In the history of the church, one of the most famous conflicts was between St. Bernard (d.1153), the charismatic abbot of Clairvaux, and Peter Abelard (d.1143), the brilliant medieval logician and theologian.
St. Bernard thought that Abelard’s new approach to theology, an approach that emphasized dialectic (which means pushing objections in order to flush out more precise theological formulation), threw scriptural language into the background. St. Bernard did not want a church fed by treatises; he envisions the faithful feed by sermons profoundly saturated by scriptural language.
I’ve tried to follow St. Bernard by encouraging theologians to return to biblical commentary—for example, the Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible series.
But as I’ve thought more about St. Bernard and Abelard, I can see that perhaps I haven’t really understood the deeper issue, which is the relation of spiritual discipline to intellectual discipline. Reading St. Bernard, one can see that his deepest commitment is to the priority of spiritual discipline. Our love, for St. Bernard (following St. Augustine) is our weight, our center of gravity. And our love is not formed, shaped, and guided by syllogisms—at least not reliably, not consistently.
There is, I think, a larger truth here. The wise are not always clever, nor are the clever always wise. Wisdom has to do with a feel for life—its fragility, its possibilities, its integrity. This is especially true for theological wisdom, which concerns God, a fullness of truth at once far more alien than what is known by natural wisdom, and at the same time far more searching, more personal, and more penetrating. To receive divine truth the soul must be carefully cultivated with instruments of prayer and spiritual discipline that are more powerful than the intellectual tools of analysis and argument.
So I find myself somewhat chastened. Yes, I’m the general editor of a series of theological commentaries, even writing my own (Genesis). Yet I’ve come to see that it is possible to make scripture one’s focus, but do so under the guidance of Abelard’s spirit of intellectual rigor: parsing, arranging, analyzing. But St. Bernard has taught me that one must be romanced by scripture, one must fall in love with the divine Word, and that this theological love must be disciplined by prayer, liturgy, and church authority in order to become reliable rather than fickle. Only then will our intellectual prowess be put to good use.
October 15th, 2010 | 7:38 pm
We can no more develop spiritually through intellectual processes than we can develop physically through intellectual processes.
To grow physically we exercise our bodies, to grow intellectually we exercise our intellect, to grow spiritually we must exercise our spirits. Exercising your spirit is as hard as doing push ups or calculus and that’s why most people don’t develop much spiritually.
October 16th, 2010 | 2:52 pm
This post makes me so happy. I believe Dr. Reno that you are spot on. Ben F. Meyer spoke of much current biblical interpretation as a “flight from the intended sense of the text”. The reason for such flight, he argued, was due to the interpreter’s unease with the text, the word he uses consistently is “alienation” from the text, which allows an interpreter to side-step issues instead of handling them head-on. His most controversial stance on interpretation, though, was his position that what might be required for the interpreter is conversion. By conversion Meyer argued for the need for an interpreter to be “in tune” with the world of the text, the “Word of God”. It does not help an interpreter to come to a theological text without any sense of the theological concerns at stake in the text or without any sense of goodwill to the things of the text. This stance marks, in my words, a “great divide” in N.T. studies and gets to the heart of interpretive fault lines and the inability for scholars to speak to one another in many cases. If conversion to the thing(s) of the text is needed, then the great divide in biblical studies is a philosophical and theological issue, not precisely one of method and tools. What it does imply is that someone who is “in tune” with the N.T. takes seriously the theology of the N.T. and takes seriously all of the N.T. data and takes seriously one’s own spiritual life.
This fault line Meyer felt, the alientation from the Bible and the Church, went back to the beginnings of biblical scholarship. He traced the alienation to Richard Simon and Benedict Spinoza. “In the wake of Richard Simon (1638-1712) and Benedict Spinoza (1632-1677), modern biblical studies took shape as twin streams, one of continuity, the other of discontinuity, with biblical religion. Simon and Spinoza respectively might be named their patrons. On technical matters (lexicography, textual criticism, environmental research, and so on) the two streams have run parallel, but in spirit and purpose they have diverged, orthodox and pietists being pitted against neologists and rationalists in the 18th century, conservatives against liberals in the 19th century, conservative Protestants and mainstream Catholics against demythologizers and ideologically secular historians of biblical religion in the 2oth century.
Both streams or wings have made tangible contributions to technical progress. The differences between them have always been hermeneutical. The strong point of the tradition of discontinuity (dogma-free scholarship) has been its resolutely critical stance. Its weakness has lain in the sometimes latent, sometimes patent, alienation pervading its critical distance from the biblical text. Conversely, the strong point of continuity (religious and theological conservatism) has been its connaturality with the text; its weakness, a propensity to harmonize divergences and to underestimate the discontinuities between past and present. The ideal is somehow to comprehend these extremes and occupy the space between them, to temper the warmth of connaturality with the coolness of critical distance” (Critical Realism New Testament, 196-197).
At the heart of that ideal, though, is the love of the Bible and of the Church.
October 17th, 2010 | 4:49 am
Want to thank Prof. Reno for his Brazos Genesis commentary. I learned a huge amount, its a book of the Bible you really have to get right so I’m very grateful.
As an aside looking at it on my shelf it has to be said it’s a beautiful looking book. Whomever is responsible for the design should be congratulated.
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