How Not To Quote a Book, By Two Roman Catholic Bloggers

Here's an example of how not to quote a book, by Catholic Nick, compliments of Devin Rose. The following comes from Nick's A Study on Imputation of Righteousness posted on  Devin's St. Joseph's Vanguard (bolding in the original blog entry):

Despite the straightforwardness in which these sources explain the doctrine of Imputation, some Protestant sources are honest enough to admit that the teaching is not clearly laid out in Scripture. One scholar, George Ladd, taught the following in his hugely popular seminary textbook:

Paul never expressly states that the righteousness of Christ is imputed to believers. His words are, “And to the one who does not work but trusts him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is reckoned as righteousness” (Rom 4:3,5).

These words could be taken to mean that God regarded faith as the most meritorious human achievement, and therefore God accounts faith as the equivalent to full righteousness. This, however, would ignore the context of Pauline thought.
(A Theology of the New Testament, “Imputation”)

This text in context reads:

Note the last sentence: "It is an unavoidable logical conclusion that people of faith are justified because Christ's righteousness is imputed to them." So, exactly what "is not clearly laid out in Scripture"?

Thanks guys. Great stuff.

Ratzinger’s self-admitted reliance on the “Liberal” “historical-critical” method of Biblical interpretation, Part 1

Turretinfan notes “at least one Roman apologist was giving my friend, John Bugay, some grief because Mr. Bugay was citing the work of Peter Lampe. It was alleged that Peter Lampe is a ‘liberal’ because he denies the inerrancy of Scripture on historical points. Whether or not that is true, I wonder if that Roman apologist would be willing to aim his ‘liberal’ label-maker at Joseph Ratzinger, who appears to deny the historical accuracy of the gospels, and in particular that of Matthew in this selection from his forth-coming book…”

First, I'd like to thank Turretinfan for picking up on this.

Second, Pope Ratzinger/Benedict actually gives a thorough explication of his treatment of Scripture in his 2007 work Jesus of Nazareth, which was actually published after he was elected pope. I’ll let him state his view of “inerrancy,” so to speak, and see if the Roman Catholic who then rejects Peter Lampe also rejects Ratzinger/Benedict’s view of the Scriptures:

“… in the 1950s … the gap between the “historical Jesus” and “the Christ of faith” grew wider and the two visibly fell apart.

This is clearly an allusion to Rudolph Bultmann and his influence. Bultmann, who is probably one of the ultimate “liberal” “historical-critical” exegetes, is known for having made this distinction. At some level, it has become incumbent on virtually every New Testament scholar to interact with Bultmann’s ideas and methods.

But what can faith in Jesus as the Christ possibly mean, in Jesus as the Son of the living God, if the man Jesus was so completely different from the picture that the Evangelists painted of him and that the Church, on the evidence of the Gospels, takes as the basis of her preaching?

As historical-critical scholarship advanced, it led to finer and finer distinctions between layers of tradition in the Gospels, beneath the real object of faith—the figure [Gestalt] of Jesus—became increasingly obscured and blurred. At the same time, though, the reconstructions of this Jesus (who could only be discovered by going behind the traditions and sources used by the Evangelists) became more and more incompatible with one another: at one end of the spectrum, Jesus was the anti-Roman revolutionary working—though finally failing—to overthrow the ruling powers; at the other end, he was the meek moral teacher who approves everything and unaccountably comes to grief. If you read a number of these reconstructions one after the other, you see at once that far from uncovering an icon that has become obscured over time, they are much more like photographs of their authors and the ideals they hold. All these attempts have produced a common result: the impression that we have very little certain knowledge of Jesus and that only at a later stage did faith in his divinity shape the image we have of him.

So, modern “liberal” scholarship had looked for ways to suggest that the notion of Christ’s “divinity” “somehow developed” within that first generation of the church. But in contrast to this, many times now, I’ve cited Craig Blomberg to the effect that, both conservatives and atheists now agree that “the Resurrection probably was reported in the same year that it happened” So what the Blomberg example shows is that this belief in the divinity of Christ did not “develop,” but that it was the very thing the Apostles preached from the beginning.

Not only is this type of agreement a one-time occurrence, but now, because of the way that conservative scholars now interact with “liberal” biblical exegesis, this type of agreement an inevitable result. Many more examples could be cited, but this is the very thing that Ratzinger/Benedict seems to be eager to assert: Christ’s divinity was known and assumed at the time of the resurrection. See also my series of posts on The Heresy of Orthodoxy”.

So far, Ratzinger and I are on the same page. Ratzinger now comes to the description of his own book.

