ALSO another discussion states:[ http://articulifidei.blogspot.com/2009/01/justification-always-forensic.html
The various dikai- terms all refer to the same quality or effect of Jesus’ death on the believer. In other words, despite their grammatical distinctions, dikaiosunē, dikaios, dikaiōsis and evendikaioō all have the same sense; therefore, the rendering of dikaiosunē is “righteousness,” of dikaios, “righteous,” and ofdikaioō, “make righteous. (Chris VanLandingham, Judgment & Justification in Early Judaism and the Apostle Paul, pp. 245, 246 – the entire chapter, “’Justification by Faith’—A Mistranslated Phrase and Misunderstood Concept”, pp. 242-332,
The Lutheran scholar, John Reumann (hearkening back to Melanchthon) maintains that dikaioō has a double sense: declarative and causative (see his, Righteousness in the New Testament, pp. 4-11.)
Further, a group of Finnish Lutheran scholars[2] are now recognizing the importance of deification in understanding the nature of justification, and are able to declare, “Lutherans can without difficulty argue that a Christian is both made righteous and also deified as a partaker of the divine nature”[3].
Even McGrath could write:
It is certainly true that Augustine speaks of the real interior renewal of the sinner by the action of the Holy Spirit, which he later expressed in terms of participation in the divine substance itself…God has given man the power both to receive and participate in the divine being. By this participation in the life of the Trinity, the justified sinner may be said to be deified. (Ibid., p. 1.32)
Though one must wait until Augustine to find a concrete reflection on the role that deification plays in justification, the doctrine of deification itself is quite prominent in many of the Church Fathers prior to Augustine. And though most are aware of the importance of deification in Orthodox thought, recent scholars are now identifying certain elements of deification in Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, and Wesley.
To make a very long story short, Augustine’s take on justification certainly has Biblical warrant, and just might be spot-on.
[Then one comment arguing against the above]:
But what you fail to tell your readers is that McGrath provides a long analysis of the history of the word group (Hebrew, Greek, and Latin), and that Augustine, not knowing Hebrew or Greek, GOT IT WRONG!!
After a long explanation of Hebrew word “sedaqa” – the “justice” of God, which carries a wholly legal/imputation connotation, and which is translated into dikaiosune in Greek, McGrath suggests that Augustine’s Latin word, “iustitia” is a permissible interpretation of the Greek word, it is wholly unacceptable as an interpretation of the Hebrew concept which underlies it.
So the “novum” which the Reformers introduced is essentially a correct exegesis of the language that Paul used in Romans and other places
[to which the author of the article answers]:
Chris VanLandingham, in his Judgment & Justification in Early Judaism and the Apostle Paul, devotes 90 pages it this very issue, and his research makes McGrath’s conclusion highly suspect.
>>So the “novum” which the Reformers introduced is essentially a correct exegesis of the language that Paul used in Romans and other places.>>
Me: Since VanLandingham, Hiestand, Kimmel, Sanders, Dunn, and so many other competent scholars disagree with you on “this very issue”, I cannot help but think that your conclusion is suspect.
......................
>>The corruption of language introduced by Augustine condemned the medieval church, “astonishingly faithful to the language of Augustine,” was a muddle, to which the Reformers applied a good bit of clear biblical exegesis.>>
Me: Once again, there is a growing group of scholars who do not think that Augustine introduced a “corruption”.
But then there is this thought provoking article--not Catholic:
Dikaiosyne Theou (The Righteousness of God) in Contemporary Biblical Scholarship http://katachriston.wordpress.com/2011/09/03/dikaiosyne-theou-the-righteousness-of-god-in-contemporary-biblical-scholarship/
Then there is a debate type--written here between Horton and Sungenis
:http://www.faithfulanswers.com/is-justification-by-faith-alone/
:http://www.faithfulanswers.com/is-justification-by-faith-alone/
here is a bit:
James give us further evidence that such a schema won’t work by introducing Rahab to the discussion. The all-important words James uses in 2:25 are “And in the same way” (Greek: homoiws). Here is the rest of it: “And in the same way was not Rahab the harlot also justified (Greek: dikaiow) when she received the messengers and sent them out by another way?” James is telling us that Rahab was justified “in the same way” that Abraham was justified. But here’s the curious lacuna for Protestant theology: Scripture never describes Rahab’s justification as an instance in which faith was manifested before her works. Rather, Joshua 2 shows that Rahab’s faith and works were simultaneous. Thus, Protestants can’t treat Rahab’s justification in the same way they treat Abraham’s, for they hold that Abraham’s justification occurred in Genesis 15:6, many years prior to the work (supposedly for vindication), that Abraham did in Genesis 22 when he offered Isaac.
