exegesis and the death penalty

4/16 - At Evangel, Carter asks, "What Did Jesus Know and When Did He Know It?"

If God the Father is omniscient, then he knew about and approved of every word that would be uttered by the Son during his earthly ministry. If the Father knew that Noah was not a real human and allowed his son to imply that he was, then the Father is culpable in the deception since he not only allowed it to happen but foreordained the spread of this false information.

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Over the weekend there was a very interesting discussion at First Things between Joe Carter (an Evangelical) and at least two commenters (Andrew Lyttle and Stuart Koehl) about whether modern, orthodox Christian Biblical exegesis can legitimately disagree with Christ Himself regarding the historicity of certain parts of the Old Testament. This isn’t an essay. I am just trying setting it down in outline so I won’t have to go find it again.

The issue arose in the context of an argument about the death penalty that began when David Bentley Hart (an Eastern Orthodox writer) objected to Carter’s claim -- set forth in his weekly On The Square article -- that the "everlasting" Noahic covenant "provides a moral norm for capital punishment [and] delegates the responsibility to [a legitimate human authority] and limits [its application to the crime of murder]." Carter’s recourse to this covenant and his subsequent insistence on the historical existence of Noah -- authoritatively established (according to Carter), if not by the divinely inspired Old Testament, then surely by Christ’s reference to “the days of Noah” in Luke 17:27 and Matthew 24:37 -- caused a controversy to erupt in the comments section over the proper way to read the Bible. The three basic questions are (1) whether the Noahic covenant -- or any other Biblical text -- amounts to a divine mandate for the death penalty that Christians must follow, (2) whether Noah actually existed, and (3) whether Christ can be said to exhibit a theologically impossible (presumably) “ignorance” if he refers back to a Noah who is “only” mythical.

Hart accuses Carter of treating Scripture as "a collection of infallible oracles issuing directly from the lips of God." Neither legal prescriptions from the Old Testament nor the dictates of natural law are left undisturbed by the Gospel in which God is revealed to grant mercy "exorbitantly outside the bounds of natural justice." He writes:

[T]he entire Pauline theology of grace and salvation asserts that the power of the law has been surpassed by the power of God’s free gift, and so the concrete prescriptions of the law—and this means not just circumcision and kosher regulations, but its criminal and penal ordinances as well—have now been set aside. The eternal moral truths that the law contains (do not kill, do not commit adultery, and so forth) remain, but the wrath of the law has been vanquished in Christ. [...]

All peoples now belong to Christ as a single body; the partitions of law and custom—even good law and honorable custom—have been broken down; and the wrath of the law has been swallowed up in infinite charity. All had once been bound in disobedience (Jew and Gentile alike), that God might now show mercy on all. And all who belong to Christ have entered already into that new creation, and are forbidden now to retreat again to the “elemental” order of the old.

[...] For myself, the only compellingly convincing answer is that Christians can have no recourse to [the death penalty], ever; but I will not go so far as to state that I know that this is what Scripture positively requires . . . What I will say is that, if the Gospel is in any measure true, then its challenge is far more radical than the sort of argument Carter makes allows.

Regular readers of First Things may remember that in 2005, Caleb Stegall, writing in The New Pantagruel, pointed out an apparently basic difference between Fr. Neuhaus and Joseph Bottum on the question of whether Christians in a "demythologized modern state" can have political recourse to "cosmic justice" or "high justice" (e.g., by supporting the death penalty) or whether, as Bottum seemed to believe, man must "abandon [his] experience under nature and within a cosmic narrative, at least in its political form" because the state is now based on a social contract that is incapable of meting out “high justice” via its positive law. [Stegall's argument, which I am unable to get from its original source, is recapped by Daniel Larison here; Neuhaus’ response is here.]

Bottum had written, like Hart here, that "Jesus turned all our stories inside out." Here are a few excerpts from that article:

Christians may decline to accept responsibility for government, but governing must still go on. And that governing will inevitably find itself caught in the clash between justice and mercy. Christ's teaching forgives the sinner even while it condemns the sin, and human justice and human mercy may perhaps find a unity in us as individuals if we turn the other cheek as we are taught. . . . If judges show mercy, in any meaningful sense of the word, they do so at the explicit cost of justice; they are being unjust by failing to exact the penalty that justice requires.

