of converts and over the not infrequent cases of Christians converting to
Judaism.”30 Hand-in-hand with alternative financial resources, there
grew the willingness of the Crown to do without the Jewish population
in England entirely. In 1290 this would occur through expulsion; sixty
years earlier, while the hope for widespread conversion of English Jewry
to Christianity could not be ruled out a priori as the means to much the
same end, there is in fact little evidence of such a tactic.
The editors recall the concern of the council with the problem of
conversions in the other direction. Though also not widespread, such
conversions were widely noted. Matthew Paris tells us of a deacon in
Oxford, who, having converted to Judaism in 1222, was condemned to
death and hanged.31 “This event may have had a bearing on the establishment of the Dominicans at Oxford in 1221 and the Franciscans in 1224
and on the hardening attitudes of the Church as reflected in the decrees of
the Council of Oxford in 1222.”32 This first Oxford “Blackfriars” was built
in the Jewish quarter of Oxford, though a conflict with the local parish
28 Ibid.
29 Cf. Willehad Paul Eckert, “Hoch- und Spätmittelalter,” in Kirche und Synagoge.

Handbuch zur Geschichte von Christen und Juden, vol. 1, ed. Karl H. Rengstorf and
Siegfried von Kortzfleisch (Stuttgart: dtv, 1968), 210–306.
30 Grosseteste, De cessatione legalium, x.
31 Ibid., x ff., note 9.
32 Ibid.

The Two Covenants in Medieval Theology

901

soon forced the Dominicans to relocate.33 Dales and King conclude from
all this that “Henry’s policies with regard to the Jews are seen to have been
essentially contradictory,”34 but these editors pass over how this royal
ambivalence was rooted in the conflict of royal interest resulting from the
theory and the real possibilities of the servitus Judaeorum. Those to whom
the service was seen to be due had an interest in preserving their subjects
in precisely this state of servitude. Prior to the middle of the thirteenth
century, this ambivalent position had often restricted attempts at widespread conversion, persecution, or expulsion.The construction of the domus
conversorum appears here more like a cosmetic measure aimed at limiting
anti-Jewish sentiment;35 the most common alternative position was less
ambivalent but would often prove even more brutal: aiming at the elimination of the Jewish population by conversion, expulsion, or pogrom. In
the context of the thirteenth century, there seem few other options apart
from this alternative between ambivalence of the kind described and an
even harsher, if clearer, form of disapproval. Where the royal advantages
never had been shared (such as in the citizenry or the other non-Jewish
elements of the urban population) or had ceased to appear profitable (as
was increasingly the royal view in the course of thirteenth-century
England), the ambivalence that had brought harsh treatment to the Jewish
population gave way to still more single-minded severity.36
33 Cf.William A. Hinnebusch, The Early English Friars Preachers (Rome: Ad S. Sabi-

nae, 1951), 11, 49. Beginning in 1236, the relocation of the friars into another
neighborhood of Oxford was chiefly the result of their struggles with the canons
of St. Frideswide’s and seems to have had little or nothing to do with their relations to the Jewish community; cf. ibid., 6 ff. At least one Dominican friar at
Oxford, Robert Bacon, was involved regularly in the royal administration of the
Jewish community at Oxford during these years.
34 Grosseteste, De cessatione legalium, xi. Dieter Berg, “Servitus Judaeorum. Zum
Verhältnis des Thomas von Aquin und seines Ordens zu den Juden in Europa im
13. Jahrhundert,” in Thomas von Aquin.Werk und Wirkung im Licht neuerer Forschungen, ed. Albert Zimmermann (Berlin/New York: W. de Gruyter, 1988), 439–58,
esp. 450 ff. and 456, shows how this same lack of consistency characterized the
policies of the royal court in Aragon and the papacy, both based on the same
doctrine of Jewish servitude.
35 Cf. Grosseteste, De cessatione legalium, xi ff.
36 The lack of programs for conversion do not necessarily manifest greater respect
for the Jewish people. While rejecting calls at the end of the thirteenth century
for the forced baptism of Jewish children and their separation from their parents,
Petrus de Palude argued that it belonged to the revealed plan of God that the Jews
should be converted only at the end of time and that until then they would need
to be endured in their blindness; cf. Barbara Faes de Mottoni and Ulrich Horst,
“Die Zwangstaufe jüdischer Kinder im Urteil scholastischer Theologen,” Münchener Theologische Zeitschrift 40 (1989): 173–99, especially 190 ff. with notes 86 ff.

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Richard Schenk, OP

Dales and King draw from their well-founded argument about the
lack of any royal program of conversion in the 1230s a much less convincing conclusion: They claim that Robert’s work is therefore merely
academic in character, “a product of Grosseteste’s biblical and scholastic
interests (with) no missionary purpose.”37 They seem at times to presuppose the alternative: A work of this kind must be composed either with
the missionary intent of fostering conversions by arguments addressed
directly to believers of another faith or with purely theoretical and
academic interests for members of one’s own faith. Other possible contexts
and intentions of a practical nature are not discussed, such as the possible
intention of making more severe the servitus Judaeorum or even of outlawing the continued practice of the Jewish cult.38 The editors do not discuss
the significance of the fact that Grosseteste repeatedly underlines the
impossibility of tolerating the simultaneous practice of both cults by the
same persons, a practice understandable for a persecuted community and
often, probably too often, reported as fact. In any case, Robert refers
several times in his work to present-day practitioners and advocates of the
simultaneous practice of both cults.39 Although making Jewish life and
worship even more difficult might exercise some pressure to escape such
hindrances through conversion, this latter missionary aim would remain
too secondary and incidental to influence the style and shape of the text,
37 Grosseteste, De cessatione legalium, ix ff., with the reference to Beryl Smalley,“The

Biblical Scholar,” in Robert Grosseteste, Scholar and Bishop, ed. Daniel A. Callus
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955), 81.
38 Cf. Grosseteste, De cessatione legalium, xiii: “Grosseteste’s De cessatione legalium
emerges from this academic context; it was not evoked by a royal crusade to
convert the Jews.”
39 Cf. the opening sentence of the work, De cessatione legalium, I, i, 1 (7, lin. 1–3):
“Fuerunt plurimi in primitiva ecclesia qui astruerent sacramenta veteris legis
simul cum sacramentis nove legis observanda esse nec sine illorum observacione
salutem esse”; this weakening of the true faith would repeat itself “etiam adhuc”
(ibid., lin. 8); cf. De cessatione legalium, I, ii, 17 (14, lin. 26): “Dum volunt
utrumque simul observare, utrumque destruunt”; and IV, vi, 3 (176, lin. 17 f.):
“Sed dum volunt et Iudei esse et christiani, nec Iudei sunt nec christiani.” Note,
too, the association here with the Ebionites and Cerinthians, whose teachings
were heresies in the classical sense of errant forms of Christianity. Despite his
sympathy for Jerome, Grosseteste admits that Jerome’s accusations against Augustine were unfounded: that the arguments of a bishop against the immediate cessatio legalium would necessarily foster these heresies (cf. IV, vi, 2–5 [175–178]).
Robert, however, goes beyond these historical questions to define the continued
observance of the Jewish cult by non-Christians of his own day as “perniciosa”
and “heretica,” so that at least by the time of the Summa Halensis the question
had to be dealt with as to whether or not the practice of the Jewish rites by Jews
was to be tolerated in a largely Christian society.

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903

which would have to be addressed first of all to that Christian public
from whom the legal changes were being sought.The editors claim that
the very fact that the treatise does not use arguments that would
convince a Jewish audience makes it “difficult to understand how Pegge
. . . could have thought that it had a polemical purpose. Its arguments are
altogether academic.”40 The editors seek to support their claim by the
fact that the arguments are always of a scholastic, theological kind; where
there are exceptions, the “drift is invariably pastoral.” While the editors
describe the twelfth century as “a time of Christian heresies, of Judaizing
Christians, of superficially converted Jews, and of Muslims and Jews who
would not convert,”41 they identify nothing in the thirteenth century
that could make plausible a practical or even a polemical context behind
Robert’s arguments.While not going as far as Lee Friedman, whose work
Robert Grosseteste and the Jews42 describes Grosseteste “almost unbelievably, on the same evidence, as a daring and advanced liberal philoSemite,”43 Dales and King are adamant: “Grosseteste’s De cessatione
legalium emerges from this academic context.”44 That is all the more
surprising, as they summarize the point of the work as follows: “[T]he
author’s objective in each of the four parts is to prove on different
grounds that the continued observance of the ceremonial precepts of the
Jewish law is heretical.”45 As D. J. Wasserstein puts it, perhaps somewhat
too politely:

40 Ibid., xii. The reference to Grosseteste offered by the editors to refute Pegge

rather strengthens the impression that Robert is motivated by the perceived infidelity of the Jews living in his own day and not by a theoretical problem: ibid.,
IV, iv, 5: “Hoc est abnegare Christum et predicare alium adhuc venturum,
quemadmodum adhuc faciunt infideles Iudei.”
41 Ibid., xii.
42 Lee Friedman, Robert Grosseteste and the Jews (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1934).
43 David J. Wasserstein, “Grosseteste, the Jews, and Christian Hebraism,” in Robert
Grosseteste: New Perspectives on his Thought and Scholarship, ed. James McEvoy
(Steenbrugis/Turnhout: Brepols, 1995), 358.
44 Grosseteste, De cessatione legalium, xiii.
45 Ibid., xii. For the goal of each of the sections in identifying the continued practice of the cult as heretical and pernicious, cf. the introduction, xvi, as well as the
text of IV, iii, 1 ff.:“Faciens igitur illa post Christum ex intentione predicta, verbo
et significatione sue accionis mendacium et heresim loquitur, et ita in infidelitate
et peccato mortali concluditur . . . qui hec facit post Christum ut salutifera,
hereticus est et infidelis. Igitur post consummacionem factam per Christi
passionem, perniciosum est facere legalia, secundum quod legalia et velud salutifera” (166, lin. 32, bis 167, lin. 2 and lin. 8–11).

Richard Schenk, OP

904

Although a direct connection with the founding of the Domus Conversorum, for the accommodation of Jewish renegades, in that year is rejected,
as the motivation of the De cessatione legalium, by the recent editors of that
work, it may not be going too far to see the growth of Grosseteste’s interest in Jewish matters in general as having some link with the growing
prominence of the Jewish question in England at this time.46

If it had been convincing, the proof, carried out for a Christian audience of scholastic background, that the continued Jewish practice of the
Jewish cult was heretical (“non solum supervacua, sed etiam perniciosa”)47 would have had eminently practical consequences. The consequences can be imagined by looking at the controversies in the thirteenth
century surrounding Maimonides and the Talmud, where Jewish writings
were claimed to be heretical in the juridical sense of the word; there, the
accusations led to the confiscation and destruction of the texts.48
Whereas these two later controversies would claim that members of the
Jewish community had fallen into heresy by abandoning the lex vetus for
newer, post-Christian texts and ideas, the argument that Grosseteste will
develop is that the continued observance of the older cult becomes
heretical of itself once that which it continues to promise as future has
already been fulfilled. The impact of a changed history for the significance of common texts, referred to here by Grosseteste, follows at first
what had been the mainstream of argumentation since Augustine’s
remarks on the temporality of rites in Contra Faustum.What is novel here
is Robert’s intention to develop the subjective illegitimacy of a continued practice of the first cult into formal heresy, undermining the principal reason that, since Augustine, had argued for the toleration of the
Jewish communities in predominantly Christian societies: their service of
unwitting witness to the truth of Christianity.49 The status of the older
cult, which since the famous controversy between Augustine and Jerome
46 Wasserstein,“Grosseteste, the Jews, and Christian Hebraism,” in Robert Grosseteste,

366.
47 De cessatione legalium, I, iv, 1 (17, 1); cf. I, x, 32:“Nec solum est observacio legalium

cum sacramentis gratie carens utilitate, sed habens multum de pernicie” (67, 25).
48 Cf. D. J. Silver, Maimonidean Criticism and the Maimonidean Controversy 1180–1240

(Leiden: Brill, 1965); Hermann Greive,“Die maimonidische Kontroverse und die
Auseinandersetzungen in der lateinischen Scholastik,” in Die Auseinandersetzungen
an der Pariser Universität im XIII. Jahrhundert, ed.Albert Zimmermann (Berlin/New
York: W. de Gruyter, 1976), 170–80. On the growing practices of armed intervention in Jewish affairs, cf. Berg, “Servitus Judaeorum,” especially 453 n 68, and
457 n 85.
49 Cf. Jeremy Cohen, Living Letters of the Law: Ideas of the Jew in Medieval Christianity
(Berkeley: University of California, 1999), to be discussed in greater detail below.

