Author: Vincent

What Do We Mean By ”Apocrypha?”

~ Vincent

It’s so important to know what a word means before you start disagreeing with someone about it.  I remember a whole debate that I had with an old roommate about the ethics of punching someone that was “imminently” about to attack one of your friends or you.  I insisted that you should always try to de-escalate things first while he insisted that it was unethical to let someone get punched because you weren’t willing to step in.  We went back and forth and back and forth for about an hour, much to the annoyance of his girlfriend.  It wasn’t until we started roleplaying different scenarios (yes, it went that far) that we realized that the way that we were defining “imminent” was very different.  I assumed that the hostile party had just started to become erratic and hostile, showing their fast escalation towards an attack, while he assumed that they were already deeply hostile and were literally about to throw a punch.  When we recognized the difference, we realized we didn’t disagree at all on any point, much to the continued annoyance of his girlfriend, who took the opportunity to say, “You two are so stupid.  I’ve been saying this all along.”  We weren’t arguing about ethics; we were arguing about a definition.  Unclear terms are the real culprit behind a lot of disagreements.

One theological term that is infamously unclear is “apocrypha.”  The word is varyingly defined as…

•Those extra books the Catholics have (Tobit, Judith, Maccabees 1 and 2, etc.)

•Any ancient Christian-y book that didn’t make it into the Bible (Book of Jasher, Book of Adam and Eve, Book of Enoch, etc.)

•Helpful ancient books that wise Christians know about (The Epistles of Clement, Shepherd of Hermas, etc.)

•Harmful ancient books that are mostly heretical (Gospel of Thomas, Gospel of Judas, Acts of Paul and Thecla, etc.)

That boils down to two key factors that our word is trying to get at: canonicity and doctrine.  First, it might be an attempt to discuss the canonical status of a book.  Maybe someone is trying to say it’s only canonical for Roman Catholics (or “deuterocanonical” to Protestants).  That’s one option.  But it might also be saying that a book is flat out non-canonical.  Or maybe the key concern isn’t about canonicity, but about the doctrine presented in a particular book.  That doctrine could be sound without being a piece of Scripture, or it might be horrendously heretical.  Again, the term can mean either of these things.  It’s saying something about canonicity and/or doctrine… but what exactly?  The vagueness in the term isn’t a modern invention;  it’s baked into the term from the earliest days of the Church.

Factor One: Deuterocanonical vs. Purely Non-Canonical

A fair understanding of the first factor (canonicity) can be uncovered by just looking at the meaning of the word “apocrypha”.  It comes from the Greek word ἀπόκρυφα (apokryphos), which means “hidden” or “secret.”  The word was originally used by ancient Christians (or heretics) to refer to books that were wise, but had somehow been obscured because they represented a threat to authority.  It should be obvious how often this term was used by heretics to introduce “sacred” literature that violated church doctrine.  It’s not hard to find early Church Fathers railing against apocryphal books, meaning those things that were obviously non-canonical and harmful.  A good example can be found in that famous hunter of heresy , Irenaeus, when he’s against the Gnostics:

“[T]hey adduce an unspeakable number of apocryphal and spurious writings, which they themselves have forged, to bewilder the minds of foolish men, and of such as are ignorant of the Scriptures of truth.”

Irenaeus, Against Heresies, (1, 20, 1)

Cleary, he uses the word to warn Christians about harmful, non-Canonical books.  Another good example comes from that rhetorician of Carthage, Tertullian, in his Treatise on the Soul.  He notes that some philosophers arrived at partial truths about the world by using non-Christian sources such as Greek myths, but it doesn’t concern him because they don’t actually seem to hold those myths in particularly high esteem:

“[T]hese philosophers have also made their attacks upon those writings which are condemned by us under the title of apocryphal, certain as we are that nothing ought to be received which does not agree with the true system of prophecy, which has arisen in this present age; because we do not forget that there have been false prophets, and long previous to them fallen spirits, which have instructed the entire tone and aspect of the world with cunning knowledge”

Tertullian, A Treatise on the Soul, 2

Again, apocryphal here means any book that’s not a canonical part of Christian scripture.  Clearly that is indeed a valid, historic, Christian use of the term. 

At the same time, we can find Church Fathers that use the term to refer to just the opposite on this particular axis!  Some use it to refer to consent that would go on to be accepted in the Catholic canon and not the Jewish or Protestant canon.  For those that might be unfamiliar with this kind of so-called “apocryphal” content, the Catholic Bible contains a number of additions in the Old Testament that don’t appear in the Jewish or Protestant Bibles.  Why?  Early Christians often spoke Greek and consequently read Scripture from a Greek copy of the Old Testament called the Septuagint.  The Septuagint contained seven extra books (Tobit, Judith, 1 and 2 Maccabees, Wisdom, Sirach/Ecclesiasticus, and Baruch) and a few additional chapters in the books of Daniel and Esther.  Even though a broad segment of Greek speaking Jews that used the Septuagint for Scripture readings also considered this content legitimate, ultimately the authorities in Israel neither used it nor considered it canonical.  As time went on, Jews used the content less and less, returning to the Hebrew Scriptures, and Christians used it more and more.  Eventually, there was debate in the Church about it.  Why were Christians using versions of the Jewish Scriptures that the Jews didn’t actually think was canonical?  Why use the septuagint at all instead of something that would have circulated in the region that Jesus actually lived?  Should the church remove that extra content that had been used for generations?  Or did it still count as sacred Scripture?   In his Letter to Africanus, the ever-abstract and theological genius, Origen, argued for the legitimacy of the story of Susanna (a story from the additional chapters in Daniel):

But probably to this you will say, Why then is the History not in their Daniel, if, as you say, their wise men hand down by tradition such stories? The answer is, that they hid from the knowledge of the people as many of the passages which contained any scandal against the elders, rulers, and judges, as they could, some of which have been preserved in uncanonical writings (Apocrypha).

Origen, Letter to Africanus, 9

A word that was elsewhere used to condemn non-canonical writing is now used to point at the additional Septuagint literature as actually purer, uncorrupted, Scripture, hidden away from the tyranny of Israelite authorities.  You can see that from the earliest days of the faith and in the highest circles of authority, the word is used in multiple senses to talk about the canonicity of sacred writings.

Factor Two: Safe or Dangerous Doctrine

We’ve seen how the term historically was used in different circumstances to refer to different aspects of a document’s canonicity, but that’s not all it could do!  Apocryphal could also be a way to discuss expectations for the reliability of a document’s doctrine.  Obviously, Irenaeus and Tertullian used the term to refer to books that were actively heretical and not worth reading, and Origen used it to refer to books that should be considered canonical and are doctrinally pure, but we can also find people that use the term to refer to things that aren’t dangerous, per se, but don’t have any claim towards anything resembling canon.

The compiler of the Vulgate, Jerome, is a perfect illustration of this still further way of using the word “apocryphal.” In the fourth century, Jerome was debating the details of the emerging Christian canon, and he objected to the inclusion of both deuterocanonical content and certain other books that had arisen popularly in key Christian communities.  He listed the Old Testament books he thought ought to be canonical (identical to the modern Protestant and historic Jewish canon), and then makes this note:

Whatever falls outside these must be set apart among the Apocrypha.  Therefore, wisdom, which is commonly entitled Solomon’s, with the book of Jesus the son of Sirach, Judith, Tobias, and the Shepherd are not in the canon.

Jerome, Preface to the Books of Samuel and Kings

At first glance, this appears to be little more than a further exploration of canon.  Jerome is condemning the Catholic epistles to a non-canon status, just like Irenaeus and Tertullian did with dangerous books.  But Jerome doesn’t have that same attitude of suspicion and frustration when regarding these books.  To the contrary, he seems to like them.  He occasionally quotes them in his other writings.  Jerome has the utmost respect for some of these documents that he’s calling apocryphal; he just doesn’t think they’re canonical.  That’s a far cry from Tertullian and Irenaeus’s use of the term, which was essentially “horrible heresy carriers.”  He uses the term “apocryphal” to refer to books that have positive, doctrinally-sound additions to the Christian life.

To recap, we’ve established that even from the beginning of the church, the word “apocryphal” could refer to a writing that is either canonical or deuterocanonical/Catholic, or it could be a reference to the reliability of the doctrine within a non-canonical book. It’s a broad, flexible term! And it get’s thrown around pretty readily among church people that are exploring non-canonical writings enough that it causes issues from time to time.  When you’re talking with fellow Christians about apocrypha, just remember how much history this particular term has and be careful to define what you mean when you use it. It might just save you an argument.

