Sentire Cum Ecclesia

Okay, it’s called the “Red Mass” because of the colours the Judges wear, but should not the celebrants have been wearing green for Monday in the Fourth Week of Ordinary time?

UPDATE: Once again the educational benefit of running a blog has amply demonstrated itself, just as I have demonstrated my own ignorance concerning this tradition (a point of ignorance which, however, it appears that I was not alone in suffering!). Many readers, including Fr Richardson of the Sydney Liturgical Commission, have carried out an Act of Mercy by instructing the ignorant in the right paths. One reader wrote to me as follows:

The Red Mass has this name because it is the Mass of the Holy Spirit celebrated in Red Vestments (not the colour of the judges’ robes!!!!!!) which has been celebrated to invoke the aid of the Holy Spirit at the beginning of the Legal Year in Christian countries since the thirteenth century.

To quote Eccles: “Ahhooohh, I feel such a fool!”

HT to Cooees for this one. The ABC is planning a program called “Holy Switch” and are seeking youg adults to participate. But I find their selection criteria a bit confusing, not to even insulting to young peple of faith:

We are looking for questioning young adults, who are part of a family who puts faith at the heart of life, but are not rigid in adhering to their beliefs.

You may live in a family firmly anchored in one of the major religious traditions of Islam, Judaism, Christianity or Hinduism, or be part of a family who practices and lives according to a lesser-known belief system. You will be open to new experiences and interested in how the beliefs of others shape their lives. While observing your swap family’s religious traditions or strongly held belief systems, you will be prepared to challenge yourself and others as you seek to experience what it’s like to live by a whole new set of rules, cultural practises and perspectives.

I am, of course, not eligible on account of my age, but if I were, would I want to apply? The exercise sounds interesting, but is undermined by the requirement that applicants be “not rigid in adhering to their beliefs”. It is one thing to “be open to new experiences and interested in how the beliefs of others shape their lives” but another thing to be what amounts to being unfaithfil to one’s beliefs. What it seems that the ABC is looking for are people who are brought up in a particular faith, but not really serious about living that faith out. I suppose it all depends on that rather pejorative adjective “rigid”. One man’s faithfuness is, it seems, another man’s “rigidity”.

I made the comment in a post somewhere below that N.T. Wright was a bit like Sherlock Holmes in his methods. In fact, after reading his article on the Virgin Birth (discussed in the post from last Saturday) I have been forced to modify my claim: Holmes and Wright follow methods which are completely opposite.

The famous Sherlock Holmes quotation is “… when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

But Wright’s approach seems more appropriate for the historian: Without predeterming what is possible or impossible, look at the evidence and ask yoursef what is the most satisfying solution in terms of probability, simplicity and completeness (ie. it provides an explanation for all the evidence, without leaving awkward pieces of evidence out).

The answer may well lead you to covlude that what you initially thought was impossible actually happened.

As you will have been aware from my previous postings, I have just completed auditing a Masters degree course at Australian Catholic University called “Jews and Christians reading the Bible”. I’ve had a bit of time to reflect on it. This will not be a review of the course, of course, that would be inappropriate. But I did make a discovery I would like to report.

The main lecturers in the course were Rabbi Fred Morgan and Fr Francis Moloney. The course obviously fitted in with my interests in both biblical studies and interfaith dialogue, although as Rabbi Fred said in our last conversation together, it wasn’t a course in the latter. Still, for me, it was an exercise in bringing together two ways of reading (at least some of the same) Scriptures from two different religious starting points, and so in that respect, an “interfaith dialogue” was taking place – at least in my mind.

Rabbi Fred said at one point that he sees Judaism and Christianity as “two religions separated by a common scripture” (an idea based on Shaw’s wry comment about England and America). I’ve written a little about this in the post below. Reading N.T. Wright’s “Jesus and the Victory of God” has given me a lot to think about in this regard, as has another little book by Amy-Jill Levine, the American Jewish New Testament scholar, “The Misunderstood Jew”. If you haven’t the time or the inclination to read Wright, at least take a look at Levine’s book. It is short and easily readable. You might disagree with her in places (I would be surprised if you didn’t), but her writing is refreshingly honest, and an example of the kind of real dialogue Jews and Christians could be having if we really wanted to. She has a very good chapter entitled “From Jewish Sect to Gentile Church”. As a point of interest, Levine also has co-edited an annoted NRSV New Testament called (appropriately enough) “The Jewish Annotated New Testament”. I have it on order and am just itching to have a good look at it.

Anyway, the upshot is that because the two surviving 2nd Temple Jewish movements followed completely different and mutually exclusive histories in the intervening centuries, Jews cannot today recognise Christianity in any way as part of the “Jewish” tradition. It would be fair to say that the very idea – that modern Judaism and Christianity are different varieties of the same religion – would seem ridiculous to most Christians.

During the course, Rabbi Fred introduced us to the history and methods of Rabbinic interpretation, including ideas, methods and collections such as written and oral Torah, Mishnah, Talmud, Midrash (both halakha and Aggadic) and so on. In the main, it looked as if there was very little that the Rabbinic Jewish scriptural hermeneutic had in common with the Christian tradition of reading Scripture.