So what kind of justice—high, low, divine, poetic—can a Christian expect in a modern nation-state? More to the point, what kind of justice can a Christian allow modern democracies to claim for themselves? [...]

[The application of the death penalty is] the denouement of an essentially meaningful story: The universe is disordered because blood cries out from the ground, and high justice demands blood to match that blood. . . . Execution belongs [therefore] to another order of punishment/ [...]

Under any Christian understanding of political theory, where does the legal system of a modern democracy gain authority to act on this high level? [...]

The death penalty requires some extraordinary authority, and if we reject the divine election of kings over us, as all Western nations have . . . then we have also rejected the justification for a legal system to claim to be enacting the highest story of earthly justice. [...]

The divine right of kings was a short-lived political theory, swept under by rival theories in early modern times. A new understanding of the limited sovereignty of government emerged, and one of the primary causes was the gradually developing awareness that Christianity had thoroughly demythologized the state. But that is not, by itself, a stable condition. Without constant pressure from the New Testament's revelation of Christ's death and resurrection, the state always threatens to rise back up as an idol. And one sign of a government's overreaching is its claim of power to balance the books of the universe—to repay blood with blood.

Bottum has also addressed the same issue more recently here, here, and here so it is clearly this kind of argument to which Carter is referring when, in his initial article, he writes:

Some Christians have argued that since modern liberal governments do not recognize the authority of God, the modern state is free from having to carry out his mandates. The result is that the question of capital punishment must be considered a matter of social, and sometimes individual, justice. Since capital punishment does not serve a legitimate societal interest, they contend, its only purpose is to slake a victim’s quest for vengeance. [...]

To which he responds:

Different orderings of the social contract may shift the burden of carrying out capital punishment from one societal sphere (the family) to another (the civil magistrate). But the duty must be carried out. If Christians believe their governing authorities are legitimate then we must expect them to take on the role instituted by God himself.

If Carter’s support of the death penalty is based on what he believes to be a Biblical mandate. (Elsewhere he writes. “In the absence of a Biblical mandate . . . I would be opposed to the death penalty.”) Stegall’s is based on a differentiation “between the idea of mankind under the natural will of God and the idea of a remnant people within mankind living under his special revelation.” I believe his is the strongest argument. He writes:

In practical terms this becomes a problem of the conflict between worldly political powers subservient to the law of nature on the one hand, and the covenant of grace made between God and his universal people through the incarnation on the other. How ought the incarnational revelation of right order under the will of God be brought to bear on the instruments of power and those who wield such instruments? The resolution of this problem is first proposed by St. Augustine and went something like this:

The City of God, his chosen people (the church), live scattered and intermingled within the City of Man (mankind as a whole). As such, they are exiles in a world which takes on the Hebraic symbol of a new Babylon. It is of vital importance to understand and keep in mind that Babylon is not a symbol of disorder–rather it is the symbol of mankind in the drama of life under the will of God absent the special revelation of the covenant. The City of God shares in and has a special role to fulfill in this drama–it participates in the natural drama of life ordered under the will of God within the City of Man. [...]

The City of God must pay its debt to nature, but it tempers its participation with the covenantal experience of knowing that this mixing of the cities will not last forever and that there remains a higher law of the spirit; it places hope for its full historical satisfaction beyond the eschatological horizon. While the covenantal representative can participate with the city of man in the struggle for order under the law of nature, he does so knowing that the process involves him in compromise and disorder when measured against the covenantal revelation of grace in the Incarnation. By necessity, the covenantal representative can pursue cosmic justice under nature’s laws but never without generating the experience of tragedy by which the natural law is leavened with Christian guilt, responsibility, confession, penance, mercy, and the symbolic drama of participation in the sacramental overcoming of evil with good which represents the final reality of that conquest which is yet to come. [...]