Augustine’s Commentary on John 13:1-5

~ Vincent

Augustine preached his way through the Gospel of John, which is such a treat. As a fellow pastor preaching his way through John, it’s awesome to be able to see the different ways that Augustine engaged with the same Scriptures that I’m working through. I don’t always agree with him, of course. At different points, patristic exegesis can be pretty weird by modern standards, but even when Augustine is weird, he’s never dull, and that’s worth something. Since it was kind of hard to read through Augustine’s Tractates on the Gospel of John as a reference document, I thought I’d break the specific verses I was looking at down into a commentary. The ideas are his, but the words are mine. Hopefully, it makes the gems of his wisdom a little more accessible.

Here are his thoughts on John 13:1-5. The Bible verses I mention are usually from the NIV, but sometimes Augustine’s insights require language from the translation that he’s working from. In those cases, I use the NIV for inspiration but tweak it to try to make it resemble what Augustine was obviously working from.

1It was just before the Passover Festival.  Jesus knew that the hour had come for him to leave this world and go to the Father. (Jn. 13:1 a)

Augustine dabbled in a lot of different languages, so in this first verse, he points out some of the subtle truths that get highlighted depending on which language you read it in. For example, in Greek, the word Pascha (Passover) sounds a lot like paschein, the word for suffering. And sure enough, this is a period where Christ is preparing to paschein for the whole world. This wasn’t lost on Ancient Greek Christians. They naturally associated this celebration of Passover with Christ’s suffering.

If, however, you read the passage in Hebrew, the word Pascha means (unsurprisingly to us today) “pass over,” referring to the angel of death passing over houses that had lamb’s blood above the door during the last of the Egyptian plagues before the exodus. The Hebrews were saved by the blood of a lamb, and here Jesus, the lamb of God, goes to the cross so that we can be saved from death by his blood.

Still further, in Augustine’s native Latin, the translation of “Passover” would be “transitus,” which would mean something like “passing through,” “crossing,” or “transit.” How appropriate! Jesus isn’t going to die. He will, however, pass through this world. The Vulgate even uses this same language to describe Jesus’s mission later in this verse: this is the “hora ut transeat ex hoc mundo,” or in English, “the hour for him to pass through the world.” Jesus is like Moses! Moses passed through the Red Sea to lead his people out of slavery in Egypt to the promised land. Jesus passed through the world to lead his people out of slavery to sin and death and into the Kingdom of God. As Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 1:13: “For [Jesus] has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves.” Everyone will pass away from this world, but not everyone will pass through this world. Remember how Pharaoh’s soldiers sided against Moses and died in the middle of the waves because of God’s judgement? Those who follow Christ will pass through the world with him, but those who are against him will pass with the world into God’s judgement.

Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end. (Jn. 13:1 b)

What does it mean that Jesus “love them to the end?” What end? Did Jesus’s love end at the cross? No! Jesus loved us even after that. Jesus came back to life and loved us. Jesus ascended into Heaven and still loves us. There isn’t an end to Jesus’s life! So “loved them to the end” can’t refer to the end of his life. What might it refer to? In classical Christian terms, “the end” can refer to the telos, or reason that something was made. For example, the proper end of an acorn is to become an oak tree. The proper end of a heart is to pump blood. Teleologically, that’s their proper end. Romans 10:4 references this type of end when it calls Jesus the “end of the law.” Does it mean that Jesus ended the law? No. It means Jesus was the perfect culmination of the law. He was the proper end of the law. So if Jesus loved his disciples to the end, he wasn’t loving them with a partial love. This was a love that had achieved its proper end. This was a perfect love. This was the love that led him to the cross. As John 15:13 says, “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” Jesus loved his disciples with the greatest love.

2 The evening meal was in progress, and the devil had already prompted Judas, the son of Simon Iscariot, to betray Jesus. (Jn. 13:2)

At this point, the devil has already planted a spiritual suggestion in Judas’s heart: betray Jesus. This wasn’t a whisper in his ear so much as a spiritual influence that entered through his thoughts. Remember, not everything that’s spiritual is good! Paul knew all about the challenges that spiritual beings can bring.. He wrote in Ephesians 6:12, our struggle is against powers, principalities, and the spiritual forces of evil. Somehow, devils can mingle with our thoughts and encourage us to sin. But how do they do it? And how do we know which thoughts are from them and which are from us? And are there angels that introduce good spiritual thoughts to us? It seems reasonable to assume that there are, but since all of these things are happening beyond our ability to see them, there’s so much we can’t know. We may not know every detail, but we always know which of the thoughts in our mind we choose to act on. We can choose to be aided by God towards what is good, or go off on our own and choose what is wrong. Judas knew Jesus, but he didn’t accept him as his God. The instinct to betray Jesus didn’t come from the Devil. That belonged to Judas. The devil just placed that thought of betrayal in his heart and let him do the rest. He came to this meal to spy on the shepherd and sell the Savior. Judas may have planned to do evil, but God used his evil for good. Even Judas’s betrayal became a part of God’s receptive plan.

3 Jesus knew that the Father had put all things under his power, and that he had come from God and was returning to God; 4 so he got up from the meal, took off his outer clothing, and wrapped a towel around his waist. 5 After that, he poured water into a basin and began to wash his disciples’ feet, drying them with the towel that was wrapped around him. (Jn. 13:3-5)

Judas showed up to that meal assuming that his betrayal was the perfect secret, but Jesus knew. Jesus knew everything that Judas was going to do, but he wasn’t worried. He trusted his Father completely. Everything was in His hands, including Judas. In the ultimate act of humility, he knelt down to wash the feet of his disciples including the feet of his betrayer. It didn’t matter how much a person had indulged in evil. There was nobody that Jesus wasn’t willing to kneel down and serve.

And the particulars of that act tell us so much. He took off his outer garment and wrapped towel around his waist to serve us. It’s an image of the incarnation! Jesus laid aside the grandeur of Heaven (the outer garment) and took on humanity (the towel) so that he could serve us. As Philippians 2:6-7 says, “

[Jesus], being in very nature God,
     did not consider equality with God something to be used to
     his own advantage;
rather, he made himself nothing
     by taking the very nature of a servant,
     being made in human likeness.

Later, he’ll have his garments stripped from him at the cross and he’ll be wrapped in linen for burial. All of this humiliation was for our sake. Even here, as he goes to the cross, he stops to serve everyone including the lowest among us. As Luke wrote, “He came to seek and save the lost,” (Lk. 19:10).

We were lost at one point. We had that same pride that Judas had in our hearts, but God came to wash us with his grace. Don’t cling to that pride! Set it aside and serve others in love and humility until just like the one who saved you.

The Lord’s Prayer: Debts or Trespasses

~ Vincent

I’m sure many of you have had this experience: you’re visiting a church that’s a little different than what you’re used to and the time for the Lord’s Prayer comes. Things are going pretty well until… boom! They ask God to forgive them their “debts” instead of “trespasses (or “trespasses” instead of “debts”—you get the idea). What gives? Why are there two different words that churches might use in that part of the Lord’s Prayer?

The most common answer I’ve heard was that it’s because the Lord’s Prayer appears in the Bible twice: once in Matthew 6:9-13 and once in Luke 11:2-4. What a delightful, satisfying little answer… until I actually looked those scriptures up and realized that NEITHER of them says “trespasses” anywhere. Matthew’s version says “debts” both times, even if you take it back to the original Greek! The root word for debt and debtors, opheilō, is what you’ll see in both instances. Forgive us our debts (opheilēmata) as we forgive our debtors (opheiletais). Luke’s version is definitely a little different, but not because it says trespasses. Jesus asks God to forgive us our sins (hamartias in Greek) as we forgive those who are indebted to us (opheilonti). So what gives? If the Bible uses “debts” three of the four instances, how on Earth did we end up with trespasses?

