Category: Theology

God Under Another Name?

A reader writes:

Old Testament scholars like Knauf and Romer make a case for YHWH being a storm god related to Qos and Edomite religion, based on a linguistic case.

If their theory was plausible and you had to accept it, how would you reconcile that with your faith? Assume that their arguments are very convincing. How would you reconcile that with orthodox theology?

Since most people aren’t very familiar with the Edomites, let me begin my response with some background . . .

 

Meeting the Edomites

The Edomites were a people who lived in a region to the south of Israel. The Old Testament indicates that they were related to the Israelites. Their patriarch—Edom, also known as Esau—was the brother of Jacob, who was also known as Israel. The two peoples are thus deemed as being related by blood.

Just as Jacob and Esau had a sibling rivalry, so did the peoples that descended from them, and they often found themselves in competition and conflict, though they also had a shared sense of kinship that endured.

Thus one of the criticisms of the Edomites in the book of Obadiah is that they took advantage of Israel’s distress and even raided Jerusalem, despite the fact that they were kinsmen (Obad. 10-14).

This sense of kinship indicates a shared heritage that would likely includes religious elements. Thus we find archaeological evidence of the worship of Yahweh in Edom. Bert Dicou explains:

Evidence for an old connection of YHWH with Edom can also be found in extra-biblical sources. Some inscriptions found in Kuntillet ’Ajrud, mentioning the ‘YHWH of Teman’ besides a ‘YHWH of Samaria’, may even be interpreted as suggesting that in Edom (at least, in Teman) around 800 bce (the time of the inscriptions) YHWH was worshipped, since the expression ‘YHWH of Samaria’ clearly refers to YHWH as present in his cultic centre in Samaria (Edom, Israel’s Brother and Antagonist, 179).

 

The Deity Qos

The major Edomite deity was named Qos, and scholars have wondered about the relationship between Qos and Yahweh. Unfortunately, the Old Testament gives us virtually no positive information, although some have tried to mount an argument from silence. Dicou explains:

A problem within the religion history of Israel and its neighbours is the puzzling absence of the most important Edomite god, Qos, in the Old Testament. Whereas the gods of the other neighbours are rejected as well as mentioned by their names, neither happens to the Edomite god or gods. . . .

This can possibly be explained by assuming that Edom’s Qos did not differ very much from Israel’s YHWH—which must have made it difficult to reject him. It has been asserted that there are important correspondences between YHWH and Edom’s god Qos (176-177).

 

Same God, Different Name?

One possibility is thus that Qos and Yahweh are the same God being referred to by different terms.

This would not be surprising, as in the Old Testament itself, Yahweh is referred to by multiple terms: El, Elohim, Adonai, etc.

The same is true of other deities in the Old Testament. Thus the generic term Ba’al (Hebrew, “Master”) is also called Hadad, Chemosh, etc.

We often see how the same deity could be called by different terms across linguistic barriers. Thus the Latin-speaking Romans referred to the same deity by the names of Jupiter and Jove that Greek-speakers referred to as Zeus.

Even today, language barriers result in Christians all over the world using different terms for God:

  • Spanish-speaking Christians refer to God as Dios
  • Polish-speaking Christians refer to God as Bog
  • German-speaking Christians refer to God as Gott
  • Arabic-speaking Christians refer to God as Allah
  • Finnish-speaking Christians refer to God as Jumala
  • Hungarian-speaking Christians refer to God as Isten

You get the point.

Given all this terminological diversity, it’s quite possible that the Israelites and the Edomites, at least at times, simply used different terms for the same deity.

This is all the more plausible since the Edomites didn’t speak exactly the same language as the Israelites, and even in Hebrew, God can be referred to with terms as different as El and Yahweh.

Maybe in Edomite he was Yahweh and Qos.

This would explain why Qos isn’t condemned in the Old Testament the way other foreign deities are.

 

Yahweh a Storm God?

The reader referred to the idea that Yahweh and Qos may have been storm gods, but we need to be careful here.

In the Old Testament, Yahweh is not presented simply as a storm god. He is the God of everything, and everything includes storms.

Storms are very powerful, and thus they make a good metaphor for divine power. It’s thus no surprise that various Old Testament books use storm imagery in connection with Yahweh.

Despite the use of storm themes in the Old Testament, the biblical writers did not conceive of Yahweh simply as a storm god.

For them, he was the everything God—the Creator of the entire world—and they also use fire themes, harvest themes, healing themes, birth themes, death themes, battle themes, and many others. But that wouldn’t let us reduce Yahweh to simply being a fire god, a harvest god, a healing god, a birth god, a death god, or a war god.

 

Yahweh vs. Ba’al

There’s also another reason to be careful about thinking of Yahweh as principally a storm god: When the Old Testament uses such imagery in connection with him, it is often part of a deliberate attempt to subvert Ba’al worship.

In the Canaanite pantheon, Ba’al was the storm god. In Canaanite mythology, Ba’al also famously had a conflict with the sea god, Yam, who he conquered.

During much of the Old Testament period, Israelites were tempted to worship Ba’al (and the other Canaanite deities), but the prophets make it very clear that Yahweh and Ba’al are two different deities.

That’s why—if you’ll pardon a storm-related pun—they thunderously denounce Ba’al worship.

We thus find the biblical authors using Ba’al-related imagery to subvert Ba’al worship. By using storm imagery for Yahweh, they are saying, “Ba’al isn’t the true lord of the storm; Yahweh is.”

Similarly, the biblical authors subvert Ba’al worship when they make it clear that it was actually Yahweh who set the boundaries of the sea (Job 38:10-11, Prov. 8:29, Psa. 104:9, Jer. 5:22)—the Hebrew word for which is also yam.

We thus have to be careful that we recognize what the biblical authors are doing with storm imagery and not simply reduce Yahweh to being a storm god.

 

Revelation, Loss, and Clarification

The Bible depicts God and man as experiencing an original unity. This implies that God revealed himself to us at the dawn of our race.

However, as the Old Testament makes clear, our knowledge of God became disfigured by sin, and the worship of other gods was introduced.

The disfigurement became so bad that, prior to the time of Abraham, the ancestors of the Israelites worshipped the Mesopotamian deities (Josh. 24:2, 14-15).

But God began to rebuild knowledge of himself by calling Abraham and giving him new revelation. This knowledge was further clarified with the revelation given to Moses, and later through the prophets and other biblical writers.

We thus see a process whereby the original knowledge of God was largely lost, but God began to reintroduce knowledge of who he was and thus clarify our understanding of him.

This process was gradual and messy. At first, many of God’s people worshipped other deities in addition to him (Gen. 31:34-35, Lev. 17:7, Josh. 24:14). This continued even after God brought the Israelites into the promised land.

But through the prophets’ repeated calls, God made it clear to the Israelites that this must stop, and by the end of the Babylonian Exile, the practice was definitively ended.

 

Avoiding Overreach

One of the difficulties that scholars have in piecing together how this process worked is the small amount of information we have about this period in history.

Aside from the Old Testament, we have little literature about Israel and its immediate neighbors (Edom, Moab, Midian, etc.), and the Old Testament does not give us a great deal of information about many of these questions.

As a result, scholars are often left to simply guess at many issues pertaining to these early periods.

For example, one scholar (M. Rose) has proposed that Qos was not the same deity as Yahweh, and his worship was introduced only later. Dicou explains:

Rose maintains that only in later times, namely the eighth or seventh centuries bce, did the god Qos, of Arabian origin, come to be known in Edom. Nothing is known about the god who was worshipped before Qos, but it is not unlikely that it was the same god as the one of the Israelites, namely, ‘YHW’ (178).

In other words, the Edomites may have originally worshipped Yahweh, but later Qos was introduced and became their most popular deity.

How would that transition have happened? We don’t know.

Would it even have been clear to the Edomites from the beginning that Yahweh and Qos were different deities? We don’t know that either.

Scholars of religion have noted that there can sometimes be confusion about the identity or non-identity of deities, and it can go back and forth.

Sometimes—for some worshippers—Deity X will be regarded as the same as Deity Y. But other times—for other worshippers—Deity X and Deity Y will be clearly distinct.

Thus in different streams of Hinduism, the deities are sometimes considered to be separate, but in other streams they are all considered aspects of a single, ultimate God.

Closer to home, the God of the Bible was regarded by the first Christians as one, but heretics like Marcion and the Gnostics came to think of the God of the Old Testament as a fundamentally different being than the God of the New Testament.

A modern example of the same phenomenon can be seen in the fact that many Christians today are willing to acknowledge that God is also worshipped by Jews and Muslims, even if they have an incomplete or partially erroneous understanding of him. But others will vigorously deny that Muslims worship the same God as Christians.

The same phenomenon happened in the ancient world. Not everybody had the same understanding of whether this god was the same as that god.

Therefore, some Edomites may have understood Yahweh and Qos to be the same, but others may have disagreed, and the popularity of the two viewpoints may have gone back and forth over time.

We just don’t know.

This is why we have to be careful to avoid overreach—to avoid going beyond what the evidence allows us to say with confidence.

Scholars may legitimately speculate about how the identification or non-identification of various gods developed over time, precisely how the worship of these gods arose and when, etc., however we must always bear in mind that these are just speculations.

The truth is that we don’t have the evidence we would need to be sure.

 

“Not Without Witness”

Although the biblical evidence—as well as the archaeological record—makes it clear that man’s knowledge of the Creator was strongly disfigured, the New Testament establishes the principle that he did not leave himself without witness.

In Acts, Paul explains that he did so at least through the creation itself:

In past generations he allowed all the nations to walk in their own ways; yet he did not leave himself without witness, for he did good and gave you from heaven rains and fruitful seasons, satisfying your hearts with food and gladness (Acts 14:16-17).

He makes a similar point in Romans:

For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made (Rom. 1:19-20).

And thus people in various cultures have reasoned their way to the existence of the Creator. This included figures in polytheistic Greece, some of whom Paul quotes:

Yet he is not far from each one of us, for “In him we live and move and have our being”; as even some of your poets have said, “For we are indeed his offspring” (Acts 17:27-28).

If God cared enough to make it possible for us to always learn about him through creation—what is sometimes called “general revelation”—then it is reasonable to suppose that he also always continued to give “special revelation”—that is knowledge about him disclosed through visions, prophecies, etc.

