Reading. Thinking. Confessing. Part 2.

Confessing

In the first and second essay, I brought attention to Goethe’s Faust. The academic who exchanged his soul in an attempt to go beyond his own limitations. Jaroslav Pelikan depicts Faust as a seeker.¹ He is a scholar who strives and strays. There is a lack of dependence upon God in his scholarship and in his life. His study has detached him from the truth and in Part I, Faust himself makes no confession of faith in God. Early in his engagement with Margarete, she asks Faust repeatedly if he believes in God. He deflects until her persistence insists upon itself. So he replies:

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“Don’t misunderstand me, lovely girl. / Who dares name him, / Dares affirm him, / Dare says he believes? / Who feeling doubt, / Ventures to say right out, / I don’t believe? / The all-embracing, / All-sustaining, / Sustains and embraces / Himself and you and me. / Overhead the great sky arches, / Firm lies the earth beneath out feat, / And the friendly shining stars, don’t they / Mount aloft eternally? / Don’t my eyes, seeking your eyes, meet? / And all that is, doesn’t it weigh / On your mind and heart, / In eternal secrecy working, / Visibly, invisibly, about you?— / Fill heart with it to overflowing / In an ecstasy of blissful feeling / Which then call what you would; / Happiness! Heart! Love! Call it God!— / I know no name for it, nor look / For one. Feeling is all, / Names noise and smoke / Dimming the heavenly fire.”²

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Faust’s description of God is thoroughly Romantic and pantheistic, and therefore just as much a statement of disbelief as it is a language game expressing the Infinite.³ What we do not have here is a confession of belief in the God of Christian orthodoxy. All of his reading and thinking has not led him to confession of God’s great glory, but to obfuscating who God is. The young maiden Margarete perceives this clearly:

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“It sounds fine when it’s put your way, / But something’s wrong, there’s still a question; / The truth is, you are not a Christian.”⁴

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Yet, Goethe, the author of Faust, envisioned that in the end Faust would be vindicated. This is primarily seen through the climactic final speech in Part II. Climactic, because it returns readers to the blood oath that Faust made with Mephistopheles in Part I: 

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“A bet! I swear! / If ever I plead with the passing moment, / ‘Linger a while, you are so fair!’ / Then chain me up in close confinement, / Then serving me no more’s your care, / Then let the death bell toll my finish, / The unreluctantly I’ll perish, / The clock may stop, the hands fall off, / And time for me over with!”⁵

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Which is mirrored in Part II: 

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“Then, then, I might say to the passing moment, / ‘Linger awhile, you are so fair! / The footprints of my earthly passage cannot / Even after eons disappear.’ / Foreseeing such scenes of unmatched contentment, / I now enjoy the highest, supreme moment.”⁶

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Accordingly, after the Devil acquires the requisite line from Goethe’s mouth he dies. Eudo Mason, rightly asserts, how Goethe attempts to portray Faust in this final speech:

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“The point is that Faust’s dying vision, humanly and ethically considered, embodies a magnanimous, altruistic programme motivated by high ideals and sense of the brotherhood of man, and that as such it shows Faust in the most favourable light.”⁷

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In the end, Goethe intends to portray Faust as a genius, an “enlightened despot”,  in the ilk of Napoleon, Frederick the Great, and Peter the Great.⁸ The salvation of Faust then originates out of an entirely Enlightenment dressed story and worldview. But Faust is not the only one who experiences salvation in Goethe’s story. Margarete (who, albeit in a conflation of protestant and Catholic thought) provides a more identifiable Christian narrative than Faust’s life. ⁹

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It is not Faust, but Margarete who offers us a model of confession. Throughout Part I, she is put forth as simul iustus et peccator (simultaneously sinner and justified). In our first introduction to her as a reader she is leaving confession.¹⁰ Mephistopheles even comments, “She is the soul of innocence/And has no reason, none at all/To visit the confessional. Her kind is too much for me.”¹¹ Later we are told her nose is “forever in a prayerbook.”¹² Mephistopheles even chides Faust for allowing Margarete to put  “the Doctor through his catechism.”¹³ To which Faust responds:

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“Monster [that is Mephistopheles], lacking the least comprehension / How such a soul, so loving, pure, / Whose faith is all in all to her, / The sole means to obtain salvation, / Should be tormented by fear / The one she loves is damned forever!”¹⁴