Rudolf Schnackenburg was probably the most prominent Catholic exegete writing in German during the second half of the twentieth century. It is clear that toward the end of his life, this crisis surrounding the faith made a profound impression on him. In view of the inadequacy of all the portrayals of the “historical” Jesus offered by recent exegesis, he strove to produce one last great work: Jesus in the Gospels: A Biblical Christology. The book is intended to help believing Christians “who today have been made insecure by scientific research and critical discussion, so that they may hold fast to faith in the person of Jesus Christ as the bringer of salvation and Savior of the world” (p. x). At the end of the book, Schnackenburg sums up the result of a lifetime of scholarship: “a reliable view of the historical figure of Jesus of Nazareth through scientific effort with historical-critical methods can only inadequately be achieved (p. 316); “the efforts of scientific exegesis to examine these traditions and trace them back to what is historically credible” draw us “into a continual discussion of tradition and redaction history that never comes to rest” (p. 318).

His own account of the figure of Jesus suffers from a certain unresolved tension because of the constraints of the method he feels bound to use, despite its inadequacies. Schnackenburg shows us the Gospels’ image of Christ, but he considers it to be the product of manifold layers of tradition, through which the “real” Jesus can only be glimpsed from afar. He writes: “The historical ground is presupposed but is superseded in the faith-view of the evangelists” (p. 321). Now, no one doubts that; what remains unclear is how far the “historical ground” actually extends. That said, Schnackenburg does clearly throw into relief the decisive point, which he regards as a genuinely historical insight: Jesus’ relatedness to God and his closeness to God (p. 322). “Without anchoring in God, the person of Jesus remains shadowy, unreal, and unexplainable” (p. 322).

This is also the point around which I will construct my own book….

Keep in mind that the writer that Ratzinger is not only citing, but “constructing his own book around,” a person who is “THE leading Catholic exegete” writing in German. Schnackenburg’s doubts are not the doubts of some off-in-the-woods kind of scholar. He was THE LEADING CATHOLIC EXEGETE” of his time. So thus we see, in his own words, Ratzinger who as he writes, is a pope, describe his own work on “Jesus of Nazareth” as being constructed on a point at which he must consciously “anchor in God” the person of Jesus, lest he become “shadowy, unreal, and unexplainable.”

To digress here, where is the former Roman Catholic certainty, the certainty of, say, a Pius XII, who wrote not of a “shadowy, unreal, and unexplainable” Mary, but of a Mary whose [mythical] “Assumption” was the firmest of all anchor-points of the Roman Catholic faith – the mere “calling into doubt” of which would not only indicate that a person has “fallen away completely from the divine and Catholic Faith,” but which would also “incur the wrath of Almighty God and of the Blessed Apostles Peter and Paul”.

But I digress. Oh, and by the way, keep in mind the liberal axiom of “the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man” as you continue to read Ratzinger/Benedict’s words here.

[My book] sees Jesus in light of his communion with the Father, which is the true center of his personality; without it, we cannot understand him at all, and it is from this center that he makes himself present to us still today.

To be sure, in the particular contours of my own presentation of Jesus I make a determined effort to go beyond Schnackenburg. The problem with Schnackenburg’s account of the relationship between New Testament traditions and historical events stands out very clearly for me when he writes that the Gospels “want, as it were, to clothe with flesh the mysterious son of God who appeared on earth” (p. 322). I would like to say in response that they did not need to “clothe him with flesh,” because he had already truly taken flesh. Of course, the question remains: can this flesh be accessed through the dense jungle of traditions?

Schnackenburg tells us in the foreword to his book that he feels indebted to the historical-critical method, which had been in use in Catholic theology ever since the door was opened for it by the encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu in 1943 (p. ix). This encyclical was an important milestone for Catholic exegesis. Since then, though, the debate about method has moved on, both inside and outside the Catholic Church. There have been significant new methodological discoveries—both in terms of strictly historical work and in terms of the interplay between theology and historical method in scriptural interpretation. Dei Verbum, the Second Vatican Council’s Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, made a decisive step forward. In addition, two documents of the Pontifical Biblical Commission communicate important insights that have matured in the course of debates among exegetes: The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church (Vatican City, 1993) and The Jewish People and Their Sacred Scriptures in the Christian Bible (Vatican City, 2001).

I’ll pause here because there’s much more to come from Ratzinger. But I’d like to point out a couple of things.