The Two Covenants in Medieval Theology

905

had been said to be mortua resp. mortifera for the practitioners themselves,
is now qualified by Grosseteste as a known and pernicious heresy, which
could and should be forbidden by the laws of the time.50 This suspected
practical context, if established, would distinguish the point of Robert’s
text not only from its patristic sources but from the majority of his
contemporaries as well.
That Robert would not likely be indifferent to the more immediate
implications of the scholastically proven, heretical character of the Jewish
cult was shown a few months prior to the composition of De cessatione
legalium in Robert’s well-known letter to the Countess of Winchester.51
At the time, Grosseteste was archdeacon of Leicester.The younger Simon
de Montfort, to whom the sixty-some-year-old Grosseteste became a
close friend and advisor, had just been made Earl of Leicester. One of
Simon’s first actions was to expel the Jewish population from the city and
territory. The refugees found welcome in the large, well-organized (and
well-utilized) Jewish community of Winchester. Though his jurisdiction
stopped at the borders of Leicester, Grosseteste wrote an angry letter to
the Countess of Winchester, accusing her in accepting the refugees of
aiding and abetting gross injustice and of obstructing divine justice on a
grand scale. Referring to this letter, Richard Southern’s classical biography of Grosseteste draws the following conclusion about Robert:
[I]t shows that, in an area of conduct where brutality was the rule, he
was prepared to go to even greater lengths of brutality, because he took
the principles on which it was based more seriously than most men. He
thought with more energy, with more fierce commitment, and with
more urgent desire to give practical expression to his thoughts than
most men in high positions.52

This biography, which dwells from beginning to end on Robert’s rise
from “humble parentage”53 and his resulting lack of any aristocratic
respect for long-standing traditions, points to other polemical texts on
Judaism translated and popularized by Robert, where again there are no
50 Cf. just prior to De cessatione legalium Robert’s portrayal of the patristic debate in

Robert Grosseteste, Expositio in Epistolam Sancti Pauli ad Galatas (Turnholt: Brepols,
1995), II, nos. 12–35, where the reference to the heretical character of the continued practice of the Jewish ritual by Jews is less explicit (yet cf. the qualification of
the ritual as perniciosa in l. 674).
51 Epist. 6, ed. H. R. Luard (London, 1861); cf. R. W. Southern, Robert Grosseteste:
The Growth of an English Mind in Medieval Europe, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1986, 1988), 244–49.
52 Southern, Robert Grosseteste, 247.
53 Ibid., for example, already 3.

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Richard Schenk, OP

obvious signs of any widespread program of conversion; rather, they are
texts whose popularity seems to stem from Christian frustration with the
lack of conversion. This is true for the period after De cessatione legalium
and, as a continuation of its argument, of Robert’s “discovery” and translation, together with John of Basingstoke and Nicolaus Graecus—of the
so-called Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs,54 as well as the article “Jesus,”
from the Byzantine encyclopedia titled the Suda.55 In both cases these are
works alleging to present stories of Jewish leaders admitting their knowledge of Jesus’ true messianic mission and their venal reasons for hiding
this from their people; such accusations could only strengthen the charge
of heresy. Especially for his transmission of the first of these two works,
which was considered for a time by some to be a previously lost part of
the older Testament, Grosseteste was praised even by his critics as “one of
the greatest clerics in the world.”56 Even Matthew Paris, who devotes so
much energy to defending the Benedictine Order against the visitations
and other perceived intrusions by Grosseteste, praises the work as “a
glorious treatise for strengthening the Christian faith and confounding
the hatred of the Jews.”57 Both stories were widely received and considered genuine. Remaining within the arguments of Grosseteste’s De cessatione legalium, these alleged proofs of a knowing Jewish refusal to follow
the texts of the first Testament toward Jesus Christ could only serve to
underscore the heretical character of any continued practice of the older
cult.Yet other theologians refused to draw this same conclusion, at least
for the majority of Jewish worshippers. In arguing for tolerance of the
older cult, the Summa Halensis shows that Grosseteste’s thesis did not find
complete acceptance even within the Franciscan school.The Summa does
feel compelled now to ask whether the provisions of all those Sicut54 Cf. Marinus de Jongue, Studies on the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs:Texts and

Interpretation (Leiden: Brill, 1975); idem,“Robert Grosseteste and the Testaments
of the Twelve Patriarchs,” Journal of Theological Studies 42 (1991): 115–25.
55 Of the some seventy articles that Robert translated from this Byzantine lexicon,
the article on “Jesus” is the only one known to have circulated separately and,
indeed, in both Latin and French versions: again, a measure of the interest that
Grosseteste found for his views on these matters; cf.Wasserstein,“Grosseteste, the
Jews, and Christian Hebraism,” 359 and 359 n 9.
56 The Chronica fratris Salimbene de Adam ordinis minorum (vol. 32 of Monumenta
Germaniae Historica, Scriptores, ed. O. Holder-Egger [Hanover: 1905–1913], 233)
records that the Joachimite Franciscan, Hugh of Digne, held Grosseteste in such
esteem; cf. Southern, Robert Grosseteste, 283 n 17. Part of Robert’s greatness was
that he knew how to call upon the help of less famous friends, like his successor
in Leicester, John of Basingstroke, who had suggested the work to him, and
Nicholas Graecus, who joined Robert in completing the translation.
57 Cf. Southern, Robert Grosseteste, 9.

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Judaeis bulls since Calixtus II (1119–1124) had been justified, which
mandated that the older cult must be tolerated; but it provides an answer
opposed to Grosseteste: “dicendum est quod, licet blasphemiam perpetrent, credunt tamen se non in hoc delinquere, eo quod nondum credunt
Messiam venisse.”58 The modern editors of the Franciscan Summa refer
to the stark difference here between Alexander and Robert.59
In his disputed question, De complecione universi,60 Grosseteste had
developed the arguments for the absolute predestination of Christ that
would help De cessatione legalium toward its conclusions. Without its
return to unmediated contact with God, the world would lack all meaning.The conviction that the world without Christ is a world without any
internal meaning can contribute little toward making plausible hopes for
fulfillment that do not yet have Jesus Christ as their intentional basis.
Unlike Kilwardby, who after largely neglecting the prefigurative dimension of the older covenant needed to reverse the bulk of his arguments
to make a place for the newer covenant, Grosseteste had never allowed
the rites of old their own res significata praesens, contenta et effecta; his was
always a reductionist—here even Christomonistic—view of pre-Christian rites, which from their beginnings were meaningless and ineffective
without the “unilateral continuity” of their reference to the future Christ
and which therefore became counterproductive immediately after his
passion. While Grosseteste could make room for inclusivist arguments
that allowed the Old Testament rituals before Christ’s passion an anticipation of grace not by their own immanent meaning, but by an implicit
or explicit faith in Jesus Christ on the part of their practitioners, his use
of exclusivist arguments to describe the continued practice of the older
law after Christ’s passion is unambiguous. The attempt to show that the
continued practice of the older rites by the Jewish community was a
pernicious heresy which should be prohibited by law depended upon this
univocal, reductionist, and “unilateral insistence . . . on the continuity” of
the two cults in their common source of meaning and fulfillment in Jesus
Christ.61 It is that exaggerated continuity of meaning and purpose
between the two covenantal rites that demands the discontinuity in the
blessing and curse of their continued practice.
58 Op. cit., II–II, 3, 8, 1, 1, 2, ad 1, (Quaracchi, 1930), 729 B, no. 740 ff.
59 Ed. cit., LV B, n. 4.
60 Grosseteste, De complecione universi, 89–124.
61 For the impact of Grosseteste’s ideas on John Duns Scotus in the questions of

forced baptism and the servitus Iudaeorum, cf. Faes de Mottoni and Horst, “Die
Zwangstaufe jüdischer Kinder,” 177, 180 f.

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C. Thomas Aquinas
At the end of a richly documented study, more nuanced than his earlier
monograph on The Friars and the Jews: The Evolution of Medieval AntiJudaism,62 though similar in its argumentative goal, Jeremy Cohen sums up
his impressive four-hundred-page work, Living Letters of the Law: Ideas of the
Jew in Medieval Christianity,63 with the remark: “More than anything else,
our story has featured the ambivalence in which medieval Christianity
construed the Jew and Judaism.”64 The attentive reader meets that ambivalence throughout the book not only in the dozens of times the terms
ambiguity and ambivalence themselves occur, but in the very point of all
four major parts: (1) in the study of Augustine’s own development of the
theory of living Jewish witness to Catholic truth, to be carried out by the
continued practice of the Jewish rites with their cultivation of Jewish texts
as well as by the servile existence of the Jewish community under Christian rule;65 (2) in the reinterpretation of and resistance to this Augustinian
legacy during the early Middle Ages: When Gregory the Great (d. 604)
would ensure the legal practice of Augustinian protections and restrictions
of the Jewish community with its ritual practices, even while absorbing a
very non-Augustinian polemic against the Jews in his exegetical writings;
when Isidore of Seville (d. 636), with his sympathy for the policies of the
Visigoth King Sisebut, could hear enough of the Augustinian warnings to
stop just short of promoting the forced baptism of the Jews and the
complete homogenization of society; and when Agobard of Lyons (d. 840)
would meet with only limited success in opposing the legal protections of
Jewish life mandated by Louis the Pious; (3) in the twelfth century, when
the loss of some of the Jews’ special testimonial status accompanied their
growing inclusion into the broader lists of enemies of the Church, ever
more frequently lumped together (in part already by Anselm of Canterbury, d. 1109) with irrational non-believers, Muslims, Christian heretics,
and Christian sinners, even as Alexander II (already d. 1073), Bernard of
Clairvaux (d. 1153, from whom the description of contemporary Jews as
62 Jeremy Cohen, The Friars and the Jews: The Evolution of Medieval Anti-Judaism

(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, 1982).
63 Jeremy Cohen, Living Letters of the Law: Ideas of the Jew in Medieval Christianity

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); cf. especially 156, 165, 313 ff.,
359 and 364.
64 Ibid., 398.
65 Ibid., 35 ff., shows how Augustine, around 414, finally discovers in Psalm 59 (58)
the ambivalent text that sums up for him and his legacy both the preservation of
the lives and rituals and the continued hardships of the Jewish community that
are mandated by God:“Slay them not, lest at any time they forget your law; scatter them in your might.”

