Kyle Rader's Dissertation

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO LEARNING TO LOVE: A CONSTRUCTIVE THEOLOGY OF ASCETIC READING FROM I JOHN TO ERNST TROELTSCH A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE DIVINITY SCHOOL IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY BY KYLE RADER CHICAGO, ILLINOIS MARCH 2016 © KYLE RADER 2016 VERENA, PETER, und RASMUS GEWIDMET “No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us.” -1 John 4:12 “None of these things is hid from you, if ye perfectly possess that faith and love towards Christ Jesus which are the beginning and the end of life. For the beginning is faith, and the end is love.” -Epistle of Ignatius to the Ephesians CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS vi INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 1: LOVE IN THE JOHANNINE COMMUNITY 13 CHAPTER 2: READING THE BODY OF CHRIST IN AUGUSTINE 57 CHAPTER 3: SAPIENTIA AEDIFICAVIT SIBI DOMUM: AFFECTIVE AND INTELLECTUAL FORMATION IN THE HOUSE OF ST. VICTOR 132 CHAPTER 4: HISTORY, CATHOLICITY, AND LOVE: A CONVERSATION WITH ERNST TROELTSCH 184 CHAPTER 5: MEANS OF GRACE AND HOPE OF GLORY: A NEW FORMULATION OF THE MEDIEVAL FOURFOLD 234 BIBLIOGRAPHY 290 !v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Reader, I pray that you may understand, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and know the love of Christ which passes knowledge, so that you may be filled with the fulness of God. If this dissertation contributes to that understanding in any small way, then thanks be to God. This dissertation would not have been possible without the best advisor I could have asked for, Willemien Otten. I am thankful not only for her scholarly expertise and advice, but for helping me struggle with my voice and my vocation. She is the finest of historians and theologians, but she could have been a pastor. I am also grateful to my two readers, Susan Schreiner and Hans-Josef Klauck. Thanks are also due to my original advisor, Kathryn Tanner, for seeing the potential in a much earlier attempt to work with some of these same ideas and figures and taking me on as her student. Likewise to Cynthia Lindner, the Director of Ministry Studies at the Divinity School, for luring me to Chicago over ten years ago and never letting me separate theology from the practice of ministry. The Martin Marty Center provided invaluable financial support the year I held the Junior Dissertation Fellowship. I am grateful to my cohort in the Marty Seminar and to the seminar director, William Schweiker, and Lucy Pick, scholar and novelist, who helped me discern why I was writing at a very key moment. !vi The cloud of witnesses in and around the Divinity School who have given suggestions, encouragement, or inspiration over the years are too numerous to name, but I will single out Tim Hiller, Bryce Rich, Mary Emily Duba, Matthew Robinson, Ian Gerdon, Sally Stamper, Maurice Charles, Gianluigi Gugliermetto, Larisa Reznik, Daniel Schultz, and Linn Tonstad. Special acknowledgment goes to Stacy Alan and the community of Brent House, the Episcopal campus ministry at the University of Chicago. They are the reason I mean anything by the word “church” in this dissertation. I think they influenced chapter two more than Augustine and chapter four more than Troeltsch. Thanks to Colleen Mullarky and the Dissertation Office for their flexibility and formatting help. I thank my parents and inlaws, Jack and Julie Rader, and Karl and Erna Meyer, for their encouragement and financial support. Finally, words cannot suffice to express my gratitude to my wife, Verena Meyer, who has borne more of the burden of this project than anyone else. She has been gracious with delays, patient with financial constraints, and ready to hand with intellectual synergy. She helped me understand the difference between an existential problem and a practical problem, and she shared Franconia and Java with me. This dissertation is dedicated to her and to our newborn sons, Peter and Rasmus. !vii Introduction What follows is an exercise in integrating a theologian and pastor’s training in historical-critical biblical studies with some of the doctrinal and devotional traditions of the Christian churches. Even in the decline of its near monopoly on training in biblical studies in universities and mainline seminaries in the United States, the methods of reading scripture as historical documents remain prominent in many seminaries, universities, and churches.1 Such reading seeks to interpret the biblical texts in the environments in which they were composed and edited and use them as evidence for piecing together their prehistories and the histories of the communities that generated them. Though the aims, assumptions, and methods of historical-critical study have evolved and continue to evolve, it has generally been characterized by a methodological agnosticism. The reality of God, the Resurrection, the coming of the Holy Spirit, and the like are