Everett Ferguson: A Perspective on Early Councils and Creeds

I would like to offer another perspective on the early councils and creeds. It is similar to a viewpoint expressed to me by a theologian from India, Paulos Gregorios, who is a member of the Syrian Orthodox Church, one of the so-called Monophysite churches that rejects the authority of Chalcedon (I say “so-called,” because “Monophysite” is a label the members of these churches emphatically reject). He said that he was respectful of the early councils but did not feel bound by their wording. I would adopt a similar attitude. Given the philosophical context and the language in which the issues were formulated, I judge Nicaea and (unlike this Indian theologian) Chalcedon to be correct. I agree with the outcome in terms of the time and way the issues were phrased. But I do not feel bound by their wording, nor do I think we should bind their terminology on other times and other conceptual worlds. In other words, they may be accepted as confessions of faith but not imposed as tests of fellowship.

Ferguson, Everett (2013-06-10). The Early Church & Today, Vol 1: A Collection of Writings by Everett Ferguson (Kindle Locations 1932-1938). Abilene Christian University Press. Kindle Edition, pg. 120 in the printed edition.

These Nonsensical Objections from Bryan Cross are Not to be Trusted

In addition to Bryan’s “begging the question” objection, he placed several other predictable objections to Gregg Allison’s work,“Roman Catholic Theology and Practice: An Evangelical Assessment”.

Bryan’s objections begin here.

At one point, discussing an interview in conjunction with the release of the book, Bryan is kind enough to note, “In the next part of the interview, as Allison lays out the Catholic system, he does so quite fairly and accurately.” A few lines down, however, we see this:

So Allison starts his interview affirming the importance of approaching the question systematically and evaluating the Catholic paradigm on its own terms, but already here he is (a) making use of a consumerism approach as a way of critiquing the Catholic paradigm, which rejects the consumerism paradigm, and (b) making use of his biblicist assumption (“not biblical”) to critique the Catholic paradigm. So instead of evaluating the Catholic paradigm on its own terms, he is evaluating it on Evangelical terms, and thus begging the question.

In the book, which Bryan appears not to have read so far, there is clearly an effort to present both sides in an objective way; that is, the Catholic viewpoint “fairly and honestly”, and also, the “Evangelical” assessment, “fairly and honestly”. That is a hallmark of the book.

But in his critique, Bryan makes some assumptions of his own here. I’ve extended these from two to three (breaking the “consumerism” objection into two parts):

A. Allison makes use of a “consumerism approach”
B. The “Catholic paradigm” rejects the “consumerism paradigm”
C. Allison works with “Biblicist” assumptions (not “biblical” assumptions)

Let’s look at Bryan’s objections here one at a time:

Paradigms, Tradition, and the Lexicon, Part 3

Which “tradition”?

Everett Ferguson, in his “Backgrounds of Early Christianity”, (Grand Rapids, MI and Cambridge, UK: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co, © 1987, 1993, 2003), defined the Halakah this way:

The authoritative compilation of the oral law in the Mishnah was the achievement of Rabbi Judah the Patriarch (or Prince) at the end of the second century. He was the great-great grandson of Gamaliel the Elder (Paul’s teacher from Acts 22:3 and Acts 5:34) and is often cited simply as “Rabbi”…

Rabbi Judah’s compilation of the oral law in written form and with a few minor additions is the Mishnah, a topical collection of legal rulings. The word comes from a verb meaning “to repeat,” and so means “study.” The Tannaim (lit. “repeaters”) were the rabbinic scholars of the first and second centuries whose interpretations are collected in the Mishnah. More specifically, the Mishnah is a codification of the Halakah (pl. Halakoth). The verb halak means “to walk,” and halakah referred to an authoritative legal decision on how one was to conduct himself according to the law. (Note the frequency of “to walk” in the practical, ethical sections of the New Testament Epistles – e.g., Gal. 5:16; Eph 4:1, 17; 5:2; 8’, 15; Col 4:5; 1 Thess 4:1) (pg 492).