Again, we see how Scripture traps those who impose artificial systems on it. It seemed plausible to them to separate Abraham’s justification into two components (one justifying, one vindicating) but they can’t do so with Rahab’s justification. Here is where the haunting words “And in the same way” come to roost, for this means that Abraham was justified identical to Rahab. There can be no difference, otherwise there would be two salvation plans, one for Abraham and one for Rahab, but that is not possible. No, the reality is that Rahab’s justification occurred when she exhibited faith and works, simultaneously. In fact, Hebrews 11:31 calls Rahab’s incident with the spys an act of “faith,” whereas we have seen James call it a “work.” Thus, her faith was working together with her works to give her justification. We certainly cannot say that the work James ascribes to Rahab was merely something to vindicate her.
And it is no surprise to see Scripture speak of Abraham in the same way, for Hebrew 11:19 says that his attempt to offer Isaac to God was an act of “faith,” whereas we have seen James call it a “work.” In both Rahab and Abraham, faith and works are simultaneous, and thus it is no surprise that James says they were justified “in the same way,” and thus it is conclusive that “faith alone” did not justify either of them. There are more proofs to what I have introduced above. I suggest that those who are interested should read Chapters 1 and 2 of Not By Faith Alone to get the full picture.
...........................................
......................................................................................
As for Dr. Horton’s contention, ala Alister McGrath, that
“…the best example of the errors in the Latin Vulgate, corrected in tail end of the Renaissance, concerns its translation of the Greek word ‘dikaiosune,’ which means ‘to declare righteous.’ It is a legal term, a verdict. But the Latin Vulgate had translated ‘dikaiosune’ with the Latin word iustificare, which means ‘to make righteous,’”
it can be easily shown that McGrath is the one in error here. Here is an excerpt from my book Not By Faith Alone which deals with McGrath’s assertion:
In his work, Iustitia Dei, McGrath maintains that in Augustine’s translations, his Latin meanings were not faithful to the Hebrew meanings. This echoes the assertion of the German Lutheran, Martin Chemnitz (1522-1586), a student of Melanchthon, who said that Augustine misrepresented the Greek word dikaioun to refer to “making righteous” instead of “declaring righteous.” McGrath cites Chemnitz’s view on page 29, and elsewhere in the book attempts to show through the etymology and usage of the Hebrew that tsedaqah is a more general word than the Latin iustificare.
Hence, McGrath says Augustine’s Latin translation missed the “soteriological overtones” associated with the Hebrew tsedaqah (p. 8). McGrath says these kinds of problems were further complicated by the Greek word dikaiosune which was also limited in scope due to its Aristotelian origins. To support this position, McGrath cites several usages of the Greek eleemosune (“mercy, alms”) by the LXX to translate the noun tsedaqah rather than the normal insertion ofdikaiosune. McGrath also cites the anomalies of where LXX uses dikaiosune to translate tsedaqah in Lev. 19:36; Deut. 25:15; and Ezk. 45:10; in these instances the Hebrew merely carries the sense of “accurate” not, as translated, “just.”
In another example, McGrath cites the translation in Deut. 33:19 which should be “correct sacrifices” instead of “righteous sacrifices.” Similarly, McGrath sees a weakness in dikaiosune to translate the general scope of the Hebrew verb tsadaq. He cites the LXX translation of Isaiah 5:22-23 and 43:26 as proof. As a result, McGrath is of the opinion that the semantic range of the root dikaioun was expanded to accommodate tsedaqah. McGrath suggests that the difficulty comes to the fore when the “post-classical” Latin term iustificare is used to translate the “expanded” forms of the dikaiooderivatives.