bracketed. Doctrines based on the scriptures are, at best, data for the history of interpretation. Even in seminaries, the sort of reading into which students are socialized in their Bible classes is this secular reading. In universities, “theological” and “confessional” are generally used as insults when describing the perspective of a historian. Seminaries and university divinity schools may not be at all hostile to reading and interpreting the Bible for other ends. An M.Div. student in particular must be able 1 For an interesting empirical account of the state of historical-critical biblical studies in seminaries and university- based ministry training programs, see Dale B. Martin, Pedagogy of the Bible: An Analysis and Proposal. Louisville (Westminster/John Knox Press, 2008). !1 to say what the text means as well as what it meant! But such interpretation is generally left to other courses. For its part, theology has had a tenuous relationship with historical-critical methodologies. In an earlier era, Christian apologists adopted many of their principles in order to dispute their results. Others ignored these methodologies altogether. In more recent decades, many theologians have admitted their usefulness and appropriateness within their proper domain, but have considered them an inadequate foundation for theology and the spiritual life of the church. Other theologians who are interested in doctrines that were originally argued on exegetical but not historical-critical grounds tend not to address the status of those earlier methods. In one of the most important systematic theologies of the last decade, Kathryn Tanner acknowledges that her use of patristic authors who support their positions exegetically is somewhat in tension with the intentions of those same authors, because she is “principally interested in the theological claims that result from such interpretation, and believe[s] the theological merits of those claims to be separable from biblical commentary that at least in its particulars is often dubious from a modern historical-critical perspective.”2 Her bracketing of the question of the status of pre-critical reading vis-a-vis historical-critical reading is completely appropriate for her project. It is, however, the very question I take up in this project. 2 Kathryn Tanner. Christ the Key. Cambridge (Cambridge University Press, 2010). p. x. !2 Given that, for myself and my likely readers, historical-critical reading and the epistemologies underlying it remain our default mode of operation at least in our day to day lives and have proved fruitful in interpreting their data, is it possible for historical- critical exegesis and revived patristic and medieval modes of exegesis to enhance one another? Thomas Hoyt Jr., an African American biblical scholar, argues that “while many have vigorously criticized the historical-critical method as inadequate for one reason or another, one cannot ignore it.”3 Despite its tendency to restrict itself to the supposed original meaning of the biblical texts, Hoyt points out that “in order to allow the Scriptures to serve as the Word of God that sanctions the church as well as judges it, the historical-critical method was devised.”4 It is the historical-critical method that has demonstrated that “Scriptures had their genesis in various ancient faith communities,”5 and thus contain (and obscure) multiple voices. When Hoyt commends the experience and wisdom of the African American community and its struggle against racism as an equally valid context for biblical interpretation, it is not a repudiation of historical- critical interpretation, but an enhancement of it and acknowledgment of its limitations. Such is the present project as well. 3 Thomas Hoyt, Jr. “Interpreting Biblical Scholarship for the Black Church,” in Stony the Road We Trod: African American Biblical Interpretation. ed. Cain Hope Felder. Minneapolis (Fortress Press, 1991). pp. 17-39. This quotation is on p. 23. 4 Ibid, pp. 22-23 5 Ibid. p. 23 !3 In asking about the validity and authority of later developments as interpretative keys to the biblical texts, we are asking about the status of what most churches call “tradition,” the accretion of new ideas and elements over time which become part of the imaginative framework in which texts are interpreted. Some churches consider certain persons to be the authorized stewards of tradition, while others see it as less formal. But beginning with the insight of historical-critical methodology which Hoyt has named, that the biblical texts were generated by communities, it is fair to say that the interpretative accretion of tradition is not merely found in the reception history of the texts as we have them. The texts are already the products of traditions which, like all traditions, are contested and developed. As I will show in the first chapter with reference to the Johannine literature, some of the biblical texts show internal evidence of the development of tradition.

Load more