This would apply even in the dark times before Abraham and Moses and even in communities other than Israel.

Thus we find figures like the Jebusite king Melchizedek, who “was priest of God Most High” (Gen. 14:18), the Midianite priest Jethro, who rejoiced at what God did for Israel under Moses (Exod. 18:9-12), and the Mesopotamian prophet Balaam, who prophesied for Yahweh (Num. 22:8-24:25).

We thus see a knowledge and worship of the true God outside of Israel in these early times.

At our remote date, we cannot know the details of this knowledge and worship. It may have—and in fact almost certainly was—partial and at times confused, for that is what we see within Israel itself, as the struggles of the prophets indicate.

However, we can say that God always preserved a knowledge of himself, however dimly he was understood in a particular age, and however hybridized his worship came to be with pagan ideas.

We may be thankful that he did lead the Israelites along the path he did, that he did restore knowledge of himself, that he did clear away pagan confusions, and that he finally gave us the full revelation of himself in Jesus Christ, his Son.

 

Summary

With the above as background, I would offer a short summary of the response to the reader’s initial query as follows:

  • The speculations about Yahweh and Qos being storm gods who were related is, in fact, not at all certain.
  • However, even if it could be proved, there are a number of ways to square this with an orthodox Christian understanding:
    • Yahweh and Qos may well have been the same deity being worshipped under two names.
    • Yahweh may have been the earlier deity and Qos only introduced later.
    • God has always preserved knowledge of himself in the world. Even though it has been partial and overlaid with misunderstandings, God eventually clarified it and gave us his definitive revelation through his Son.

Did God Punish Jesus on the Cross?

Penal substitution is a theory of the atonement that says God literally punished Jesus on the Cross.

This theory is problematic because one cannot justly punish an innocent person, and Jesus was innocent. Therefore, for God to literally punish him would be unjust.

In a previous post, I discussed how this view relates to other theories of the atonement. In this post, we’ll take a look at a proposed basis in Scripture for penal substitution.

 

A Scriptural Basis?

Advocates of penal substitution frequently appeal to the Suffering Servant described in Isaiah 52 and 53.

The Suffering Servant passage is one of a number of places in Isaiah that describes a significant servant of God, and it seems this passage offers the best chance of providing a basis for penal substitution.

From the beginning, Christians have understood this passage as a messianic prophecy, and the New Testament authors apply various parts of it to Jesus (cf. Matt. 8:17, Luke 22:37, John 12:38, Acts 8:32-33, Rom. 8:36, 10:16, 1 Pet. 2:24-25).

This makes it clear that the Suffering Servant passage is a messianic prophecy, but it doesn’t mean that it applies only to Christ.

 

The Original Suffering servant

As I discuss in another post, the literal sense of many Old Testament prophecies applies to something during or near the lifetime of the original prophet, and they then have a further fulfillment in Christ as part of the spiritual sense.

We therefore need to examine the Suffering Servant passage in its original context first, before proceeding to apply it to Christ, and this we did in a post on the original Suffering Servant.

There we explored several possibilities about who the original Suffering Servant may have been. Proposals have included the prophet himself, one of the Gentile leaders who supported the return of the Jewish people to their land, and the Jewish governor Zerubbabel, who oversaw efforts to rebuild the temple.

However, at least eight passages in Isaiah (41:8-9, 44:1-2, 21 [2 references], 45:4, 48:20, and 49:3) identify the whole nation of Israel as God’s servant, and so we focused primarily on the idea that Israel was the original Suffering Servant.

Jesus would then recapitulate and go beyond what happened to Israel the same way in the Suffering Servant passage that he did the prophetic statement found in Hosea 11:1, “When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son” (cf. Matt. 2:14-15).

 

The Issue of Language

In our post on theories of the atonement, I noted that it’s possible to use penal substitution language for what happened on the Cross—i.e., language that makes it sound as if God punished Jesus—as long as this language isn’t meant in a fully literal sense.

The latter would require God to commit the unjust act of punishing an innocent.

But if the language is being used in a non-literal or accommodated sense—one that doesn’t require punishment in the full, ordinary sense—then it can be used.

We even saw how Scripture sometimes uses punishment language in such senses.

This means that, in looking at Isaiah 52-53, we need to be sensitive to how the passage uses language. So let’s consider that issue . . .

 

How Does the Suffering Servant Passage Use Language?

It is clear that there is a great deal of non-literal language present in the text:

  • If the corporate interpretation of the Servant as Israel is correct then we have a metaphor where a whole nation is depicted as a single individual.
  • We have inanimate things (e.g., the hill Zion, the “waste places of Jerusalem”) and composite things (e.g., Jerusalem) urged to do things they would not be literally capable of doing (Isa. 52:1-2, 9).
  • The watchmen are said to “see the return of the Lord to Zion”—a literally invisible and metaphorical event (Isa. 52:8).
  • The Lord’s invisible and metaphorical arm has been shown to the Gentiles (Isa. 52:10, 53:1).
  • The ends of the earth are said to “see” the Lord’s salvation (Isa. 52:10).
  • The Lord is said to “go before” the captives and to “be your rear guard” (Isa. 52:12).
  • The Servant is said to be “exalted and lifted up, and shall be very high” (Isa. 52:13).
  • The Servant’s appearance (if it’s Israel) is said to be extremely disfigured (Isa. 52:14, 53:2).
  • The Servant is compared to “a young plant” and “a root out of dry ground” (Isa. 53:2).
  • The Servant is said to have carried griefs, sorrows, iniquities, and sin as if they were physical objects (Isa. 53:4, 11, 12).
  • God is imagined to have physically hit (“stricken, smitten,” “bruised”) the Servant (Isa. 53:4, 8, 10).
  • The Servant is said to have been physically wounded, bruised, and lashed (Isa. 53:5), which would be a non-literal description of Israel’s sufferings if the Servant is a collective entity.
  • The human speakers are compared to wandering sheep (Isa. 53:6).
  • God is said to have laid iniquity on the Servant, as if it were a physical object (Isa. 53:6).
  • The Servant is compared to a lamb and a sheep (Isa. 53:7).
  • The Servant—whether it is Israel or a literal individual—experiences a metaphorical death and burial (Isa. 53:8-9).
  • The Servant is depicted as an offering for sin—i.e., as a sacrificial animal (Isa. 53:10).
  • The will of the Lord is said to prosper in the Servant’s “hand” (Isa. 53:10).
  • The Servant is said to “see” the “travail of his soul” (Isa. 53:11).
  • The Servant is said to divide “a portion with the great” and “divide the spoil with the strong” (Isa. 53:12).
  • The Servant is said to have “poured out his soul to death,” as if the soul were a liquid and death were a container or location (Isa. 53:12).

As with many passages in the prophets, this one is filled with non-literal language.

Underlying all of this language is the concept that God has allowed the Servant to suffer, and from this he has brought about good for Israel, in its restoration to the land, and for the speakers, who have received spiritual benefits through the Servant and, in particular, the Servant’s knowledge of the Lord.

 

Applying the Text to Jesus

In Matthew’s Gospel, we see the application of Hosea 11:1 (“When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son”) applied to Jesus, who recapitulates Israel’s journey to and return from Egypt (Matt. 2:14-15).

If the Servant of Isaiah 52-53 is meant to be Israel in the literal sense of the text then the New Testament use of these chapters for Jesus involves the same kind of application, whereby Jesus recapitulates something Israel initially experienced.

On the other hand, if the Servant was originally meant to be a single, historical individual, this also fits with the way the New Testament applies Old Testament precedents to Jesus, for he is also depicted as the new Moses and the new David.

Either way, being aware of the amount of non-literal language in Isaiah 52-53 means that we must be careful in how literally we take this language in making the application to Jesus.

Some elements will apply to Jesus in a more literal way than they did to the original Servant:

  • Jesus is a sin offering in a more literal way than the original Servant was.
  • Jesus died in a fully literal way, unlike the Servant.

However, other elements will be less literal:

  • Jesus did not literally have offspring (children), and so the statement that the Servant “shall see his offspring” (Isa. 53:10) must be taken in a less literal, spiritual sense (e.g., as applying to Christians).
  • Jesus did not “divide the spoil with the strong” (Isa. 53:12) in the same sense as the Servant. Ordinarily, this would refer to the spoils of a battle or, at least, to material prosperity, but Jesus was poor and remained poor.

Other elements of the text will remain equally non-literal, even if they apply to Jesus in a different way:

  • Jesus does not literally carry griefs, sorrows, iniquities, and sin as if they were physical objects (Isa. 53:4, 11, 12).
  • God does not literally lay iniquity on Jesus, as if it were a physical object (Isa. 53:6).

We therefore must pay close attention to the way in which we understand the text and how it applies to Jesus.

 

Penal Substitution?

If there is to be a basis for penal substitution in this text, it will be found in the way the passage describes God’s interaction with the Servant: What does the text say God does to the Servant?

The first passage we need to look at is Isaiah 53:4-5, which reads:

Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows;
yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted.
But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities;
upon him was the chastisement that made us whole, and with his stripes we are healed.

We have already dealt with the non-literal nature of the language about Jesus bearing our griefs and carrying our sorrows.

The next line says that the speakers “esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted.” Read in the natural way, this means that they thought God had done these things to the Servant, on account of the Servant’s sins (that’s why God normally strikes someone in Old Testament thought), but the reality was different, as revealed in the next line.

Instead, the Servant “was wounded for our transgressions” and “bruised for our iniquities.” The use of the passive voice here could mean that God wounded and bruised the Servant, but if so, it isn’t meant literally.

God did not physically harm Jesus. His wounds and bruises were caused by the Romans. God allowed this to happen as part of his plan, but he himself didn’t do these things. We thus don’t have a basis for saying that God literally punished Jesus.

That idea is further undermined by the fact that the text explicitly states it was on account of our sins—not the Servant’s—that these things happened.

If God allows something bad to happened to one person despite his innocence, that’s an indicator that the innocent person was not being punished in any literal sense of the word.

What about the “chastisement” the Servant receives? The Hebrew word used here, musar, means “discipline,” “chastening,” or “correction,” but the context again indicates a non-literal use. The fact Jesus was innocent meant he wasn’t being disciplined, chastened, or corrected in any literal sense.