Those Roman Catholics who want to accuse me of “inconsistency” and even “denying the inerrancy of Scripture” have got their heads in the sand when it comes, not only to the world of “biblical exegesis,” but especially what Roman Catholics are doing in this area. Those who want to deny that Raymond Brown, for example, had any legitimacy [in their minds, at least] have no idea of the role that he played, and the central role that his method played in shaping what their own Pope Ratzinger is saying right here.

Brown’s conclusions: that the “sacerdotal” priesthood was a development of the second century; that the monoepiscopacy was an uneven development throughout the second century (around 110 in the east, 150 in Rome); that the papacy itself was a fourth-century development—these conclusions are the only possible conclusions that come near to Roman Catholic teaching. (And I would largely agree with much of this).

Those who try to teach, as the Called to Communion folks, that Christ made Peter the first “pope,” that there was, from the beginning, a “succession” of “bishops,” and that there was a sacerdotal priesthood in place from the beginning, are merely living in a world of make believe.

Peter Lampe, George Eldon Ladd, History, and New Testament Interpretation

J. Gresham Machen said, “The student of the New Testament should be primarily an historian. The center and core of all the Bible is history. Everything else that the Bible contains is fitted into an historical framework and leads up to an historical climax. The Bible is primarily a record of events.”*

Down below, there’s some sniping about what constitutes liberal biblical interpretation, and what constitutes conservative biblical interpretation.

Maybe in the 1960’s, there was a clear delineation, but, and I’ve written about this in the past (see here and here for example), but not only is there a confluence of method—the historical analysis is largely the same; the difference is now whether one accepts the supernatural in-breaking by God into history or not—but the evangelical conservatives are winning.

In 1974, a New Testament Theologian named George Eldon Ladd wrote a work, “A Theology of the New Testament”, which has become not only a standard textbook for conservative New Testament studies, but it showed the way for a whole generation of evangelical New Testament scholars, who are producing marvelous work these days. (Just look at all of the exceptional commentaries that are available today; I don’t know their genesis, but I wouldn’t be surprised if much of this work was done in the shadow of Ladd’s ground-breaking study.)

Of course, during the first half of the 20th century, there was a mushrooming of “higher critical” study, the hallmark of which involved a denial of the supernatural elements in the Scriptures – names like F.C. Baur (who introduced Hegelian dialectical method into the study of the NT), Albert Schweitzer (“Quest of the Historical Jesus”, 1906) and Rudolf Bultmann, who separated “the historical Jesus” and “the Christ of faith” almost into two different subjects. Methods such as “form criticism” and “redactional criticism” came to the fore.

Conservative “Fundamentalist” scholars rightly recoiled from this anti-supernaturalist type of thinking, and they moved in the direction of Geerhardus Vos’s “Biblical Theology.” But in the process, they also noticed something else. There were some valuable elements in the methods that the “higher-critical” scholars—the Liberals—were using.

Oscar Cullmann used the term Heilsgeschicte (“history of salvation”) and the Dutch theologian Herman Ridderbos became known for a similar approach, “Redemptive History”.

In 1993, Ladd’s work was updated and re-issued with some new material, including a long introductory essay by Donald Hagner (who wrote the two-volume commentary on Matthew for the Word Biblical Commentary series). Hagner describes Ladd’s approach in the context of an Old Testament theologian who had basically adopted the same approach:

Gerhard Hasel’s 1972 work OT Theology: Basic Issues in the Current Debate, insisted that “there is ‘a transcendent or divine dimension in Biblical history which the historical-critical method is unable to deal with.’ Biblical theology must be done from a starting point that is biblical-historical in orientation. Only this approach can deal adequately with the reality of God and his inbreaking into history.

I’ll pick up from that essay here:

Large-scale New Testament theologies continue to come from German scholars. That of L. Goppelt appeared posthumously in 1974 and became available in a two-volume English translation in 1981 and 1982. Ladd’s and Goppelt’s theologies, though completely independent of each other, share basically the same perspective, namely that of salvation history, and the similarity of approach shows that Ladd’s theology still has reason to be considered viable….

Thus it does not seem that Ladd’s theology, although approaching twenty years old, should at all be thought of as outmoded or passé. Indeed, in its basic orientation, Ladd continues to remain appealing. The reason for this is very simply Ladd’s commitment to the historical study of the New Testament, but with an openness to its theological truth. He sees his task as fundamentally a descriptive one, focusing on what the text “meant.” But since he accepts the Bible as the record of the acts of God for the redemption of the world, he therefore accepts the normative character of the New Testament witness and its ongoing relevance for humanity today, i.e., the importance of what it “means.” Ladd thus refuses to regard New Testament theology as merely the history of early Christian experience. Ladd employs the historical-critical method, but in a modified form that allows him to remain open to the possibility of the transcendent and thus enables him to do justice to the content of the materials being studied (18-19).