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Most importantly, after her private and public sins (uniting with Faust out of marriage, her part in the death of her brother, mother, and child) she confesses and places her dependence upon God:

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“In your hands, our Father, oh save me!” / You angelic hosts, stand about me! /Draw up your ranks to protect me!”¹⁵

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And it is after this that the heavens announce: “She shall be saved.” ¹⁶

This brings us to the central aim of this third essay, that of confessing. Confession commences, permeates, and is the proper end of the activity of faith seeking understanding. It is therefore the fitting end to reading and thinking. In this essay, I primarily consider confessing, as that activity, which is pregnant to faith seeking understanding. Pregnant, because faith seeking understanding must give birth to confession and is born out of the confessing individual.

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On Confessing

The word confession or confessing has a plethora of meanings within protestant Christianity. It may describe the individual christians turning away from sin and toward God. As Wittgenstein once said, “A confession has to be a part of your new life.”¹⁷ In this sense, confession is a term that refers to repentance, an activity which the Christian is to be active in throughout their life.¹⁸ This is primarily the way I use confession above in reference to Faust.  

In another sense, confession may refer to those symbols and creeds that define what Christians believe both personally and collectively. In other words, a confession of faith, such as the Belgic Confession or the Westminster Confession of Faith. As John Webster put it:

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“A creed or confessional formula is a public and binding indication of the gospel which is set before us in the scriptural witness, through which the church affirms its allegiance to God, repudiates falsehood by which the church is threatened, and assembles around the judgment and consolation of the gospel.”¹⁹

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The word confession may also refer to the personal and corporate act of praise. In what follows, I use confessing chiefly in the third sense: the thankful, public voicing of faith in the God who has spoken. It is the necessary beginning and end of reading, and thinking. Beginning because faith seeking understanding begins in Augustine’s words with: “I believe so that I may understand.”²⁰ The end of faith seeking understanding Bavinck portrays well, that just as the individual—made in the image of God— “absorbs the thoughts of God embedded in creation” and makes them his own, he must then, “express them again in his own words.”²¹ The ‘I believe’ is at the beginning and end of intellectual inquiry. The appropriation of truth into the mind of the Christian, becomes as it were a part of them, and is then taken up in the activity of confessing. In other words, thinking too must come to a head. In our case, it must return to its starting position or following the idea of Romans 11:36 it must return to God. “To him be the glory. Amen.”

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The headline of Herman Bavinck’s university diary reads: “Ex animo et corpore” (From soul and body)¹ followed by “Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis” (Everything transitory/ is symbolic only).² The latter, German phrase is one of the last lines from Goethe’s play Faust. Presumably, although we cannot enter the brain of Bavinck himself, he writes this at the top of his diary to remind him of the vulnerability that lay before him in his study.  At the center of Goethe’s tale is a man of science (Wissenschaft) who, in exchange for all human possibility, sells his soul to the devil, Mephistopheles.³ These events transpire on Holy Saturday, the eve of the celebration of the resurrection.⁴ We should not be surprised that theological themes pervade the narrative. We may even permit ourselves to perceive Faust to be a theologian, albeit not an orthodox one, or rather a “confused, disordered” one.⁵

In the study or the leather arm chair, the earnest academic in their pursuit of knowledge is often required to turn to the task of reading. In attending to reading here, I do not mean to isolate it from participation in the Body of Christ, in the means of grace, and those activities that shape the Christian life in community (Mic. 6:8; James 1:27; Heb. 10:24-25; 1 Cor. 13). Reading, by virtue of Word and sacrament, is essential to the life of the church. All serious academic inquiry requires reading; theology is no different (Ps. 1:2; Josh. 1:8).  In the space that follows, I seek to reflect on what ‘reading’ is for the theologian, how God may use it in the formation of the intellect and the heart, and how it must be pursued with humility, dependence, and spiritual attentiveness.