I tried to look for the oldest version of the Bible I could find that used some form of “trespasses” instead of “debts,” and I’m pretty confident that the furthest back you can get is the 1526 Tyndale Bible, one of the earliest and most influential Bibles in the English language. He was translating from Erasmus’s 1522 edition of the New Testament, which had both Greek and Latin text to work from. The Greek (which he was primarily working with) has the same words that we already looked at (debt, debtors, people indebted to us), and even if we glance at the Latin, the words are pretty debt-centric (“remittimus omni debenti“— release us from our debts, in Matthew 6:12, for instance). But when we look at Tyndale’s translation, you can see trespasses and trespassers for the first time! Why did he do that? Who knows? Nobody else was doing it. Maybe he was inspired by what Jesus said just after the Lord’s Prayer in Matthew 6:14-15, in which Jesus warns people that God will forgive their trespasses (paraptōmata) as they forgive the trespasses of others, but we can’t know for certain.

But how did Tyndale’s translation get so popular? Because it was used in the 1549 Book of Common Prayer, which is the official book of liturgy for the Church of England. At the time, his translation was one of the most readily available editions that came from the Greek. Over time, other English translations didn’t follow Tyndale’s direction on those verses, but the Book of Common Prayer kept it that way. In every service across the Church of England, that’s what people said, and as with all repeated pieces of liturgy, that’s how it stuck. As time went on, the influence of the Book of Common Prayer was felt in other denominations. Churches that make use of formal liturgy are more likely to say “trespasses” (Anglican, Methodist, Catholic, Lutheran, Eastern Orthodox), while churches that don’t use that same kind of formal liturgy are more likely to say “debts” (Presbyterian, Reformed, Baptist).

Which is probably the better translation? Debts. Obviously debts. It’s not even a question. That said, I doubt it would be a major grievance in Jesus’s eyes if you said trespasses instead. That’s how he described sins and forgiveness immediately after saying the Lord’s Prayer, so I can’t imagine him disapproving too much.

For those that want to go further, if you want to look at the Greek for yourself, the interlinear translation on Bible Hub is a great tool. They’ve also got Tyndale’s translation available. If you’re really wild, Erasmus’s 1522 Bible translation is over at archive.org.

Conveniently Untranslatable: Sheol, Hades, and Gehenna

~ Vincent

One of my personal pet peeves is when pastors bust out the weird words for Hell. “You can see here that they’re talking about Gehenna, which is different than Hades and certainly much different than Hell.” Huh? Hades and Gehenna aren’t English words. You’re just leaving words in their original language and insisting that it’s somehow different and deeper for not having been translated. Can you imagine if any other theological subject took the same approach? Imagine talking about the Gospel and someone said, “well, let’s be sure to speak about the evangelion, which is different from the gospel or the devar YHWH.” Or imagine if we were talking about prophets and someone insisted that we needed to start talking about prophētēs and navi’im if we REALLY want to be serious about all of this. Not all of these conversations are wrong-headed. There absolutely is a place for learning more about cultural attachments to different words and the art of translation, but when a single theological subject (Hell) is the only one that people ever want to debate, I start to wonder if it’s out of a misled curiosity or a deep-seated need for the text to say something other than it does. Ironically, when I looked at the players involved in those translation decisions, both intellectual wanderlust and deep discomfort with Hell seem to be present in the Hades/Sheol/Gehenna conversation.

On one side, you have evangelical pastors that seem to see conversations about Hades and Sheol as the work of serious scholarship unburdened by the assumptions of previous tradition. The logic goes something like this: do you really want to know what the biblical author was trying to tell you? Then you need to get back to the source of the book itself! What did these words mean in the original Jewish setting? The authors didn’t even know the word “Hell,” and if you read passages about Sheol while thinking about a burning pit full of devils, you’re going to totally misunderstand what they were getting at. If you want to be accurate, you have to accept that there are no clean, accurate translations of these concepts into English. We need to leave these words in their original language and let people learn what Jews thought about the afterlife in those timeframes if we want people to understand what those passages mean.

To some extent, I respect the thought process. It’s sincere and genuinely focused on the Bible. It is, however, a little misled. It tosses out the contributions of historic Christians in the effort of uncovering something “more accurate,” but what’s uncovered is almost always much, much less so. After all, it implies that there is a reasonably simple, non-scholarly way for people to comprehend what Jewish religious thought was about the afterlife over thousands of years, and that’s totally unreasonable. Just look at the three-year stretch that Jesus spent in public ministry! Throughout the New Testament, we see the Saducees and the Pharisees. Were they on the same page about the afterlife? No! For a Sadducee, any talk about the afterlife would have been absurd. They believed there was no afterlife at all. The Pharisees, on the other hand, there was a bodily resurrection at the end of time after which some would go on to everlasting life and others would go on to eternal torment. That’s a pretty big difference in the way they thought about the afterlife! Do you think they agreed on the meaning of the word Sheol? And remember, we’re only looking at two groups that were active in the three years that Jesus was involved in public ministry. The Old Testament covers THOUSANDS of years of history. If we’re convinced that words like Sheol and Gehenna are so wildly unlike our modern words that we need to leave them untranslated, we also need to accept that we can’t offer up one explanation about what the afterlife REALLY was to Jews for thousands of years and claim that this is a penetrating work of scholarship that finally explains the concept. If Jewish religious scholars couldn’t agree during the life of Jesus, they certainly weren’t all miraculously on the same page before that. No, we would need a study that’s far deeper and wider than we’re really interested in to seriously embark down this road. In describing what Jews “really thought” about Sheol, you’re inevitably picking one interpretation and blanket applying it for a broad swath of history.

Beyond introducing a level of complexity that is both not scholarly enough to be taken seriously and too scholarly for the most people to understand, there’s a bigger, simpler concern that ought to disqualify the use of these terms in an evangelical setting: is Sheol a real place? It’s usually described as a a spooky, neutral realm of the dead, so is that an actual possible landing place for people that die? What about Hades? And is Hades a different place than Sheol? After all, it is similar, although the Greeks had some moral distinctions to their Hades. You could make it to Elysium or sink to the depths of Tartarus. Oh, but those aren’t explicitly mentioned in the New Testament, so do they count? Or was the New Testament Hades different from the Greek Hades? And how does Gehenna fit into all of this? And how does ANY of it fit in with Christian orthodoxy? The simple truth is that it doesn’t fit into Christian orthodoxy. These places, if imagined as anything other than Hell or Heaven, don’t fit within a cohesive Christian framework. Our Christian forebears recognized this. Bibles didn’t leave those words in their Greek and Hebrew forms until the 19th and 20th centuries and none of those words appears in any historic doctrinal standards (unlike Heaven and Hell, which are pretty standard fare). Leaving the words untranslated doesn’t just risk confusing people! It also risks adding non-existent places to Christian’s understanding of the cosmos. The hundreds of years of resources where our ancestors in the faith translated those words as “Hell” actually help us to understand how they contribute to a consistent worldview. In ditching them for a “more accurate understanding,” we’ve ditched a tremendous aid.

But let’s jump to the other side of the theological spectrum. What about more liberal theologians? Why are they in favor of Hades and Gehenna instead of Hell? This one doesn’t take a lot of explaining. Universalism in both it’s soft and hard forms, are much more common in mainline churches and expectations for doctrine tends to be more pluralistic. In the tradition of Schliermacher, the Bible is often seen as a compilation of ideas about God that are bound by a very different time and culture, rather than a singular authoritative voice illuminating any objective truth. Removing instances of the word Hell from the Bible is generally seen as a good thing, since eternal suffering is supposedly incompatible with the idea of a good God. To use terms about Hades and Gehenna instead helps establish the foreignness and pluralistic nature of the Bible. It becomes more of a cultural curiosity, rather than something serious that needs to be addressed.

My belief is simple enough: people deserve to have Bibles where EVERY word is translated into their language, not just the convenient ones. For over well over a thousand years, Hades, Gehenna, and Sheol were normatively translated to “Hell.” The Vulgate used the Latin word for Hell. The Wycliffe Bible used Hell. The King James used Hell. Hell is the best English rendering of those Greek and Hebrew words, and using them creates a theological consistency that’s necessary to have any honest understanding of the faith. At times, I see people blame the shortcomings of Latin and English for a translation as “shallow” as Hell. The Latin word for Hell, Infernum, is pretty close culturally to our understanding of Hell, so maybe that’s where things fell apart! They claim, “we just don’t have the same vocabulary available to us as the Greeks and the Hebrews did! The Latins mistranslated those word, and English kept those wrong connotations, but now we’re getting back to a purer understanding.” The argument sounds good on paper, until you realize that Latin and Greek were both spoken in the New Testament era and there were no ancient Greeks disgusted by the Latins use of their filthy word Infernum for being too far from their pure Hades. If similar translations were good enough for the Greeks, how they it be too poor for us? A mountain has been made out of a molehill. These words can be reasonably translated! We just don’t like the translation, either because it bores us or because it scares us.