Moving forward in the text, verse 6 says that God “laid on him the iniquity of us all.” This is more of the same non-literal language depicting Jesus as carrying our sins as if they were physical objects.

Verse 7 says “he was oppressed, and he was afflicted,” but—again—it was the Romans that literally did these things. God only allowed them as part of his plan.

Verse 8 says he was “cut off out of the land of the living” and “stricken”—things that were again literally accomplished by the Romans—with the prophet noting the reason God allowed them was as part of his plan for dealing with “the transgression of my people.”

Finally, verses 9 and 10 note the ironic contrast:

Although he had done no violence, and there was no deceit in his mouth.
Yet it was the will of the Lord to bruise him; he has put him to grief.

The second part of this might be more literally translated that it was God’s will to “crush” him and that he has “made him sick.” If the latter translation is correct (and there is doubt about this), then it would not apply to Jesus in a literal way, because we have no indication he was sick.

However that may be, any literal bruising/crushing that was done to Jesus was performed by the Romans, with God only allowing it as part of his plan.

And significantly, we again have an affirmation of the Servant’s innocence paired with a statement about what God “did” to the Servant. Taking these statements together, the idea of punishment in the literal sense is thereby undermined.

I therefore conclude that the Suffering Servant passage does not give us a basis for saying that God literally punished Jesus on the Cross.

It may use language that—taken out of its historical and literary context—could suggest this, but the only literal injuries that were done to Jesus were performed by the Romans, not God, and the text goes out of its way to stress the innocence of the Servant and, by extension, Jesus.

We thus don’t have in this passage a solid basis for the idea of penal substitution—as opposed to other substitutionary theories of the atonement.

What Does “Atonement” Mean—And How Did Jesus Do It?

Most basic theological terms come from Greek or Latin, but one sprang from English: atonement.

Here, the –ment suffix is used to refer to the result of something, like amazement is the result of something that amazes. Atonement, therefore, is the result of an action that atones.

So where does “atone” come from? It’s a contraction of the phrase “at one.” By making atonement for mankind, Jesus made it so that God and man are no longer separated. They are now “at one”—or reconciled with each other.

If we were to pick a contemporary word that expresses the same idea as atonement, the word reconciliation would be a good choice.

 

How Did Jesus Atone for Us?

Scripture uses a number of images to explain what Jesus did for us. This is not surprising. Given the infinite richness of the divine mystery, it would be surprising if a single image could fully convey what he did on our behalf.

For example, one image that Jesus himself uses is that of a ransom. He states that he came “to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45).

However, the primary image that the New Testament uses is sacrifice: Jesus’ death on the Cross served as a sacrifice to reconcile us with God.

Thus Paul states that “Christ, our paschal Lamb, has been sacrificed” (1 Cor. 5:7), and Hebrew says that “when Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God” (Heb. 10:12).

Biblically, the primary theory of the atonement is one of sacrifice.

However, precisely because Christ’s death on the Cross did not need to be repeated, Christians discontinued the practice of animal sacrifices, which were otherwise practiced everywhere among Jews and pagans.

A consequence of this was that Christians began to lose an intuitive understanding of animal sacrifices, and so they began to seek other ways of explaining what Jesus did for us.

Over the centuries, many alternative “theories of the atonement” have been proposed, and many of them contain elements of truth. Just as the New Testament uses different images to convey what Jesus did, different theories of the atonement can often be understood in harmony with each other.

 

Christ Our Substitute

Some theories of the atonement involve the concept of substitution. It is the idea that, by dying on the Cross, Jesus in some sense substituted for us: He did something we otherwise would have had to do for ourselves (and were incapable of doing).

Sometimes, the substitution idea is referred to using the term vicarious, which means the same thing. A vicar (Latin, vicarius) is a substitute.

The question is in what way did Jesus substitute for us?

One theory, proposed by St. Anselm of Canterbury, is that he satisfied God’s justice by restoring the honor of God, which man has offended by sin.

Since on this view Christ satisfied God on our behalf (i.e., vicariously), theories of this nature are sometimes called vicarious satisfaction theories.

 

A Problem Case?

Not all theories of the atonement are free from problems. One theory that has recently come in for criticism is known as penal substitution. This idea was proposed by John Calvin, and the theory has been common in Calvinist circles.

Penal substitution can be conceived of as one type of vicarious satisfaction theory, but it needs to be distinguished from the others.

What makes it distinct is that it sees Christ as satisfying God by being punished on our behalf.

At least if we take the idea of punishment literally, penal substitution seems to propose an injustice on God’s part.

One cannot justly punish an innocent person, and since Jesus was an innocent—for “he committed no sin; no guile was found on his lips” (1 Peter 2:22)—God could not justly punish him.

I don’t have a document of the Church’s Magisterium that weighs in on this idea one way or another, but along with many others I find the argument against penal substitution—understood literally—to be convincing.

 

Non-Literal Language

Although I don’t see how God could literally punish Jesus on the Cross, this doesn’t mean one could never use punishment language in connection with the atonement.

There’s a great deal of flexibility in language, and metaphor abounds when we are dealing with spiritual realities, including the atonement.

Thus when Jesus describes what he did for us as a “ransom” (Greek, lutron = “price of release,” “ransom payment”), he didn’t mean that he literally was going to offer a sum of money on our behalf. He’s using a metaphor, as is evident from the fact that he says he will “give his life as a ransom for many.”

Since Christ suffered on our behalf, and punishment involves suffering, I think it is possible to use punishment language in connection with the Cross—as long as one does not literally understand God to be committing the unjust act of punishing the all-innocent Jesus.

In that case, the punishment language would have to be understood in a non-literal or accommodated way.

Thus Aquinas acknowledges that one can speak of a person voluntarily taking on the “punishment” of another, as when one voluntarily pays a fine on someone’s behalf, but this is only punishment in a qualified sense.

It isn’t punishment in the full, normal sense because the person who pays the fine is innocent, and so paying the fine voluntarily doesn’t have a penal character:

If we speak of that satisfactory punishment, which one takes upon oneself voluntarily, one may bear another’s punishment, in so far as they are, in some way, one, as stated above (Article 7). If, however, we speak of punishment inflicted on account of sin, inasmuch as it is penal, then each one is punished for his own sin only, because the sinful act is something personal (ST I-II:87:8).

 

Non-Literal Punishment Language in the Bible

It is important to note that punishment language is sometimes used in non-literal or accommodated ways, because Scripture sometimes does so. Consider this passage:

The Lord is slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, forgiving iniquity and transgression, but he will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of fathers upon children, upon the third and upon the fourth generation (Num. 14:18; cf. Exod. 20:5, 34:6-7, Deut. 5:9; Jer. 32:18).

Taken without any qualification, this could be understood to mean that God punishes the descendants of sinners down to the third and fourth generation, even if they are innocents.

That would be unjust, and Ezekiel has an extended discussion in which he points out that God will not punish children for what their fathers have done (Ezek. 18:1-30), saying:

The son shall not suffer for the iniquity of the father, nor the father suffer for the iniquity of the son; the righteousness of the righteous shall be upon himself, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon himself (Ezek. 18:20).

Passages that seem to suggest otherwise must therefore be understood in a different sense.

A clue to that sense is found in Exodus 20:5 and Deuteronomy 5:9, which state that God will visit “the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me”—i.e., the children will be punished if they follow in the footsteps of their fathers in opposing God, but otherwise they will not.

Any negative consequences children experience because of the actions of their parents will thus not have the character of punishment—unless the children reaffirm and repeat the sins of their ancestors.

Thus the Israelites whose sin of idolatry led to the Babylonian Exile experienced the Exile as a punishment in the proper sense. However, the righteous of Israel who were taken into Exile, as well as innocent children born in Exile, were not being punished for the sins of others, though they did experience negative consequences as a result of others’ actions.

What can we learn about divine punishment and the atonement Jesus made for us? That will be the subject of our next post.

The Original Suffering Servant

Isaiah 52 and 53 famously describe a mysterious figure that scholars have dubbed the “Suffering Servant.”

The parallels between the Servant and Jesus are striking, and the New Testament authors see Jesus as fulfilling the role of the Suffering Servant—as have Christians ever since.

The Suffering Servant passage is a case of genuine messianic prophecy. However, prophecy often works on more than one level.

As we covered in a previous post, various prophecies have a fulfillment in the Old Testament itself, and then a second, additional fulfillment in Jesus.

Often the first fulfillment is found in the original, literal sense of the text, and the fulfillment in Christ belongs to its greater, spiritual sense.

This raises a question: Did the Suffering Servant passage have a fulfillment in the Old Testament era? Was there an original Suffering Servant who foreshadowed Jesus? If so, who was this Servant?

Let’s take a look at Isaiah 52 and 53 and see what they might reveal . . .

 

The Suffering Servant in Context

Much of the book of Isaiah deals with the Babylonian Exile, and Isaiah 52 begins with a word of encouragement for the Jewish captives who are experiencing the Exile.

This word is initially addressed to Jerusalem itself, which is captive and filled with the uncircumcised and the unclean. God indicates that this situation will end (Isa. 52:1-2). He will turn again to his people and deliver them (Isa. 52:6).

We then read the famous statement, “How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him who brings good tidings” (Isa. 52:7). In its original context, this statement has to do with the end of the Babylonian Exile.

The Lord is thus returning to Zion, and “the waste places of Jerusalem” are to rejoice “for the Lord has comforted his people, he has redeemed Jerusalem. The Lord has bared his holy arm before the eyes of all the nations” that have oppressed them (Isa. 52:7-10).

Consequently, the Jewish captives in Babylon are told, “Depart, depart, go out from there, touch no unclean thing; go out from the midst of her, purify yourselves, you who bear the vessels of the Lord. . . . for the Lord will go before you, and the God of Israel will be your rear guard” (Isa. 52:11-12).

 

“Behold, My Servant”

At this point the Servant enters the narrative, and we are told, “Behold, my servant shall prosper, he shall be exalted and lifted up, and shall be very high” (Isa. 52:13).

In our previous post, we looked at the different “servants” of the Lord identified in Isaiah.

In the present context, at the end of the Babylonian Exile, who is the Servant?