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“living letters of Scripture” comes), and perhaps even, with some grave
qualifications, Peter the Venerable of Cluny (d. 1156) sought in the midst
of crusading fervor to renew and sharpen the ambivalent Augustinian basis
for protecting and limiting Jewish existence and cult; and finally, (4) in
“The Friars Reconsidered,” with the increasing momentum of a thirteenth-century trend, not accepted by the Catholic majority, to perceive
Talmudic Judaism no longer as a genuine witness to biblical truth but as a
heresy in the strict sense of the term, undermining the Augustinian basis
for the protection of the Jewish community and its cultic practice. In the
final chapter of this section, the “Ambiguities of Thomistic Synthesis,”
Cohen seeks to demonstrate “that the lasting influence of that perception,
albeit subtle and illusive, may in fact have been more profound than one
has noticed.”66
Cohen’s substantive work seeks to underline the ambivalent character of
even the more tolerant tradition of medieval Christian attitudes toward the
Jews, a tradition of conditional tolerance that Cohen traces from Augustine
through Bernard of Clairvaux to Thomas Aquinas. It belongs to Cohen’s
central theses that even these undisputed calls for tolerance went hand in
hand with a theoretical rejection of the continued legitimacy of Judaism
and with a practical willingness to condone the harsher conditions of existence that were the usual lot of the Jewish community under Christian
rule.The argumentative goal of the work involves showing that the theological defense of toleration had been based on a theological service
expected of the living Jewish communities that namely by their continued
rites, writings, and harsher forms of existence would nolens volens bear
witness to the truth of Christianity by being what Bernard called the living
letters of Scripture. Wherever this anticipated service of witness came to
seem unlikely, as with the growing Christian awareness, especially among
the mendicants of the later thirteenth century, of the critique of Christianity in Talmudic writings, the ambivalent basis of tolerance tended to be
lost in favor of more single-hearted plans for the elimination of the Jewish
communities from predominantly Christian societies. Cohen’s basic thesis
is well documented and altogether plausible.
Cohen’s general picture would have been confirmed while gaining
additional facets and depth, had he devoted more space to the contemporary alternatives to the voices of ambivalence. In Augustine’s case, that
was especially Jerome, mentioned only superficially in this study, although
wirkungsgeschichtlich the dispute between Augustine and Jerome on the
cessation of the ritual law was a principal theological locus that fascinated
66 Ibid., 363.

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and preoccupied medieval authors. Especially from the twelfth century
onward, Augustine’s position on these matters was rarely understood
apart from this contrast. Defending opposite sides, Kilwardby and Grosseteste each devoted substantial sections of their works to presenting and
reflecting upon the Patristic debate.After the inclusion of the controversy
by Peter Lombard in his Sentences, no Catholic theologian until Trent
could easily pass over the questions framed by the patristic debate about
the relationship of Christianity and Judaism. Augustine’s ambivalence
became all the more evident to later generations by its contrast to
Jerome’s simpler and more negative position.
For Thomas Aquinas, the contrast with Robert Grosseteste (who is
never mentioned in Cohen’s work, despite the author’s interest in the thirteenth century’s new qualification of Judaism as heresy) and with the
Franciscan tradition inaugurated by Grosseteste, would have been especially instructive.The contemporary calls for the prohibition of the Jewish
practice of the older cult, for harsher types of labor for Jews than for the
Christian citizenry67 or for the forced baptism and foster care of Jewish
children68 were contemporary demands that found no acceptance by
Thomas or the majority of ecclesiastics and theologians.Thomas displayed
a degree of impatience with arguments such as Grosseteste’s that sought
to undermine even the limited practices of tolerance, such as they were at
the time, by retrieving the arguments of Jerome against Augustine:
Respondeo dicendum quod maximam habet auctoritatem ecclesiae
consuetudo, quae semper est in omnibus aemulanda. Quia et ipsa doctrina
catholicorum doctorum ab ecclesia auctoritatem habet: unde magis standum est auctoritati ecclesiae quam auctoritati vel Augustini vel Hieronymi
vel cuiuscumque doctoris. Hoc autem ecclesiae usus nunquam habuit
quod Iudaeorum filii invitis parentibus baptizarentur.69

Greater attention to the concrete historical alternatives could have helped
to identify the precise dynamic intended by passages such as Summa theologiae II–II, question 9, article 1, which in the context of their time meant
more of a protection of Jewish practices against the new charges of heresy
67 Cf. Leonard E. Boyle,“Thomas Aquinas and the Duchess of Brabant,” Proceedings

of the Patristic, Mediaeval, and Renaissance Conference 8 (1983): 23–35, with reference to contemporary positions articulated by John Peckham in answer to the
same questions.The contrast to both Thomas and John reveals the uniqueness of
Robert Grosseteste’s positions.
68 Cf. Faes de Mottoni and Horst, “Die Zwangstaufe jüdischer Kinder.”
69 ST II–II, q. 10, a. 12, c. Much the same atypically ironic remark recurs at II–II, q.
11, a. 2, ad 3; cf. Faes de Mottoni and Horst,“Die Zwangstaufe jüdischer Kinder.”

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than the lowering of the traditional barriers to allow the equating of Jewish
rituals with the legal crime of Christian heresy.While Cohen understands
the passage merely as representing a loss of the Christian sense of a special
place and role of the Jewish people, now ranked as just another form of
infidel among many, the defense of the Jewish community against forced
baptism and other methods of elimination demanded the rejection, formulated here, of the formal charges of heresy.70 To distinguish presumed
Jewish error from Christian heresy meant the difference between continued toleration and intensified persecution. The distinction of error from
heresy was more important in its day than the generic category of infidelity. In the controversial context of the times, the former issue was nothing less than a question of life or death.
While admitting in general terms this side of Thomas’s practical tolerance, Cohen’s work is more concerned with documenting the darker side
of the “Ambiguities of (the) Thomistic Synthesis.” “Although Thomas’s
Jewish policy stood squarely within Augustinian tradition, the Jew who
emerged from his biblical hermeneutic and his theology challenged the
very rationale for that policy.”71 Far from wrong, that precise claim might
have been argued even more strongly than in Living Letters of the Law, had
the author drawn a distinction between the work that Thomas had done
before the Spring of 1272 in Paris on the second part of the Summa theologiae and the work that he undertook at Naples in the final year or so of
his academic and literary activity. The theoretical work that Thomas had
devoted in the second part of the Summa theologiae to the meaning and
efficacy of the older covenant rites had expressed his ambivalence toward
the older law. In her magisterial essay from 1974, Beryl Smalley showed in
detail how Thomas, in these longest single articles of the Summa, no longer
restricts his interest to the quest for the literal sense of the rites, a quest
that had reached its first significant zenith with William of Auvergne.72
Here the pendulum was already swinging back, showing more or less
equal interest again in the prefigurative or Christological sense of the
older rites. This programmatically ambivalent interest of the second part
of Thomas’s final Summa in the literal and the prefigurative meanings of
the older rites avoids what the Pontifical Biblical Commission termed “a
unilateral insistence either on continuity or discontinuity” between the
70 Cf. R. Schenk, “Evangelisierung und Religionstoleranz:Thomas von Aquin und

die Gewissenslehre des II.Vatikanums,” Forum Katholische Theologie 8 (1992): 1–17.
71 Cohen, Living Letters, 388.
72 Beryl Smalley,“William of Auvergne, John of La Rochelle, and St.Thomas Aquinas

on the Old Law,” in St.Thomas Aquinas 1274–1974: Commemorative Studies, ed. A.
A. Maurer et al. (Toronto: PIMS, 1974), II, 11–71.

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Richard Schenk, OP

two covenants. For Thomas in this phase of his thought, the ceremonial
precepts have a twofold end:“Et haec omnia habebant rationabiles causas
et litterales, secundum quod ordinabantur ad cultum Dei pro tempore illo;
et figurales, secundum quod ordinabantur ad figurandum Christum.”73
And yet the pendulum kept moving away from the immanent sense of
the rites and from the relative discontinuity of contexts which that implied.
During his final tenure at Naples,Thomas lectured on the Epistles of Paul,
seemingly for the second time.74 Whether it was the motive for his
renewed research on the “Corpus Paulinum” or its unexpected byproduct,
Thomas began to stress in his biblical commentaries and in the relevant
passages of the tertia pars of the Summa theologiae the prefigurative dimensions of the older rites with an exclusivity new to his thought.Twice in the
tertia pars,Thomas refers to his change of mind about the sacrament of initiation into the older rites.75 He now holds that the rite was never an instrumental cause of grace, but, like non-covenantal religious practices, at best
an occasion of the implicit (or even explicit) faith in Christ.76 It was by this
Christological faith alone that the rite of circumcision had mediated grace,
the very same grace and by the very same faith as in Christian baptism.
Thomas’s late view of circumcision makes it resemble more the status that
he had already assigned to the rest of older covenant ritual, a status not
unlike the interpretation that Martin Luther later develops for Christian
sacraments, a status also in some ways closer to the common Jewish selfunderstanding of its own rituals as expressions of their (own) faith.
This late reduction of the causality of the ancient sacrament of initiation
to the force of its Christological faith corresponds to the shift in the prime
analogate for the very meaning of older covenant rites.Without denying a
literal sense to the cult of the older covenant,Thomas started to define its
meaning ever more exclusively in terms of the younger one. Verus Judaeus,
vera circumcisio, interior Judaismus et circumcisio all mean primarily a life in
Christ.77 Where they are not fully spiritualized, the details of the historical
rite are seen increasingly as having been directed immediately toward
73 ST I–II, q. 102, a. 5.
74 On the still unresolved picture and editions we have of Thomas’s works on Paul,

cf. Jean-Pierre Torrell, Saint Thomas Aquinas, vol. 1, The Person and His Work (Washington, DC:The Catholic University of American Press, 1996), esp. 250–57.
75 ST III, q. 62, a. 6, ad 3; III, q. 70, a. 4, c.; cf. also In Rom, 4, lect. 2.
76 Cf. R. Schenk, “Covenant Initiation,” 555–93.
77 For example, In Rom 2, lect. 4; 3, lect. 1; 4, lect. 2; ST III, q. 37, a. 4, c.Thomas’s
abstinence from the easy polemic often attached to those terms can be observed
by noting the stark contrast to many of his predecessors; cf. Gilbert Dahan, The
Christian Polemic Against the Jews in the Middle Ages (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991), esp. 105–16.

The Two Covenants in Medieval Theology

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Christ.The eighth day, the stone knife, the hope for the future, the desire
to control concupiscence were now portrayed as meaningful even in their
own day only as prefigurative of Christological faith, at least insofar as they
were not practiced for simply pragmatic reasons.78 The few literal meanings still mentioned are dwarfed more and more by the prefigurative
ones.79 Circumcision is seen almost exclusively now as a “signum futuri,”80
a “signum passionis Christi futurae,”81 a “signum foederis consummendi
[in Christo].”82 1 Corinthians 10:11 takes on a programmatic character for
Thomas’s theology of the first covenant:“antiquis Patribus omnia in figura
futuri contingebant.”83 “Illa sanctificatio erat figuralis.”84 Thomas now
argues that circumcision as a “quaedam protestatio legis implendae” could
have made sense only in reference to the future Christ.85 The Jews of the
first covenant were being sanctified by this, that “applicabantur cultui
divino secundum ritum veteris legis, qui totus ordinabatur ad figurandem
passionem Christi.”86 More so than in his earlier work,Thomas stresses the
Christological sense of the very faith of the older covenant:“Eadem autem
est fides nostra et antiquorum Patrum.”87 This does not mean for Thomas
a reduction of both covenants to some common ground, in general
monotheism, but a Christological focus uniting the various lines of the
more ancient faith: “et fides eorum erat de futuro.”88 Thomas now
concludes: “circumcisio erat praeparatoria ad baptismum inquantum erat
quaedam professio fidei Christi quam et nos in baptismo profitemur.”89
Abraham’s faith and the initiation rite of the “populus fidelium congregandus”90 are now seen by Thomas in this immediately Christological
light.Abraham’s faith is of one “qui credidit se patrem futurum Christi sibi
repromissi.”91 Thomas no longer mentions a twofold end (finis duplex) of
the ceremonial precepts, as he had in Summa theologiae I–II, question 102,
article 2, corpus; and it is hard to see how he could, given his shift toward
78 In Rom 4, lect. 2; ST III, q. 66, a. 7; III, q. 68, a. 1; III, q. 70, a. 3, ad 2 and 3.
79 ST III, q. 70, a. 2, ad 4, and a. 3, ad 1.
80 In Rom 4, lect 2.
81 ST III, q. 62, a. 6, ad 3.
82 ST III, q. 4, a. 6, ad 3.
83 ST III, q. 70, a. 1, c.
84 ST III, q. 62, a. 6, ad 2.
85 ST III, q. 40, a. 4 c., referring to Gal 5:3.
86 ST III, q. 62, a. 6, ad 2.
87 ST III, q. 70, a. 1, c.
88 Ibid.
89 ST III, q. 70, a. 2, c.
90 Ibid., ad 1 and 2.
91 Ibid., ad 4.

