Biblical Truths with Professor Dale Martin

I have felt for a long time that the whole 19th and 20th century project of theology of the New Testament or theology of the Old Testament or theology of the Bible was an unsuccessful completely failed enterprise because most of the time people were trying to do a descriptive work of the theology contained in the Bible but they were also trying to read that to confirm their own Orthodox Christianity but they are also trying to use purely historical criticism so they weren't trying to be allegorical or do spiritual interpretation they were trying to say this is what Paul really meant when he talked about the spirit or faith or Christ or whatever our God and yet then they seem to think that that justifies let's say a fully Nicean or Caledonian doctrine of Christ or the docking of the Trinity and I've always felt like that you can't read the New Testament judging by the criteria of modern historical criticism and get truly robust Christian orthodoxy out of it because orthodoxy in the full sense that I've been confessing it in church all my life wasn't in the the New Testament historically it took it took centuries to develop I don't think there's anything wrong with that I am like I think most Roman Catholics and Episcopalians a lot of other people and believing that when we confess the Creed's which we do all the time in church whether it's the Apostles Creed the Nicene Creed the definition of kal seeding or whatever when we say we believe these things it's perfectly fine to say we believe these things without without believing that the historical Paul even knew about them much less taught them so part of the book the introduction of the book is to try to trace the rise in the fall or at least I'm hoping it's a fall the Secession of the discipline of theology of the New Testament and then to say but that doesn't mean that we can't read the New Testament or the Bible for that matter and take out of it by our own creative interpretation fully robustly Orthodox Christian doctrine a lot of the book drew out of my own experience of four decades being a historical critic of the Bible and a historian wrote of Christianity knowing that the Bible is not historically accurate it's not scientifically accurate and and yet I stand up I teach that in my classes and yet I stand up in Sunday and I say something like I believe that Jesus descended into hell well how can I say that I'm still saying it what do I mean by that and I was in my own mind I've over the years made a difference in between historical interpretation of the Bible and theological interpretation of the Bible and this book is an attempt not just to urge that that to display at least my way of doing it how do I make sense of the New Testament reading New Testament without limiting myself to historical criticism in other words allowing fairly creative interpretation and exegesis and yet reading the Bible so that it supports and informs the full orthodoxy of the church that I'm a member of and and so the book is my attempt to demonstrate that and to argue that going forward in the from now on it's perfectly fine to be a Christian and not be uncritical from a historical point of view about the Bible but we need to learn and to teach our fellow Christians how to read the Bible theologically and not just historically there are two ways most of the times that people have organized theologies of the New Testament in the past two centuries one was trying to do it canonically Matthew Mark Luke John saw it the other way would do maybe chronologically so you start off with Paul as the earliest then you go and then some people have done it otherwise through topics so I decided to actually put a constraint to myself and say I'm going to constrain myself voluntarily to what are some of the classic topics of systematic theology that tin has tended to be Protestants more than Catholic but and so the introduction of the book is basically explaining what the theology of the New Testament was how it arose and my critique of it and what I think should substitute in its place and the rest of the book is organized by chapters the first chapter is knowledge on the piste Amala G because one of the main things up through the whole book is how do we know what we know about anything so the first chapter is kind of a theology of epistemology the second chapter is scripture and it's a theology of Scripture because of course I'm going to be dealing with this text not as a historical document solely but as Scripture of the church and then I follow very straightforward traditional systematic theology topics chapter on God the next chapter on Christ the next chapter on the Spirit then there's a chapter on theological anthropology I just call it human and in the final chapter is on the church so it's ecclesiology those are somewhat organized because God is where you kind of have to start once you get past the issues of what is Scripture and what is knowledge God is the first topic I think in most systematic theology the church topic is last because I wanted to end up I see the church as being the best place to talk about the future eschatology and so I put the church last for that reason so I intentionally organized the book in a very non biblical studies way and in a very traditional systematic theology would write so I could say you really can do this the last 10 years I've been talking about it a lot and a lot of my friends would say you're doing what you're writing theology why are you doing that I think it's because it's just a fact I don't I don't hesitate to be somewhat autobiographical in the book I talk about my growing up in a fundamentalist Protestant Church in Texas small-town Texas from there becoming dissatisfied that even as a teenager and eventually attending Princeton Theological Seminary being introduced there to real historical criticism which I found liberating it gave me a way to think about the Bible in intellectual ways that I at least I didn't experience it at a time as faith destroying although I think maybe some of my friends did and then I went to Yale for my PhD and that I I think when I got to Yale all I knew had to do was biblical exegesis but I was at Yale in the 80s when some of the greatest theologians were working on what was being called the Yale