But then, to my great surprise, we discovered a very significant point of commonality. This emerged almost incidentally in the course, and wasn’t made much of, except as a curiosity. It is my belief that in fact, this “point of commonality” actually speaks volumes about a shared history that extended far beyond 135AD, and even beyond the era of Constantine, right into the later Patristic period of Christian history. This is a period which is roughly equivalent to the formative Rabbinical period. What we discovered is a clue that in fact the separation of the “two religions” was by no means hard and fast, and that there WAS some overlap in hermeneutical procedure.

Rabbi Fred introduced us to the Jewish concept of “Pardes”. “Pardes” is the Persian word from which Jews, Christians and Muslims alike get the word “Paradise”, and it means a “water garden” or “pleasure orchard”. Jews use it as an acronym of the four ways of interpreting Torah, where the Torah is seen as a “paradise” through which the reader strolls. Courtesy of the wonderful source of all knowledge, Wikipedia, here is a summary:

Pardes refers to (types of) approaches to biblical exegesis in rabbinic Judaism (or – simpler – interpretation of text in Torah study). The term, sometimes also spelled PaRDeS, is an acronymn formed from the name initials of the following four approaches:
• Peshat — “plain” (“simple”) or the direct meaning.
• Remez — “hints” or the deep (allegoric: hidden or symbolic) meaning beyond just the literal sense.
• Derash — from Hebrew darash: “inquire” (“seek”) — the comparative (midrashic) meaning, as given through similar occurrences.
• Sod (pronounced with a long O as in ‘bone’) — “secret” (“mystery”) or the mystical meaning, as given through inspiration or revelation.

When it is pointed out that the “Derash” includes interpretation of the text for how one is to practically live one’s life based on the Torah, the astute and well-informed Catholic reader will immediately go “Ah-ha! That sounds familiar!”, and so it should.

An “innovation” in the 1992 Catechism of the Catholic Church was the inclusion, front and centre, of the ancient Patristic (and Medieval) Christian idea of the “four senses” of Scripture. Here is a brief summary abbreviated from paragraphs 115-118 of the Catechism:

115 …[O]ne can distinguish between two senses of Scripture: the literal and the spiritual, the latter being subdivided into the allegorical, moral and anagogical senses. …
116 The literal sense is the meaning conveyed by the words of Scripture and discovered by exegesis, following the rules of sound interpretation: “All other senses of Sacred Scripture are based on the literal” [St. Thomas Aquinas].
117 The spiritual sense…
1. The allegorical sense…
2. The moral sense…
3. The anagogical sense….
118 A medieval couplet summarizes the significance of the four senses: “The Letter speaks of deeds; Allegory to faith; The Moral how to act; Anagogy our destiny.”

Now, if you allow that the anagogical sense is in some way the “mystical” reading of Scripture, what we see in this Patristic hermeneutic is in fact exactly the same as the Jewish Rabbinical hermeneutic of PaRDeS.
I find that incredibly fascinating. I wonder what Kate would make of it, given that she has been pressing me to go beyond the historical reading of Scripture and to apply the Patristic methodology. Perhaps she would agree with our Jewish friend, Amy-Jill Levine, who writes on page 116 of “The Misunderstood Jew”:

To suggest that the text cannot take on new meanings but must be interpreted only in the context of its original setting dooms both the church and the synagogue, because this argument precludes people from finding their own meaning in the text. Theologically speaking, a fully historical focus threatens to put the Holy Spirit out of business.

Could it be that, when read this way, the Holy Spirit is still “in business” among the Jews as well as in the Church?

As I mentioned below, I was writing a “little” post about my experience with Rabbi Fred Morgan and Fr Francis Moloney in the ACU course “Jews and Christians reading the Bible” while I was down at the beach last weekend – when my laptop battery went flat and I found I hadn’t brought the power cord to recharge.

Probably a good thing I didn’t post what I had written thus far, because when I returned to work this Monday, I found myself caught up in a conversation about the possibility of “double belonging” among the Abrahamic religions, particularly Jews who believe in Jesus yet wish to continue to live according to the halakhic laws of modern Judaism, and Muslims who believe in Jesus, but who continue, for a variety of reasons, to live and act within the Muslim Ummah. The most common example of the former are the so-called Messianic Jews, or “Jews for Jesus”, movement. As far as I know, the latter don’t form any kind of group within the Islamic community – mainly they keep their beliefs to themselves.

Anyway, having just finished the ACU course, I was thinking a good deal about these matters, and especially about what it means to be “Jewish” in today’s context.

I realised, for instance, something more exact about a fact I already knew. We all “know” that Judaism and Christianity are two separate religions. Rabbi Fred likes to say, with apologies to Shaw, that “Judaism and Christianity are two religions separated by a common Scripture”. But of course, to the historically minded such as myself, there is the fact that these two religions we today call “Judaism” and “Christianity” arise from exactly the same source, the same point in time, the same geography, the same culture, the same language and the same community.

