MetaCatholic

There have been quite a few posts recently which I wish I had time to interact with more fully, but here’s a brief commented round-up. (The photo is explained at the end.)

The reaction against the New Perspective on Paul seems to be gathering pace, The free download of John Piper’s blast against it is one symptom. In drawing attention to this PDF version (Thanks!) Jacob Paul Breeze, in a comment addendum makes the delightful observation: “If you observed the art on the two Dr.’s books you’ll see the presuppositions: Piper has Luther on the cover and Wright has Paul on the cover.” Chris Tilling offers an early quick glance at Piper’s work. I intend to get round to reading this book, but my own initial skim suggest that Piper, like many others, really hasn’t got the point. Also on NPP, Mike Bird gives space to a guest post by Don Garlington on another Piper related conversation. It seems to me that anyone who takes on any of the emphases of NPP, even if to hod a mediating position, is automatically lumped indiscriminately with Wright. And to these upholders of a Reformed tradition, Wright is the big bogeyman, because younger evangelicals are reading him and finding him persuasive. But from where I stand it’s beginning to look as though the Reformed traditionalists have developed a new doctrine: no longer are people justified by faith, rather they are justified by believing in justification by faith (Reformed version).

Although I find the evangelical argument over the role of women frequently alien to me, I couldn’t help but be struck by the potent point made by Molly Aley on the Complegalitarian blog. Apparently the root of Eve’s sin in the eyes of some “complementarians” is that she took the lead in responding to the serpent, rather than asking Adam what she should do. Her sin was failing to acknowledge her “husband’s headship.” (Yeah, I know, this is bizarre!) Molly makes the point sharply:

Mary did not ask the angel to wait until she had time to let Joseph pray about this and get his decision and then let God know what her male authority decided. Mary simply said yes. And her yes effectively ruined their honeymoon, their reputations, and made them have to take an emergency detour to Egypt, no less.

Towards the end of an earlier post I noted the ways in which it was appropriate to think of Scripture as a sacrament. Ben Witherington, from a traditionally Protestant point of view, now offers a similar argument.

Sticking with the Bible, recently Iyov asked why Christians were satisfied with English only Bibles. As I noted in a comment there, this is not simply a modern or English phenomenon. The earliest Church seemed largely satisfied with a Greek only Bible. The mainstream Western Church had Latin only Scriptures. The general satisfaction with a mother-tongue only Bible seems to me, despite the best efforts of the inerrantists, to point to a message rather than language dominated view of truth, translation and transmission. That’s not to decry the scholarly use of the original language texts as quite fundamental to serious exegesis. It is to say that Christians don’t have a holy language, through which and only through which the fullness of revelation might be known.

Finally, thinking about translation, John Hobbins again moonlights as the papal translator, giving us the thoughts of Benedict XVI on St Jerome.

Our dialogue with Scripture must always have two dimensions. On the one hand, it should be a truly personal dialogue, because God speaks to each one of us through Holy Scripture and has a message for each.
We must read Holy Scripture not as a word of the past, but as the Word of God addressed also to us. We are to seek to understand what the Lord is saying to us.
So as not to fall into individualism, we must remember that the Word of God is given to us to create communion, to unite us in the truth in our walk with God.
It is, besides being a personal Word, a Word which creates community, and builds the Church. We must read it in communion with the living Church. The privileged place of reading and hearing the Word of God is the liturgy. In the liturgy, the Word is celebrated and the Sacrament of the Body of Christ is made present; the Word is made real in our life and becomes present among us.

Jerome’s cell is still there in Bethlehem, part of the larger conventual complex attached to the Church of the Nativity – the photo above shows (the Orthodox) part of multi-denominational Christian complex. It is a reminder that for Jerome the work of translation was rooted in community and the life of prayer.