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On Reading

Broadly, ‘reading’ is an attentive mode of inhabiting the world. It is in this sense that Augustine in his Confessions can write of “Heaven and earth and everything in them on all sides tells me to love you. Nor do they cease to tell everyone that ‘they are without excuse’ (Rom. 1:20).”⁶ Likewise, John Calvin, can write of the universe as compelling us to see God with “unmistakable marks of his glory” and even Karl Barth, says “God makes himself known to us in the world.”⁷ To consider the world as ‘readable’ is to acknowledge that God both reveals himself in the world, and has gifted humanity the capacity and faculties to know him in this world. This kind of reading is similar to seeing, but moves behind the eyes to the mental processes of the brain. It is to acknowledge that we have been given eyes so that we may turn from darkness to light (Prov. 20:12; Ps. 119:18; Acts 26:18; Eph. 1:17-18). As Bavinck put it, “The whole [of] nature is a book, written by God’s hand, and the great and small creatures are letters and syllables and words and sentences.”⁸ All of creation is accordingly a theatre which portrays to us the drama, or a book that puts before us the typeface of the knowledge of God. 

Theology itself, has not always been a discipline that relies on physical texts, but is put forth before our eyes in art and liturgy, architecture and sacraments, music and people. Broadly, then the Christian ‘reads’ or ‘sees’ the whole as they intentionally inhabit the world aware that God reveals himself through his creation. Such broad reading trains the Christian not simply to gather information, but to perceive the world with reverence, gratitude, and attentiveness, learning to receive creation as a gift and summons.

Narrowly, ‘reading’ involves deciphering words, numbers, or musical notes.⁹ This definition is initially put forth by Wittgenstein in his Philosophical Investigations.¹⁰ There he spends about 20 paragraphs dissecting and scrutinizing what reading is, that it is not a distinctive inner experience, mental process, or felt causal connection between signs and sounds.¹¹ Wittgenstein never proffers a positive definition of what it is, at least not concretely. However, it fits within his larger scheme of developing a “language game” that is, it is something we learn in community, through instruction, and forms of life, and that we readily see and know what ‘reading’ is according to its use in language. ¹²

Reading necessarily then participates in something that is larger than the individual reader.  In other words, in reading we do not begin ex nihilio, but rather we enter into a broader intellectual community. This is true of reading in general, but also of course of reading theology. This was the contention of John Webster in his essay “Reading Theology”, that “we do not begin de novo, because in one real sense we do not begin. We appropriate and transform, we preserve and enrich by entering upon the use of ‘an existing spiritual world.’”¹³ Reading then is an act of receptivity and reading theology is a participation in the communion of saints, in which we are instructed and corrected by those who have gone before us. Reading binds us to the past so that we might attend to the present with wisdom.

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Augustine and Reading

We must also consider how God may use reading; Augustine is a suitable guide for this. In his Confessions he informs readers about the books he has read and their respective impact on his soul. First, we encounter this in Book I, in which he was sent to school in particular “to learn to read and write.”¹⁴ He acknowledges at this time he hated reading and studying.¹⁵ In time, this acquired skillset became of great value to him, although these early books that he read did not lead him to God. He wept for Dido, but not for his misery and alienation from God.¹⁶

In Carthage, Augustine was assigned Cicero’s Hortensius. A transformation occurred in Augustine on account of his reading. As he put it: “The book changed my feelings. It altered my prayers, Lord, to be towards you yourself. It gave me different values and priorities. Suddenly… I longed for the immortality of wisdom with an incredible ardour in my heart.”¹⁷ While the book cultivated in Augustine a love for wisdom, it lacked the integral and centerpiece of wisdom, Christ. His reading was beginning to prepare him for a life in pursuit of wisdom.

In Book IV, around the age of 20, Augustine is introduced to Aristotle’s Ten Categories. He writes of the prideful experience of reading and understanding more than other students.¹⁸ Throughout the Confessions there are really two obstacles that keep Augustine from God: pride and error. His reading of Aristotle cultivated pride in his heart.

A decade on from his experience with Aristotle the error that Augustine had succumbed to was that of Manicheanism.¹⁹  It was his wide reading among the philosophers that led him to see through the errors of the Manicheans and it was the lack of reading by the Manichean expert (Faustus) that cast doubt into Augustine’s mind of his prowess.²⁰ Throughout his reading nothing was able to convince Augustine that God did not exist.²¹ But he was not yet a Christian. His philosophical reading was helping him to overcome the errors in his thinking, but not the pride in his heart.