By recognizing and articulating clearly the source, location, and function of both the natural law and the Christian law, and by understanding them as mixed in an age that was passing away but which contained “loved things held in common,” Augustine made a key breakthrough in the development of political theology which in its fundamental form remains valid today–a penitent, tragic political theology bound to pay an ongoing debt to nature yet cemented by a love that is both universal and particular: it transcends the City of God and orders all mankind; it is also concerned with the things of this world–“the things which are passing away”–and not with the things to come. However, this Augustinian balance has always been precarious. When the tension between the natural law and the Christian law collapses, the result is a disordering pressure either towards a rolling back of the protective shadow of the Christian law and engagement in the world wholly under the stark glare of nature which rewards only power and results in open tribal and political conflict, or towards a Gnostic denial of the reality of the law of nature and ideological attempts to remake the present age into the age to come. [This quotation comes from Stegall’s self-citation at the Front Porch Republic.]

Peter Hitchens has also written some excellent posts on the issue (see his index). Stuart Koehl offers his own justification of the death penalty via Christian tradition [7:28 AM] and links to a justification of capital punishment as a “communal proclamation” that effects a necessary catharsis -- similarly, in 2008, R.R. Reno responded to Evangelium Vitae by arguing that

[t]he earthly city is not simply a compact of men and women organized for mutual protection. Society also embodies and expresses a moral vision. As legal theorists have recognized, the law gives important public form to this moral vision. When the jury pronounces judgment and the judge sentences, they are acting for a moment as teachers. “This is wrong,” says the verdict, and “it’s exactly this bad,” says the sentence weighing out the punishment. You know a lot about a society when you find out what it criminalizes and how it punishes.

Avery Cardinal Dulles wrote in 2001 that “revelation, as it comes to us through Scripture and tradition, interpreted with the guidance of the ecclesiastical magisterium” takes the death penalty for granted and that Scripture and tradition agree “that the State has authority to administer appropriate punishment to those judged guilty of crimes and that this punishment may, in serious cases, include the sentence of death.” See also Ed Feser’s two recent exhaustive posts here and here. So much for the death penalty.

The transition can be made back to the question of Biblical interpretation by way of Bottum's dependence on the distinction between "stories" (and, later, on the divine right of kings), on the one hand, and social contract democracy and modern exegesis on the other, on the other. In the comments following the posts by Carter and Hart, numerous individuals are arguing over how Biblical interpretation ought to deal with Noah, the Noahic covenant, and Christ’s reference to “the days of Noah.” Koehl, who supports the death penalty, joins forces with both Hart and Andrew Lytlle to reject Carter’s Evangelical reading of the Bible.

Lyttle, one of DBH’s former students, writes [1:59 PM]:

[T]he Noah story is an old Mesopotamian myth. God never said anything of the sort to anyone, because Noah never existed. All of those passages may be scripture, but the early Christian tradition generally treated them -- if at all -- allegorically. Even if that were not so, Christians are not supposed to read the Bible as a Christian Koran, literally infallible in every part. Otherwise Paul would not have said to the Galatians that the law of Moses was defective because it was delivered by an angel through a human mediator, and that Christians who follow the works of the law for the sake of righteousness (which would include criminal prescriptions) are cut off from Christ.

Hart writes [9:46 AM]:

I have to admit that I find the "literalist" and "oracularist" traditions of the Evangelicals impossible to take very seriously, as they lead to manifest incoherence.

A few readers object to Carter’s article being published at First Things in the first place and Carter responds [9:08 PM]:

Yes, how dare FT allow me to post an article that does not share your view that Noah was a "mythical" person.

Koehl [5:45 AM]:

As it happens, I don't really think there was an actual historical person named Noah, or even like Noah. I do believe there was an actual, historical flood about 6000 years ago, though it did not inundate the world and wipe out all life except for the people and animals on the ark. Lots of Near Eastern civilizations have a flood myth, because they all carried ancestral memories of the flooding of the Black Sea basin when the land bridge at the Dardanelles collapsed.