More importantly, McGrath also asserts that Greeks and Latins had decisively different ideas of the concept of merit, and that this was the main cause for the Latin church’s emphasis on merit and the prevalence of merit in medieval theology. According to McGrath, in Greek culture merit was only a matter of “estimation” which is not inherent in its object, i.e., considering an entity to be something that it is not in itself. McGrath asserts that merit, in the Latin culture, refers to the quality inherent in the object or person.
Representative of these two meanings, according to McGrath, is the Greek passive axiousthai (“to deem worthy”) and the Latin equivalent, mereri. The Greek word that would have denoted “inherent merit” is meroma, from which the Latinmeritum is derived. McGrath’s conclusion: the disjunction between axiousthai and mereri is similar to the disjunction between dikaiosune and iustificare. Hence the Greek word has the primary sense of being considered righteous, whereas the Latin word denotes being righteous or the reason one is considered righteous.
All in all, McGrath concludes that the initial transference of a Hebrew concept, to a Greek concept, to a Latin concept, led to a fundamental alteration in the concepts of justification and righteousness as the gospel spread from Palestine to the Western world (p. 15). Unfortunately, McGrath’s linguistic analysis and conclusion appear to read into history what his theology dictates.
Despite the anomalies that always occur in translating a word from one language to another, it is a matter of certain faith that inspired Scripture, which translates Hebrew text into Greek text, cannot err, and does not envision the problem McGrath proposes. First, without reservation, the New Testament authors use the dikaioo cognates to translate the Hebrew and Septuagint cognates. These translations occur in many non-justification contexts (i.e., “non-imputation” contexts).
For example, in 2 Cor. 9:9 Paul cites a quotation from Psalm 112:9 and uses the Greek dikaiosune to translate the Hebrew feminine noun tsadaqah (which the LXX also translates as dikaiosune). The context of 2 Cor. 9:9-10 concerns liberal giving, both of God and men, to those in need.
Thus, contrary to McGrath’s thesis, dikaiosune is understood as that which is inherent within both God and man due to the good they have done. Similarly, Hebrews 1:9 uses dikaiosune to translate the Hebrew male noun tsadaq in Psalm 45:7 (of which the LXX uses dikaiosune) and speaks of the inherent righteousness of Christ. (The relevance of the LXX may be even more significant here since Hebrews 1:6 is quoted by Paul directly from the LXX).
In addition, 1 Peter 3:12 uses dikaioo to translate the Hebrew adjective tsadeek of Psalm 34:15 (of which the LXX usesdikaious). The context of 1 Peter 3:12 regards righteous individuals as inherently righteous, for it is they who “turn from evil to do good” and “seek peace and pursue it.” Similarly, Hebrews 11:7 uses dikaiosune to describe the righteousness of Noah, translating the Hebrew adjective tsadeek in Genesis 7:1 which refers to God seeing Noah as inherently righteous for his goodness in the midst of the wicked people of his day.
We should also add that Scripture does not support McGrath’s assessment of the Greek word axioo to refer only to the estimation of an individual rather than his merit (which he distinguishes from the Latin notion of merit that gives the individual the “right” of the third party estimation, i.e., because he is deserving of it). The New Testament uses axioo not only in considering someone worthy but also in recognizing someone worthy because he is actually worthy. For example, Hebrews 3:3 uses axioo in reference to Christ’s worthiness: “Jesus has been counted worthy of greater honor than Moses…” This is a common usage of axioo and its cognates in the New Testament (cf., 1 Thess. 1:11; 1 Tim. 5:17; Col 1:10; et al).
Thus we see that Dr. Horton relies on faulty information in the analysis of Alister McGrath.
................................
) Has any Catholic theologian ever contested that dikaiow and its derivatives are totally void or incapable of being used in a legal sense? No, never. There were various instances in which the Greeks used the word in legal contexts. Paul could have done the same thing, if he desired to do so. But that just begs the question: DID he do so? Take the word “marriage,” for example. Is that a legal term or a personal term? It can be either, depending on the context in which it is placed. When applying for a marriage license, or when in divorce court, the word “marriage” becomes very legal, does it not? But when a husband loves his wife (as opposed to merely giving her food, clothing and shelter) is “marriage” merely a legal term? No, certainly not. It takes on a whole new meaning that law knows nothing about, for law can’t love. Only people who make a personal commitment of trust and care can love each other.