Various proposals have been made, including individuals such as:

  • Isaiah himself, or the author of this section of Isaiah (sometimes called Deutero-Isaiah)—note that Isaiah is called God’s servant in Isaiah 20:2.
  • One of the rulers who supported the rebuilding of Jerusalem and its temple (Cyrus, Darius, or Artaxerxes)—note that Cyrus is called God’s “shepherd” in Isaiah 44:28 and his “anointed” or “messiah” in Isaiah 45:1.
  • The post-Exilic Jewish governor Zerubbabel
  • Another significant individual from this period

These interpretations are possible, but a view that deserves special consideration is that the entire nation of Israel may be the Servant here:

  • Isaiah explicitly identifies Israel as God’s servant at least eight times. A typical example is in Isaiah 41:8, which speaks of “you, Israel, my servant, Jacob, whom I have chosen.”
  • Isaiah has identified Israel as God’s servant quite recently, throughout chapters 41-49 (cf. 41:8-9, 44:1-2, 21 [2 references], 45:4, 48:20, and 49:3).
  • The subject under discussion in chapter 52 is the return of Israel to its land.
  • It is common in the Old Testament for an entire nation to be spoken of as if it is a single man, based on the way patriarchs represented an entire people.

This is also a common interpretation of the Servant in Jewish circles.

Therefore, let’s explore the text on the theory that its literal sense originally envisioned the Servant as Israel and then see what we can make of it.

 

God Testifies to the Suffering Servant

Isaiah 52:13-15, God himself speaks concerning the Servant. In v. 13, he states that the servant “shall prosper” and “be exalted and lifted up” and “shall be very high.” This would correspond to the much improved state of God’s people as he joyously restores them to their land to rebuild Jerusalem and its temple.

In verse 14, we have a description of the way in which the Servant formerly appeared: “many were astonished at him—his appearance was so marred, beyond human semblance, and his form beyond that of the sons of men.” This would correspond to the disfigured state of God’s people in exile, after being conquered by their enemies.

But now in verse 15 the nation’s miraculous restoration will provoke a different kind of amazement, so the Servant shall “startle many nations; kings shall shut their mouths because of him.” The nations have not have had the benefit of Isaiah’s prophecies, so “that which has not been told them they shall see, and that which they have not heard they shall understand” as God’s people are brought back to their land.

 

Others Begin to Speak

In Isaiah 53:1, the speaker shifts from God to a group of people, who are clearly here on earth. They are likely to be identified either as (a) God’s people, who have heard the prophecies of Isaiah, or (b) the nations, who are only just now learning of them as the nation is restored. They ask:

Who has believed what we have heard?
And to whom has the arm of the LORD been revealed? (v. 1)

Isaiah 52:10 said that the arm of the Lord had been revealed “before the eyes of all the nations,” suggesting that they are the same group that “has believed what we have heard”—in other words, the Gentiles, who have been astonished by the miraculous fall and restoration of God’s people, though they have learned about God’s plan only now (Isa. 52: 15).

 

The Speakers Amazed at the Suffering Servant

The resulting astonishment focuses on the figure of the Servant. The background for the astonishment is provided in verses 2 and 3.

As a minor nation among the great powers of the Ancient Near East, Israel would have seen to have grown up before God “like a young plant, and like a root out of dry ground,” and from their perspective, Israel would have had “no form or comeliness that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him” (Isa. 53:2).

Consequently, Israel “was despised and rejected” by its neighbors. Israel was “a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief; and as one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not” (Isa. 53:3).

But now, beginning in verse 4, comes the astonishing part. In the humiliation of his people’s defeat and Exile, God has done something extraordinary: He has treated Israel as a sin offering, for “Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows.” Yet that is not how it initially appeared to the Gentiles, for “we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted” (Isa. 53:4).

The reality, however, was different: Israel “was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that made us whole, and with his stripes we are healed” (Isa. 53:5).

The Gentiles then acknowledge their guilt, for “all we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way,” but the Lord has made atonement for them using his people as a sin offering, for “the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all” (Isa. 53:6).

As a minor power in the Ancient Near East, God’s people were no match for the greater nations they faced. Their powerlessness before them is compared to the powerlessness of a sheep: “like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is dumb,” Israel “opened not his mouth” (Isa. 53:7).

Consequently, by the “oppression and judgment” of the Gentiles, Israel “was taken away” from his land, resulting in a metaphorical death as a people, for in the Exile, Israel “was cut off out of the land of the living” where God had planted them.

In this experience Israel was “stricken for the transgressions of my people” (Isa. 53:8). Although the phrase “my people” is often used by God, the speaker here is a chorus of Gentiles, and so it would mean that Israel suffered—in keeping with its role as a sin offering—for the sins of the Gentiles.

Having been taken from the Promised Land—the land of the living—Israel is buried in Exile, among the Gentiles, so that “they made his grave with the wicked,” and because of the Gentiles’ rich, opulent rulers, Israel was “with a rich man in his death.”

This experience occurred despite the fact that to the Gentiles Israel “had done no violence, and there was no deceit in his mouth” toward them (Isa. 53:9). They were the aggressors toward God’s people, not the reverse.

All this happened because “it was the will of the Lord to bruise him” and “he has put him to grief” so that he becomes “an offering for sin.”

Yet now that the time of Israel’s restoration has come, “he shall see his offspring, he shall prolong his days; the will of the Lord shall prosper in his hand” (Isa. 53:10). God’s people can thus look forward to new generations being born that will have long and prosperous days.

 

God Has the Final Word

The Lord begins speaking again by verse 11. As a result of his restoration, Israel “shall see the fruit of the travail of his soul and be satisfied” (Isa. 53:11a)

Further, Israel’s knowledge of the Lord and his righteous ways will now benefit the Gentiles with whom they have come in contact, for “by his knowledge shall the righteous one, my servant, make many to be accounted righteous.”

As Isaiah elsewhere notes, the return from Exile would bring many Gentiles who would come to worship the Lord and be “his servants” (Isa. 56:6).

Thus by the experience of Exile and the consequent enlightening of the Gentiles, Israel would “bear their iniquities” (Isa. 53:11b). Consequently, God declares that in restoring Israel:

I will divide him a portion with the great, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong;
because he poured out his soul to death, and was numbered with the transgressors;
yet he bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors (Isa. 53:12).

 

Evaluating This Interpretation

How well does this interpretation of Isaiah 52 and 53 hold up?

It’s striking that the passage would speak of Israel and its sufferings as involving a sin offering on behalf of the nations. This type of language is not used elsewhere in the Old Testament, either for Israel or others, which is one of the things that makes it such a striking case of messianic prophecy.

However, the passage also contains points that in their literal sense do not point directly to Jesus. The reference to the Servant seeing “his offspring” fits the restored Israel well, for there would be new generations born in the land. However, Jesus did not literally have offspring (children), and so this element must be spiritualized when the passage is applied to him.

If we focus on the sin offering aspect of the text, it is clear that God did not use Israel as a sin offering the fashion he did Jesus, who dealt with sin in the full and final way. However, we can see how God used Israel and its sufferings to bring spiritual benefits to the Gentiles with whom the Exile brought it into contact.

This is seen in the reference to the Servant’s knowledge of the Lord and his will, so that “by his knowledge shall the righteous one, my servant, make many to be accounted righteous.”

The result of this is then seen in Isaiah’s references to Gentiles coming to worship the God of Israel, keeping his sabbath, etc. (Isa. 56:6)—a phenomenon we know happened in the pre-Christian period. This is why Isaiah understands the restored temple as “a house of prayer for all the nations” (Isa. 56:7), and it is why the temple had an outer court—known as the Court of the Gentiles—that was specifically designated as a place for Gentiles to pray.

We also see the pattern in the Bible of God treating some individuals more kindly than he otherwise would because of a person who pleased him. Thus God treats Solomon more kindly than Solomon’s sins deserved because David had pleased him (1 Kings 11:31-32). Similarly, in the New Testament, St. Paul states that even Jews who opposed the gospel and became “enemies of God” are nevertheless beloved on account of the patriarchs, who had pleased God (Rom. 11:28).

We thus may understand that God would treat Gentiles more gently than their sins otherwise deserved for the sake of Israel, or at least the righteous of Israel, thus allowing them to be depicted metaphorically as a sin offering.

This metaphor may ultimately rest in the promise given to Abraham that he would become a blessing to all nations (Gen. 12:3; cf. Gal. 3:8).

These same themes would then be fulfilled in an even greater way through Jesus.

 

Individualistic Interpretations?

We have just explored Isaiah 52 and 53 in light of the idea that the literal sense of the text envisioned Israel as the original Servant of the Lord. We thus looked at a corporate interpretation, with the whole nation pictured as a single Servant, as in other passages of Isaiah.

However, individualistic interpretations are also possible. In other words, the literal sense of the text might have envisioned a single person—such as the prophet himself, one of the Gentile rulers, or the Jewish governor Zerubbabel—as the Servant.

In that case, the relevant passages would deal not with the travails of the whole nation but of the individual in question and the role his sufferings played in the restoration of God’s people to their land (the subject introduced in chapter 52).

Some of the details of the interpretation would change: Instead of it being Gentile speakers throughout the amazement section, the speakers might include Jews, and it might be their sins that the Servant metaphorically bore.

However, the fundamental message would remain the same: God used the sufferings of the Servant to bring about benefits, including spiritual benefits, for others, and the sufferings of the Servant were so extreme that he experienced a metaphorical death.

However, eventually he would be restored by the Lord so he could “see his offspring” and “prolong his days” (Isa. 53:10), so he could “see the fruit of the travail of his soul and be satisfied” (Isa. 53:11), and so he could receive “a portion with the great” and “divide the spoil with the strong” (Isa. 53:12).

In coming posts, we will look at how the Suffering Servant passage relates more specifically to Christ and the atonement he performed on the Cross.

The Servant(s) of God in Isaiah

The New Testament quotes three Old Testament books more than any others: Deuteronomy, the Psalms, and Isaiah.

The latter is quoted, in particular, because it contains messianic prophecies that point to Jesus, and the New Testament authors record how he fulfilled them.

As Christians, we are so familiar with these passages and how the New Testament uses them that we assume they are only about Jesus:

  • “Behold a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son and his name shall be called Emmanuel” (Isa. 7:14)? That’s Jesus.
  • “For to us a child is born, to us a son is given; and the government will be upon his shoulder, and his name will be called ‘Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace’” (Isa. 9:6)? Definitely Jesus.
  • “He was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that made us whole, and with his stripes we are healed” (Isa. 53:5). Jesus again.

