God and the Teaching of Theology: Divine Pedagogy in 1 Corinthians 1-4

By Steven Edward Harris

Theologians today are facing a crisis of identity. Are they members of the academy or the church? Is it still possible to be members of both? In God and the Teaching of Theology, Steven Harris argues a way through the impasse by encompassing both church and academy within the umbrella of the divine economy. To accomplish this, Harris uses St. Paul’s description of this economy in the opening chapters of his first letter to the Corinthians.

Through Paul’s discussion of wisdom, the Spirit, and the apostles’ role in sharing that divine wisdom, theologians of the patristic, medieval, and Reformation eras found a description of their own work as educators; they discovered that they too had roles within the same divine economy.

This book thus offers a rich description of the teaching of theology as part of God’s own divine pedagogy, stretching from God the teacher himself, through the nature of students and teachers of theology, to the goal of this pedagogy: human salvation in the knowledge of God. In addressing the current identity crisis of theology faculties, Harris looks backward in order to chart a way forward. His book will appeal to academic theologians, and to theological and church educators, pastors, and Christians interested in the relationship between academic study and their faith.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Release date: May 31, 2019
• ISBN: 9780268105242

Steven Edward Harris

Steven Edward Harris is a fellow of the Kirby Laing Institute for Christian Ethics and research scholar at Wycliffe College, University of Toronto.

Book preview

GOD AND THE TEACHING OF THEOLOGY

READING THE SCRIPTURES

Gary A. Anderson, Matthew Levering, and Robert Louis Wilken

series editors

GOD and

THE TEACHING

of THEOLOGY

Divine Pedagogy in 1 Corinthians 1–4

line.jpg

STEVEN EDWARD HARRIS

University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana

University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana 46556

www.undpress.nd.edu

Copyright © 2019 by the University of Notre Dame

All Rights Reserved

Published in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Harris, Steven Edward, 1988– author.

Title: God and the teaching of theology :

divine pedagogy in 1 Corinthians 1/4 / Steven Edward Harris.

Description: Notre Dame, Indiana : University of Notre Dame Press, [2019] |

Series: Reading the Scriptures | Includes bibliographical references and indexes. |

Identifiers: LCCN 2019011966 (print) | LCCN 2019014703 (ebook) |

ISBN 9780268105235 (pdf) | ISBN 9780268105242 (epub) |

ISBN 9780268105211 (hardback : alk. paper) |

ISBN 0268105219 (hardback : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Bible. Corinthians, 1st, I–IV—Criticism,

interpretation, etc. | Theology—Study and teaching. | Economy of God. |

Wisdom—Biblical teaching. | God—Biblical teaching.

Classification: LCC BS2675.52 (ebook) |

LCC BS2675.52 .H37 2019 (print) | DDC 227/.206—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019011966

∞This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992

(Permanence of Paper).

This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail]

Make me to know your ways, O Lord;

teach me your paths.

Lead me in your truth and teach me,

for you are the God of my salvation;

for you I wait all the day long.

Psalm 25:4–5 (ESV)

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Theologians in God’s Plan

ONE. God the Teacher of His Wisdom

TWO. The Divine Pedagogy in History

THREE. Wisdom, Divine and Human

FOUR. The Students of the Divine Wisdom

FIVE. The Position and Authority of God’s Teachers

SIX. The Method and Judgment of God’s Teachers

SEVEN. The End of the Divine Pedagogy

Conclusion: Knowing God

Appendix: Chronological Table of Commentators

List of Abbreviations

Notes

Bibliography

Scriptural Index

Name Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book started out life as a doctoral thesis under the supervision of Mark McIntosh and Lewis Ayres at the University of Durham. Mark’s intellectual generosity and intense empathy for ideas arising from the Christian past is somehow matched by his encouragement, concern, and hospitality. Upon Mark’s return to Chicago, Lewis was, thankfully, willing to take on the project as it stood and see it through to the finish, being characteristically humorous and forthright along the way. I must thank, in addition, Yves de Maaseneer and Vaiva Adomaityte of Katholeike Universiteit Leuven for helping me obtain a copy of Marie Hendrickx’s dissertation on Lombard and Aquinas. A special thanks to Don Wood, formerly of Aberdeen, whose course on the history of interpretation of John 4 in many ways inspired both the method and the themes of this project.

