John: And Scripture is not “surprised” by what I’m experiencing now?
Ephraim: No. One of the difficulties in all this of course is the role of sin. People could say, Well, what you’re talking about is just saying “Whatever is, is right”, to use Alexander Pope’s famous line.
John: But this is not just a biblical fatalism you’re talking about.
Ephraim: Right. Sin is also wrapped up in the story of Scripture, but not in an easily un-threaded fashion. David is the great example of that: the great figure of the Messiah who’s also the worst sinner. It’s not that it’s not real that he’s a sinner. And it’s not that it’s not real that he’s a righteous king, who is the figure of the Messiah. But it’s hard for us to discern and unravel the threads that are the good and the bad, the sin and the grace. Part of our job, part of our vocation—which is a wonderful vocation, a joyful vocation—in reading Scripture in our own lives, is to try to do that discernment. And it’s never finished. Life is this constant discernment. We’ve got 150 songs in the Psalter for our lives (which, by the way, is a traditional Christian claim: the Psalms is the book of human life). It means that we are constantly going back and forth in the discernment of what is my responsibility and my call to repent, as well as God’s grace. You can’t really pull apart human sin from God’s grace.
So, I think we can affirm the hopefulness of my hour, this situation, at any moment, without giving in to saying “It’s all good, there’s nothing to be engaged.” But part of this situation is a situation of constant repentance. That’s a good thing. It’s a joyful thing to be able to repent. Annette and I were just reading [John Henry] Newman and he has the distinction between remorse and repentance. Remorse is just feeling bad for what you’ve done. That’s not repentance. Repentance is an openness to the power of God to encounter your having done that. So repentance is always a wonderful thing. It’s not a dead-end of feeling bad.
Annette: What if we tried to teach young people that their lives are found in the Psalter? That they don’t have to make it up. That their families are found in the Psalter, their nation. John, you said you’ve had these very hopeful experiences with young people.
John: I teach on the Psalms in our Summer Conference. We say: this is a school for prayer; it’s a gymnasium for prayer. Unlike socials, you’re not having to make yourself up all the time: God has given you a way to pray.
Ephraim: One of the greatest unintentional blasphemies of the church in the last century has been to excise parts of the Psalms. Are you aware that we’ve actually done that? One of the Canadian prayer books has left out whole Psalms because they’re viewed as offensive and filled with attitudes that are unworthy of a righteous person—something like that. I understand the reasons. But it’s the wholeness of this book that exposes who we are, inside and outside, which is why it’s so essential to have the whole book. The whole thing. And if young people could understand and be drawn into the wholeness of the Psalter…. Well, I think we can have faith that something would happen that was good.
John: You’ve said the Church finds her identity in Scripture—say more?
Well, again, to speak negatively, the fact that the Old Testament has disappeared, practically speaking, in many Christian contexts, has robbed the Church of its ability to find itself properly in the Scriptures. The thought experiment is (because we can look at the history of the Church and its attempts to do this): What if we created an ecclesiology based solely on the Israel of the Old Testament? (And of course, that’s precisely what Jesus is providing: an ecclesiology based solely on Israel of the Old Testament). But what if we worked our way to doing that? Again, there would be a lot of reaction negatively to doing that. Some people, in their worries about colonisation and decolonisation, have seen biblical Israel as the epitome of the coloniser. And there’s some truth to that. I mean, we’re right to see Israel’s oppressive actions as sinful. Scripture itself does that. But it also does other things. What do we do with the call into Canaan by God? I’m not saying I have an answer to that. But I have no doubt that looking squarely in the eye of that—if you will—ecclesiology of the conquest of the land is going to trouble and reframe Christian self-understanding. It’s not obvious how it will do so, by the way. I’m not saying it will just turn us back into a triumphalistic church militant. Not at all. The story of the conquest of the land is a complicated one, scripturally—very complicated. But we have to be willing to have the patience to do so, and the courage to spend our time there.
And the Early Church tried, with difficulty. The issue of the Canaanites and the Amalekites and so on, was a favourite place. Origen, Augustine,… a lot of them struggled with: What do we do with this? Because here it is, this is who we are. They certainly didn’t shy away from that. No lectionary excisions. If you take Origen or Augustine, what became a traditional move to deal with these texts was to say: The Amalekites are our sin; this is the struggle against sin. Which is a very allegorical or tropological reading. It means I can look at Israel struggling against Canaan, not to say how bad Israel is, but to see my own sin. This is, maybe, too neat. It became too neat: it became a wooden way of dealing with difficult texts of Scripture, with violence in Scripture, and so on. But [it is] nonetheless, I think, a valid one. The other thing about figural reading is it’s constantly being done, because if this is God’s vital Word that’s in these forms, it means that these forms have an infinite depth of meaning. It’s both singular and polyphonic. We never end our engagement with it. And one thing you can’t do is the sort of equivalent of a cancel culture on Scripture. No; we have a call just to go there to find who we are, find who God is, find what Christ is doing.
John: This dovetails with your lifelong concern, both of you, with formation. And you’ve come to a point of saying: We need to do the basics in a sustained and coherent way. What’s the conviction at work there for you?
Ephraim: So—and Annette will have her take on this—I’ve gotten very interested in my writing in the last 10 plus years on this question of the shape of a Christian life, of a mortal life. Our lives are actually pretty straightforward: we get born, we grow for a few years—at best, as the psalmist says, if we’re lucky, 80. We die. And in that period, there’s this arc of life. It’s actually pretty similar for everybody. Our lives are small things. And that’s said over and over again in Scripture: our lives are very small. And therefore, what we’re called to do is to try to live them well. And to live them in a way that’s faithful to God having made us who we are. But no more. We’re not here to remake the universe.
So, the Christian basics are framed by this modest structure of our life. They can’t and shouldn’t be more than that. They should respond to the fact of birth, of growth, of living with others and trying to nurture them, of getting weak—Christian basics should be ordered to that frame. And to that degree, I don’t think they’re that complicated. They’re profound, but not that complicated. And they haven’t been, in the teaching. The Middle Ages ended up not having big catechisms: what they had was small things—the seven works of mercy, the seven deadly sins, the four cardinal virtues, whatever. And if you think about all these things, they were very practical. They had to do with life and death, and with the suffering of those who, in their brief span of life, needed help. Burying the dead: can you imagine this? One of the seven works of mercy that every Christian was taught, illiterate or not, as being fundamental to their life, was to bury the dead. Nobody would say that today.
But I mean, lots of things come out of that, right? You could spend a course in a theological school unpacking the virtue of burying the dead, and what it means. And that’s sort of what I’m talking about. It’s simple, but profound.
The traditional three pillars of catechesis [are] the Apostles Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, the Ten Commandments. The Ten Commandments, from the Early Church on—Jesus himself—saw those as frameworks for righteousness. Maybe it seems dumb—old fashioned or something. But again, just to think through the Ten Commandments, as sort of the basic ordering of a human life: you could do a lot worse. And one has done a lot worse!