All of these are messianic prophecies, and Jesus did fulfill them.

But the biblical concept of fulfillment is richer than we sometimes imagine.

 

Prophecy in the Bible

The biblical authors recognized Scripture as operating on multiple levels. For example, Matthew interprets the Holy Family’s flight to and return from Egypt as a fulfillment of the prophetic statement, “Out of Egypt I have called my son.”

But in its original context, it is obvious the “son” of God being discussed is Israel, for the full verse reads: “When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt, I called my son” (Hos. 11:1).

Matthew understood this. He had read the first half of the verse and knew that, on the primary, literal level, the statement applied to the nation of Israel. But he recognized that on another level it applied to Christ as the divine Son who recapitulates and fulfills the aspirations of Israel.

In the same way, it is obvious in Isaiah that on the primary, literal level the prophecy of Immanuel applied to the time of King Ahaz (732-716 B.C.). At this point, Syria had forged a military alliance with the northern kingdom of Israel that threatened to conquer Jerusalem (Isa. 7:1-2). God sent Isaiah to reassure Ahaz the alliance would not succeed (Isa. 7:3-9) and told him to name a sign that God would give him as proof (Isa. 7:10-11).

Ahaz refused to name a sign (Isa. 7:12), so God declared one: “Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, a young woman shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel. . . . For before the child knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good, the land before whose two kings you are in dread will be deserted” (Isa. 7:14-16).

For this sign to be meaningful to Ahaz, it would have to be fulfilled in his own day—indeed, very quickly. It therefore points, on the primary, literal level, to a child conceived at that time (perhaps Ahaz’s son, the future King Hezekiah).

Like the other New Testament authors, Matthew recognized the biblical text as having multiple dimensions, so the prophecy was not only fulfilled in Ahaz’s day but also pointed to Christ as “Immanuel” (Hebrew, “God with us”).

 

The Literal and Spiritual Senses of the Text

In the Christian age, a way of classifying the different levels on which Scripture works was developed. The Catechism of the Catholic Church explains:

According to an ancient tradition, one can distinguish between two senses of Scripture: the literal and the spiritual, the latter being subdivided into the allegorical, moral, and anagogical senses. The profound concordance of the four senses guarantees all its richness to the living reading of Scripture in the Church (CCC 115).

It goes on to explain the literal sense:

The literal sense is the meaning conveyed by the words of Scripture and discovered by exegesis, following the rules of sound interpretation: “All other senses of Sacred Scripture are based on the literal” (Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I:1:10 ad 1) (CCC 116).

Because the literal sense is the foundation of all the other senses, we need to establish it before looking at additional meanings found within the spiritual sense of the text.

The rules of exegesis (interpretation) require us to establish the literal sense by asking what a text meant in its original context—what the biblical author was trying to communicate to his audience.

Thus we discover that, in Hosea 11:1, the son of God in the literal sense of the passage was Israel, but the spiritual sense of the text includes Jesus as the ultimate Son of God.

Similarly, we discover that in Isaiah 7:14, the son to be named Immanuel was, in the literal sense of the text, a child born in Ahaz’s day, but the spiritual sense includes a reference to Jesus as the greater Immanuel or “God with us.”

 

Isaiah 53

A number of New Testament passages focus on Isaiah 53, which describes a figure known as the Servant of the Lord (or, in some scholarly publications, the Servant of Yahweh).

The identity of this figure is not immediately obvious from reading the text of Isaiah 53, as the encounter that Philip had with the Ethiopian eunuch makes clear:

Philip ran to him, and heard him reading Isaiah the prophet, and asked, “Do you understand what you are reading?” And he said, “How can I, unless someone guides me?” And he invited Philip to come up and sit with him. Now the passage of the scripture which he was reading was this:

“As a sheep led to the slaughter or a lamb before its shearer is dumb, so he opens not his mouth.

“In his humiliation justice was denied him. Who can describe his generation? For his life is taken up from the earth” [cf. Isa. 53:7-8].

And the eunuch said to Philip, “About whom, pray, does the prophet say this, about himself or about someone else?”

Then Philip opened his mouth, and beginning with this scripture he told him the good news of Jesus (Acts 8:29-35).

Philip thus correctly identified this text points to Jesus, at least in its spiritual sense. But for a complete understanding of it, we still need to ask what its literal sense was and whether it may have pointed to someone or something in addition to Jesus.

 

Servants in Isaiah

The Hebrew word for “servant” used in the key passages of Isaiah is ‘ebed. This word appears 40 times in the book, in 36 verses.

In some cases, it refers to the servants of human beings:

  • Isa. 14:2 refers to unnamed foreigners who will become the servants of Israel.
  • Isa. 24:2 refers to the slaves of human masters.
  • Isa. 36:9 and 37:24 refer to servants/subjects of the king of Assyria
  • Isa. 36:11 has several figures referring to themselves politely as “your servants” when talking with an Assyrian official
  • Isa. 37:5 refers to the servants/subjects of King Hezekiah of Judah
  • Isa. 49:7 refers to an unnamed, despised figure who is “the servant of rulers”—i.e., a subject of foreign leaders

This last servant is also likely one of the figures described as a “servant” of the Lord, which brings us to the category we are primarily interested in: those who serve God.

Many of the uses of ‘ebed in Isaiah are in the plural and refer to God’s servants collectively. This theme emerges in chapter 54 and is especially prominent in the final four chapters of the book:

  • In such passages, the servants of God seem to refer to the righteous of Israel (Isa. 54:17, 65:8, 13-15, 66:14).
  • They are expressly identified with “the tribes of your heritage” in Isa. 63:17, and with descendants of Jacob and Judah inIsa. 65:9.
  • However, Isa. 56:6 makes it clear that they also can include foreigners who come to worship God and thus become “his servants.”

We thus see that in Isaiah God actually has many servants.

 

Individual Servants

Not all uses of ‘ebed are in the plural, and there remain 22 uses which speak of individual servants of the Lord. Four of them are named:

  • The first to be named is Isaiah himself. Isa. 20:3 refers to “my servant Isaiah.”
  • The second is Eliakim son of Hilkiah (Isa. 22:20), who was a man that God called to be the chief steward of the house of David.
  • The third is David himself (Isa. 37:35).
  • And the fourth is the corporate figure of the nation of Israel/Jacob, who is named as God’s servant in multiple passages. A typical example is Isa. 41:8, which speaks of “you, Israel, my servant, Jacob, whom I have chosen” (cf. Isa. 41:9, 44:1-2, 21 [2 references], 45:4, 48:20, and 49:3).

That leaves us still to explain 10 uses of ‘ebed. We won’t here propose definitite identifications for these passages, but we can say something about how their literal sense can be plausibly understood.

 

The Priority of Israel

Jewish interpreters tend to see the Servant of the Lord as Israel, and there are two reasons that suggest this should be our starting point in seeking to establish the literal sense of the text:

  1. Three of the four named servants are only given a single, explicit mention each, whereas Israel is named as servant multiple times.
  2. The three named servants other than Israel are all mentioned in the first part of the book, while Israel’s mentions are in the latter part, which is the location of the passages that remain to be explained (Isa. 42:1, 19 [2 references], 43:10, 44:26, 49:5-6, 50:10, 52:13, 53:11).

The logical procedure is thus to examine the remaining uses to see whether they could plausibly describe Israel or whether they more likely refer to something or someone else.

 

Servants Beside Israel?

It appears that at least some of the passages refer to a servant other than Israel. With one exception, all of the Hebrew manuscripts of Isaiah 49:3 identify Israel as the servant of that verse, but just a few verses later we seem to be reading about a different servant:

And now the Lord says, who formed me from the womb to be his servant,
to bring Jacob back to him, and that Israel might be gathered to him,
for I am honored in the eyes of the Lord, and my God has become my strength—

he says: “It is too light a thing that you should be my servant
to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to restore the preserved of Israel;
I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth” (Isa. 49:5-6).

If the identification of Israel as the servant of verse 3 was in the original Hebrew text (something some scholars have disputed), then it seems that we are reading about a different servant in verses 5 and 6, since this servant has a mission to Jacob/Israel.

Who might this be? A plausible answer is Isaiah himself. He has already been named as a servant of the Lord in 20:3, and he has the prophet’s mission of calling God’s people “back to him” that they may be “gathered to him” so that God might “raise up” his people and “restore the preserved of Israel.”

If this understanding is correct, then the Ethiopian eunuch’s guess that the prophet was speaking of himself in Isaiah 53 might be correct—in the literal sense of the text, though a reference to Jesus is clearly to be found in its spiritual sense.

Isaiah, however, is not the only other possibility for an individual servant in the remaining passages. One that is sometimes proposed is Cyrus the Persian, who is described in Isa. 45:1 not with the term “servant” (‘ebed) but using the parallel term “anointed” (mashiakh or “messiah”).

Anyone anointed by the Lord is functioning as his servant toward the purpose for which he was anointed, and Cyrus was given a mission of restoring Israel and bringing them back both to their land and their God by allowing them to return and rebuild the Jerusalem temple.

God also describes Cyrus in Isaiah 44:28 as “my shepherd,” again indicating he is serving God.

Other figures—such as Cyrus’s successor Darius or the returning Jewish governor Zerubbabel—have also been proposed as God’s servant in various passages. However, these rest on more speculative reconstructions of historical circumstances, since these figures are not named in the book.

 

Conclusion

From what we have seen, there are multiple servants of the Lord described in the literal sense of the book of Isaiah—some of whom are identified by name.

In light of this, we need to approach the servant texts and ask the standard question for determining the literal sense of a passage: What would this have meant in its original context? How would the author and his audience have understood it?

After determining this to the best of our ability, we will be in a better position to explore the spiritual sense of the text, including the applications it may have to Jesus.

Sexualizing the Eucharist?

Priest Holding Communion Wafer --- Image by © Royalty-Free/Corbis

A reader writes:

I am Orthodox and have been going to a Western Rite parish. But my son and I are pretty convinced about the role of the successor of St. Peter, so we’ve been attending Catholic Mass early in the morning before work and last night we went to an RCIA class.