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Richard Schenk, OP

“a unilateral insistence . . . on continuity” between the two covenants.
While this late shift in Thomas’s theoretical stance toward the Jewish rites
does not seem to have been accompanied by a corresponding loss of his
dedication to the toleration that he had insisted upon for the Jewish
community of his day, the shift represents, pace Cohen, a reduction or at
least a new variant in the ambivalence of Thomas’s position. In coming to
share with Robert Grosseteste and others the insistence on the eadem fides
of both covenants,Thomas might well be said to have “echoed the ideological basis for their newly aggressive program of anti-Judaism, even as he
opposed its implementation in practice.”92 That opposition, however,
points to a force that was lacking in Grosseteste’s thought, one that qualifies the similarities by a still greater dissimilarity.
III. Conclusions
The history of medieval Christian attitudes toward the contemporary
Jewish community portrays even at its best “an area of conduct where
brutality was the rule.”93 There can be no question of our direct appropriation of the whole of any of the readings of the two covenants offered by
the theologians of the day. But the lessons taught are still instructive, especially if attention is paid to what distinguished harsh from still harsher views.
The directly Christological reading of the older Covenant, with its
generous-sounding qualification of the continuity between the two
Covenants as eadem fides, belonged most often to the harsher alternative.
Neither did the complete dissociation of the two Covenants or their
subsumption into a generic religious undertaking prove satisfactory. No
Christian theology of religions should consider itself to be adequate that
fails to assign a privileged status to the older Covenant in comparison to
other religions.That would fail to express an adequate view of the (relative) “other” or of the Christian “self.” And yet, if the Christological
dynamic that is called upon to distinguish Judaism from the pre-Christian religions of the nations is too strongly emphasized, the special dignity
sought for Judaism disappears once again; Christian approval can be
detrimental to Jewish identity. “The notion of fulfilment is an extremely
complex one, one that could easily be distorted if there is a unilateral
insistence either on continuity or discontinuity.”94
92 Cohen, Living Letters, 389. Cohen’s basic thesis differs somewhat less than he

suggests (365, 368) from the less densely documented conclusion reached by John
Y. B. Hood about the ambivalent potential of Thomas’s writings; see Hood’s Aquinas
and the Jews (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), esp. 106–11.
93 Southern, Robert Grosseteste, 247.
94 Pontifical Biblical Commission, The Jewish People, no. 21.

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Without repeating medieval theories in their entirety, a view must be
sought that can show the two Covenants to be in only partial continuity
with one another. It seems likely in turn that such will be possible only
on the basis of a studied ambivalence, different in content from, yet similar in structure to, those of the less unilateral medieval theories. Similar
structures of reflected and disciplined ambivalence, seeking as much similarity as possible while admitting as much difference as is necessary, might
indeed be characteristic of interreligious discussions as a whole.95 Despite
the beauty, power, timeliness, and profound truth in the Christian description of the Jewish people as “elder brothers,”96 the relation sought must
be one of an extended family.
N&V

95 Cf. R. Schenk, “Debatable Ambiguity: Paradigms of Truth as a Measure of the

Differences among Christian Theologies of Religion,” in Jahrbuch für Philosophie
des Forschungsinstituts für Philosophie Hannover, ed. R. Schenk, V. Hoesle, and P.
Koslowski (Vienna: Passagen, 2000), 121–51.
96 The words found by Pope John Paul II during his visit to the Roman synagogue
in the spring of 1986.

Nova et Vetera, English Edition,Vol. 4, No. 4 (2006): 917–940

917

Book Reviews
Sanctified Vision: An Introduction to Early Christian Interpretation of the Bible by John J. O’Keefe and R. R. Reno (Baltimore: The
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), xii + 156 pp.
I N SPITE of the proliferation in the last five decades of research in the field
of patristics, which has given rise to critical editions, contemporary translations, and detailed commentaries on the writings of the Fathers of the
Church, these venerable texts often bewilder those approaching them for
the first time. Much of this, John J. O’Keefe and R. R. Reno rightly suggest,
is due to the unavoidable presence in such works of “biblical citation, paraphrase, and exegesis,” which they deem “the great common denominator”
(3). To take a notorious example, one they allude to in their work, how
many teachers have had to respond to an objection raised by students reading the Confessions of St. Augustine, surely the most accessible work from
the patristic era, that the scriptural citations woven into so many paragraphs
threaten to extinguish the vividness and relevance of the personal voice
they seem to hear from the bishop of Hippo? Indeed, many of the writings
of the Fathers, even those that are not formal commentaries upon biblical
books, seem at first glance to consist of little more than vast expanses of
scriptural citations, often with little or no intervening commentary, and thus
with little explicit guidance for a reader seeking to discern their purpose.
According to a 1958 study by Wilhelm Krause, the works of Origen and
Iranaeus contain more than one thousand direct citations from Scripture, as
do the writings of Clement of Alexandria, whose well-known receptivity
toward Hellenic paideia—manifested in frequent citations of Greek poets
and philosophers—in no way eclipsed his reverence for Sacred Scripture,
which alone was paramount because its author was the Holy Spirit. But
apart from the staggering number of scriptural citations, it is the overall
approach to the Bible on the part of the Fathers, especially their apparent
lack of concern with its historical import, that troubles many readers today.
This has resulted in the neglect of many of the exegetical works of the
Fathers and confusion about the role of Scripture in works that are not

918

Book Reviews

overtly exegetical.
The purpose of the work under review, Sanctified Vision: An Introduction to Early Christian Interpretation of the Bible, is to render intelligible the
patristic reading of Scripture. In this, O’Keefe and Reno, two associate
professors of theology at Creighton University, have admirably
succeeded. They have written an engaging, stimulating, and thoughtful
work that could well serve as an excellent introductory text for undergraduates or seminarians who are approaching the Fathers for the first
time, but it should also prove useful to graduate students or even seasoned
scholars in theology and related fields who may not have first-hand
knowledge of the writings of the Fathers. Most people, to be sure, are
aware of the contributions of the Fathers to the unfolding of Christian
doctrine, and they perhaps sense that there is hidden treasure in their
writings, but they may have found such works difficult to read from cover
to cover and opted instead for excerpts in anthologies. Sanctified Vision is
not, however, a history of early Christian exegesis; the authors pointedly
and boldly decline to offer a chronological survey, for they perceptively
maintain that “to know the history of patristic exegesis is not the same as
knowing how that interpretive tradition functions with its own inner
logic and cogency” (5). Nor, again, is the work centered on the emergence of Christian doctrine, for O’Keefe and Reno rightly maintain that
the depth of early Christian interpretation of Scripture can be missed by
one who reads the works of the Fathers solely with an eye toward creeds
and councils.
O’Keefe and Reno do not seek to defend the truth of patristic exegesis—they repeatedly make this disclaimer—although it is clear that they
have great admiration for the Fathers and are disturbed by the negative
assessments, some of which they mention, of the patristic reading of the
Bible. They seek, rather, to establish that the exegesis of the Fathers is
coherent, mature, and worth reading, all of which are not immediately
apparent, especially to beginning readers. To overcome the alienation
such readers experience, O’Keefe and Reno descend to the level of first
principles, those assumptions and presuppositions that are often left
unstated, but which animate any work, ancient or modern.The difficulty
in reading the Fathers, then, is the incongruity between our assumptions
and theirs.“Our assumptions about what is meant by literal and spiritual,
as well as our notions about the relationship between doctrine and Scripture, made the Church Fathers seem disorganized, ineffective, and even
contradictory” (6). One virtue of the book is that O’Keefe and Reno
often employ the first-person plural pronoun, especially as they narrate

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their own struggles to learn how to read the Fathers.
The first two chapters, “Scriptural Meaning Modern to Ancient” and
“Christ Is the End of the Law and the Prophets,” are devoted to making
this disconnect explicit, to identifying and coming to terms with those
aspects that render patristic exegesis frustrating or even tedious to read.
The principal discrepancy between assumptions, they argue, is that “most
modern readers hold a referential theory of meaning, which assumes that
our words and sentences are meaningful insofar as they successfully refer
or point” (8), while for the Fathers “the arrow of analysis is directed
toward and through the literal particularity of the text and not beyond
it” (18).The Fathers did not strive to get behind the Bible, to the historical circumstances or influences that in the eyes of modern readers conditioned the text and are therefore essential for a proper understanding of
it, and sometimes indeed can even become more important than the text
itself; rather, the Fathers looked “into the text” (12). Certainly they were
not oblivious to historical or doctrinal implications of Scripture, but the
Bible “absorbed” their attention:
Scripture was, for them, the orienting, luminous center of a highly varied
and complex reality, shaped by divine providence. It was true not by
virtue of successfully or accurately representing any one event or part of
this divinely ordained reality. Rather, the truth rested in the Scripture’s
power to illuminate and disclose the order and pattern of all things. (11)

With particular attention to Irenaeus, O’Keefe and Reno give cogent
explanations of three terms, hypothesis, economy, and recapitulation, the understanding of which is fundamental for any student of the Fathers, inasmuch
as the Fathers sought an overall interpretation of the Bible, a coherent,
unified truth about God’s relationship with creation and with mankind in
particular. The core of the book consists of chapters three, four, and five,
each of which takes up a different “strategy” by which the Fathers developed this overall interpretation of Scripture, with Christ as the cornerstone: “Intensive Reading,” “Typological Interpretation,” and “Allegorical
Interpretation.” As illustrations of these strategies, each chapter contains
discussions of passages from the Greek and Latin Fathers, from Ignatius of
Antioch to Cyril of Alexandria and Theodoret. Augustine, Irenaeus,
Gregory of Nyssa, and Origen are favorite authors. As befits an introductory work, all passages are in translation; endnotes provide references; and
there is a brief bibliography and an index.
Under the heading “Intensive Reading,” O’Keefe and Reno discuss
the perplexing ways in which the Fathers move “within, across, and

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through” the text of Scripture (12), making associations between words
and passages in ways that disenchant modern readers. They show the
exceptional scrutiny that the Fathers lavished upon every single word of
the Bible, perhaps best illustrated in Origen’s well-known, lengthy discussion of the prologue to the Gospel of John, but really ubiquitous in the
writings of many Fathers. It would be difficult to accuse the author of the
Hexapla of careless philology or of inattention to the details of the text!
Two claims, in particular, stand out in this chapter.The first is the assertion that we should give more attention to the role of exegesis in early
disputes over doctrine. For example, the authors assert that Athanasius did
not invoke Scripture as a mere polemicist looking to prove his doctrine
concerning the relationship of the Son to the Father; rather, they suggest,
his doctrine was more effective for exegesis than that of the Arians. It
explained more verses.“Thus, for Athanasius, what is prior is the urgency
of a unified, coherent reading of Scripture, a reading that maximizes the
number of unstrained interpretations of individual words, verses, and
episodes. Doctrine ‘follows’ from that priority” (61). The second is the
notion that for the Fathers “Scripture [was] always worthy of more intensive scrutiny” (67).They quote from a homily of John Chrysostom:
For, just as with grains of incense, the more they are moved about with
your fingers, the greater the fragrance they give out, so it is with the
Scriptures in our experience; the more you devote to studying them,
the more you are able to discover the treasure hidden in them, and
thereby gain great and unspeakable wealth. (67)