He then encounters Ambrose. In contrast with Faustus, Ambrose was not only available to his followers but he was also a reader: “When he was not with them, which was a very brief period of time, he restored either his body with necessary food or his mind by reading.”²² Scripture and the reading of Scripture begins to take on a new hue for Augustine after his engagement with Ambrose.²³  As he states:

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“In plain words and very humble modes of speech it offered itself to everyone, yet stretched the understanding of those who were not small-minded. It welcomed all comers to its hospitable embrace, yet through narrow openings attracted a few to you—a few, perhaps, but far more than it would have done had it not spoken with such noble authority and drawn the crowds to its embrace by its holy humility.”²⁴

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It is a book that is revered for its depth, but also is accessible to all. The humble and profound Scriptures set Augustine on a new trajectory. This is soon amplified by his reading of the platonists. In engaging with platonism he overcomes the plethora of errors of Manichaeism and moves philosophically toward Christianity, but the truth of the humble and incarnate logos has not yet become significant.²⁵ Pride remained in the way. “I began to want to give myself airs as a wise person… Worse still, I was puffed with knowledge.”²⁶ All of Augustine’s reading was festering in him a sense of self-exaltation.

Once again, Augustine engages with Scripture and is struck by its humility. The truths of platonism that he found so appealing he finds in Scripture, but those concepts he found lacking in platonism he also finds in Scripture, namely the beauty of grace and the humility of the work of God in Christ.²⁷ This reading of Scripture prepares Augustine for his encounter with Christ under the tree in Book VIII.

Book VIII is full of books.  Early in the chapter a friend Simplicianus tells the story of the conversion of Victorinus (one who also read widely!).²⁸ This account was precipitated by Augustine’s admission to reading books translated into Latin by Victorinus. After this, Augustine and his friend Alypius are visited by Ponticianus who tells the story of a friend converted through reading an account of the life of St. Antony a desert monk.²⁹ It is the story of St. Antony that sends Augustine both inward (to assess the conflict of his own soul) and out of the house looking for a tree that he might sit under in the garden. As he confesses, “The tumult in my breast had swept me away to this place, where no one would interfere with the blazing dispute I had engage in with myself…So I went out into the garden.”³⁰

Once in the garden, Augustine battles with his own pride and spiritual dithering. He weeps not for Dido, but for his own sin.³¹ Amid his crying he hears a voice from a child playing nearby: “Pick up and read, pick up and read.”³² Taking it as a divine command, and recalling how St. Antony was instructed by the reading of Scripture, he picks up the epistle of Romans and reads 13:13-14, and he confesses, “No sooner had I reached the end of the verse than the light of certainty flooded my heart and all dark shades of doubt fled away.”³³ The reading of Scripture, illuminated by the Holy Spirit, transformed his heart.

We might gather four things from Augustine to illuminate how God may use reading. First, reading may be transformative for the intellect and will.  Each book that we are introduced to in Augustine’s narrative plods him along toward Christ. This, of course, is a possibility for those whom God is drawing to himself. Yet this transformation does not arise from the book as such, but from God’s gracious use of it; the act of reading becomes fruitful only as it is gathered up into His providential work upon the soul.

Throughout Augustine’s narrative the lifelong habit of reading brings him closer and closer to the truth. Reading then can be corrective to error, second. He reads widely (Prov. 11:14; 18:17; Dan. 1:17). The various books that he engages with allow the errors of various teachings to percolate to the surface and be sifted from his mind. The lack of reading of Faustus does not permit him to see his errors; he relies instead on his personality.

Third, in all of his reading, Augustine was always surrounded by other communities of readers. A vulnerability of highlighting reading is that of isolating the activity of the theologian over against the community. We must not forget as we read we participate in a broader culture and when reading theology, a communion of saints. And through our reading we must strive to participate in this same community, with our whole selves, in the present. This includes the corporate activity of hearing the reading of Scripture, participating in the Body of Christ, seeing and tasting the sacraments.

Fourth, there is one particular book that God uses to transform the head and heart of his people, Scripture. Scripture itself teaches us that the reading and ingesting the Word of God is particularly sweet (Ezek. 3:3). In approaching the theological task through Scripture and in dependence upon the Spirit we cleave to Him. What ultimately crushed Augustine’s pride was the humility of Scripture, which placed before his eyes the humility of Christ. The humble, yet exalted Christ becomes a balm for his soul. The path to God for Augustine is one of humility and this is cultivated through the reading of Scripture. 