By no means do I say any of this to imply that serious cultural and word studies ought to be off limits. Of course Christians should learn more and continually try to understand what the Scriptures say. But we ought to ask ourselves, why is Hell the single word subject to this intense modern scrutiny? Nobody is scrambling to know the cultural nuances behind ancient and modern understandings of Heaven or implying that a purer understanding of purgatory is just beyond our grasp if we stopped using English. Why are the words for Hell mysteriously the exact words we can’t translate? Why are some of the explanations for those words popularly offered up by detractors actively incorrect (no, Gehenna was not a garbage dump outside of town and not a shred of archaeological or historical evidence has ever implied that it was)? Why has an uptick in interest in universalism coincided with our unwillingness to use “Hell”? Why are the untranslated words mysteriously absent from all historical doctrinal standards? We could go on and on with pointed questions, but the point is that we’re being horribly inconsistent when we use Sheol, Hades, and Gehenna, and our inconsistency isn’t random. It’s the product of very particular thought processes, all of which are skeptical of historic Christian tradition. The evangelicals want to abandon tradition to get back to a “true sense” of the text, and the liberals want to abandon it because they just don’t like it, but they’re both missing out. The things we were handed down from our Christian forebears may not always be perfect, but in this particular instance, they’ve given us clear direction on how to reasonably translate words into our language, and their translations offer doctrinal clarity that you simply can’t find without it. Next time you come across a Sheol, Gehenna, or Hades, be a little spicy and just say “Hell.” The choice isn’t just defensible; it’s better.

The Seven Deadly Sins: Their Origins and Why to Love the List

~ Vincent

I just wrapped up a sermon series on the seven deadly sins, and I have to admit, I learned to appreciate that little list more than I expected.  I hadn’t seen it used all that much outside of tv shows (don’t tell me you’ve never seen a hero fight their way through a band of seven deadly sins themed goons), but it brings more to the table than schlocky action fodder.  It’s actually a really great reflective tool that can help draw our attention to the parts of our life that may not be as Christ-centric as we want them to be.

If your seven-deadlies knowledge falls somewhere near where mine was a few months back (zero), let me give you a brief overview.  The list of seven deadly sins is a tool that Christians have been using for well over a thousand years with its origin going all the way back into the fourth century.  The seven sins are pride, greed, lust, gluttony, envy, sloth, and wrath.  The theory here is that most of the sins that you’re engaged with on a daily basis have their roots in one of these seven big sins.  If you can focus on those seven things, your life will be much, much holier.  In short, it’s a contemplative tool for rooting out sin in your life.  You look at the list, you look at your life, and then you see where you have to make adjustments.  It’s been significantly more popular in Catholic circles than Protestant ones (we’ll get to why), but you can see why people use it.  It’s easy to apply.  It’s not hard to understand or wildly theoretical.  It’s pretty straightforward for devotional use or sermons or whatever else.

Not only was this a useful tool to add to my tool belt, but it was a delight learning about where it came from and how it was taught.  The people that developed this tool were big names in the ancient Christian world that all had a reputation for living holy lives.  Reading some of their works was a great opportunity to soak in some timeless wisdom.  But before I get to them, I want to talk about someone who comes up in a lot of articles about the seven deadly sins that wrongly gets credit for creating them: Tertullian.

The Red Herring: Tertullian’s List of Unforgivable Sins

Tertullian was a massive theological name in second century Christianity.  It’s not surprising that a lot of content can be traced to him.  That said, the list of the seven deadly sins isn’t from him.  He does have a list of seven sins, but relating them to the “seven deadly sins” as we know them today is such a wild stretch that I can’t imagine anyone who has actually read Tertullian’s work making that connection. His list of sins may happen to contain seven items, but the goal is wildly different.  He isn’t trying to tell you about some major sins so you can keep an eye open.  No, Tertullian is trying to tell you about sins that are literally unforgivable.

[T]here are some sins of daily committal, to which we all are liable… if there were no pardon for such sins as these, salvation would be unattainable to any. Of these, then, there will be pardon, through the successful Suppliant of the Father, Christ. But there are, too, the contraries of these; as the graver and destructive ones, such as are incapable of pardon — murder, idolatry, fraud, apostasy, blasphemy; (and), of course, too, adultery and fornication; and if there be any other violation of the temple of God. For these Christ will no more be the successful Pleader: these will not at all be incurred by one who has been born of God, who will cease to be the son of God if he do incur them. (On Modesty, Ch.19)

To consider this the origin of the seven deadly sins, we would have to ignore the fact that there’s not a single sin on the list that’s also on the list we know today AND ignore the fact that the function of the list is so wildly different from lists today AND we’d even have to ignore the fact that Tertullian’s list isn’t limited to seven items.  Notice that he ends his list with a catch-all for anything he missed: “and if there be any other violation of the temple of God.”  It’s not even really a list that’s intended to be limited to any given number of items.  It would be absurd to consider this a serious forerunner to the seven deadly sins, especially when you take a look at the next theologian with a claim to the title of originator:

Monkish Wisdom: Evagrius Ponticus and the Eight Evil Thoughts

Evagrius was a monk in fourth-century Egypt, which was the hotbed of Christian monasticism in its day.  He wrote a book called The Praktikos (The Practices) to help other monks live holy lives.  Sure enough, that book had a list of eight evil thoughts that was intended to be a list of big sins to root out in your life.  And when you think about it, doesn’t it make sense that a list like this began with monks?  The contemplative evaluation of your life combined with a fervent hope that hard work and effort can bring about virtue and holiness are exceedingly monkish.  It also helps explain why the list gets more traction in Catholic circles than in Protestant ones!  If you think that you need works and faith for salvation (as Catholics do), a list of major vices is obviously helpful.  If you think that faith alone brings about salvation (as Protestants do), the list’s focus on human action and its lack of references to Christ might be considered a little concerning.  Not that it’s unusable for Protestants, of course, but it certainly would be viewed as less helpful and maybe a little strange.

Evagrius’s “eight evil thoughts” (or the Ὀκτώ γενικώτατοι λογισμοὶ in his words, which actually translates to something like “eight general tempting thoughts,” but that’s much less catchy) is the first list that shows an obvious attempt to create something like what we know today, and it’s undeniable when you look at his writings:

There are eight principal kinds of tempting thoughts, that contain within themselves every tempting thought: first, that of gluttony; and with it, that of sexual immorality; third, that of love of money; fourth, that of sadness; fifth, that of anger; sixth that of acedia; seventh, that of vainglory; eighth, that of pride. We cannot control whether these tempting thoughts can agitate the soul or not; but whether they remain in us or not, and whether they move the passions or not – that we can control. (The Praktikos, 6)

You’ll notice that there’s still significant work to be done before we reach our final form.  At this point, we’re missing envy and sloth.  Instead, we have sadness, vainglory, and acedia (a Greek word that’s hard to translate that means something like “spiritual boredom” or “apathy”).  On the whole though, the list is really close.

Evagrius’s proceeding advice is pretty hit or miss.  Even in the selection above, you can see that he makes some connections that most of us today would just kind of scratch our heads at.  For example, why does he connect gluttony and sexual immorality?  To us, they’re totally different things.  To Evagrius and his immediate audience, it’s obvious that if you’re feeling lustful, you ate too much.  The weird parts are definitely there, but there’s some really relatable stuff too.  For example, his warnings about the challenges of acedia (boredom):

It makes the sun appear to slow down or stop , so the day seems to be fifty hours long.  Then it forces the monk to keep looking out the window and rush from his cell to observe the sun in order to see how much longer it is to the ninth [hour, i.e. 3 pm], and to look about in every direction in case any of the brothers are there. (Ibid. 12)

That is painfully relatable, and definitely helps me think about how much time I fritter away on the days that I’m not particularly diligent about my work.  Evagrius has created a great tool for monks, but it needs a pastoral touch to get it to a place where it’s applicable to the average person.  And luckily, it would make its way to the perfect person.  One of Evagrius’s students, John Cassian, compiled a lot of Egyptian monk wisdom into a wildly successful book called The Institutes and it helped lay the foundation for Western monasticism.  One of the monks that was formed by it’s wisdom happened to become pope, and that monk was named Gregory the Great.