In the same way, Protestants think that just because they can find some examples where Greek culture used dikaiow in a legal sense that this automatically allows them to conclude that Paul is using it thusly, and, in fact, is confined to such a meaning in the New Testament. It is the all-or-nothing meaning that Protestants attempt to assign to dikaiow that is the problem. They tell us that it can ONLY refer to legal matters, and thus Paul is forced to use it forensically. But they have never proven this. They have never shown that dikaiow has such an exclusive meaning in Greek, nor have they produced a clear passage of Scripture which shows that Paul used dikaiow forensically, and only forensically. What they have done is give a lot of misinformation about dikaiow and Paul’s use of the term in the New Testament, not the least of which is Dr. Horton’s attempt below.
The verbal ending of dikaiow is declarative; if the biblical writers intended by “justification” a process of moral transformation, there is a perfectly good verbal ending for that sort of thing in Greek: adzo rather than ow. For instance, “to make holy” is translated from the Greek verb, “hagiodzo,” and this word is never rendered “to justify.” When the biblical writers refer to justification, they use the declarative ending; when they refer to sanctification, they use the progressive ending. If it is good enough of a distinction for the biblical writers themselves, surely we should have not trouble with the Bible’s own language.
6) Although Protestants have touted the ow ending as being exclusively forensic, the reality is that this is simply not true. We can find disproof for Dr. Horton’s contention in one of the very Protestant sources Dr. Horton admires. Philip Schaff, for example, says “Modern exegesis has justified this view of dikaiow and dikaiowsis, according to Hellenistic usage.” and then Schaff makes the admission: “.although etymologically the verb may mean to make just, i.e., to sanctify, in accordance with verbs in ow (e.g., delow, phanerow, tuphow, to make manifest, etc.” (History of the Christian Church, Vol. VII, f. 2, p. 123).
A study of these three NT words confirms Schaff’s admission. The word delow appears seven times in the epistles, all of which denote a recognition of an actual manifestation (e.g., 1 Cor 3:13; Col 1:8); phenerow appears fifty times, denoting the same (e.g., 1 Cor 4:5; 1 Tim 3:16); tuphow is used three times, referring to an actual blindness (John 12:40).
We also have the witness of M. J. LaGrange stating: “First, we should not that verbs in ow mean to make whatever the root indicates. Thus dikaiow would properly mean “make just” (La Justification selon saint Paul, RB 1914, 121, cited by C. Spicq, Theological Lexicon of the New Testament, 1995, 1:341).
Protestants attempt to defend their forensic use of dikaiow by appealing to equally dubious definitions of associated words. For example, Protestants attempt to support an exclusively forensic meaning to dikaiow by appealing to the Greek word logizomai, normally translated as “credited” or “reckoned” in modern translations (cf., Romans 4:3). As taken from pages 324-325 of NBFA, here is what happens when they do so:
“This matter concerns the use of the Greek word logizomai, translated as ‘reckoned,’ ‘credited,’ ‘accepted,’ ‘counted,’ ‘considered.’.Protestant exegesis, especially that of Romans 4 where the Greek word logizomai appears twelve times, has consistently understood the word in the sense of ‘credited.’.Abraham is understood as one who has ‘something to his credit’ so that when God looks at his ledger book, as it were, he sees that, in accounting terms, Abraham is in the black.
Evangelical Joel Beeke comments on this verb:
‘This verb most often indicates ‘what a person, considered by himself, is not, or does not have, but is reckoned, held or regarded to be, or to have. It is clear then that when Abraham was justified by his faith, the righteousness which was reckoned or ‘charged to his account’ was a righteousness not his own but that of another, namely, the righteousness of Christ.’