I have bookshelves full of works of individuals who have adopted this method, including names like D.A. Carson, Douglas Moo, Thomas Schreiner, Darrell Bock, Andreas Kostenberger, Peter T. O’Brien, but there are many, many more such names, writers who are coming out of the conservative Protestant seminaries who are showing the world once more what Tertullian claimed back in the third century:

In the Lord’s apostles we possess our authority; for even they did not of themselves choose to introduce anything, but faithfully delivered to the nations (of mankind) the doctrine which they had received from Christ. If, therefore, even “an angel from heaven should preach any other gospel” (than theirs), he would be called accursed by us.

It is the heretics who “when, for the sake of deceiving us, they pretend that they are still seeking, in order that they may palm their essays upon us … when men, therefore, are not Christians even on their own admission, how much more (do they fail to appear such) to us! What sort of truth is that which they patronize, when they commend it to us with a lie? Well, but they actually treat of the Scriptures and recommend (their opinions) out of the Scriptures! To be sure they do. From what other source could they derive arguments concerning the things of the faith, except from the records of the faith?”

We therefore come to (the gist of) our position; for at this point we were aiming, and for this we were preparing in the preamble of our address (which we have just completed),--so that we may now join issue on the contention to which our adversaries challenge us. They put forward the Scriptures, and by this insolence of theirs they at once influence some. In the encounter itself, however, they weary the strong, they catch the weak, and dismiss the waverers with a doubt. Accordingly, we oppose to them this step above , all others, of not admitting them to any discussion of the Scriptures.

If in these lie their resources, before they can use them, it ought to be clearly seen to whom belongs the possession of the Scriptures, that none may be admitted to the use thereof who has no title at all to the privilege ….

Now this heresy of yours does not receive certain Scriptures; and whichever of them it does receive, it perverts by means of additions and diminutions, for the accomplishment of its own purpose; and such as it does receive, it receives not in their entirety; but even when it does receive any up to a certain point as entire, it nevertheless perverts even these by the contrivance of diverse interpretations. Truth is just as much opposed by an adulteration of its meaning as it is by a corruption of its text. Their vain presumptions must needs refuse to acknowledge the (writings) whereby they are refuted. They rely on those which they have falsely put together, and which they have selected, because [of] their ambiguity (Tertullian, The Prescription Against Heretics).

Hagner summarizes Ladd’s influence and this confluence that Ladd has posited:

Without question Ladd’s theology reflects the orientation of a specific interpretive community, that known widely as “Evangelicalism.” It was Ladd who was especially instrumental in helping many fundamentalists to see for the first time not merely the acceptability, but the indispensability, of historical criticicsm. Evangelicals – at least many of them – have become more open to many of the conclusions of critical scholarship (in regard to, for example, the authorship and dating of New Testament writings and the implications for the development of the New Testament) in the twenty years since Ladd wrote (in 1974). They continue, however, to share the basic convictions embodied in Ladd’s approach to biblical theology. For all the actual diversity in the New Testament writings there remains an unforced and genuine unity among them at the same time. For all the historical particularity of these writings they continue to possess a normative authority for the church. And if, as J. Reumann has recently written, “the ultimate test for any biblical theology will be whether it enables faith and obedience to God’s word,” that practical concern was close to the heart of Ladd. Ladd’s interpretive community continues to cherish the goals of faith and obedience. At their best, evangelicals will cultivate openness to all that increases faith and leads to a more effective obedience (pgs 19-20).

As for Lampe’s work, one of the things these scoffers fail to recognize is that the New Testament is mentioned or referenced only in about three or four of his 41 chapters and four appendicies. As I’ve said before, Lampe seemingly scavenges every single piece of paper, every inscription, every cemetery, every scrap of archaeological evidence that’s available in that city, from that time period.

Nick bloviated: “This is one reason why I don't rush to endorse or appeal to that many scholars, and why I almost always subordinate the opinions of scholars to that of Scripture and primary historical sources.”

Nick, you couldn’t even read “primary historical sources” if it weren’t for scholars like Lampe. They’d be inaccessible to you.


* From the essay, “History and Faith,” Machen’s inaugural address as assistant professor of New Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary, delivered on May 3, 1915. The essay was first published in the “Princeton Theological Review 13 (1915), pgs 337-351, and cited here in D.G. Hart, “J. Gresham Machen, Selected Shorter Writings”, Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing, ©2004).