A Pastoral Touch: Gregory the Great and the Seven Principal Sins

Yes, the guy who helped get the seven deadly sins to their (mostly) final form was a pope.  If you’re Protestant, don’t freak out.  John Calvin, one of the biggest Protestant names in history, insisted that Gregory the Great was the last good pope, and if a prominent reformer who was persecuted for Protestantism was cool with him, maybe we should be too.

Gregory’s work on the seven deadly sins appears in a wildly different context.  He wasn’t trying to make a list of sins for monks to think though.  Actually, Gregory ended up crafting his list while in a commentary on the book of Job.  Weirdly, he was exegeting Job 39:25, “At the blast of the trumpet it snorts, ‘Aha!’ It catches the scent of battle from afar, the shout of commanders and the battle cry,” which is actually God talking about how Job could never make an animal as amazing as a horse, which is a pretty far cry from something you’d expect to lead to a discussion on the seven deadly sins.  Medieval Christians thought that every Bible passage had several different layers of meaning, some of which could be pretty abstract.  In his section about the moral interpretation of the horse passage, Gregory argues that it’s actually about the life of a Christian and how they’re supposed to behave.  The line “The shout of commanders and the battle cry,” leads to discussion about spiritual warfare, and thus follows the seven deadly sins that we need to watch out for:

For when pride, the queen of sins, has fully possessed a conquered heart, she surrenders it immediately to seven principal sins, as if to some of her generals, to lay it waste. And an army in truth follows these generals, because, doubtless, there spring up from them importunate hosts of sins. Which we set forth the better, if we specially bring forward in enumeration, as we are able, the leaders themselves and their army. For pride is the root of all evil, of which it is said, as Scripture bears witness; Pride is the beginning of all sin. [Ecclus. 10, 1] But seven principal vices, as its first progeny, spring doubtless from this poisonous root, namely, vainglory, envy, anger, melancholy, avarice, gluttony, lust. For, because He grieved that we were held captive by these seven sins of pride, therefore our Redeemer came to the spiritual battle of our liberation, full of the spirit of sevenfold grace. (Morals on the Book of Job, Vol 3, Pt. 6, Book XXXI, 87)

At this point, I think we have what I’m comfortable calling the modern list of seven deadly sins.  Even here, there are a few noteworthy things that are a little different.  The name, obviously.  Just like the “eight evil thoughts” name got made up to describe what Evagrius was talking about because it was way cooler than the title that came up with, “seven deadly sins” got made up because the actual name that Gregory came up with, “the seven principal sins,” isn’t all that catchy.  That said, it’s actually a more accurate title.  These are the seven main sins you’re involved in, not the seven sins that will kill you.  When did “capital” become “deadly?”  Honestly, I can’t tell you.  It wasn’t Gregory’s doing, and most formal theological treatises call them the seven capital sins well through the middle ages and even into early modernity.  It looks like something that just kind of bubbled up in popular imagination over time.

A second difference that’s worth noting is that vainglory is still here!  A weird amount of sources say that Gregory removed vainglory and added pride, but I can’t find a shred of evidence that they’re right.  This list very much proves the opposite.  Pride is listed as “the queen” of the seven deadly sins, but not actually one of them itself.  Instead, pride is defined more closely as the willingness to step away from God, whereas the immoral act of exhibiting what we would call pridefulness in other circumstances is referred to as vainglory.  It’s actually a pretty clever solution.  Most modern explorations of the seven deadlies that I see simultaneously list pride as the root of all sins AND one of the seven, which is a little clunky.  It may as well be six deadly sins and their ringleader at that point.  Kudos to Gregory for solving the problem before it happened.  Pride is defying God; vainglory is glorifying yourself.

As weird as Gregory’s exegesis of Job may be, his section on the seven deadly sins is actually really applicable.  I used Gregory’s wisdom liberally in sermon preparation.  Sure, not everything he wrote is applicable today, but he clearly understands the trials of the human heart and that’s universal.  He’s also very clear about how each of these sins may be separate,but really, they all intertwined.  Lust leads to pride.  Pride leads to envy.  Envy leads to anger.  They’re all connected, and they’re all in our lives.  A mature Christian isn’t free of these problems; they should actively be involved in fighting them.  If we’re not fighting them, it’s not because they’re not there; it’s because we’re not paying attention.

It reminds me a little of a question I used to ask in confirmation classes.  These classes always have a mix of actually religious kids and kids that are just going through the motions.  After a lesson about sin, I would ask the kids to rate how close to perfect holiness they thought their daily lives really were.  From my perspective, it was an obvious opportunity for a little moment of repentance.  Of course you rank yourself low!  You’re a sinner!  You just saw what God’s standards are!  You’re not living up to them, right?  Surely, all the kids would admit that they weren’t really doing as well as they wanted to, and then we could pivot to talking about Jesus.  It didn’t really work out that way.  The less religious a kid was, the higher they would rank themselves on the holiness index.  Some kids unironically gave themselves a nine out of ten and said they were doing a pretty good job at keeping God’s law.  Try pivoting to Jesus’s sacrifice on the cross after a kid said they’re really actually pretty holy on their own.  It doesn’t work.  A person can be so blind that they can’t even see their situation clearly.  You have to be aware of sin if you want to fight it.  That’s one of the best things that this list brings us.  In Gregory’s strangely horse-themed words:

But the soldier of God, since he endeavors skillfully to pursue the contests with vices, smells the battle afar off; because while he considers, with anxious thought, what power the leading evils possess to persuade the mind, he detects, by the sagacity of his scent, the exhortation of the leaders. And because he beholds the confusion of subsequent iniquities by foreseeing them afar off, he finds out, as it were, by his scent the howling of the army. (Morals on the Book of Job, Vol 3, Pt. 6, Book XXXI, 91)

Ultimately, that awareness is what the list of seven deadly sins is intended to develop in us.  I know it felt convicting preaching my way through them.  It’s easy to see the sins of others, but it’s a little trickier to be aware of the sins in ourselves.  I hope that some of that conviction stays with me.

Reading the Bible in Latin is Cool

~ Vincent

I’m back! I took some time away after the birth of my second son, and it was incredibly rewarding. I’m blessed not only to have him in my life, but to have had some time to spend with him and his brother and my wife in that transitional period as our family grew. I learned something unexpected during my leave, and I wanted to share it: studying the Bible in a different language is really rewarding.

I wouldn’t have expected this revelation for myself. I don’t know Greek at all and I only have the smallest shreds of Hebrew under my belt. At one point, the prospect of learning Hebrew was really exciting to me. I worked my way through about half of a Hebrew textbook and went to seminary with a real fire for biblical languages, but once I got there, I thought about my high school experience with Spanish. How much Spanish do I remember today? A pitiful amount. And frankly, I never really invested the time to get good at it. Who could have imagined that a high school boy might not be deeply passionate about learning a second language for the sole purpose of polishing his university applications, right? Looking back on my failings with Spanish, I told myself that I must be bad at languages and that I should use the time I would have learned Hebrew in seminary on classes that would better benefit the congregations I would someday serve. After all, I could use an interlinear copy of the Bible and a Hebrew dictionary and get by just fine for the purpose of preaching, and most interesting translational choices are hammered in commentaries anyway. Thus my dream of being a master Hebrew speaker died a quiet death.

But while I was feeding a screaming baby at 2:00 am, I got bored. I wanted to be productive and I realized that the environment wasn’t particularly conducive to reading anything that required an unbroken train of thought. And what’s easy to do in small, flashcard-sized chunks? Memorize vocabulary words. And so I decided to pick up some Latin. I don’t know a lot of Protestants that know Latin, so it would definitely help me bring something unique to the table, and I read enough Augustine that I figured it’d be neat to read his stuff firsthand, instead of through translators. I made it about halfway through a beginner’s Latin textbook before my leave was up, so I can now talk about advanced theological topics like who is in the bedroom and if the dog is barking.