The priest is a nice guy, but he said that receiving the Eucharist is like God making love to us. . . . What???

So . . . the Father likes to make love to his children? Is this the type of thinking that has led to pedophilia and rape among the ranks of the clergy?

Have you ever heard this before about the Eucharist? Can you help?

Thank you very much for writing! I think I can be of assistance.

I have heard of this concept before. Some have used language that employs a sexual metaphor for the Eucharist, though I am unaware of any document of the Church’s Magisterium that does so.

It sounds like, in this case, the concept was explained in a particularly unfortunate way that omitted important elements needed to properly understand the idea.

For those who use the metaphor, it is not meant to be homosexual in nature.

 

Christ and His Bride, the Church

Instead, the concept is based on the New Testament’s bridal imagery regarding Christ and his Church. This imagery is found in a number of New Testament books, and it is used in a particularly striking way in Ephesians, where St. Paul writes:

For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior.  As the church is subject to Christ, so let wives also be subject in everything to their husbands.

Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish.

Even so husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no man ever hates his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, as Christ does the church, because we are members of his body.

“For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.”

This is a great mystery, and I mean in reference to Christ and the church (Eph. 5:25-32).

In this imagery, Christ is—naturally—seen as masculine and the Church as feminine.

As members of Christ’s Church, individual Christians can be seen as functioning in a feminine, receptive role with respect to Christ and his masculine, active role.

The same principle can be used to envision every creature as functioning in a feminine, receptive role with respect to God our Creator and his masculine, active role.

This mode of thought is based on the fact that God (for all creatures) and Christ (for all Christians) displays masculine qualities by protecting, providing, and ruling, while we display the corresponding feminine qualities with respect to them.

The imagery is thus intrinsically heterosexual, regardless of the physical gender of an individual creature or Christian.

Concerning Christ and his bride, the Church, the question then arises whether there is a particular moment that could be considered analogous to the marital act.

 

New Birth in the New Testament

The answer may be surprising. St. Peter tells his readers:

You have been born anew, not of perishable seed but of imperishable, through the living and abiding word of God (1 Peter 1:23).

This relies on the ancient way of speaking in which a husband’s “seed” (Greek, spora or sperma—from which we get the obvious corresponding English word) is implanted in the wife like a seed in a field to produce offspring.

Peter says we as Christians have been born anew not by “perishable/corruptible” (Greek, phthartos) seed—i.e., not through corruptible human reproduction—but by “imperishable/incorruptible” seed, which he identifies as “the living and abiding word of God.”

The word which converts believers to Christianity is thus envisioned as God’s imperishable seed which brings to birth new children for God.

The thought is paralleled in John’s Gospel, where we read:

To all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God; who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God (John 1:12-13).

Here again we have the Christian new birth compared to and contrasted with human sexual reproduction (“not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man”; other translations: “nor of the will of a husband”) and associated instead with God’s action.

On this passage, British scholar George R. Beasley-Murray observes:

The successive phrases contrast birth from God with human begetting, and emphasize the inability of men and women to reproduce it. The plural haimata (commonly = “drops of blood”) alludes to the blood of the parents who beget and give birth; the “will of the flesh” denotes sexual desire; the will of “a male” (andros) has in view the initiative generally ascribed to the male in sexual intercourse (Word Biblical Commentary on John 1:13).

Although Peter and John express it in different ways, both invoke human sexual reproduction in comparison with Christian new birth.

Both state that spiritual birth is not by human reproductive means, and Peter in particular compares the male seed to the word of God that brings people to conversion, allowing the new birth itself to take place in the sacrament of baptism (cf. 1 Peter 3:21, John 3:3-8).

The New Testament thus employs a sexual comparison for the beginning of the Christian life and the new birth it entails.

 

What About the Eucharist?

If it’s possible to employ a sexual metaphor for the beginning of the Christian life, is there an aspect of ongoing Christian life where one can be employed?

Advocates of a sexual understanding of the Eucharist propose that there is: Just as the marital act is an ongoing, intimate, lifegiving exchange between husband and wife, so the Eucharist is an ongoing, intimate, and (spiritually) lifegiving exchange between Christ and the members of his Church.

According to this view, Christ performs the masculine role by giving himself to us in the Eucharist, and we perform the feminine role by receiving him in the Eucharist.

So that’s the basis of the view.

Is it possible to use a metaphor like this? Well, it’s possible in the sense that you can always draw an analogy between two things as long as they have points of similarity of some kind.

Does that mean this metaphor will always be helpful? No. Every analogy has its limits, because two things are never exactly the same.

In particular, when we take the male/female image of Christ and his Church and try to cash it out in terms of Christ and the individual Christian, problems can ensue, for the obvious reason that not every individual Christian is female.

To put it forthrightly: I am a man, and I don’t find it helpful in receiving Communion to think, “Something like a sexual act is taking place right now with respect to me.”

Ugh!

I can imagine many women not finding it helpful at that moment, either, but in the case of a man it can be especially unhelpful, for exactly the reason that the reader pointed out when he first heard the idea.

So while one can make an analogy between any two things that have points of similarity, I personally don’t find this a helpful analogy, and I don’t employ it. It has too much potential to lead to confusion or even scandal, especially if explained only briefly.

I hope this helps!

Is It Okay to Listen to Non-Religious Music?

music guitarA reader writes:

Despite being a Protestant, I enjoy reading your blog. Since I see that you’ve answered other people’s questions before, I thought I’d ask you a question about a problem I’m having.

In my community, people often say that it’s wrong to listen to rock music and to secular music in general.

In addition to that, when I told an older lady I sometimes listen to Asian music (in particular Japanese rock), she told me to avoid all that “pagan stuff.” I didn’t know what to say to her.

Can you please tell me your opinion on this (perhaps giving some Biblical basis to them, so that they won’t be seen just as a Catholic opinion)?

I also wanted to ask you to also share your opinion, from a moral point of view, on EDM (Electronic Dance Music) and metal music

I’d appreciate it if you could write a public blog entry, so that I could share a link to that, instead of showing a private email.

No problem!

First, we need to establish a number of principles.

 

Devoting Attention to Things Other Than God

God gave mankind the gift of intelligence and skills so that we could glorify him by being creative. However, this does not mean that he wants us to be explicitly religious in every creative thing we do.

There are many situations in life where our human nature requires us not to explicitly think about God every moment.

It is enough that we orient our lives toward God in a general way, seeking to please him in whatever we do, even in those moments where we must devote attention to things other than him. St. Paul speaks of this general orientation of our lives to God when he writes:

Whatever your task, work heartily, as serving the Lord and not men (Col. 3:23).

When we are at work we must devote attention to our work duties rather than be thinking about God every second. When we are with family and friends we must think about them and their needs. Even when we are alone, we have to devote time and attention to our own needs.

While God gave us the ability to multi-task to a degree, it is a limited one, and human nature does not allow us to be thinking about God every single moment of our lives. Since God gave us our nature, this reveals that it is part of God’s plan for us to think about other things also.

Therefore, it is part of his plan for us to periodically re-orient ourselves and our thoughts toward him, asking him to guide and bless us and receive to his glory the work that we do, even when our attention is directed to it rather than to him explicitly.

 

Glorifying God Through Our Cultural Creations

All creation glorifies God by displaying aspects of his greatness. This includes the things humans make as part of culture.

A key aspect of culture is language, and we see how the gift of language glorifies God, even when it is directed to non-religious matters. For example, in Genesis we read:

So out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name (Gen. 2:19).

Adam’s act of naming the animals brings glory to the Lord by using the God-given gift of language to produce words naming the animals.

Other applications of language—like creating speeches, stories, poems, and lyrics—also glorify God.

The same is true when our skills are used to produce other works of culture, such as music, drawings, paintings, sculptures, and other works of art.

 

Misusing God’s Gifts

This is not to say that we can’t misuse God’s gifts. Of course we can. People misuse the skills God has given them in all kinds of ways.

Thus St. Paul writes:

But now put them all away: anger, wrath, malice, slander, and foul talk from your mouth (Col. 3:8).

Note the misuse of language in several of St. Paul’s examples.

The reality of human sinfulness means that sometimes people do create works of art and literature that are marred by sin and that lead people toward sin.

 

Even Non-Christians Have Contributions to Make

Just because a work of art was not written by a Christian does not mean that it doesn’t have admirable qualities or that we as Christians can’t make use of it.

Several times in the New Testament, St. Paul quotes from pre-Christian Greek authors who wrote works of poetry that contained insights he found useful.

Thus when he was before the Areopagus in Athens, he said:

Yet [God] is not far from each one of us, for

“In him we live and move and have our being”;

as even some of your poets have said,

“For we are indeed his offspring” (Acts 17:27-28).

The first quotation (“In him we live and move and have our being”) is from the Greek philosopher-poet Epimenides, and the second (“For we are indeed his offspring”) is from the poet Aratus.

Similarly, he writes the Corinthians:

Do not be deceived:

“Bad company ruins good morals.”

The quotation “Bad company ruins good morals” is from the comic playwright Menander.

Bear in mind that all of these men were pre-Christian pagans, yet Paul did not balk at using elements from their writings.

 

Sorting the Good from the Bad

Since Paul was aware of these quotations, he was obviously familiar with these pagan authors’ writings. They were part of his cultural education, even though he had been a strict Jew. He describes his background by saying that he was:

circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law a Pharisee, as to zeal a persecutor of the church, as to righteousness under the law blameless (Phil. 3:5-6).

Because of his Jewish and later Christian beliefs, he by no means agreed with everything he read in pagan authors. Yet he did agree with genuine insights he found in them, and was willing to quote them, even to fellow Christians (as with the Corinthians).

He thus engaged in a process of sorting the good elements in them from the bad elements and employed a principle he recommends to his readers in another context:

Test everything; hold fast what is good (1 Thess. 5:21).

On this basis, he is elsewhere able to tell his readers:

Finally, brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things (Phil. 4:8).