As an historian, therefore, I have difficulty with the description of Judaism and Christianity being described or treated as two separate religions at least in the period before 135AD. In that stage, I think it is far more accurate to describe both the Rabbinic and Christian (“Messianic”) movements as the only two living sects of Judaism surviving from the plurality of “Judaisms” or “Jewish options” in the late 2nd Temple period.

BUT after this, there comes a long and often unhappy relationship between these two groups. Due principally (in my mind) to the decision at the time of the pre-70AD Christian movement to allow Gentiles to enter into the movement without the observance of the halakhic laws, the Christian movement outstripped the Rabbinical movement both in terms of numbers and in terms of distance from their roots. The Rabbis reinforced identity in line with the 2nd Temple synagogue tradition (in effect, significantly narrowing the options for ways of being “Jewish”), whereas the Christians established a community separate from the synagogue, and ultimately unattached to ethnic Jewish-ness.

Whether my reading of this is right or not, the almost 1900 years since of separate (though for the large part parallel) existence achieved a near total division between the two communities, such that what we have today are indeed “two separate religions” rather than two versions of the one religion. (Rabbi Fred and I discovered at least one clue to the fact that the separation may not have been total – a shared way of reading scripture during both the Rabbinic and Patristic traditions – more on this in that other post I am writing).

To be “Jewish” today means to live in continuity with the specifically Rabbinic tradition. Traditions – though ethnically Jewish – apart from that Rabbinic line are not accepted as religiously “Jewish” today (any more than Catholics accept as authentically Catholic any expression of Catholicism that does not exist within the apostolic tradition and communion of the Catholic Church). An example is the work of Philo. Philo was a Jew, but was never accepted as a part of the Rabbinical tradition. Conclusion: Philo is NOT “Jewish”. Christianity too developed its own very idiosyncratic tradition. Two most notable features (aside from anything else) that – from earliest times – separated the Church from the Synagogue was the celebration of Sunday instead of the Sabbath, and Easter rather than Passover.

It is very hard for me today to see how someone who is ethnically and religiously a Jew, who “meets Jesus” and comes to believe in him as the divine and incarnate Son of God, the second person of the Holy Trinity, could continue to expect to be accepted as “Jewish” by the modern Jewish community, even if they continued to practice according to the Rabbinical tradition. The ultimate point of division is not this faith in Jesus as the Messiah (at a stretch, that could be accommodated, I guess, as an heretical form of “Judaism” – I have in mind those Lubavitchers who are thoroughly Orthodox except claim that one of their recently deceased Rabbis was in fact the Messiah).

It is the two thousand or so years of divided tradition and history that makes Christianity and Judaism today mutually exclusive religions – even while remaining ever-so-closely related in patterns of belief and praxis due to common origins. This is necessarily and truly a point of deep sadness to me, but as an historian, I must accept it as a fact.

You may like to have a look at this article in the opinion section of The Age: Sisterhood beware – silencing ideas stymies progress. It’s one of those articles where you get to have your say in an online opinion poll. The question is: “Are women who oppose abortion entitled to call themselves feminist?” And apparently we men are not excluded from expressing an opinion, even though we don’t have a horse in this particular race.

If you are made of really strong stuff, you might want to have a look at some of the comments at the end of the article. One thing that I noticed toward the end of the article is that the author, Cathy Sherry, says

I do not know Tankard Reist and I am not pro-life, but I defend her right to express her opinions, call herself a feminist and prosecute her beliefs.

I thought that was an interesting line, “I am not pro-life”. One of the commentators – a member of the “sisterhood”, it seems – reacts:

We need to stop engaging we the anti choice zealots using their language of choice. They are not “pro-life”. They are anti-choice. It’s not a courtesy to them, it’s letting them own the debate.

Now that is what I would call “b—y”.

I was halfway through preparing a longish post on my recent experience of the “Jews and Christians reading the Bible” course at ACU when my laptop went flat, so I turned back to my reading. Happily I came across this article by N.T. Wright on the Virgin Birth, published on the ABC Religion and Ethics site before Christmas.

The birth narrative in Matthew was one passage we looked at in the course. Those critical of using historical critical methods to read the Scripture often reach their position of criticism because the methods seem to undercut our orthodox faith. But need it be so? If we are convinced that the hisstorical basis of our faith is important, studying the history of our texts should not be a “no go” area.

This essay by Wright is short but to the point. I commend it to you for consideration.

Doing a quick bit of research, one turns to the repository of all knowledge, Wikipedia.

But if you go down to the woods today, be sure of a big surpise:

They are making a good point.

Currently enjoying the course “Jews and Christians Reading the Bible” at ACU. However, a simple thought after today’s experience:

1) Always apply an attitude of critical questioning to any “historical-critical” reading of Scripture;

2) Always remember that every “historical-critical” reading of Scripture has an historical context all of its own.

IOW, the name says it all: when “historical criticism” questions the text, apply “historical criticism” to the reading.