This was a first century “oral law”, not written down and codified until about the year 200. However, various snippets of it were commented on in a variety of ancient sources, from which the following derives.

Halakah and Ethics in the Jesus Tradition

Previous generations of scholars frequently approached the ethics of Jesus from a naively Christian perspective, by categorically asserting the superiority of his love command and the Sermon on the Mount to the supposed ‘legalism’ and hide-bound casuistry of his Jewish contemporaries. More recently, however, the blossoming study of ancient Judaism has enabled us, perhaps for the first time since the first century, to explore Jesus’ moral teaching meaningfully in its original setting.

All the main features of Jesus’ ethics are deeply conversant with Jewish moral presuppositions. God is one and he is supreme. Ethics is therefore inalienably theonomous rather than autonomous: both the substance and authority of right behaviour have their source in the God of Israel. ‘Why do you call me good?’ Jesus asks. ‘No one is good but God alone’ (Mark 10:18 par.). The commandment to love God in the Shema‘ Israel, along with the love of one’s neighbor, is for Jesus the heart of the Torah – as it was for some of his contemporaries (see Deut 6:4–5; Mark 12:29; [other non-New Testament references omitted], from Markus Bockmuehl, “Jewish Law in Gentile Churches”: Halakhah and the Beginning of Christian Public Ethics, Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, ©2003, pg 4).

Note here, whereas Bockmuehl does not hesitate to provide a source for Jesus’s ethical teaching (“deeply conversant with Jewish moral presuppositions”), Bryan Cross introduces his concept of “agape paradigm” to support the Roman Catholic view of “infusion of agape as “the law written on the heart”.

Jesus’s ethical teaching features no such “infusion” of anything at all, much less agape. In pointing to “law written on the heart” (Jer 31:33). Paul notes the nature of this in 2 Cor 3. Scripturally, this new ethical teaching is “written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God”, “the ministry of the Spirit”, “the ministry of righteousness”.

He contrasts this with a so-called “list paradigm”, but this is what an ethical law is.

What is the content of this law? As I suggested in my last blog post in this series, the content of the New Testament is overwhelmingly taken from the Old Testament:

By standards that Beale relates, there may be more than 4,000 “allusions” or “echoes” of the Old Testament found within the New. Given that there are 7956 verses in the New Testament, more than half the New Testament can be seen as bearing at least some form of “echo of” or “allusion to” some Old Testament concept or idea.

Thus, when a New Testament writer talks of “tradition” “handed down (παρέδοσαν) to him by “those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word”, which in Luke 1:2 is a clear reference to the apostles, the “content” of that “tradition” was oozing with Old Testament words and concepts.

Bockmuehl concurs with this:

To this day, textbooks continue to make much of the fact that explicit use of the Torah plays only a minor role for the Gospel writers. This in itself might seem to cast doubt on Jesus’ indebtedness to Jewish moral teaching. Three points, however, must be raised in defense of our proposition.

First, many other Jewish ethical texts also make only limited explicit use of the Torah (see Niebuhr 1987; also cf. the Mishnah), and one must not extrapolate from the specialized exegetical discourse of certain sages and Dead Sea Scrolls to the whole of pre-70 Judaism, as is still so often recklessly done.

Secondly we are dealing with Gospels written in Greek for a Gentile or mixed audience outside Palestine; and that in itself will have a great deal to say about the shape in which the gospel material has been transmitted.

But thirdly and most importantly, to understand the Jewishness of Jesus’ morality it is in any case far less appropriate to theologize abstractly about what he said (or indeed did not say) about the Torah in general than to examine the verbal and practical clues as to how and why he acted as he did. In other words, it is impossible to judge the supposed ‘uniqueness’ or otherwise of Jesus’ moral teaching without an adequate assessment of his practical ethics and his halakhah. It is to this subject, therefore, that we must now turn.

I’ll look at this in another blog post, Lord willing.