Unfortunately, Beeke presents a false premise which leads a false conclusion. First, the Greek verb logizomai does not ‘most often indicate’ what someone or something is merely ‘considered’ to be but is not so in reality. The New Testament uses logizomai 41 times. Most of these refer to what someone is thinking as a mental representation of the reality they are witnessing (cf., Luke 22:37; Rom 3:28; 6:11; 9:8; 1 Cor 4:1; 13:5, 11; Phil 3:13; 4:8; Heb 11:19, et al). Contrary to Beeke’s proposition, in only a few instances is logizomai used as a mental representation of something that does not exist in reality (cf., Rom 2:26; 2 Cor 12:6).
Hence, the preponderant evidence shows that logizomai denotes more of what is recognized or understood intrinsically of a person or thing than a mere crediting to the person or thing something that is not intrinsic to it. In the case of Abraham, we can then understand the phrase “his faith is reckoned as righteousness” in Romans 4:3 such that God is recognizing or viewing Abraham’s faith as righteousness.This is very different from saying, as Beeke claims, that God ‘credited’ Abraham with righteousness as if to say that Abraham was not really showing any righteous qualities when he demonstrated his faith but that God, because of the alien righteousness of Christ, merely gave him the label of righteousness.’
I recommend to the reader that he consult pages 324-354 in Not By Faith Alone to see all the arguments refuting the contention of Dr. Horton that dikaiow is exclusively forensic.
end of quote
More on this topic is discussed at this site and in this comment 192 http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2014/05/the-witness-of-the-lost-christianities/
re: #188)
1. His failure to understand the Hebrew behind sdq and related Hebrew concepts for “justice” and “righteousness” in the Hebrew Scriptures (Old Testament)2. This word group is then translated into the Greek; the original meanings are contained in the translated terms, but the terms in Greek culture acquire new meanings.3. Augustine relies on the equivocated Greek meanings (extant in later Greek culture, but not found in the original Hebrew) in his writings rather than the original (Hebrew) concepts.4. By the time these verses are translated into the Latin, they have meanings that are entirely different from what they originally meant in Hebrew.5. Thus, the Latin-speaking world is treated, via Augustine, to a concept of “justification” that simply is not derived from the knowledge of the Old Testament God.
The fifth premise does not follow from the first four. Just because one does not know Hebrew, it does not follow that one has no knowledge of the “Old Testament God.” So that argument is a non sequitur.
But more importantly, the argument you are trying to construct presupposes that the only way to know correctly the Apostolic doctrine of justification is by knowing Hebrew. If, for example, (speaking hypothetically) there was a direct chain of reliable oral transmission from the Apostles to St. Augustine, concerning the doctrine of justification, then even if St. Augustine did not know Hebrew, he would know the Apostolic doctrine of justification. So the hidden premise doing all the work in your argument is a premise claiming that the only way to know the Apostles’ doctrine of justification is by knowing the Old Testament in Hebrew. And that’s not only a question-begging premise (for reasons laid out in “The Tradition or the Lexicon“) but one that is problematic as well, because it would imply that in order for the Apostles to teach their doctrine of justification to the first generation of Christians, they would first have had to teach all these early Christians to read the Old Testament in Hebrew. It would entail that *all* the Greek-speaking Christians who preceded St. Augustine and who did not know Hebrew (from the first century to the fourth century), did not know the truth about justification, and could not have known the truth about justification until learning Hebrew. It would thus entail a massive automatic apostasy (inasmuch as the doctrine of justification is the doctrine on which the Church stands or falls) in the first century as soon as the gospel reached persons who did not speak Hebrew and did not learn Hebrew. In this way your presupposition makes learning Hebrew a prerequisite for becoming Christian (and for catechizing one’s children into the Christian faith), more so than even Arabic is thought to be necessary for becoming Islam, and limits the spread of Christianity only to persons who know Hebrew. Your argument thus imposes the lexical paradigm on St. Augustine, and in this way begs the question by presupposing (a) the non-existence of a community passing on the Tradition, and (b) that a necessary condition for coming to know the truth about the Apostles’ doctrine of justification (and thus about the gospel) is by way of exegeting the Hebrew Old Testament.