In chapters four and five, O’Keefe and Reno take up typology and allegory, respectively.They recognize that devoting separate chapters to these
may not meet with universal approval. They assert, for example, that the
distinction between allegory and typology in many ways hardened during
and after the Reformation, when Protestant scholars sought to distinguish
sharply typology, which “rightly operated within the literal atmosphere of
Scripture,” from allegory, which was thought to entail “a willful abuse of
the literal sense” (20). And they conclude their preface with a plea that
Robert Wilken, whose assistance they gratefully acknowledge, nevertheless pardon them for maintaining this distinction (xii). But according to
O’Keefe and Reno, although allegory and typology both belong to the
“same family of reading strategies,” they differ “in the amount of work the
reader must put into the interpretation” (90). A failed typology requires
explanation, while an allegory involves much “interpretive ambition” and
requires “significantly more interpretive investment capital” (90). One

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hopes that scholars continue to debate the merits of this distinction.
O’Keefe and Reno distinguish three patterns of typology and three
uses of allegory. At times a typology traces the prefiguration of Christ in
the Old Testament; on other occasions it connects a Christian practice
such as baptism with an event in the Old Testament; and there are still
other instances in which a typology provides a way for a Christian to
interpret his own life and experiences and those of his fellow Christians
(such as the martyrs) in the light of Christ’s life. An allegory, in turn,
sometimes enables one to make sense of a scriptural passage that seems
not to make sense; at other times it facilitates a deeper reading of a text;
and there are still other occasions when it enables one to map a new
reading onto a text, as Origen does with the Song of Songs. Sensitive to
the difficulties that readers today have with typology and especially with
allegory, which according to some is a “betrayal of the reality of texts”
(89), O’Keefe and Reno offer two responses. On the one hand, they
provide analogies from contemporary culture to illustrate the above
strategies. For example, efforts to make sense of the pop singer Don
McLean’s cryptic “American Pie” exemplify allegory “making sense of
nonsense”; again, the interpretation of C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia is
adduced as an illustration of “allegory adding to the sense”; and baseball,
The Brady Bunch, and Martin Luther King provide an approach to the
discussion of typology. On the other hand, O’Keefe and Reno offer a
refreshingly frank diagnosis of what they understand to be the real obstacles to tolerating, much less accepting, these strategies.The real difficulty
with typology, they argue, is that it depends upon a conviction, no longer
shared by many readers today, that the life, death, and resurrection of
Christ are somehow more real than our own lives (88):
When contemporary readers object to patristic typology, we are
convinced that the true target of their objection is not typology itself
but the presumed divine economy across which patristic typology functioned. In other words, the objections are theological rather than
methodological. (85)

Again, contrary to modern estimations, allegory, which is not a flight
from the text but is actually the result of careful attention to details,
makes the heads of many readers spin not because the method is irksome
(for O’Keefe and Reno rightly note that allegories are not altogether
foreign to our contemporary culture), but because “the persuasiveness of
allegorical readings depends very much upon the economy the interpreter presupposes” (107). O’Keefe and Reno consistently dissuade us

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from a fixation on method and instead concentrate on the underlying
assumptions that make the patristic reading of Scripture coherent. Of
course the ultimate assumption behind patristic exegesis, as they recognize, is faith in Christ.They also happily steer clear of the insidious fixation on hermeneutics of power.
The sixth and final chapter, “The Rule of Faith and the Holy Life,”
underscores the importance of discipline for the exegete, not only a
personal commitment to asceticism, but also the discipline of living in a
community, the Church, and being receptive to the Rule of Faith. It is
here that one sees the ramifications of the underlying assumptions that
O’Keefe and Reno have discerned and made explicit thus far in the book.
For example, there is the claim, vital for any understanding of patristic
exegesis, that the Fathers sought not to assess Scripture, that is, to probe its
accuracy or its origin, but rather to interpret it, and of course to contemplate the ineffable mysteries revealed therein. One also finds in this chapter Augustine’s startling stipulation that Scripture should be memorized
even before it is understood, as well as his conviction that exegesis is
profoundly linked to one’s moral life. There is Clement of Alexandria’s
claim that an exegete will lapse into heresy and will misread Scripture if
he extracts himself from the discipline of the Church; an exegete needs
her guidance.This is deserving of further comment, inasmuch as it evokes
a striking difference between ancient and much modern exegesis: For the
Fathers, exegesis was inseparably linked to, and was at the service of, the
tangible, everyday realities of sacramental life in the Church.There is also
Origen’s notion that the exegete must conform his mind and heart to
Scripture, and Irenaeus’s conviction that all of Scripture produces a
marvelous harmony, even if one has not worked out the implications of
every verse.And one encounters the notion from Origen’s Commentary on
the Song of Songs that certain books of the Bible should not be read indiscriminately, and the related point that some passages of Scripture are
deliberately obscure so as to confound a superficial reading. The book
concludes with a discussion of Origen’s rich understanding of the
profound link between anthropology and exegesis. Though sure to
provoke some readers, such notions will at least now be intelligible in light
of the earlier chapters in Sanctified Vision.
It remains to be said that the book, which is certainly the result of
several years of teaching and reflection as well as scholarly research, is very
well organized and clearly written. Its brevity and price should make it
attractive to professors looking for an introductory text that takes the
Fathers seriously, and not just as interesting landmarks on the way to a
more enlightened reading of the Bible. A few readers perhaps will take

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umbrage at some of the analogies that the authors persistently raise.
These, indeed, should not be pressed too far. For example, in the
concluding chapter the authors repeatedly press an analogy with modern
science in order to explain the way in which the Rule of Faith or Rule
of Truth served as a control on individual exegesis.The authors recognize
the limitations of this analogy. It probably was designed to evoke for the
typical undergraduate a discipline that requires no justification, even if it
remains opaque to many laymen; although few understand the particulars of scientific research, rarely does anyone dispute that, as a discipline,
science possesses internal logic or coherence. This, then, is what these
&V
authors hope students will grasp about patristic exegesis: One should Nnot
take its strangeness as a sign of naivety or immaturity.
Andrew Dinan
Ave Maria University
Naples, Florida

Toward a Christian Conception of History by M. C. Smit, edited
and translated by H. Donald Morton and Harry Van Dyke (Lanham, MD:
University Press of America, 2002), xi + 426 pp.
M EYER C ORNELIS S MIT (1911–1981), a Dutch thinker whose theological and philosophical roots are in the intellectual milieu of the neoCalvinism of Abraham Kuyper (1837–1920), Herman Bavinck (1845–
1921), and Herman Dooyweerd (1894–1977), taught history and philosophy in the Universitas Libera Reformata at Amsterdam for a quarter
century (1955–1980).This collection of his wide-ranging writings spans
a thirty-year period—from his 1950 doctoral dissertation, titled The Relation Between Christianity and History in the Present-Day Roman Catholic
Conception of History, to published and unpublished articles, addresses, and
lecture notes, inter alia, on the nature of history and historical study; God
and history; history, meaning and knowledge; Christ, redemption, and
culture; the relation between faith and reason; and the epistemological
significance of faith for philosophy as well as scholarship in general.
Of particular importance to readers of Nova et Vetera is the sympathetic
but critical attention Smit pays in part one of this book to the chief
representatives of la nouvelle théologie—Jean Daniélou, Henri de Lubac,
Yves Congar, and other Catholic thinkers of the first half of the twentieth century such as Maurice Blondel, and the neo-Thomism of Jacques
Maritain and Etienne Gilson.The hermeneutical context of his interpretation of these thinkers is the problem of the two orders of nature and
grace, of the natural and the supernatural.The position one takes on the

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relation of these two orders informs the answer to questions such as the
following: What is the relation of God and the world? Of salvation
history and world history? Of Christ and culture? Of Christ and history?
Of faith and reason?
Smit begins his study with the assumption that nineteenth-century
Catholic thinkers interpreted the relation between these orders as a twostory system: nature being either the purely passive substratum for grace
or a self-enclosed order with its own natural ends, to which is then added
the freely given gift of grace (donum superadditum) essential to attaining
man’s supernatural end.These two orders of nature and grace are regarded
as parallel levels having only an extrinsic, but non-contradictory, relation to
each other. Nature and grace existed in a harmonious relation in man’s
prelapsarian condition. The postlapsarian state is such that nature is
wounded by sin in the sense that it loses the extra-added gift of grace, of
original holiness and righteousness. Redemption in Christ then means
that nature regains that supernatural gift of grace. According to Smit,
however, this understanding of the relation that nature has to grace
deprives sin as well as Christ’s redemptive work of its radical character.
Since the loss of grace only effects the second story and not the lower first
story, then “Nature as such [is not affected by the fall] and [hence] does
not need to be restored through God’s work of redemption” (22; 82). Smit
rightly sees the core problem with this view: It fails to consider that grace
directs, orders, and transforms nature from within rather than alongside of
or above nature. Now, since the lower order of nature and culture is left
untouched by sin and hence untransformed by the grace of redemption,
this results in a kind of naturalism at that lower level: a nature and culture
without God’s transforming presence, running their own course separately
from any contact with grace, and hence a nature and culture not ordered
from within their depth to God become increasingly independent and
autonomous. Smit correctly judges, “Here [the dualism of nature and
grace] we have one of the sources of the secularization of culture.”
In contrast, argues Smit, by the mid-twentieth century, especially since
1930, Catholic thinkers shifted their focus of attention to “the synthesis and
intimate union of the two [orders of nature and grace]” (9). One might say
that for them the key idea in the theology of nature and grace of, for example, De Lubac, Gilson, and Maritain is that grace restores nature in its own order
rather than grace flanking or supplementing nature (33).
Smit holds that this shift in thinking about nature and grace happened
for three reasons. One, as a result of the transition from a classicist worldview to historical-mindedness, that is, from the abstract to the concrete,
from the static to the dynamic, from some state of pure nature to a nature