All those flood myths have a lot in common--waters rising, man puts family and herds on boat and rides out the flood, to start civilization anew when the waters recede. The story of Noah in Genesis is distinguished by how it elaborates this story. It and it alone sees the flood as punishment for the wickedness of mankind. It and it alone has God picking out one man to be the instrument by which life on earth survives. It and it alone has God making a covenant with this man to ensure that God will never again attempt to destroy his creation.

In short, the story of Noah is distinguished by the moral imagination that the ancient Hebrew authors of the story--undoubtedly one of their early creation myths passed down orally until compiled in written form--a moral imagination that shows the unique relationship of that people with their God. If you think that this is not divinely inspired because it is at least partly fictional, I really pity you, because you have a very circumscribed view of how God works through his people.

Carter [10:23 AM]:

Then I guess the genealogy in Luke which claims Jesus was a descendant of Noah is simply inaccurate, right? Perhaps the book of Luke is not historical either.

Koehl [11:12 AM]:

Luke (and Matthew) were both concerned to establish that Jesus was the Messiah of Israel foretold by the Prophets, which meant establishing his Davidic bona fides, and thence back to Abraham and the Forefathers, using the time-honored tradition of family trees. These can be quite accurate: even in the 20th century, a Bedouin Arab who might not know his age or birthday could recite his ancestry going back six generations on both sides of his family. Which is why I believe that the genealogies in the Gospels are accurate back to the beginning of historical time. Prior to that, I seriously doubt the Hebrews knew enough of their history to be that precise (which is not to say that either Genesis, Exodus or Judges is without historical foundation. I consider them to be authentic windows into the past of the Hebrew people, in the same way that the Iliad and Odyssey are windows into the Greek Bronze Age. Certainly the Armana Tablets and other archaeological discoveries prove that the stories in Genesis go back at least to the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries BC, and were not made up by post-exilic scribes, as most revisionists of a pro-Palestinian bent like to state.

The bottom line is this: Christianity is a faith founded upon truth. Scripture is the divinely inspired Word of God in print, therefore Scripture is true. But getting the truth out of Scripture is not easy, particularly if one is interested in Scripture as the history of God's relationship with his people. In such instances, a naive literality will founder upon the rocks of historical evidence, which would emphasize the importance of being able to discern the different literary genres and methods being employed--what is history (and how was history understood by the writer); what is mythology; what is poetry; what is allegory; and what is inspirational fiction.

Lyttle [12:05 PM, in response to Carter]:

If you really believe Noah was a real historical personage, then indeed we have nothing to talk about. Your view of scripture, of history, and of reality in general is so alien to mine that we clearly have no common ground.

Carter [12:27 PM]:

As Jesus said, "But as the days of Noah were, so shall also the coming of the Son of man be. For as in the days that were before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noe entered into the ark, and knew not until the flood came, and took them all away; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be."

But what did he know. He was just a first century Jew living in Palestine. He didn't have the book learnin' necessary to understand that Noah couldn't have actually existed.

Koehl [1:29 PM]:

Jesus had an excuse [for referring to someone who didn’t actually exist] -- either because of his voluntarily kenosis, or because, as the Troparion of the Transfiguration says, "Thou wast transfigured on the Mountain, O Christ God/Revealing to thy Disciples as much of your glory as they could contain." God in his nature is ineffable, and his ways defy human comprehension and language. Therefore, God's revelation to man at any given time and place never exceeds the ability of man to appreciate and assimilate it.

Carter [1:53 PM]:

We're not talking about science, we're talking about a historical figure that we referred to by Christ himself.

Lyttle [2:24 PM]:

I have no idea what Jesus knew or did not know, but I do know that, as a first century Galilaean, he was probably ignorant of many things indeed. And, if I understand orthodox Christology correctly, there is no contradiction in believing that part of the condescension of God in the incarnation was to become a real limited man at a real finite point in time within a real culture and within a real circumscribed area of space.

Carter [2:49 PM]:

It appears that you do not understand orthodox Christology correctly. The theological kenosis has historically not been used to claim that when Christ made pronouncement he didn't know what he was talking about. The orthodox assumption is that when Christ made a claim that people would take him at his word. His hearers at the time of his earthly ministry believed that Noah as a historical figure and would not have adopted the modernist, liberal view you have that he was talking about a mythical being.