from comment 204"
Moreover, presupposed in the notion that the meaning of the Greek (and Latin) terms for justification, must not differ from the meaning of the Hebrew term as used in the Old Testament, and insofar as they do differ, there is a *theological* error, is the assumption that the New Covenant cannot go beyond the Old Covenant, that the new wine must be poured into old wineskins. This deeper assumption (i.e. that the New Covenant cannot go beyond the Old) is in essence the error of the Judaizers described in St. Paul’s letter to the Galatians, in that by denying that the New Covenant can go beyond the Old, it implicitly denies that the one who purportedly made the New Covenant is greater than Moses, capable of being the mediator of “a better covenant, which has been enacted on better promises” (Heb 8:6), and in that way it denies the incarnation of Christ, as Matt Yonke has explained in “Too catholic to be Catholic.”
end of quote
also one Protestant describes 2 Cor 5:21 in this way--as follows and this could fit with Catholic Theology
The difficult expression of 2 Corinthians 5:21, that in (relationship with) Christ “we might become the righteousness of God” further underlines a relational rather than a judicial or ontological meaning. The text is concerned with reconciliation to God in and through Christ (see Center; Peace, Reconciliation and calls those who are reconciled to become instruments of that reconciling work (2 Cor 5:18–19). In that context, the phrase “to become God’s righteousness” means that believers become participants in God’s reconciling action, extensions of his restoring love.
For Paul, then, God’s righteousness is God’s saving deed. In continuity with OT expressions of God’s righteousness as God’s faithfulness and steadfast love toward Israel, Paul sees this divine action finally expressed in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. The acceptance of that divine condescension through the act of faith justifies us (makes us right) with God. Righteousness is present in this restored relationship when life is lived in conformity with God’s purposes.
While I respect the scholarship that goes into trying to reconstruct the nuances of words at two-to-three thousand years’ remove, a text of limited length is simply never going to convey the wealth of meaning and understood nuance and context that oral transmission conveys, nor with the reliability of oral transmission.
For this reason, I think the more reliable rule-of-thumb for “reconstructing” ancient Christianity is: Rely on (informed, scholarly, arduously-assembled, respectable) speculations about the meanings of words and how they change over time only if you must.
And “only if you must” means: “only if there isn’t a robust, documented chain of oral transmission you can use as a CHECKSUM, so-to-speak, at various points in time along the way. If there is a robust and documented chain of oral transmission, then it makes more sense to prefer that over a process of “lexicographical archaeology,” because it is more reliable. Indeed, it provides you the Answer Key In The Back Of The Book, so-to-speak, against which you can check your forays in lexicography to see how accurate they turned out to be.”
(I don’t know if you know what I mean by the word “checksum.” It’s an Internet term: When a message is sent from Computer A to Computer B, it is broken into packets; each of these carries part of the message plus a checksum which is a “hash” of the content of that packet created by processing the content of the packet through a mathematical algorithm. The “hash” algorithm has the following property: Two messages with slightly different contents produce radically different “hashes.” When a packet arrives at Computer B, Computer B does not automatically trust it. Instead, it looks at the contents and “hashes” them, and compares the “hash” of what it received to the “hash” generated by Computer A of the same packet. If the two “hashes” are different, then Computer B knows that the content of the packet was corrupted or altered en route; Computer B reacts to this by ignoring the corrupted packet and sending a message asking Computer A to re-transmit it.)
I reiterate the fundamental principle: oral transmission of certain kinds is highly accurate.
There is, of course, a kind of oral transmission which is not reliable, and you reference it: The “game of telephone,” in which each person in a circle must quickly whisper a message to the next, in such a way that no other can hear it, and the next does the same to the person after him, and so on.
The reason this very unusual form of oral transmission is unreliable is: When the message passes from A to B, and then from B to C…
- A is not allowed to repeat himself to B;
- B is not allowed to ask A whether he got it right;
- A is not allowed to wait until he is sure that B got it right before appointing B to pass the message on to C;
- A is not allowed to listen to what B is saying to C, to make sure he is saying it right.
- B is not allowed to ask A whether he got it right;
- A is not allowed to wait until he is sure that B got it right before appointing B to pass the message on to C;
- A is not allowed to listen to what B is saying to C, to make sure he is saying it right.
Thus a game of “telephone” produces errors.
But imagine how the game of “telephone” would be if B was allowed to spend months with A, conversing about the message.