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that is, in the order of history, concretely, fallen and redeemed (7, 28, 186).
Two, “in close connection with the ‘discovery’ of history as an essential
element of concrete reality stands the rediscovery of the religious dimension of
reality.” Religion is neither simply a higher level of human life, nor something added to human life. Instead,“religion . . . integrates and synthesizes
the whole of human life” (9). Three, present-day Catholic thought is
decidedly Christocentric rather than theocentric partly due to the movement of ressourcement with its return to the Church Fathers (10–12).
Smit has deep appreciation for the efforts made by the Catholic
thought of la nouvelle théologie, neo-Thomism, and other lesser-known
Catholic thinkers (for example, Oskar Bauhofer, Alfred Delp, Leopold
Malevez, and Gustave Thils) in the first half of the twentieth century to
overcome the dualism of nature and grace.Yet, he remains critical of this
thought because it still fails, he holds, to grasp the “inner unity of creation
[broadly including human beings, history, culture, and society], fall, and
redemption” (81). Smit attributes this failure to the untenability of their
view regarding “a strict boundary between a natural order and a supernatural order.” He adds: “The former may be regulated by the latter, and
be peacefully and harmoniously connected to it; in reality there is a polar
tension between the two, since what is actually rooted in each other is
here first placed side by side and only thereafter brought into connection”
(72). In consequence, he argues that regarding the relation of Christ to
history, specifically what the intrinsic value of Christ’s redemptive work is
for history as well as for learning, society, and culture, Catholic thought,
possibly except for Maritain, “does no better than posit an external
connection” (58). If they start with the fall in thinking about history, this
results in setting up an opposition between Christ and history. If they start
with redemption, they end up ascribing a mere instrumental value to
history, culture, and so forth. On this view, which Smit attributes to
Daniélou, “religious history is total history, in which profane history
fulfills only a subordinate role . . . it has no intrinsic value or goal” (56). If
they hold that history has an intrinsic value and not merely an instrumental value with respect to Christ’s redemptive work, then we are back
to the question whether there is an intrinsic connection between Christ’s
work of salvation and history. Indeed, this question arises again in connection with the theme of how world historical progress is related to Christ
who is “conceived concretely as the inner unity and decisive turning point
of world history” (94, 260).
Even Maritain ultimately disappoints, Smit claims, because he too fails
to arrive at a deeper unity of Christ and history, including culture, despite
his best efforts at showing their intimate union.Yet, Smit’s dissatisfaction

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with Maritain is puzzling. He acknowledges that, for Maritain, the goods
of creation, of the temporal order, have intrinsic, and not merely instrumental, value. He also acknowledges that Maritain’s incarnation theology
seems to be free from the nature-grace dualism because in the mystery of
the Incarnate Word the highest possible union of God and man, of nature
and grace, took place. Furthermore, the full effect of the Incarnate Word’s
universal significance is not merely that man’s nature is elevated and
oriented toward its supernatural end. Rather, the transforming efficacy of
Christ is within rather than alongside or above man’s nature—his grace
penetrates and perfects and transforms nature. Thus, integral humanism,
according to Maritain, is the humanism of the Incarnation.“The grace of the
incarnation draws to itself all that is human,” including history, culture,
and society. In reply then to the following questions Smit raises of Maritain’s position one must say “yes.” “Is this a definitive break with the
notion of an autonomous natural domain alongside a religious reality? Is
‘profane’ history imbued with religious significance?”
Nevertheless, Smit is persuaded that the source of mid-twentiethcentury Catholic thought’s failure to break fully with the nature-grace
dualism is that it did not grasp (as Herman Dooyeweerd puts the matter)
“the indivisible unity . . . of the divine Word revelation, that of creation,
fall, and redemption through Jesus Christ.” In Dooyeweerd’s own words,
“Whoever denies the radical character of the fall and redemption cannot
but hold an unscriptural view of creation. The reverse is also true:
whoever maintains an unscriptural view of creation cannot but arrive at
a view of fall and redemption that shortchanges the Word revelation”
(81). According to Smit, then, sin is radical because it influences the
whole of creation, and redemption is, accordingly, equally radical because
the whole fallen creation “is reconciled in Jesus Christ and is opened to
the re-creating work of God’s Spirit.” “The effect of sin is radical and
deep,” adds Smit, and “deep and universal is likewise the effect of salvation in Christ” (75–76). The failure to grasp the radical character of the
fall and redemption is reflected in an unbiblical view of creation.That is
to say, the fundamental dependence of creation on God is compromised
because of (a) a strict boundary between the “natural” and the “supernatural,” and (b) “a certain autonomy and independence [is granted to the
natural realm] with respect to God” (75).
In this light, Smit alleges that the Catholic tradition as expressed in the
thought of Gilson, Maritain, Blondel, and others is intellectually committed to “rational autonomy,” or the “autonomy of natural thought” in the
natural realm (133, 135, 137–38, 187–88). In addition, he alleges that the
mid-twentieth-century crisis of Catholic thought that Pope Pius XII

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sought to avert in his 1950 encyclical, Humani generis, reaffirmed, not
only the Church’s intellectual commitment to rational autonomy, but also
Thomas Aquinas’s philosophy of natural reason where man’s rational
autonomy establishes a rational foundation on which to build a Christian superstructure of faith (185–88). And although he acknowledges
“Catholic thinkers [such as, Gilson, Maritain, Blondel, de Lubac] are serious in their quest for an integral Christian philosophy,” their inability to
develop an “intrinsically Christian philosophy” is due to their “unwilling[ness] to relinquish the autonomy of rational thought” (187).
These typical neo-Calvinist allegations about rational autonomy are
indefensible in my judgment, not only as a characterization of the Catholic
tradition as a whole, but also, in particular, of the thought of Aquinas and
neo-Thomists like Gilson and Maritain. Although terms like “rational
autonomy” or “autonomy of rational thought” are much used by neoCalvinists like Smit, their meaning is ambiguous. Briefly, we know that
“rational autonomy” does not mean the self-sufficiency of “absolute
reason” as the source and basis of all truths. Human reason’s self-sufficiency
is rejected by Pius IX in his 1864 Syllabus of Errors:“Human reason, without any reference whatsoever to God, is the sole arbiter of truth and falsehood, and of good and evil; it is law to itself, and . . . hence reason is the
ultimate standard by which man can and ought to arrive at the knowledge
of all truths of every kind” (see also Vatican Council I [1870]).
I would also argue that for Pius XII in Humani Generis the “autonomy
of rational thought” could mean neither “pure reason” nor its logical
corollary, namely, the so-called state of pure nature. For he refers to the
concrete situation in which we exist as fallen human beings and the
noetic effects of original sin, which leaves the proper ordering of our
intellectual powers to the truth in a precarious, confused, and disordered
state. In this, Pius XII is echoing Aquinas who argues that the knowing
powers of human reason suffer the wound of ignorance and are deprived
of its direction toward truth; additionally, that the disordered state of our
intellectual powers also affects “man’s desire to know the truth about
creatures,” for he may wrongly desire to know the truth by not “referring
his knowledge to its due end, namely, the knowledge of God” (Summa
theologiae I–II, q. 85, a. 3, c.; q. 109, a. 2; II–II, q. 167, a. 1, respectively).
Now, suppose that by rational autonomy one means “natural reason,”
which is not self-sufficient and is rather finite, fallible, and fallen, and
which includes, I take it, the belief-producing human capacities of intuition, reasoning, sense perception, memory, introspection, testimony,
moral intuition, and what Calvin and others like Luigi Giussani call the
sensus divinitatis. Then, arguably, all of these capacities are still reliable,

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because, whether one is a believer or an unbeliever, natural reason can
apprehend truth. For example, the human reasoning of an unregenerate
individual can still construct valid arguments; he can correctly remember
what he had for breakfast this morning, he can see, hear, feel, taste, and
smell things like flowers; he can have rational insight into self-evident
truths; he can affirm the reliable word of another; he can know that it is
wrong to steal, murder, commit adultery, and so forth. Furthermore, he
can know God, albeit that this natural knowledge of God has vast errors
and confusions. Indeed, St. Paul in Romans 1:18–21 speaks of men who
are inexcusable because “having known God, do not glorify Him as God.”
He adds: “For although they knew God, they neither glorified Him as
God nor gave thanks to Him, but their thinking became futile and their
foolish hearts were darkened.” This text suffices to show that, according
to St. Paul, men are rendered inexcusable precisely because they know
God.Without this natural knowledge, St. Paul’s whole doctrine collapses.
Lastly, contra Smit, I would also argue that Pius XII clearly reaffirms the
teaching of Aquinas and Vatican Council I that natural theology is sufficient to show that belief in God is rational but not necessary to having
rational, justified, knowledge of God, or for knowing that the Christian
faith is true.
About half of part two of Smit’s book contains his own constructive
reflections on a Christian conception of history. In concluding this
review, I want to identify three claims at the heart of Smit’s reflections as
well as some problems with them. First, Smit affirms God’s integral presence in history (231), and hence he objects to the view that “puts God
in a dual relation to his creation” (228). That is to say, objectionable, for
Smit, is the notion that God relates to history indirectly and directly. This
direct/indirect scheme means that God not only relates to history mediately through the “[natural] forces and laws at work in the world-order
[that are] expressions of the divine will,” but also that he intervenes
“immediately and supernaturally to give things a different turn than
might have been anticipated in the natural course of events” (227, 229).
Smit argues that this scheme has dualistic implications: (1) the natural
process of history comes to be viewed as autonomous of God, focused
on human beings deliberating and acting, and human intentions and
motives, with God being pushed to the margins except for “fragmentary
interventions in the form of surprising and unusual events” (232); and (2)
“if [the reality of] God is no longer regarded as concretely knowable in his
[historical] acts, he recedes from our vision to the periphery of existence,
in spite of our general confession of his guidance” (229). In contrast, Smit
claims that God is intimately present in this world, acting in it existen-

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tially and integrally relating all things to himself. If this claim is true, then
we “would [not] be able to say anything true about history while leaving
God out of account” (231). Indeed, adds Smit, historical facts are constituted only in relation to God (243).
Smit’s view that God is actively involved in the constitution of historical facts, indeed of all creaturely things, has the appearance of being a
version of the metaphysical doctrine called occasionalism. Let me put the
critical point this way: In an effort to break with a dualism between God
and creation, Smit not only holds that God is the primary or first cause of
all creaturely things, but also seems to imply that he is the only cause of
such things.This doctrine of divine causation holds that the created order,
which would include the actions of human beings, has no secondary
causation of its own. God causes whatever happens in the world, creatures
being merely occasions for his activity. Smit is right to break with the
dualistic implications that (necessarily?) follow from the direct/indirect
scheme by affirming the necessary, existential dependence of creaturely
reality upon God for its existence, preservation, and power. But his rejection of the scheme itself seems to entail a depreciation of the created order
with the proper causal powers and laws of created things, and hence it
appears that Smit fails to do justice to the self-subsistent existence of
created beings in their relation to God. Of course I am not suggesting that
the anti-scholastic strand of the Dutch neo-Calvinist tradition explicitly
embraces occasionalism. Still, I should add that this criticism of neoCalvinists is a recurrent one, mostly made by Catholic thinkers, namely,
that the stress on the immanence of God’s activity in the world amounts
to depreciating the proper being of creaturely activity. This criticism is
aimed at the neo-Calvinist opposition to the traditional metaphysical
notion of substance.
In addition, reason needs faith, and thus faith has epistemological significance in two ways, according to Smit. First, faith is a way of knowing God
and his Revelation, and the knowledge singular to faith is perfectly certain
(188). Does Smit regard such knowledge to be rational, justified knowledge? Furthermore, how does such faith-knowledge relate to the project
of giving reasons for one’s Christian beliefs? In other words, does faith
need reason and, if so, in what sense? That is to say, I think Smit is right to
claim that (in Etienne Gilson’s own words) “we can know the Christian
faith to be true without showing it to be true” through arguments. Still,
is there no place for the project of showing the reasonableness and truth
of Christian beliefs to those who are not Christians?
Second, faith is an integral aspect of all human knowing; it is no more
optional to knowing than is thought. In particular, says Smit,

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That which faith tells us . . . is an integral part of the fabric of scientific
knowledge. Faith is not an ornament added to knowledge acquired in
another way; nor is it a subjective prejudice. . . . Faith, rather, when
oriented to God and divine Revelation, is a conscious ingredient of the
scientific method that the researcher employs to open us his “field.”
(233; see also 381, 393)