While working through that textbook, I also started studying my weekly Scriptures using the Vulgate (old Latin Bible), and I was shocked to see how deeply it affected my studying. When you don’t really know what any of the words in a given passage mean, you have to scrutinize each word. That level of study changes your relationship with the passage. For example, at one point, I was reading through James 1, and I reached verse 16: “Do not be deceived, my beloved brothers,” (ESV). If I was reading in English, I don’t think I would have spent much time not his passage. It’s a warning to pay attention to what James is about to write. Cool. Got it. But when you’re going word to word, dictionary open in another tab, and you see that James just called his readers “mei dilectissimi” or “my dearest ones” (something that, strangely enough, was in the first half of the latin textbook), there’s an impact and a warmth to it that I wouldn’t have felt otherwise. When you’re reading in English it’s easy to end up scanning through a passage for big ideas, controversial pieces, or emotional turning points and end up spending my energy on those. When you’re working in an unfamiliar language, you can’t take any word for granted. Each one is a battle, and each one carries a weight that it wouldn’t otherwise.

There’s also something supremely humbling about tuning in to youtube videos to help you learn the week’s lessons and hearing some teacher that recorded their lectures say, “Salvete, eighth graders!” Yes, my learning partners are mostly thirteen years old. Kids are smarter than we give them credit for.

No idea if my iter longum ad discit Latinum (“long journey to learn latin” probably misconjugated idk I’m new) will go anywhere. Time will tell. But in the meantime, it’s a fun little exercise to make me pay attention to things I wouldn’t otherwise.

Keep: Deep Tradition

~ Vincent

This is my final entry on my series on the things I inherited from Eastern Orthodoxy and my re-evaluation of them in light of my awakening to classical Protestantism.

The time has come to bring this to a close. I could go on at length about the influences I want to keep and the sources I want to let go of from the Eastern Orthodox world. I could talk about the beauty of Anthony of Egypt’s biography! I could opine about the liturgy of John Chrysostom. I could grumble about their failure to stand firm against encroachment by corrupt state officials. I could critique their decentralized role of Scripture. I could do all of that and more. But at some point, you have to move on. As I said previously, I’m skeptical of Eastern Orthodox reads on Church History, I’m lovingly mixed on the impact of the Desert Fathers, and I’ve dropped Bulgakov completely. Time to write about something I definitely want to keep: the emphasis on traditional sources.

The Eastern Orthodox world is so good at treasuring their spiritual heritage. When they have a resource or a writer or a saint that’s especially worthy of remembering, they remember them! Their sermons reference John Chrysostom! Their books reference Gregory of Nazianzus! Their devotionals are often written by figures like John of Damascus! They stand on the shoulders of giants! Now, is every Eastern Orthodox Church like this? I couldn’t tell. you. I can only see the little enclaves they have in the West. But what I see here is amazing. What a precious, delightful gift to see people being nourished by the historic heroes of their faith..

Nikodemos of Athos is one Eastern Orthodox figure in this pattern who particularly stands out to me. He was this Greek monk in the 19th century that was renowned for his writing. And what did he write? He translated and compiled old Orthodox writings so that Greeks could see the beauty of their spiritual heritage. And it was timely to do so! As Greece became more secular and modern, people started lionizing old pagan philosophers as “the real Greek heroes.” Nikodemos was pointing back to the saints of the Byzantine era and telling people, “Don’t forget who you really are! This is your real heritage!”

We Protestants would benefit so much from this. In too many of our churches, there’s almost no substantive reference to any timeframe except the pastor’s personal life and the Bible. Two-thousand years of studying, praying, living, and dying are just cast aside. And what do we lose in that? We lose voices that could help guide us and teach us. We lose access to wisened saints who can tell us, “Hey, I’ve been there, and here’s what you can do.” We lose access to the record of questions that have been asked time and time again, reminding us that we’re not the only ones to ponder things. We lose so, so much.

Why don’t we engage with our spiritual heritage? There are probably a lot of things that could rightly be pointed to. We could look at the role of emotionality in Western Protestant churches after the Enlightenment. There was a cultural movement that come along and told the Church, “Science is the realm of facts and logic, religion is for feelings and stuff. Stay in your bubble and we’ll stay in ours.” Too many churches took them up on that deal. Heck, there are whole traditions where the Holy Spirit is more or less equated with strong emotionality! And those traditions cross-pollinate with other Christian groups and cause all sorts of headaches. If we divide our lives into facts and feelings, we can’t be surprised when our church gets “sorted”fixed” to fit cleanly into our boxes. And if we’re happy enough for church to just fill our hearts, other things will come along and fill our heads.

A second challenge that I think is uniquely worth mentioning for American Protestantism is our denominational history. Some of our biggest denominations (Methodist, Baptist, Pentecostal) were able to spread across the frontier areas of the United States so quickly and gain such a strong foothold partially because they had really low educational requirements. For some of those denominations, that’s a source of pride; God can use anybody that he calls if they’re sincere and want to serve him! Which is partially true, but also implies that Christianity is really pretty easy when it comes down to it. All you need to do is pray and read your Bible and you’re good to go, which is a bafflingly low bar. Nobody wants to hire a lawyer whose only qualifications are feeling God’s call on their life and reading a few pages from the constitution every morning. Nobody wants to receive surgery from a doctor who didn’t go to medical school but has a nice smile and feels convicted that the Holy Spirit moves his hands during surgery. “But Vincent, those aren’t the same things!” You’re right! They’re not. Neither of these can affect our eternity quite as much as a pastor can. Why should the people who do work on eternal souls be held to a lower standard than the people who handle any other serious task in our lives?

Yes, theology is hard. No, not everyone in a church needs a comprehensive knowledge of patristics to know Jesus. But do they need a total lack of theological knowledge? Do we need to avoid talking about who Augustine and Luther and Gregory the Great to make sure nobody feels too challenged? How many folksy analogies should a Protestant congregant have to wade through to hear something about one of the giants of the faith? Because the Eastern Orthodox Church is going wild passing on historic treasures to its congregations. It isn’t trying to be cool; it’s busy being important. It’s not trying to be accessible; it’s teaching people what they need to learn. It’s not trying to be relevant to pop culture; it’s busy trying to be relevant to God. And maybe some of that praise is a little over the top, but I see that they have something that we desperately need. They have a sense that the contributions of their saints are actual, life-changing teachings, not just strange burdens that clergy in training are obligated to stumble through before they can get ordained.

That’s one thing I don’t think I’ll ever lose. I’m really thankful that my time with Eastern Orthodoxy taught me that tradition is a blessing, not a burden. The saints that went before you WANT to help you understand the Bible! They WANT you to grow spiritually! They WANT to be a blessing! And they were to generations of people. Jesus Christ is the foundation, but these are the spiritual bricks that are in the wall beneath us. We need to know the saints from our tradition. We need to share the treasures of Spurgeon, Chrysostom, Machen, and so many others. We have a history. If we want to look forward, we need to be empowered by our past, not free of it.

God in the Mountains: Moving from Bulgakov to Machen

~ Vincent

I’ve been doing this little series about thinkers and doctrine from the Eastern Orthodox world that I’m slowly moving away from since uncovering classical Protestantism, and today, I’m looking at Sergei Bulgakov.  Bulgakov is a towering figure in Eastern Orthodoxy, though not without controversy.  He was accused of heresy for his teachings on Sophiology (more on this to come).  Even still, he’s influential enough that his name is pervasive. As someone who spent a fair amount of time with his works, I wanted to appreciate the best of what he brought to the table while holding the more theoretical parts very loosely, but the further I’ve moved away from Eastern Orthodoxy, the more I can see that Bulgakov’s work just isn’t worth holding on to at all. Not only are his ideas overly-complicated and bizarre, but they really influence every other part of his work.

But what is this potentially-heretical Sophiology?  It’s an uncommon enough field that a lot of people have probably never heard of it.  I’m going to try to keep it simple (which is more than can be said about Bulgakov, whose books are both annoyingly long and unimaginably unintuitive).  The core of it can be found in Proverbs.  You know that female figure that’s supposed to be the embodiment wisdom?  In Greek, the word wisdom is “sophia,” so this female incarnation of wisdom is occasionally referred to as “Sophia,” (which is strange, given that Proverbs is written in Hebrew; her name should really be Chokhmah instead of anything in Greek, but what are you going to do?).  Sophiology starts here.  Rather than taking the traditional view that lady wisdom a metaphorical character intended to represent wisdom, she is fleshed out into a whole other divine being that is literally the wisdom of God.  And that comes with tremendous implications.  Is Sophia God?  Is she a fourth member of the Trinity?  Theologians know they can’t have a second god or a fourth trinity member and still consider themselves legitimately Christian, so they have to come up with elaborate explanations to avoid these problems. In Bulgakov’s case, he said that the trinity was three beings (hypostases) with one essence (ousia), but Sophia was one essence with no being. She was fully hypostasized by the Trinity (and I hate to use an abundance of Greek words, since it obscures more than it enlightens, but if I didn’t drop the Greek words, I don’t think I’d be properly representing his thoughts).  Despite Sophia being made of the essence of God, she was set apart by him in creation so that she could continually creatively grow to be more like Him and His holiness. In other words, she is creation, constantly growing and becoming more like God, which is what she’s really made of.