 

Application to Music

If we take the principles from the preceding five sections and apply them to music, we can say the following:

  1. Not every piece of music we listen to has to be explicitly religious. Our lives must have a fundamental orientation to God, but that doesn’t mean we have to be explicitly thinking about him every moment. Thus not every poem, novel, movie, or song has to be explicitly about God.
  2. All of our cultural creations—including music, art, and literature—are based on skills that God gave us and that thus bring glory to him as long as we don’t mar them by sin.
  3. We do need to be on guard against cultural creations—including songs—that lead us toward sin (i.e., that tempt us personally to commit sin in some way).
  4. Just because a song or other work of art is of non-Christian or even pagan origin, that doesn’t mean it will be a temptation for us to commit sin or that it doesn’t have genuinely good points that are worth us knowing about or quoting, as St. Paul did with pagan Greek poets who had genuine insights.
  5. What we should do, therefore, is test every item of culture we encounter—whether it is music, art, or literature—hold fast to what is good, and recognize and appreciate what is good in it while rejecting what is bad.

Therefore, if a particular piece of music (or a particular movie, TV show, novel, or painting) would tempt you personally to sin, it needs to be avoided. However, if it doesn’t then it can be critically evaluated and appreciated the way St. Paul did with works of pre-Christian Greek literature.

This is a sketch of the principles I would apply to listening to (or performing) music. I don’t have feedback to offer on particular genres of music. No genre is categorically good or bad. It’s the individual songs in that genre that are good or bad.

However, I would caution against taking an overly harsh attitude in evaluating individual songs and their lyrics. For example, consider the following song lyrics:

O that you would kiss me with the kisses of your mouth!
For your love is better than wine.

O that [my beloved’s] left hand were under my head,
and that his right hand embraced me!

My beloved speaks and says to me:
“Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.”

Behold, you are beautiful, my love,
behold, you are beautiful!

Your lips distil nectar, my bride;
honey and milk are under your tongue

Your two breasts are like two fawns, twins of a gazelle.
Your neck is like an ivory tower.

O loved one, delectable maiden!
You are stately as a palm tree,
and your breasts are like its clusters.
I say I will climb the palm tree
and lay hold of its branches.

Oh, may your breasts be like clusters of the vine,
and the scent of your breath like apples,

and your kisses like the best wine
that goes down smoothly, gliding over lips and teeth.

As you may have guessed, these lyrics are from a particularly famous song—the Song of Solomon (see Song. 1:2, 2:6, 10, 4:1, 11, 7:3-4, 6-9).

On the human level, the Song of Solomon is about the love of a man and a woman. It also has allegorical applications (e.g., to Christ and the Church), but on the literal level, it is a love song. We even have records of Jewish people in prior centuries who would sing it aloud.

This reveals to us, in a striking way, that God does not have a problem with love songs. It also reveals that he is not a prude. In this divinely inspired love song, we are asked to contemplate:

  • romantic kisses (“O that you would kiss me with the kisses of your mouth!”)
  • romantic embraces (“O that [my beloved’s] left hand were under my head,
    and that his right hand embraced me”)
  • romantic getaways (“Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away”)

We’re also asked to contemplate things like:

  • how beautiful the beloved’s breasts are (repeatedly! “Your two breasts are like two fawns,” “You are stately as a palm tree, and your breasts are like its clusters; I say I will climb the palm tree and lay hold of its branches,” “may your breasts be like clusters of the vine”)
  • how beautiful her neck is (“Your neck is like an ivory tower”)
  • how sweet her breath is (“the scent of your breath like apples”)
  • what it’s like to kiss her (“your kisses like the best wine
    that goes down smoothly, gliding over lips and teeth”)

All of this is in the context of married love, but a lot of people today would reject modern songs that invited us to think about the images and sensations described here, even in a marital context.

When a love song this vivid is found right in the pages of the Bible, we should be careful in how we evaluate other compositions.

As always, St. Paul’s principle prevails: “Test everything; hold fast what is good” (1 Thess. 5:21).

Jimmy Akin’s Mysterious World – The Lost Gospels

MYS005

Jimmy Akin and Dom Bettinelli discuss the claims and counter-claims about the so-called Lost Gospels from both the faith and reason perspectives. Do they tell a suppressed or untold story about Jesus Christ, are they the ravings of lunatics, or something in between?

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Jimmy Akin’s Mysterious World – Transhumanism

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Jimmy Akin and Dom Bettinelli discuss the mysteries of Transhumanism, both its promises and dangers, including what the Church says about this effort to perfect humanity through science.

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Understanding the “Unanimous Consent” of the Church Fathers

In 1546, the Council of Trent issued a decree which prohibited people from interpreting Scripture “contrary to the unanimous consent of the Fathers.”

The meaning and significance of this concept has been widely misunderstood, so let’s take a look at the subject.

Here are 15 things to know and share . . .

 

1) What was the context of the decree?

The Council of Trent (1545-1563) was called to deal with two subjects: (1) doctrinal errors that were being spread by the Protestant Reformers and (2) internal reforms needed within the Catholic Church. Consequently, historian Hubert Jedin notes:

By the terms of the decision of 22 January [1564], dogma and reform were to be discussed simultaneously and every dogmatic decree was to be matched by a decree on Church reform (A History of the Council of Trent 2:87-88).

Therefore, the decrees of Trent are divided between those of a doctrinal nature and those of a disciplinary nature. Thus the fourth session of the Council thus released two decrees:

  • Decree Concerning Canonical Scriptures
  • Decree Concerning the Edition, and the Use, of the Sacred Books

The first of these decrees was dogmatic (i.e., concerning doctrinal matters), and it dealt with which books the Catholic Church regards as sacred and canonical.

The second decree concerned Church reform (i.e., disciplinary matters), and it’s the one that mentions the unanimous consent of the Fathers.

 

2) What subjects did the second decree cover?

It dealt with several abuses that had been proposed for reform by one of the Council’s committees (Jedin, 70-71). The final, published form of the decree established several disciplinary norms:

  • Of all the Latin editions of Scripture then in circulation, the Vulgate would be used as the standard one “in public lectures, disputations, sermons, and expositions.”
  • No one is to interpret the Scripture contrary to the sense held by the Church or the unanimous consent of the Fathers.
  • Printers are not to publish copies of the Scriptures unless they have been approved by the local bishop; the same applies to books of a theological nature, which also must carry their authors’ names; and the same applies to the circulation of unprinted manuscripts.
  • No one is to use the words of Scripture in superstitious or profane practices (e.g., incantations or defamatory libels).

The second decree also empowered bishops to impose appropriate penalties on those who violated these norms.

 

3) What did the second decree say about the unanimous consent of the Fathers?

The relevant provision says:

Furthermore, in order to restrain petulant spirits, [the Council] decrees, that no one, relying on his own skill, shall—in matters of faith, and of morals pertaining to the edification of Christian doctrine—wresting the sacred Scripture to his own senses, presume to interpret the said sacred Scripture contrary to that sense which holy mother Church—whose it is to judge of the true sense and interpretation of the holy Scriptures—hath held and doth hold; or even contrary to the unanimous consent of the Fathers; even though such interpretations were never (intended) to be at any time published.

Contraveners shall be made known by their Ordinaries [i.e., bishops], and be punished with the penalties by law established.

The core of this statement is:

No one . . . shall—in matters of faith and of morals . . . —interpret the said sacred Scripture contrary to that sense which holy mother Church . . . hath held and doth hold; or even contrary to the unanimous consent of the Fathers; even though such interpretations were never (intended) to be at any time published.

 

4) What does this mean?

It means that the Council is establishing a law providing that—even in writings not intended for publication—Catholics are not to contradict (1) the teaching of the Church about the meaning of Scripture or (2) the unanimous consent of the Fathers about what it means, and if they do, their bishops can apply appropriate penalties.

 

5) Is this an infallible doctrine?

Here we encounter a major misunderstanding of the text.

Trent’s doctrinal decrees contain infallible teachings. These are found among its canons, which use the formula “If anyone says . . . let him be anathema”—anathema being a type of excommunication that existed at the time (not a condemnation to hell).

However, this is not a doctrinal decree but a reform decree. It does not have canons, and it does not use the requisite anathema formula, as the quotation above indicates.

Consequently, it’s establishing a discipline—a law—that barred Catholics from contradicting Church teaching or the unanimous consent of the Fathers about the meaning of Scripture, even in writings not intended for publication.

This law is based on doctrinal principles—which we will cover below—but it isn’t itself a doctrine. It’s a discipline regulating discourse within the Church (note the context, which deals with the edition of Scripture to be used in public, what book printers must and mustn’t do, how people are to avoid profaning God’s word).

The status of this requirement as a law was underscored by Pope Leo XIII (1878-1903), who referred to it as a “very wise law” (Providentissimus Deus 14) and by Pope Pius XII (1939-1958), who included it among “the rules and laws promulgated by the Church” (Divino Afflante Spiritu 47).

 

6) Does the decree mean that Catholics can’t interpret the Bible and must simply repeat what the Church or the Fathers say it means?

No. The decree doesn’t say anything so restrictive. Catholics are free to read and interpret the Scriptures.

The law merely established that they weren’t to contradict Church teaching or the unanimous consent of the Fathers when these sources had a definitive teaching on the meaning of a passage.

 

7) Are there many such passages?

No. Pope Pius XII pointed out in his encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu:

There are but few texts whose sense has been defined by the authority of the Church, nor are those more numerous about which the teaching of the Holy Fathers is unanimous (n. 47).

Catholic biblical interpreters thus have a broad liberty of interpretation. As Leo XIII stated:

By this very wise law the Church by no means retards or blocks the investigations of biblical science, but rather keeps it free of error, and aids it very much in true progress. For, to every private teacher a large field is open in which along safe paths, by his industry in interpretation, he may labor efficaciously and profitably for the Church (Providentissimus Deus 14).

 

8) What is the status of the law today?

There is more to its legislative history than we can cover here, but the short answer is that it is no longer part of Church law per se.

Trent added the requirement to the body of canon law that existed at the time, which was scattered in many documents. Subsequently, Vatican I (1870) renewed the decree, and when canon law was codified (brought together in a single volume) in 1917, the first edition of the Code of Canon Law contained provisions that gave the requirement ongoing legal force.

However, Vatican II (1962-1965) did not repeat the requirement, and after the Council it was dropped from the legal instruments where it still existed.

When the 1983 Code of Canon Law was released, it abrogated both the 1917 Code and “any universal or particular penal laws whatsoever issued by the Apostolic See unless they are contained in this Code” (see can. 6, §1, 1° and 3°).