Here too, Smit is correct in claiming that faith is an “integral part” of all
knowing, in particular, scientific knowing, or scholarly inquiry. Yet this
intriguing claim raises some questions that Smit leaves unanswered.
For one thing, Smit’s claim suggests a certain resemblance to Augustine who held that faith is the condition of knowledge: credo ut intelligam.
Of course Smit has in mind not only the knowledge of God but also,
indeed, especially knowledge acquired through the disciplines generally
and not just theology. But that only makes the question more pressing:
How is one to understand the claim that faith is an integral aspect in the
process of all human knowing?
For another, Smit may be taken to imply that there is no such thing as
religiously neutral scholarship. Scholarly practice always operates under
certain presuppositions, such as an individual’s faith-commitment in the
autonomy of rational thought (138–39). In general, Smit assumes the
legitimacy of religiously based scholarship on the grounds of something
like the following argument. All reasoning is limited and relative to one
or another set of ultimate presuppositions, which are themselves “arational principles” requiring faith commitment.The Christian (or anyone
else) has an epistemic right to making that ultimate commitment. The
problem with this position is that Smit makes no effort to distinguish it
from fideism. Furthermore, fideism presupposes some version of epistemic
relativism because, according to Smit, “reason too must be intrinsically
historical” (381). Thus, Smit leaves disconcertingly open not only the
question regarding the role of reason in justifying ultimate presuppositions, but also whether he rejects the aspirations of human reason to grasp
some kind of universally valid and objective truth.
Lastly, Smit enthusiastically informs us that he aims to give a full and
coherent acknowledgment of the reality of historical consciousness. He
confidently affirms the ontological thesis that the nature of things is thoroughly historical (390). Furthermore, he holds that man is a “thoroughly
historical being, and that thought and the other forms of knowledge are
therefore likewise of an historical nature” (388). “Knowledge is intrinsically historical. It is not only in history,” Smit adds, “but is itself history”
(393). In other words, the whole of created reality is constituted through

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and through as “history” (366). The chief problem with Smit’s thesis is
that it lacks clarity on how he can make (in the editors’ words) “an
unqualified avowal of the thoroughly historical nature of things without
acceding to historical relativism” (v).
This concern is lessened with understanding that by “history” Smit
means to express, it would seem, the dynamic power of God’s act of creation,
which not only includes bringing things into existence but also keeping all
things integrally related to God (366–67). Smit calls this integral relation to
God “first history” or “transcendental history,” and also the “transcendental
relation,” because history in its totality, indeed,“the whole of reality and the
whole of life . . . are oriented to the transcendental Origin” (367; see also 325).
Now, the very nature of this transcendental relation is such that it constitutes the meaning of all things (391). By meaning, Smit refers to a “phenomenon’s origin, ground, rich variety, and value” (369). For example, the
meaning of justice, of freedom, of love, of goodness, and so forth, is a fundamental given of existence rather than something we create; in short, meaning is not made, it is discovered. Meaning is given directly in the divine act
of creation, with its mode of existence being such that it exists totally apart
from human beings, ever having a claim on us, indeed, ever retaining its
unity, its identity, its integrity and constancy (370–71). Furthermore,
although meaning is given to us in the transcendental relation of all
creation to the Origin, our knowledge of the meaning of, say, justice has its
context, being thoroughly historical. And yet, given Smit’s anti-essentialism, with his emphasis on the rich variety of expressions of justice, one
wonders how “justice retains its identity throughout all the changes it
undergoes” (368). In a reassuring manner, Smit writes, “However strongly it
may be tied into history, it nevertheless has its own originality. If it did not have
this—if it were purely historically determined—then it would not even
have its ‘being’ ” (346). In other words, without such an identity, the meaning of justice, its “essential element” (369), would be a product of human
history, swallowed up by historical particularity, sheer historical flux.
Let me conclude by asking two questions of Smit’s view. One, with all
Smit’s reflections on history and meaning, he, disappointingly, never asks
how history and truth are related, or how meaning relates to truth. If the
meaning of justice is, as Smit claims, “immune to fleeting, annihilating
time, changeable, certainly [in light of being always imperfectly realized,
often violated, and constantly threatened], but ever retaining that most
essential element” (369), that is, its self-same identity, is not that because
the truth about justice is objective and its validity is universal, which is
something that holds everywhere, and at all times? Two, if meaning is not
made, but found, because of the objectivity and universality of truth, and

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if truth is a property of propositions expressing the meaning, that is, stable
content of justice, then surely it makes sense to draw the form/content,
context/content distinction? Without some such distinction, we must
conclude that a change of context (or form) necessarily results in a
change in content—that is, meaning, truth. Indeed, without such a
distinction, historical particularity is so “constitutive of knower and
known that ‘knowledge’ is mere human construct” (as Aidan Nichols
critically remarks). This is historical relativism, which Smit much to his
credit never accepted.
Nevertheless, for all my reservations and criticisms, this book is worthy
of study. It raises challenging issues between Catholics and neo-Calvinists that neither can afford to ignore. As the French Dominican Yves
Congar put it a half-century back: “Smit demonstrates great skill at
perceiving the different currents [in recent Catholic thought] . . . graspN&V
ing them at their deepest roots.”
Eduardo J. Echeverria
Associate Professor of Philosophy
Sacred Heart Major Seminary
Detroit, Michigan

Morality and the Human Goods: An Introduction to Natural Law
Ethics by Alfonso Gómez-Lobo (Washington DC: Georgetown University
Press, 2002), xvii + 142 pp.
A LFONSO G ÓMEZ -L OBO, in a brief and readable volume, provides
perhaps the best summary of the (new) natural law ethics available. It
covers both the nature of practical reason, moral norms, and basic goods
as well as the pressing questions of abortion and euthanasia. Gómez-Lobo
mentions his debt to Germain Grisez and especially John Finnis, whose
influence “is obvious on every page of this book” (129). Gómez-Lobo’s
introduction will make an influential interpretation of natural law readily accessible to a wider audience.
It is clear that this work is the fruit of years of teaching and reflects the
background and concerns of college students today. Gómez-Lobo begins
with Plato’s Crito, recalling one “of the oldest (and finest) examples of the
practice of moral philosophy” (xi). Like the Crito, Gómez-Lobo’s work
appeals to objective reasons rather than subjective feelings in the quest to
decide what is right or wrong.“Our goal is to obtain agreement in moral
matters” by means of appeal to reasons that are in principle compelling
to all human beings (even if in a particular case circumstances of age or
disability exclude a class of human beings from being able to actually

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933

participate in the discussion). This agreement on morals is not merely a
contractual creation in which what is good and right becomes good and
right because we agree to it. Rather, “we should agree on something
because it is true.Therefore, our efforts in search of agreements should aim
at finding reasons to think that what we agree on is indeed true” (3, original emphasis).
In chapter one, Gómez-Lobo treats the first principle of practical
reasoning, that good is to be done and evil avoided. He calls this the
“Formal Principle,” which is not itself moral but rather a general principle of practical rationality.Why should we believe in the Formal Principle? The Formal Principle is not known to be true in virtue of empirical
observation and experimentation. The Formal Principle is not a claim
about what is the case, but rather is a claim about what ought to be the
case.The Formal Principle is a normative principle, not a descriptive one.
Rather, the “first principle of practical rationality is true by virtue of the
meaning of its terms” (5).The truth of the Formal Principle is therefore
analogous to the truth that a bachelor is an unmarried man, in that it is
by definition true.These truths tells us, formally speaking, that something
is the case, without pointing out which instances of men or possible
goods actually instantiate this formality.
Some readers might ask further questions at this point. Do we have
reason to so sharply distinguish between what is normative and descriptive? Even if the Formal Principle is normative, isn’t the Formal Principle
arguably also descriptive, in that every agent pursues only that which is
taken to be in some sense (albeit sometimes mistakenly) good? One might
also ask about the rationale for accepting the Formal Principle. If the
Formal Principle is true by virtue of the meaning of its terms, isn’t the
meaning of terms discovered precisely by means of empirical observation
and discovery of the way language is actually used in the world? However,
to ask and answer these kinds of questions may have taken the author too
far from his target undergraduate audience and into direct debate with critics of Germain Grisez’s interpretation of Thomas Aquinas.
In chapter two, Gómez-Lobo treats the list of “basic goods” that together
make up human happiness and flourishing. He deftly pits two competing
intuitions of students (subjectivism and fallibilism) against one another.
What seems good to me may actually not be good for me simply because
I can make mistakes. Indeed, one of the most notorious domains for selfdeception is that of one’s own good. When I want something badly, I
have little trouble convincing myself that it will be for my own good.
Some people are known for buying beautiful, bright red “lemons.” (7)

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Although students widely believe that “what seems good to me is good,”
they perhaps even more strongly believe that no one is infallible. GómezLobo does them the service of pointing out the tension between these
two beliefs.
Also helpful is his analysis of the basic goods, in particular his defense
of the claim that basic human goods are good without exception.
Health, we agree, is the good of the body. The fact that here is a war
going on and that young, healthy men are going to be drafted and sent
to die in a foreign land is not part of the concept of health. It would
be better, indeed, for a young man to be ill when the summons arrives,
but this does not affect the notion of health. What is bad is not the
health of the recruit but the draft and, ultimately, the war. Health by
itself, we must admit on reflection, is still a good. (36)

Similarly, life is always a good, though sometimes evils are made possible on
account of life. Gómez-Lobo’s distinction between qualified and unqualified consideration of a good helps avoid the pitfalls of such contemporary
notions as “wrongful life.” The fact that good can come from evil or evil
can come from good does not change good into evil or evil into good.
In chapter three, he handles certain questions about whether money,
beauty, freedom, or pleasure should be considered basic goods. In coming
to a negative conclusion, his discussion of whether pleasure is a good is
particularly instructive, allowing this text to be fruitfully read in class
along with the classic Utilitarianism of John Stuart Mill, whose views are
explicitly raised in the penultimate chapter of the book.
In chapter four, Gómez-Lobo provides “guidelines for the actual
attainment of goods, some of which provide the link between the foundational and the specifically moral domain” including vigilance, commitment, inclusiveness, detachment, impartiality, care, and respect.
In chapter five, “Agents, Actions, and Consequences,” perhaps the
most challenging part of the book, the author tackles the problem of
defining the “act itself ” or, as it is sometimes called, the “object of the
human act.” Drawing perhaps implicitly on Veritatis splendor, he focuses
on the “main immediate goal of the action itself ” in distinction to
“immediate partial goals of an action” and “the more remote or further
goal of the agent” (51). Not all consequences define an action as a certain
kind of action, but rather “[a] consequence is non-accidental if it is so
linked to the nature of the action that an adequate description of the
action would account for it” (53, emphasis removed). One wonders how
Gómez-Lobo would apply this criterion in a variety of cases, for example the separating of conjoined twins Jodie and Mary, the use of

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935

methotrexate to treat ectopic pregnancy, and craniotomy in cases of
cephelo-pelvic disproportion.
This leads into a discussion of “double-effect” and moral norms.
Gómez-Lobo justifies moral norms in terms of goods. The moral life is
not a matter of “rule worship,” but rather the rules enlighten what is or
is not truly fulfilling.The exceptionless negative norms, for example, not
to kill the innocent or commit adultery, protect and promote the human
flourishing of all. Also of great value in his discussion are the seemingly
tangential remarks throughout the text, such as the following:
An individual who shies away from commitments simply will not be able
to enjoy certain goods. If you never sign a contract committing yourself
to the purchase of a house, you will never own a house.A person who is
“free” from all commitments inevitably will end up empty-handed. (63)

This important book may indeed prompt a commitment in those who
read it seriously, a commitment to think deeper about the purpose of life,
the nature of the human good, and the role of reason in both. Through
Morality and the Human Goods: An Introduction to Natural Law Ethics,
Gómez-Lobo’s experience in the classroom now will benefit an even
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wider audience.
Christopher Kaczor
Loyola Marymount University
Los Angeles, California

Heralds of the Good News: Isaiah and Paul in Concert in the
Letter to the Romans by J. Ross Wagner (Leiden: Brill, 2002), xxii +
437 pp.
C ONTAINING APPROXIMATELY one-quarter of Paul’s citations of the
Old Testament, Romans 9–11 has puzzled interpreters through the ages.
Although C. H. Dodd may have put it more bluntly than others, he
certainly is not alone among New Testament scholars in his assessment of
Paul’s argument in these chapters as “the weakest point in the whole epistle.” Like many, Dodd suggests that in Romans 9–10 Paul sets out an
argument that he eventually abandons in Romans 11 for an encomium
on the mercy of God. In Heralds of the Good News, J. Ross Wagner sets for
himself the ambitious task of systematically examining each of Paul’s citations of and allusions to the Book of Isaiah in the Letter to the Romans,
focusing primarily on Romans 9–11 and 15. The result is an impressive
work that makes considerable progress toward untangling the knot of
Paul’s dense and perplexing argument.