Carter [3:25 PM]:

[Y]our view that Jesus was an ignorant Jew that didn't know what he was talking about is not "traditional."

Koehl [5:01 PM]:

Jesus seems to reflect the understanding of his time, no more and no less. Even if he did retain perfectly the prescience of the Divine Logos, the Church does indeed teach that God reveals no more to man at any given moment than man is able to comprehend (I gave an example of that in the Troparion of the Transfiguration, earlier). Suppose Jesus knew that Noah did not really exist, or that Jonah did not convert the Assyrians, or that Daniel, the Three Youths and others mentioned in the Book of David did not do the things they were reputed to have done, and may not have lived in Babylon at all? Do you really expect that he would sit down and patiently explain all this to his followers, or would he just use these texts for what they are--apocalyptic, didactic and inspirational religious fiction inspired by God to instruct the Jews during their tribulations under the Persians, the Greeks and latterly the Romans?

And that’s it so far. I have never seen the question raised before. If Noah did not exist, and Christ speaks of him as if he did, does that mean that Christ is ignorant in terms of historicity? If so, is such a “reflection of the understanding of his time” to be understood as part of Christ’s human nature? Does this change anything with respect to Christ’s “use” of Scripture? Is Christ speaking, like a poem (according to Rainscape’s beautiful essay -- more on that in a later post), “to and in the being of a person.”

In the Fall 2010 edition Communio, Adrian J. Walker draws our attention to what Benedict XVI, in Jesus of Nazareth, calls the Gestalt of Jesus:

First, when Benedict refers to the Jesus of the New Testament as a Gestalt, he is claiming that the Central Personage who meets us in the pages of the gospels is as it were always “in character.” No matter from which angle you contemplate him, Jesus is always supremely himself. He is not just seemingly self-consistent in every situation; he is also many-sided, inexhaustible rich, and overflowingly full. [...]

This Gestalt is so startlingly novel that nothing about Jesus could be the product, say, of the primitive Christian community. . . . He is not the product of anything less than himself. Indeed, his glorious freedom makes sense only if he is not a “product” at all; not made but begotten of the very nature of God.

Walker also points out that, for Benedict, “the original Gestalt of Jesus . . . is the rule and measure of the meaning of the Bible.” As Benedict writes, “[t]his Christological hermeneutic, which sees Jesus Christ as the key to the whole and learns from him how to understand the Bible as a unity, presupposes a prior act of faith . . . . But this act of faith is based upon reason -- historical reason -- and so makes it possible to see the internal unity of Scripture.” Walker goes on:

To read the Scripture spiritually is to let the Spirit mold us (and our understanding of the text) according to the pattern that gives Scripture as a whole its shape. But let us not forget that this biblical pattern is the Gestalt of Christ as Son. . . .

[Such] spiritual reading is is the only intepretative “method” fully adequate to the inspired character of the Bible. One reason for this is that the sacred authors themselves wrote spiritual reading into the very fabric of the biblical texts themselves . . . [John] composes his narrative within the Church’s Spirit-led “remembrance” of Jesus’ life in light of his Resurrection. What the pope means by remembrance is essentially a synonym for “spiritual reading.” . . . The spiritual reading (“remembrance”) of Jesus’ life in light of his rising from death is constitutive of our human readership of it. Before it is something that happens to an already existing Scripture, spiritual reading is something that happens in Scripture itself as it is being written. . . . John’s gospel . . . embodies the evangelist’s Spirit-led remembrance of Jesus’ earthly life in light of the Resurrection. . . .

[B]efore this sort of spiritual reading found its way into the gospels, it first occurred in and as the Church’s liturgy . . . This [liturgical] participation is bound up with the person of Mary . . . . “Keeping all these words” (Lk 2:18) in her Immaculate Heart, Mary embodies and guarantees the remembrance or spiritual reading whereby the Church shares . . . in the Holy Spirit’s work of inspiring Scripture.