theology and talking about Hans Frei George Lynn Beck David David Kelsey and I really learned what theology was only by fitting on the other side not participating in but listening to other theologians talk about what is theology if one were to do theology and that's where I learned and then I started learning how to a see illogical thinking of the text was very different from historical I never thought that I wanted to stop the historical study of early Christianity because I found it interesting and it's not just that it's important a lot I don't I think it's important although I don't think it's necessary for Christian theology but I just liked doing it but learning how the ology could be done in ways that I hadn't really understood before and that really happened in the five years I was a doctoral student Yale and then after that I just always recognized that I was I was doing two different sides of my own career I was Scott from a scholarly point of view I was being a historian or a textual or a cultural historian or a textual interpreter but I was also continuing to go to church and it took me a while to decide that maybe I should address that in my scholarship well I'm not the first biblical scholar for anything to talk about this kind of event I was thinking of AKM Adam who's published on hermeneutical theory and Scripture so I've been in dialogue with other people about this but if there were four theologians who are the most important to me mainly more about the theological aspects and issues and it's interesting because all four of them I'm not Roman Catholic but all four of these are Roman Catholic theologians who are philosophically trained they're all Thomas that is Thomas Aquinas is their main focus they're all also left-wing Marxists for the most part or at least left wingers and they all four are they've all been they all come at the study of Thomas from the point of view of vidcon stin Ian ordinary language philosophy and I just gravitated toward them because they just seemed to be so right about the meaning of language how does language work and what are the central aspects of of theology they all emphasize for example the centrality of negative theology or apophatic theology and that would be herb Herbert McCain furgus car Nicholas lash and in my Yale colleague Dennis Turner I read a lot of those four people I also had a lot of my colleague yael kathy tanner but lots and lots of other people for the first time i found myself getting serious about augustine and thomas aquinas themselves and then for a lot of the apophatic theology pseudo-dionysius the areopagite was I discovered him through Thomas and through these other epithet icky legends so they were inspiration from all over the place it's Episcopalians have tried to define themselves as a bridge between project ISM and Roman Catholicism but also when the Anglican Church start first started breaking away from Roman Catholicism the a lot of those church Divine's we would call them in Elizabethan England and thereafter they tried to go to the eastern fathers Eastern Orthodoxy - reclaims forms of Catholicism and orthodoxy that they thought would kind of help them jump over the more recent Roman Catholic what they would call innovations so the Council of Trent for example they wanted to Episcopalians at least in the u.s. want to reclaim the most central aspects of Christian catholicity and Orthodoxy and so I wanted the book to be informed by that Episcopalian broad Church orientation which means I wanted to be seen as as orthodox by Eastern Orthodox Christianity Christians by Roman Catholic Christians and by Protestant Christians so for example most of what I talked about as Orthodox Christianity relates to the first several centuries of Christianity up to the great Creed's great ecumenical Creed's and I don't even talk about some of the things that come later like the infallibility of the papal infallibility or a lot of the Filioque I'd talk a little bit about the Filioque controversy but just to say this was an unfortunate rupture between east and west that we probably could have avoided and hopefully we may be able to get over so I think being an Episcopalian has made me want to be Catholic in the broad sense of that term I send a lot of time talking about how we should not think of the text of the Bible as some kind of epistemological foundation that we first set the meaning of before we then use it in a devotional or theological or doctrinal way that base superstructure idea that history and the text provides the base and the superstructure is application either theological or devotional whatever I say let's just get rid of that entirely that's been the whole problem with a store with historical criticism in the role of the theology of the new testament project i also say we need to get rid of the idea that scripture is a rule book is a manual is a constitution or Ito's kinds of models in fact what I've used in a previous publication might sex in the single Savior book the very last chapter talks about let's think of scripture as space we occupy it's like a cathedral you walk into does it communicate yes but it doesn't communicate in any kind of a general sense in a one way since you you interpret the space because of the space so I'll talk about Scripture as Cathedral in that book I also talk about Scripture as a museum an art gallery the art has meaning but you don't have to come up with some authorial intention of the artist in order to get meaning out of it you go into an art museum and you just really the best way to do it is not what did this artist try to do but just say what am i experiencing here how do I interpret this so I use that in the sex and the single Savior book I also use the image in this new book of scripture for Christians should not be a place we go to get answers scripture is the water we swim in we are fish swimming in the water of Scripture that's how we need to think of it you live in Scripture you don't go to Scripture for a philosophical answer for data for information for science for history as a Christian you go to Scripture you just don't go to Scripture you live in Scripture so scripture is water

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Length: 14min 25sec (865 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 24 2017