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Wagner begins by laying some methodological groundwork in two
interrelated areas: the question of Paul’s Vorlage and his hermeneutical
strategy. The study seeks to integrate these two issues by demonstrating
the points at which Paul does and does not consciously reshape his scriptural citations to support his argument. In addition, Wagner consistently
compares Paul’s interpretations with other exegetical traditions, not to
suggest dependence, but rather to set the letter more firmly in its historical and cultural background. Further, the study also pays close attention
to the broader context of the Isaianic passages Paul cites to determine
how that context sheds light on Paul’s argument. Following this discussion of methodology, Wagner sets forth his primary thesis: Paul read
portions of Isaiah as pointing to his role as missionary to the Gentiles in
the eschatological restoration of Israel. The majority of the book (263
pages out of 359 in the main text) consists of three densely argued chapters that address, in turn, the three major issues in Paul’s argument in
Romans 9–11: the apparent failure of God’s word (Rom 9:1–29); the
puzzling phenomenon of Gentiles attaining to righteousness while many
Jews have not (Rom 9:30–10:21); and the status of God’s inheritance
(unbelieving) Israel (Rom 11:1–36).The fifth chapter discusses Paul’s use
of Isaiah in Romans 15 in light of the results of chapters 2 through 4, and
a concluding chapter summarizes and ties the argument together.
Chapters 2 through 4 thus form the heart of the book: a close examination of Paul’s use of Isaiah and the way the Isaianic texts interact with
and relate to other scriptural citations in Romans 9–11. One of the
primary goals of this main section is to demonstrate that rather than being
a failed argument to be abandoned by Paul in chapter 11, chapters 9 and
10 actually anticipate the final discussion of God’s mercy and fidelity to his
people Israel. In chapter 2,Wagner addresses Paul’s first major assertion in
the argument,“it is not as though the word of God has failed” (Rom 9:6),
showing how Paul’s references to Scripture underscore the continuity in
God’s dealings with Israel. Initially Paul refers to two foundational narratives, the call of Abraham and the Exodus, in order to remind his readers
that God has distinguished between individuals within Israel in the past,
calling some and hardening others.This retelling of the two narratives leads
to the first quotation of Isaiah, a conflation of Isaiah 29:16 and 45:9. Seen
in the broader context of each of these two verses, the potter/clay imagery
that Paul employs acts simultaneously as an affirmation of Israel’s election
and a rebuke of Israel’s questioning of God’s chosen means of redemption,
two themes that recur throughout Romans 9–11. The exodus motif of
hardening continues to undergird Paul’s argument, particularly the discussion of the vessels of mercy and wrath in 9:22–24.Wagner, however, points

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out that Paul never equates the vessels of wrath with unbelieving Israel, a
fact that becomes important when one considers the rest of Romans 9–11.
The second quotation of Isaiah in Romans 9 is used, in Paul’s hands, to
interpret an oracle of Hosea to include the Gentiles. This observation
supports Wagner’s suggestion that in order to understand Paul’s use of Isaiah
one must pay close attention to how Isaianic texts interact with the other
scriptural passages that Paul uses.The chapter closes by arguing that Paul’s
citation of these texts actually points forward to the restoration of all Israel,
since Paul never replaces the nation Israel with the remnant.
In the third chapter Wagner examines Paul’s explanation of why the
Gentiles have attained righteousness while many in Israel have not. The
analysis hinges on two key points: Paul’s identification of Christ with the
end/goal of the Law in Romans 10:4, and the broader context of the
scriptural passages that Paul uses to support his argument. Paul’s use of a
conflation of Isaiah 8:14 and 28:16 makes better sense of his argument in
light of the function of each passage in its context. Both passages envision
a division in Israel between a faithful remnant and the majority of Israel.
Moreover, the latter group seeks deliverance for the nation apart from
God. Finally, the two groups are divided by their trust or lack thereof. All
three of these themes form a crucial part of Paul’s argument from Romans
9:30–10:4, in which Paul wrestles with the reasons for the stumbling of
many in Israel and the success of Gentiles in attaining righteousness.The
Isaianic passages provide him with a precedent to critique his fellow
Israelites for not pursuing the Law on the basis of faith. Following his
complex reinterpretation of Deuteronomy 30:12–14 in Romans 10:5–10,
Paul once again cites Isaiah 28:16, though this time with a change: By
adding the adjective “all” to the verse, Paul connects the Isaianic verse
with Joel 2, thus signaling the inclusion of Gentiles in the number of those
who are saved by responding to Paul’s message.The apostle’s next citation
of Isaiah (52:7 in Rom 10:15) points to his own role in the plan of salvation and his understanding that the eschatological salvation promised to
Israel in Isaiah has begun to take place, though again including the
Gentiles. Not only does Isaiah point to this eschatological deliverance,
however; Paul’s citation of Isaiah 53:1 in Romans 10:16, as well as his allusion to Isaiah 40 in the following verses, shows that he also believes that
Isaiah’s message anticipated the obstinacy of a large part of Israel. Paul
concludes this section of his argument with partial citations of Deuteronomy 32:21 and Isaiah 65:1–2, texts that at the same time castigate Israel
for her disobedience, speak of the inclusion of the Gentiles, and yet envision this inclusion as working out the salvation of Israel and demonstrating
the covenant faithfulness of Israel’s God.

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Chapter 4 rounds out the discussion of Romans 9–11 by exploring
Paul’s use of Isaiah in Romans 11 and seeking to demonstrate the continuity of his argument throughout this section of the epistle. In the opening verses of Romans 11, Paul denies that God has forsaken Israel, by
interpreting his own faith in Christ in light of the scriptural precedent of
the Elijah narrative. Paul’s descent from the nation of Israel combined
with texts affirming the faithfulness of God to his people points to the
reliability of God’s election, since it does not depend on the faithfulness
of Israel. In 11:2–6 Paul applies the Elijah narrative to his own situation
to show that a remnant of Israel has believed. Yet, Wagner argues, Paul
does not thereby equate the remnant with Israel. Rather, “ ‘Israel’ is an
eschatological category for Paul.” Following this scriptural application,
Paul returns to the question of the hardening of Israel, a motif first developed in Romans 9. As there, so here also he does not assert the sovereignty of God as some arbitrary use of power, but rather as a part of God’s
plan to restore Israel and to bless the Gentiles through that restoration.
Again appealing to Isaiah to interpret his own times, Paul asserts the
faithfulness of God “to restore those whom he has rendered insensible.”
Indeed, the hardening of Israel is just one step in the plan of God to
rescue all of Israel, a step Paul supports by appealing once more to Isaiah
in tandem with Deuteronomy to interpret his own mission. The reason
for his ministry to the Gentiles is to provoke his fellow Israelites to jealousy and thereby bring them back. Paul’s reticence to equate either the
elect or the rest of his fellow countrymen with “Israel” suggests that his
statement that “all Israel will be saved” in Romans 11:25–27 refers to
both groups, envisioning a restoration of the whole nation. To the end,
Paul’s letter maintains a tension between God’s sovereignty and mercy,
which drives him to remain firm in his mission to preach Christ and in
his confidence in the faithfulness of God. Thus, as Wagner notes, Paul’s
“theodicy gives way to doxology” in which his voice blends indistinguishably with that of Isaiah to praise the goodness, the mercy, and the
incomprehensibility of God.
The final substantive chapter considers Romans 15, arguably the
climax of the epistle, in which Paul appeals one last time to Isaiah to
confirm his own mission. Picking up themes already treated at length,
Paul once again explores the significance of Christ’s ministry and Paul’s
own mission for the salvation of Jews and Gentiles. By putting together
a complex combination of scriptural citations, he reasserts God’s purposes
through Christ to bring about one community of Jews and Gentiles
praising God together for his faithfulness and mercy. Not least significant
in this web of scriptural texts is Isaiah 11:10, which appears in a broader

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939

context that envisions the restoration of Israel leading to a blessing for the
Gentiles and all of creation. Finally, in Romans 15:14–33, Paul once again
gives the rationale for his missionary strategy. His final quotation of Isaiah
(52:15) reaffirms his purpose in preaching to the Gentiles for the sake of
the restoration of Israel.
In chapter 6 Wagner takes stock of the results of his study and draws
together conclusions about Paul’s citation technique and interpretive strategy, as well as the significance of Isaiah among the various Scripture
passages that Paul cites, specifically in the Letter to the Romans. Of particular importance in Paul’s epistle is the way in which he reads Isaiah and
Deuteronomy in tandem as narratives of God’s faithful purposes for his
people Israel, a faithfulness that will ultimately succeed in spite of Israel’s
own unfaithfulness. It is this confidence that undergirds Paul’s mission and
enables him to hold out hope that one day “all Israel will be saved.”
It is scarcely possible to do justice to such a rich work in such a short
space.The skill with which Wagner interacts with the various versions and
textual traditions is impressive, only to be outdone by the way in which
he puts this technical expertise to the service of grappling with Paul’s
argument. Wagner repeatedly offers insightful readings of Romans that
grow naturally out of detailed, technical work, thus providing a model of
how meticulous scholarship can be used to further our understanding of
the biblical text. Nevertheless, questions remain concerning the broader
Pauline corpus, the inner logic of Romans 9–11, and the significance of
this key Pauline text for Christian theology. First, looking at the broader
Pauline corpus, one wonders what to make of the apostle’s affirmation of
Israel’s worth in Romans in light of the rather negative assessment he
makes of his own status as an Israelite in Philippians 3. To be sure, Paul’s
statements there compare his former life with what he has gained in
Christ Jesus, but this is precisely the point: If for Paul his own status as a
member of Israel means nothing apart from Christ, then how, according
to Paul, can the status of other Israelites who have not gained Christ be of
any value? Returning to the narrower scope of Romans 9–11, although
Wagner makes a strong case for the integrity of the argument of the
section as a whole (pace Dodd et al.), at least one puzzling feature continues unresolved, namely, how does Paul’s assertion that “all Israel will be
saved” relate to the examples he uses in chapter 9, which seem to suggest
that not all Israel was saved in the past dealings of God with his people (cf.
Rom 9:6)? Finally, Wagner makes an impressive case for the ongoing
significance of the remainder of Israel, but one is left wondering exactly
what role unbelieving Israel qua Israel plays for Paul. Equally pressing in
this regard is how Christians reading Paul two thousand years later are to

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deal with the same problem with which he struggled. Granted that this
question has perplexed Christians through the centuries, it would have
been appropriate for a work that (refreshingly) does not quarantine theological questions from biblical scholarship to address the issue more
explicitly. Nevertheless, none of these criticisms should take away from the
considerable merits of the book, which goes a long way to resolving a
number of the difficulties in Romans 9–11.
N&V
Rodrigo J. Morales
Duke University
Durham, North Carolina