The Crossing Blog

I was recently reminded that I was coming upon my twentieth year of ordained ministry. I decided to take a quick trip down nostalgic lane. In the process, I went back and found the sermon given at my service of ordination; a service that included the laying on of hands by many of my colleagues. This particular message was given by my friend and mentor, J. Coert Rylaarsdam, whose book, Revelation in Jewish Wisdom Literature; I still consider a classic in the field of biblical studies. I was pleased and honored that this was one of his last public presentations. Using as his two biblical texts, Psalm 90 and John 16: 13, here is what he had to say—-

“…the work of our hands, establish thou it…”

Psalm 90
“When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth.”
John 16: 13

Almost forty years ago Robert Hutchins, the President of the University of Chicago, and Mortimer Adler, Professor in the Department of Philosophy, published the Great Books of the Western World, the classic authors of ancient Greece and Rome and of the so-called western world that took their place. It was an event that stimulated a lot of discussion; articles in the public press, lecture series, and evening courses for busy citizens. In the midst of all the excitement someone asked Mr. Hutchins why the Bible was not included in his set of great books. He responded by saying that it was presupposed. I have often wondered what he meant by that. Surely, the Bible was not presupposed by the authors of Greece and Rome; they had never heard of it; and by no means did all the later writers presuppose the greatness of the Bible in what they produced. Some had been pretty rough on it! I suggest that the Bible is so different from all others books in the western world that it may never have occurred to Adler and Hutchins to set it alongside them. If so, more power to them.

How shall we speak of this difference of the Bible that sets it apart? We are reminded that it is the Book of the Synagogue and of the Church. And it is true, I think, that just as the Bible is different from all other great books in our world, so Synagogue and Church also stand apart. We know, of course, that it is possible to excerpt literary bits and pieces from the Bible that speak directly and powerfully to the cultural scene; also I have a good neighbor who often speaks of the Churches as one among the many voluntary organizations. Nevertheless, just as the Bible is fundamentally different from all other literature in the western world, so Synagogue and Church are different.

We have just attended the reading of Psalm 90: O LORD, thou hast been our dwelling-place in all generations, it begins; and it ends with the prayer. The work of our hands, establish thou it. The poet who composed those lines had a theocentric outlook on life; he assumed he lived by the grace of God. Only the LORD, the divine Mystery, whose servant he is, can bring his little projects to fulfillment. God comes out as the center in the psalmist experience of life. Some years ago, on a Sunday evening, I was playing with an old radio, to learn what Chicago was being taught. I hit on a black service: a very loud anthem was just ending, and the minister leading the service called the congregation to pray with her. I can only remember how she began: “We thank ye Lawd; you been might good to us Lawd; No complaints, Lawd; no complaints!” The themes and the mood were those of our psalm. God was addressed as the living one, the Mystery who acts.

At this service today our Gospel is a few lines from the so-called farewell discourses in the Gospel of John. We note the beginnings of what was to become the doctrine of the Trinity: Jesus Christ is the word of God, the action of God in the world. The Father and I are One, he says. And he promises the coming of the Spirit of truth, the active, guiding presence of God in the world for the time to come. Like the psalmist, the evangelist assumes that the divine Mystery comes to the top in human consciousness and experience. The theocentricity of Israel, in which the prophet was the key figure, is maintained. This radical theocentricity of the Bible, and of our Christian faith, is never entirely at home in our western world, as, in principle, it was in Jerusalem. Our world is a hybrid that, in paradoxical fashion, holds together the theocentricity of Jerusalem and of the Bible with the anthropocentricity of Athens. Our world tries to hold together science and faith, human power and human dependence, and the two are always in tension. We glory in human power and possibility; and we confess our weakness and need. We are pilgrims who want to follow in the way of the Savior, but also heroes in the quest for freedom and independence. We set the school and the university close by the church and the cathedral. So we accent the tension! We venerate the Hebrew Bible and the Gospels but also concentrate on Aristotle and his successors. We find it impossible to devise an enduring synthesis between Jerusalem and Athens, though we acknowledge both our sin and mortality and the divine image in us. We pray the divine spirit to guide us into all truth, but we retain some projects of our own.

That is as it should be. Scripture says we are created in the image of God. We possess the gift of creative thought, speech, and action. But it also makes clear that this gift of freedom and creativity is to be used as a response to the divine visitation of that Spirit of God our Gospel reminded us of. Scripture tells us that ever since Adam we have tended to forget that. There has always been a bit of Athens in all of us. In the midst of our acknowledgements of dependence we tend to grasp for independence that places us at the center of the action. Abraham Lincoln was on guard against that in the Gettysburg Address: that this nation, under God, may have a new birth in freedom, he said. The temptation to forget it is all the greater in our hybrid culture, in which the perspective of Athens permits unlimited anthropocentric vistas. That is both threatening and enriching: it can make us forget about the status of servant hood conferred upon us by Jerusalem; but, with divine help, it can make us see the greatness of the Mystery of the divine image in which we are created. When a century ago, Harvard changed its motto from pro Christo et ecclesia to Veritas (Truth) it did not necessarily deny the hybrid character of our culture. It tried to state the perennial tension in our hybrid world, a world in which the church speaks for Jerusalem and the University for Athens.