If the bar for good theology was creative thought, Bulgakov would be crushing it.  If the bar is accurately expressing the apostolic faith found in the Scriptures, we’re in trouble. Almost none of this stuff is clearly present in the Bible.  We’re taking some “made in the image of God” stuff from Genesis, a little of John 1, and some select chapters of Proverbs and running wild with it.  The divide between creator and creation is practically non-existent in this model.  Yes, humans are made to be like God, but nowhere in Scripture is creation said to be from the essence of God, eternally returning to Him.  That’s fanciful and completely made up.

To be fair to the Eastern Orthodox world, Bulgakov’s Sophiology was mostly rejected.  Probably the best quote about him comes from an untranslated Russian work of little snippets from Archbishop Nathaniel of the Eastern Orthodox Church. He recalls sitting with a group of people that were all hating on Bulgakov and Metropolitan Anthony said:

Unfortunate Father Sergius, unfortunate Father Sergius. After all, this is a very smart person, one of the smartest in the world. He understands many things that only very few understand. And this makes him terribly proud. It’s hard not to be proud if you know that something is clear and completely understandable to you, but no one around you can understand it.  
(Archbishop Nathaniel L’vov, https://azbyka.ru/otechnik/Nafanail_Lvov/krupitsy-pospominanij-o-vstrechah-s-velikim-avvoj-mitropolitom-antoniem/, trans. Google)

He isn’t wrong.  Bulgakov’s work and feels very much like the creation of someone who got bored and felt a need to invent a whole philosophical system to delight themselves. The fact that it’s almost impossible to explain his ideas to anyone without them making a confused face and saying, ‘Huh?” is a really, really bad sign. Ideas are generally supposed to solve problems. Here, Bulgakov has created a problem where there was none to introduce a solution that is nothing but a problem.  I have no doubt that he was smart.  I don’t know that he was interested in receiving the faith so much as he was creating one.

Despite his Sophiology never catching fire, Bulgakov still has a lot of clout in Eastern Orthodoxy.  He’s one of the big names.  His works have weight.  A lot of people are willing to ignore the worst to enjoy the best. As was I!  Until I started noticing just how much everything depends on his worst.  For example, Bugakov was an atheist and a communist before he converted.  One of his big conversion moments was a beautiful meditation on the mountains and God’s presence in them:

Evening was falling. We were travel-ling along the southern steppe, covered with the fragrance of honey-coloured and hay, gilded with the crimson of a sublime sunset. In the distance the fast-approaching Caucasus Mountains appeared blue. I was seeing them for the first time . . . My soul had become accustomed long ago to see with a dull silent pain only a dead wasteland in nature beneath the veil of beauty, as under a deceptive mask; without being aware of it, my soul was not reconciled with a nature without God. And suddenly in that hour my soul became agitated, started to rejoice and began to shiver: but what if . . . if it is not wasteland, not a lie, not a mask, not death but him, the blessed and loving Father, his raiment, his love? . . .God was knocking quietly in my heart and it heard that knocking, it wavered but did not open . . . And God departed. (Unfading Light, trans. Thomas Allen Smith, 8.)

Breathtaking!  But the more I looked, the more I saw trouble.  Notice that God isn’t just visible because of his work in nature.  No, God is in nature.  There’s an intimate unity between the two.   If it were anyone else, I would say I was reading into it, but isn’t it interesting that a man that insisted that creation was actually Sophia, the essence of God, becoming like Him and striving to return to Him, is the one that said that the oneness of God and nature were critically important to his conversion?  Uh oh.  That’s right.  The example in question is, at its core, an affirmation of his Sophiology.  The creation/creator divide is intentionally wibbly-wobbly.  And while it might be Eastern Orthodox, it’s certainly not orthodox in the traditional sense.  

I realized I had to move on from Bulgy, and luckily for me, there are plenty of examples of people seeing God’s hand in nature that are a lot more theologically-sound than Bulgakov’s.  For example, I stumbled across John Machen’s account of seeing God’s hand at work in creation when he looked out at the Alps.  Both men were looking at mountains, but you can see how Machen does a better job respecting that creature/creator line:

To me, nature speaks clearest in the majesty and beauty of the hills. One day in the summer of 1932, I stood on the summit of the Matterhorn in the Alps. Some people can stand there and see very little. Depreciating the Matterhorn is a recognized part of modern books on mountain-climbing. The great mountain, it is said, has been sadly spoiled. Why, you can even see sardine cans on those rocks that so tempted the ambition of climbers in Whymper’s day. Well, I can only say that when I stood on the Matterhorn, I do not remember seeing a single can. Perhaps that was partly because of the unusual masses of fresh snow which were then on the mountain, but I think it was also due to the fact that, unlike some people, I had eyes for something else. I saw the vastness of the Italian plain, which was like a symbol of infinity. I saw the snows of distant mountains. I saw the sweet green valleys far, far below at my feet. And as I see that whole glorious vision again before me now, I am thankful from the bottom of my heart that from my mother’s knee I have known to whom all that glory is due. (Machen, Things Unseen, 16)

Is the land God?  No.  It’s a symbol of infinity.  A symbol that has been ignored by so many that only see the dead stuff of humanity, but an effective one to those who are really looking.  The same core elements are all there, but the little details check out. I can share that account without having to wonder, “What weird stuff could that lead to if they ever google the guy I talked about?”  

As much time as I spent with Bulgakov, I don’t think there’s much (if anything) worth the effort in his work.  Even the little moments are too caught up in his bizarre theories.  I don’t care if he has clout.  I’m starting to take these tools out of my toolbox to replace them with more reliable ones.





The Desert Fathers and Works Righteousness? Say it ain’t so!

~ Vincent

In my last post, I mentioned that there were some theological tools I picked up from my mentor that I’m not sure I want to keep. For the most part, they’re Eastern Orthodox. Since I didn’t have classical Protestant thinkers at my fingertips when I connected with so many of these resources, they were great for that period of my life, but now that I’ve had some time to get a little more classical Protestant thinkers under my belt, I think it’s time to say goodbye to some of the things from my past that I have more disagreements with than I fully understood at the time.

And this first one is a hard one: the Desert Fathers. SAY IT AIN’T SO! If you haven’t read The Sayings of the Desert Fathers before, let me just affirm that it is one of the most beautiful books I’ve ever read. Selections from this book were a part of my morning devotions for a long time. Here’s one of my favorites:

A brother came to see Abba Macarius the Egyptian, and said to him, ‘Abba, give me a word, that I may be saved.’ So the old man said, ‘Go to the cemetery and abuse the dead.’ The brother went there, abused them and threw stones at them; then he returned and told the old man about it. The latter said to him, ‘Didn’t they say anything to you?’ He replied, ‘No.’ The old man said, ‘Go back tomorrow and praise them.’ So the brother went away and praised them, calling them, ‘Apostles, saints and righteous men.’ He re- turned to the old man and said to him, ‘I have complimented them.’ And the old man said to him, ‘Did they not answer you?’ The brother said no. The old man said to him, ‘You know how you insulted them and they did not reply, and how you praised them and they did not speak; so you too if you wish to be saved must do the same and become a dead man. Like the dead, take no account of either the scorn of men or their praises, and you can be saved.’ (The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, trans. Benedict Ward, 132)

Isn’t that wonderful? Each of these sayings balance wittiness and wisdom, and they’re always focused on living Christianity, not just theorizing about it. I ran across this book for the first time while I was in seminary, studying abstract (and unorthodox) theories about how the Bible was written in my Bible class. I randomly plucked it off a shelf in the library, and when I opened it up? Boom. It felt like the Holy Spirit was right there next to me, encouraging me to live a Christian life, not just theorize about things that will never be edifying for real Christians.