Christ and the Definition of Chalcedon

In this light, Chalcedon is very important for our celebration of Christmas today. The Chalcedonian Definition was a clarification of the Christian confession that was written at the Council of Chalcedon in 451 AD. Before Chalcedon, other councils had decided important doctrinal issues. Once the church was clear in its articulation that Jesus is truly God in the same way that the Father is God (Council of Nicaea, 325 AD), more difficulties arose around how we should understand the humanity of Christ. The beauty of Chalcedon is that it puts in clear succinct language how it is that Jesus's humanity and divinity are united in the one person. Here is the Definition:

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Therefore, following the holy fathers, we all unite in teaching that we should confess one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ. This same one is perfect in deity, and the same one is perfect in humanity; the same one is true God and true man, comprising a rational soul and a body. He is of the same essence as the Father according to his deity, and the same one is of the same essence with us according to his humanity, like us in all things except sin. He was begotten before the ages from the Father according to his deity, but in the last days for us and our salvation, the same one was born of the Virgin Mary, the bearer of God, according to his humanity. He is one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, and Only Begotten, who is made known in two natures united unconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably. The distinction between the natures is not at all destroyed because of the union, but rather the property of each nature is preserved and concurs together into one person and subsistence. He is not separated or divided into two persons, but he is one and the same Son, the Only Begotten, God the Logos, the Lord Jesus Christ. This is the way the prophets spoke of him from the beginning, and Jesus Christ himself instructed us, and the Council of the fathers has handed the faith down to us.

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Let's highlight several key features from the Definition that are particularly relevant for our faith, especially in the season of Christmas:

Jesus is both truly God and truly man at the same time. "This same one is perfect in deity, and the same one is perfect in humanity; the same one is true God and true man." The whole purpose of the Definition is to expound exactly what we mean by this, in accordance with Scriptures. How can a person (Jesus Christ) be both God and man at the same time? Scripture tells us this is true but there are many unbiblical ways to understand this. Church history is rife with error and misunderstanding.

Jesus in his humanity is fully human and like us in every aspect of humanity: "and true man, comprising a rational soul and a body." This is clear from numerous Biblical texts, for example:

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Heb. 2:14 Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same things, that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil,

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Jesus is not just a divine person or being covered over in human flesh so that he merely looks human. He is truly and fully human. Just as we have body and souls, so in his humanity Christ took to himself a human body and a human soul in the very same way that we have a body and soul. His divinity is not the super powered battery animated in human flesh. The eternal person of the Son also took on a human soul.

"He is of the same essence as the Father according to his deity, and the same one is of the same essence with us according to his humanity, like us in all things except sin." Here the Definition uses the word "homoousia" or "same essence," which was a hard-fought phrase central to the Nicene creed to describe the equality of the Son with God the Father and applies the same word to describe his identity with us in our humanity. According to his divine nature, the Son is God in the same way that the Father is God, and in his humanity he is human in the same way that we are human.

In their union, which happens in the one person of Christ, the divine and human natures don't lose their unique attributes. They become connected but they don't mix or change. They unite but it is not a union where each aspect changes or morphs:

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who is made known in two natures united unconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably. The distinction between the natures is not at all destroyed because of the union, but rather the property of each nature is preserved and concurs together into one person and subsistence.

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At first glance, this may sound technical and esoteric. But there is a simple Biblical logic to it. When the Son becomes man, if something in his divinity changed then he wouldn't still be God the way the Father is God. And if the humanity he takes on changes to become something like a superhuman or a divinized human, then he wouldn't be able to represent us as one of us. Both the humanity and the divinity are united and neither undergo a change because of this union.

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Chalcedon and Our Christmas Confession

Christmas is a time to celebrate and remember who Jesus is and what he did! At Christmas, as much as any time of year, we confess that the Son of God who has existed for all eternity as truly God, took upon himself our humanity in the incarnation. In the Virgin's womb, he takes on all the attributes of humanity without ceasing to be God or losing any aspects of his divinity. These two "natures" come together and are united without either experiencing a change in the essential "godness" of the divine and "humanness" of the humanity. The Definition of Chalcedon is nothing but a faithful representation of Biblical language. He is God. He is God with us. He is God with us in the flesh.

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Matt. 1:23 "Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Immanuel" (which means, God with us).

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