Dec
31
Those Pin-Heads Still Tantalize
December 31, 2006 |
You can tell whether your medieval history professor is any good or not by asking him (or her) whether medieval theologians really debated the question, How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? The lazy ones (history professors, that is), will not know either that the question was not about pin heads but about needle points, nor that it was not a genuine medieval debating point at all but a lampoon of such debates invented by Isaac D’Israeli in the 19th century (though based, no doubt, on the genuine question, posed by Saint Thomas Aquinas, whether several angels could occupy the same space at once). This is not to deny that some medieval scholars worried about some rather bizarre things. Whether Christ was a hermaphrodite, for example, or whether there be excrement in paradise, were both genuine “talking points” among medieval theologians.
Here’s another one for you:
In Luke 18:14 we read, “I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other.” (From the parable of the publican and the pharisee.) Now what has happened here? Is the “justification” of the publican—a type for all sinners—a definitive act, or has he only entered into a process which is less than complete? If it is the latter, how do you account for the perfect tense of the participle “justified,” and indeed, what would be the point of the parable?
I confess that I shamelessly stole this one from Laurence Wells, who asked this question of Fr. Al Kimel, who provides his own response in a recent post at Pontifications. I mention this one, not because I think questions about justification frivolous, but because I think most arguments from Greek grammar–especially koinê Greek grammar–to be beyond frivolous.
I mean, really, if the folks who ask such things really knew half as much about the linguistics behind their question as they need to, they wouldn’t ask such questions in the first place. Now, the author of Luke is a slightly better stylist than the author(s) of the other Gospels, but his attention to grammatical detail is still rather lackadaisical, and to make elaborate claims about what the author of Luke might mean by employing a perfect tense is rather like claiming that an undergraduate is intentionally exploring new depths of existential angst by purposely employing both present and past tenses in a five page essay on the writings of Swift. This difficulty is only exacerbated further when the question is not about the author of Luke, who possibly spoke Greek as his native language, but about Saint Paul, whose writings were probably translated into Greek for him:
In Romans 5:1-2, we read “since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand…” The Greek participle is not perfect but only aorist, I admit; but the results are clearly perfect: we have peace, we have obtained access, we stand. How do you interpret this verse?
I certainly do not dispute the fact that “How do you interpret this verse” could be an interesting question, but to make the point of the question hang upon this kind of point of grammar is, well, pointless–though it has helped untold numbers of academics earn their tenure in departments of religious studies.
These sorts of questions, to me, sound like sola scriptura on steroids–we must make careful sense out of every jot and tittle in the text, else we utterly fail to make the case for our interpretation. Fr. Al does a very nice job, I think, of showing how doing justice to the text must always move forward in the context of the tradition and the magisterial authority of the Church.
Just to show that I’m not too haughty and proud to engage in such pedantic pin-headed debates myself, however, I will draw your attention to my own obsession over jots and tittles as manifest right here in this very forum earlier this year.
New Year’s Resolution: work on developing a sense of shame.