As much as I love this collection of sayings, I’ve come to see its limitations. You can even see one of them in this piece. Did you catch what the man said when he asked for help? “Give me a word that I may be saved.” There’s only one word that can save you, dude, and that’s Jesus himself (Jn 1). And I know some would argue that I’m nitpicking here, since that little saying is just a standard part of the Desert Father’s story formula and there’s ways you can try to justify it, but on the whole, I think it’s pretty honest. A massive portion of the Desert Father’s stories are about how to develop a virtuous character, and they usually open with someone asking, “Father, give me a word that I might be saved.” A virtuous character is key to their understanding of salvation. And my logic here isn’t random or unfounded. The deadly edge of monasticism, as expressed by Luther so often and so clearly, is works righteousness. That’s incompatible with the Christian faith that you see in John 3:16 or Ephesians 2:8-9. There’s a big, glaring disagreement with most monastic literature and the Protestant battlecry of Sola Fide (by faith alone).

I may not have fully understood this when I picked up The Sayings, but it did rub off on me. I started reading more and more monastic literature, which pointed me towards Aristotle and his virtue-based ethics. His work is the philosophical underpinning of monastic thought. He argues that practicing good character traits consistently slowly molds you into a just person. I read up on that and thought it was pretty good! Just like the monks, really. So I decided to share my new leanings with my wife. I told her that Protestantism was probably a little wrong in parts. After all, it’s not just faith that makes you what you are! It’s what you do that molds you. It’s faith AND works that save you, when you think about it. Aristotle told me so.

While the monks would have approved of my thoughts, my wife certainly didn’t. She doesn’t often go all-out in arguments against me, but saying, “We might not be saved by faith alone,” was something she absolutely went all-out to defend. And I’m thankful that she did, because when your husband says, “I think Aristotle might be more right than the Bible,” you probably need to set him straight.

I’ve bounced back a lot since then. I’ve come to see that as much as I love the monks, they didn’t always focus on things in a way that reflects what the Bible clearly teaches. To use another Protestant phrase, I genuinely believe that Sola Scriptura (by Scripture alone) is true. Everything we need for salvation is in the Bible. Unfortunately, I can’t find anything that looks like what the Desert Fathers were doing. I think they have a logic to their actions that doesn’t reflect the heart of Scripture. Does that mean I think they’re all garbage? Absolutely not. But it does mean I think some of their emphases are a little off. If I want to read them, I have to be aware of the points where we diverge so I can get the best and leave out the worst.

So what to do with the Desert Fathers. Are they perfect? No, but here’s still a lot that I appreciate about them. I’ve just shifted my level of enthusiasm. Whereas historically, I would unapologetically have loved to do whole a sermon series that focuses on the Desert Fathers and their stories, now I’d rather keep Scripture at the center and maybe occasionally use them for a fun devotional or illustrative story. Am I throwing out these tools? Absolutely not. But they’ve gone from a core part of my toolbox that I used every day to some tools that stay up on their hooks until a special occasion comes out.

Still Orthodox, but Less Eastern

~ Vincent

Every worker needs good tools to do good work.  A carpenter needs a quality hammer.  A janitor needs a durable mop.  A politician needs a tailored suit.  Regardless of the specific profession, everyone needs good tools.  Theologians are no different.  We need good tools.  We need finely-tuned doctrines, illustrative metaphors, and relatable stories to communicate the faith.  And just as in other fields, the name attached to these tools matters.  A carpenter might prefer Craftsman tools and a janitor might prefer Clorox disinfectant.  Why?  Because those are reliable names in their field.  The name shows that the tool is trustworthy.  We should also prefer tools associated with trustworthy names.  A metaphor that we find on some random website might seem clever, but will it sound half as good when you say it out loud?  Who knows?  It might end up confusing someone more than it helps them understand.  But if you’re working with time-tested materials from trusted names, such as John Calvin or Augustine of Hippo, you know any given metaphor has been used time and time and time again.  Someone didn’t come up with it over their lunch break!  It’s good stuff.

I say all of this because I’m doing a little cleansing of my theological toolkit right now. When I was in seminary at Duke Divinity School, Eastern Orthodoxy was a huge influence on me.  And why?  Well, I was an evangelical Christian at a mainline seminary.  While I was still a long way from being “fully cooked,” there were certain doctrines common among my classmates that I couldn’t accept.  For example, a fair few thought that Scripture often reflected the biases of the author, including ignorance, sexism, and racism, rejecting the doctrine of plenary inspiration of Scripture.  Others were excited by “new” and “innovative” ways of thinking about faith, rejecting historic orthodoxy.  Still others would begin their theologizing by talking about a specific solution to a modern issue facing the world and then ask how that solution could be found in Scripture, which it struck me as a very backwards sort of process.  And far be it from me to suggest that every professor or every student that thought that way, but it was enough that the “norm” was definitively uncomfortable for me.  Edward Rommen, an adjunct professor and Eastern Orthodox priest, was someone that felt the weight of tradition and orthodoxy in a way that was very different than the norm.  I considered him my mentor and snapped up independent studies and classes with him as often as I could.

There are many things I’m grateful I learned from him.  I learned to love tradition.  I learned to listen to the voices of the saints before me by diving into classical Christian resources (which led to the creation of this little blog).  I learned to see Church history as a way to reveal the faith we practice, rather than as a burden to be shoved under the rug.  All good stuff.  I did, however, pick up some tools that haven’t served me as well as I’d hoped.  Father Rommen was DEEPLY Eastern Orthodox, and while it seemed cool at the time, I wasn’t as critical of some of it as I’ve come to be.  For example, both he and most of his Eastern Orthodox contemporaries were very enthusiastic about the “seven ecumenical councils.”  They were said to be binding for Christians everywhere and things that were agreed upon by the whole church before the Great Schism between Eastern and Western Christianity.  That sounded impressive to me.  Who was I to question it?  It wasn’t until I dug into the historical record that I saw that these seven councils weren’t as representative of all Christians as I had thought.  The seventh council was literally about why icons were great and should be used in worship.  And do you see any icons in Western Churches?  No!  So why would one of these seven all-inclusive, inarguable councils approve something that nearly all Western Christians don’t like?  Because that particular council was attended by and disproportionately controlled by Eastern Christians.  Western ones were mostly peeved at the council’s decision and saw it as a document full of “the errors of the Greeks” (see Libri Carolini by Theodulf of Orléans for a response from a prominent Western Christian to the seventh ecumenical council).  So these seven authoritative ecumenical councils weren’t particularly ecumenical in all cases and weren’t as authoritative as it seemed at the time.

And far be it from me to bash away at Eastern Orthodoxy for having their own perspective.  That’s what it really boils down to, I think.  If you like icons and think they’re great, OF COURSE you’re going to be excited about that one council that happened while you were still in communion with the Western Church where the result was favorable to you.  Fair enough.  I’m not mad.  But I have to ask myself, was the result of that council really inarguable?  Certainly not.  They argued about it while it was happening!  And is the practice of prayer to icons clearly represented in Scripture?  Certainly not.  It seems laughable to imagine Mary, Joseph, or Jesus, first century Jews that weren’t even comfortable having people’s faces on coins because of graven image laws, busting out an icon of Elijah during prayer time.  The historical record just doesn’t line up for that practice unless you’re only looking at very specific, secondary Eastern Orthodox sources.  And if I disagree on the legitimacy of these councils, which carry so much weight in the Eastern Orthodox world, what else needs thought through?  Are some of my tools stamped with a name that I may not trust as much as I used to?  Because while throwing everything out isn’t the answer, keeping tools that I’m not comfortable using benefits no one.

This is not some great, emotionally-laden process, by the way.  All of this discovery has happened a good deal back for me.  Which is for the best!  Trying to throw out tools that you were just using the other day would be a perilous prospect indeed!  But I know there are little arguments that I have sitting around in my head that don’t hold anymore.  There are stories that I enjoy that I’m no longer committed to.  There are people that I’d gladly cite for one purpose that I don’t actually agree with on a fair amount of other things.  And there are resources that better reflect where I’m at spiritually that I could be using now.  I’m thankful for some of the tools in my theological toolkit because of Eastern Orthodoxy, but I’m also curious about which ones are no longer as effective as I once perceived them to be.