Consequently, canon law has been revised in a way that the decree no longer has legal force.

However, this does not mean that we don’t have to honor the doctrinal principles behind it.

 

9) What are the doctrinal principles behind the decree?

In the case of Catholics not contradicting the teaching of the Church regarding the meaning of Scripture, the decree spelled out the underlying doctrinal principle. Catholics aren’t to do this because the Church “is to judge of the true sense and interpretation of the holy Scriptures.”

That’s just as true today as ever, and Catholics are bound today to honor the teaching of the Church when it intervenes authoritatively on the meaning of a Scripture passage.

However, apart from a handful of cases, the Church presently gives interpreters very broad liberty in how they take particular passages (see my piece, The Limits of Scripture Interpretation).

Trent did not spell out the doctrinal principles underlying the requirement that Catholics not contradict the unanimous consent of the Fathers. However, it was explored by Leo XIII in Providentissimus Deus:

The Holy Fathers, we say, are of supreme authority, whenever they all interpret in one and the same manner any text of the Bible, as pertaining to the doctrine of faith or morals; for their unanimity clearly evinces that such interpretation has come down from the apostles as a matter of Catholic faith. The opinion of the Fathers is also of very great weight when they treat of these matters in their capacity of doctors, unofficially (n. 14).

Here he considers two different situations:

  1. When the Fathers “all interpret in one and the same manner any text of the Bible, as pertaining to the doctrine of faith and morals,” and
  2. “When they treat of these matters in their capacity as doctors [i.e., teachers], unofficially.”

In the first situation, he says that their unanimity shows that “such interpretation has come down from the apostles as a matter of Catholic faith,” while in the second situation he says that their opinion is “of very great weight.”

We thus need to distinguish, in any given case, which of these two applies. If it is the latter then a modern interpreter needs to give the Fathers’ views due weight, but he is not ultimately bound to accept them.

If, however, something they teach is a matter of Catholic faith, then it is binding.

In fact, to say that something is “a matter of Catholic faith” is a term of art in theology that indicates an infallibly defined teaching.

This means that we need to situate Leo XIII’s statement within the doctrinal development that has occurred on when the Church teaches infallibly.

 

10) What doctrinal development has occurred on the Church’s infallibility?

When Leo XIII issued Providentissimus Deus  in 1893, the First Vatican Council (1870) had met and defined papal infallibility.

However, because of the wars going on in Europe at the time, the Council was unable to complete its work, and it fell to Vatican II to formulate other aspects of the Church’s infallibility. This was done in its document Lumen Gentium.

It held that God has given the Church a charism of infallibility. This gift protects the Church as a whole from error in matters of belief (in credendo), and it protects the Church’s Magisterium from error in matters of teaching (in docendo). Infallibility manifests in the following ways:

  • Through the sensus fidelium (the sense of the faithful, “from the bishops down to the last member of the laity”)
  • Through the “ordinary magisterium” of the bishops scattered throughout the world, teaching in union with the pope
  • Through the “extraordinary magisterium” of the bishops meeting in an ecumenical council
  • Through the “extraordinary magisterium” of the pope when he issues an ex cathedra statement

The conditions for the first of these are discussed in Lumen Gentium 12 (cf. CDF, Mysterium Ecclesiae 2) and the others in Lumen Gentium 25.

 

11) How do the Fathers relate to these categories?

The Fathers were a mixed group. Some were bishops (e.g., St. Augustine), some priests (e.g., St. Jerome), some deacons (e.g., St. Ephrem the Syrian), and some lay faithful (e.g., St. Anthony of Egypt).

The Fathers as a whole thus do not represent the Church’s Magisterium, which consists only of the bishops teaching in union with the pope.

They would, however, be representative of the whole people of God in their day, and thus a unanimous consensus among them could be taken as an unerring manifestation of the sensus fidelium.

On the other hand, the Fathers who were bishops would be capable of exercising the Church’s infallibility, and a unanimous consensus among them could be taken as an infallible exercise of the ordinary magisterium.

 

12) How would a consensus of the Fathers as a whole manifest the unerring sensus fidelium?

According to Lumen Gentium 12:

The entire body of the faithful . . . cannot err in matters of belief. They manifest this special property by means of the whole peoples’ supernatural discernment in matters of faith when from the bishops down to the last of the lay faithful they show universal agreement in matters of faith and morals.

One of the keys to understanding this passage is recognizing that the Church’s infallibility applies “in matters of belief” (Latin, in credendo). This is a technical term referring to truths which must be believed as part of the faith, as opposed to mere theological opinions. They therefore represent things which have a definitive character—things that are to be held by the faithful definitively.

The passage then indicates that the unerring sense of the faithful is manifested in these matters when three conditions are met:

  1. “The entire body of the faithful . . . from the bishops down to the last of the lay faithful” is involved
  2. “They show universal agreement”
  3. This agreement concerns “matters of faith and morals”

For the Fathers to fulfill these conditions regarding the interpretation of Scripture, we would need to understand them as representative of the people of God of their time, which is reasonable, thus fulfilling condition (1).

The Fathers then would need to show universal agreement, fulfilling condition (2). The precise nature of this agreement will be discussed below.

Finally, to fulfill condition (3), the matter in question would have to be the interpretation of a particular Scripture text involving “matters of faith and morals.” This is significant because, as Leo XIII noted in Providentissimus Deus:

[The Fathers], in interpreting passages where physical matters are concerned, have made judgments according to the opinions of the age, and thus not always according to truth, so that they have made statements which today are not approved. Therefore, we must carefully discern what they hand down which really pertains to faith or is intimately connected with it . . . for in those matters which are not under the obligation of faith, the saints were free to have different opinions, just as we are (n. 19).

Here the pontiff has in mind matters like the geocentric model of the cosmos, which was one of “the opinions of the age” in which the Fathers lived but which was a “physical matter” that did not “really pertain to faith.”

As noted above, the Fathers would have to be in agreement that this interpretation represents a mandatory belief for all Christians—that it is a belief to be held definitively.

This corresponds to Leo XIII’s distinction between what the Fathers hand on as “a matter of Catholic faith” versus what they teach “in their capacity of doctors, unofficially” (Providentissimus Deus 14).

 

13) How would the bishop Fathers exercise the ordinary magisterium infallibly?

According to Lumen Gentium 25:

[The bishops] proclaim Christ’s doctrine infallibly whenever, even though dispersed through the world, but still maintaining the bond of communion among themselves and with the successor of Peter, and authentically teaching matters of faith and morals, they are in agreement on one position as definitively to be held.

The following conditions thus need to be met:

  1. The bishops are “dispersed through the world”
  2. They maintain “the bond of communion among themselves and with the successor of Peter”
  3. They are “authentically [i.e., authoritatively] teaching matters of faith and morals”
  4. They “are in agreement on one position as definitively to be held”

Conditions (1) and (2) represent the normal state of the Fathers.

Condition (3) corresponds to Leo XIII’s distinction between what the Fathers hand on as “a matter of Catholic faith” versus what they teach “in their capacity of doctors, unofficially” (Providentissimus Deus 14).

For it to be fulfilled in our context, the subject of their authoritative teaching would have to be the interpretation of a particular Scripture text regarding “matters of faith and morals”—as opposed, for example, to merely “physical matters” or “the opinions of the age” (Providentissimus Deus 19).

Finally, condition (4) would be fulfilled when they unanimously agree on this particular interpretation of Scripture “as definitively to be held.”

 

14) What kind of unanimity would the Fathers need to display?

The Church has not given us a mathematical way of determining what kind of consensus the Fathers would need to display either for the body as a whole to represent the unerring sense of the faithful or for the bishop Fathers to infallibly exercise the ordinary magisterium.

In fact, the difficulties of verifying when the conditions regarding these two modes of infallibility are met are the main reason we need the extraordinary magisterium (i.e., the infallible definitions issued by ecumenical councils and popes).

However, we can discern the general circumstances that need to occur:

  1. We would need a large number of the Fathers to address the interpretation of a specific passage of Scripture. One could not say that a consensus existed among them—much less a unanimous one—if only a relatively small number address the passage.
  2. They would need to teach a single interpretation of this passage as true. Assessing this could be somewhat complex because the Fathers could see passages as teaching several things, based on the different senses of Scripture. However, they would have to hold at least one of these interpretations in common.
  3. They would need to teach this interpretation as definitive—i.e., not just something they believe to be true but that something all Christians must hold to be true. Otherwise, the conditions needed for the unerring sense of the faithful or the infallible exercise of the ordinary magisterium would not be met.

It is frequently pointed out that absolute unanimity is not needed and that a moral unanimity suffices. This is true. However, the Fathers represent such a small number of individuals that even a few dissenting voices on a question would prevent us from describing their consensus as unanimous.

In fact, even a single, highly influential Father—such as an Augustine—who held a contrary view could be seen as preventing unanimity, though a Father of minor status might not.

In view of the difficulty in verifying that the needed conditions have been met, Pius XII’s judgment that the unanimous consent of the Fathers applies only to a few passages seems justified (Divino Afflante Spiritu 47).

Anyone who has worked with the texts of the Fathers knows that it is difficult to find cases where the above conditions have been fulfilled.

The Fathers are a relatively small group of individuals, often only a few of them comment on a given passage of Scripture, and when they do they frequently make different proposals about its meaning.

When there is a reasonable doubt, one must assume that infallibility has not been engaged, for “no doctrine is understood as defined infallibly unless this is manifestly evident” (Code of Canon Law 749 §3).

 

15) What’s the bottom line?

The concept of the unanimous consent of the Fathers is widely misunderstood.

Trent established a discipline that barred Catholics—even in writings not meant for publication—from contradicting the unanimous consent of the Fathers regarding the interpretation of Scripture.

This law remained in force until the 20th century, but it lost legal force following the Second Vatican Council.

However, the law was undergirded by important theological principles that remain in force and that have been illuminated by doctrinal development.

The unanimous consent of the Fathers as a whole can manifest the unerring sense of the faithful, and the bishops among the Fathers represented the Magisterium of their day and thus could teach infallibly under the usual conditions for the infallible exercise of the ordinary magisterium.

The number of cases where this applies to the interpretation of a particular passage of Scripture is small, but such cases must be taken seriously.