Imagine how the game would play out if B wasn’t allowed to talk to C until and unless A felt so confident that B had the message down pat that A was willing to appoint B to an office of leadership in an organization that existed for the purpose of propagating the message.
Imagine how the game would play out if, for months or years, A could remain in a supervisory role while watching B deliver the same message to C and D and E, to make sure nothing was getting changed over time.
And imagine the results if all this happened in a culture where there was a strong tradition of oral memorization, and no Internet Blogs (!) or Smartphone Apps to distract the participants.
Is there any doubt that the game would be…well, no fun? Because the message would be transmitted entirely without those funny distortions which make the usual version of the game amusing?
But these, of course, are exactly the circumstances under which the Apostolic Tradition was passed from the Apostles to the earliest bishops like Polycarp and Ignatius and Clement, and from them to their successors like Irenaeus.
And of course it was how it was handed from Jesus to the Apostles, with the exclusion of Paul — but let us assume that this very mystical special case received a transmission equally clear.
At any rate, this method of transmitting what is meant by a word — by using it in context until it becomes part of one’s workaday vocabulary, in an organization dedicated to preserving the message of which that word was part — is a far more reliable way for a man to know the meaning of a word, than is the practice of lexicographical spelunking.
I don’t mean to discount the real effort, perhaps even the genius, that these men put into trying to derive what these words meant, and into discovering whether they meant the same things in various times and places.
But the oral tradition — of the type by which Irenaeus received the Apostolic Faith from Polycarp, and he from John, and John from Jesus — simply provides a richer and more certain way to receive the “fullness of the faith.” By comparison, any attempt to reconstruct the faith — at a remove of more than a thousand years, and over the wider gulf of drastic cultural change — from mere textual analysis will produce…well, will produce a lot of widely-varying notions of what the original message was, and when it comes to scholarly research into this or that term, “two of a trade will never agree.” (Well…not “never.” But very very far from “always.”)
So I think your methodology — relying on McGrath, et alia, to have discovered in their text-based reconstructions of the faith things which somehow escaped the notice of men who spent months or years learning it (and many more years practicing it) from men who spent months or years learning it from the Apostles is just plain backwards. Instead of using it for Topic X because the Fathers are silent about Topic X, you’re using it when the Fathers are not silent about Topic X to try to prove the Fathers wrong about Topic X.
That’s like wanting to know the worldview of the Ramnulfid family in Acquitaine in the year 1100, and trying to figure it out by working backwards from a collection of modern and ancient French-English dictionaries…all the while ignoring that you have a thousand pages collected from the personal diaries of that family’s children and grandchildren including Elanor of Acquitaine and William III and Adelaide and Hugh Capet. And then, when you come up with a theory you’re fond of, you want to argue that Elanor and Bill and Adelaide and Hugh have it all wrong…?
In all of this, I’m not mentioning the fact that, when I first read the quotes from McGrath about how the Hebrews viewed sedaqa or saddiq, it seemed as if you were trying to argue for the Catholic view of righteousness or justification over and against the Protestant! Certainly I was unable, from what you cited, to find anything that wasn’t amenable to the faith as I know it. I certainly didn’t see how your accusation against Augustine followed from them. But that kind of thing is more up Bryan and David’s alleys, so perhaps they can say more.
But I thought I should comment on your overall procedure and how very backwards it seems to me, preferring what is less-reliable, more prone to scholarly error, over-and-above the very evidence that those scholars ought to be using to check their work.
They ought to say, “If I had been asked to sum up certain theological topics on the basis of my reading of the Bible, I would never have described it the way I find Origen, Tertullian, John Chrysostom, Athanasius, Irenaeus, Clement, Ignatius, and the rest of these fellows do. Sure, they disagree — with no clear majority — in some areas or are silent about others: Those are the points where I am forced to rely on my own best reading. And there are some areas where my Bible-reading produces the same resulting expressions of faith as they use…which means I must have read correctly. But in areas where their view disagrees with my own, unanimously or nearly-so, I am forced to conclude that no matter how clever my own exegesis and how ample my scholarly resources, I am probably missing something.”
No comments:
Post a Comment