During this volume’s passage from adolescence to maturity, Mark Elliott and Franklin Harkins provided invaluable comments and guidance. I also thank the two anonymous reviewers, whose comments did substantially improve portions of the manuscript. I particularly thank them for inviting me to consider the scope and force of the book more broadly and to engage across biblical studies and historical and contemporary theology. I thank the series editor, Matthew Levering, for his initial enthusiasm in considering the manuscript; Stephen Little, the acquisitions editor, for all his work in the process; and the team at University of Notre Dame Press. Finally, a heartfelt word of thanks to my wife, Valerie, who has been unwaveringly supportive through these many long years.

My thanks for permission to reprint the following as part of Chapter 5: ‘Was Thomas Crucified for You?’: 1 Corinthians 1:12–13 and the Premodern Critique of Theological Schools of Thought, Journal of Theological Interpretation 9/2 (2015): 211–26.

INTRODUCTION

Theologians in God’s Plan

For if someone experiences love towards the Word,

and if he enjoys hearing, speaking, thinking, lecturing,

and writing about Christ, he should know that this is not

a work of human will or reason but a gift of the Holy Spirit.

—Martin Luther, Lectures on Galatians (1535)

God ordinarily teaches us about himself through other people. This simple truth seems to be a commonplace in Christian experience: pastors, counselors, and spiritual directors regularly contribute to one’s understanding of God and his ways. Christians typically understand them to be called and gifted by God to serve in this capacity. Yet theologians, those whose work is to teach about God, often find it difficult to understand themselves in this light, as those whom God uses to teach others about himself. When they think about what they do, theologians often turn to their institutional situatedness and obligations, the advancement of (critical) knowledge and a history of academic discourse. Perhaps their self-understanding, whether spontaneous or reflective, is more closely connected to ideas of ecclesial situatedness, divine vocation, and even present divine teaching. But the connection of this self-understanding to a larger theological vision of divine pedagogy is difficult to make and not readily available in the whorl of twenty-first-century theological pluralism.¹

In the premodern period, roughly up until the seventeenth century, theologians, and other teachers of the knowledge of God such as pastors, bishops, and catechists, understood themselves to be sharing in God’s own economy of teaching. This was true even where this teaching was practiced primarily in the University. Efforts to retrieve an understanding of theological work within the divine pedagogy are sometimes tempted to disparage the University as a potential site of faithful theology. But while the present text will not make any particular case—prescriptive or prognostic—regarding the fate of theology in the modern University, it works to retrieve a premodern sensibility of theological education, in its broadest sense, as a mode of the divine pedagogy, whether undertaken in a Sunday homily, a monastery chapterhouse, an adult Bible study, or a University lecture hall. In so doing, it practices a theology of ressourcement or retrieval,² offering up what it finds in premodern theology in confidence that it will aid in the overcoming of some harmful modern inhibitions.

It is also a contribution to ecumenical theology. As we shall see, those who have done most in the past half century or so to retrieve the doctrine of divine pedagogy in relation to the teaching of theology have had their church’s particular concerns in mind. On the one hand, Protestant retrievals have tended to focus on God’s present teaching through scripture, so, where this concerns the theologian, presentations have centered on the individual theologian learning from God. Catholic retrievals, on the other hand, have tended to focus on God’s role in instituting apostolic succession and donating infallibility to the teaching office of the church to guarantee the continuing proclamation of the truth of the gospel, and thus on the theologian’s responsibility vis-à-vis that divinely instituted and preserved teaching office. While the present work will not, in itself, resolve certain Protestant-Catholic (and intra-Catholic) differences over questions such as the emergence of papal authority and the magisterium, the division between theologians and the magisterium, and the material and/or formal sufficiency of scripture, it will provide a common vision within which all of these things, and the teaching of theology more broadly, find their origin, nature, and end. It is this wider economic vision, I hope, that will contribute to ecumenical rapprochement and the reinvigoration of theological teaching, practice, and self-understanding.

To return to our thesis, then: God ordinarily teaches us about himself through other people. This relatively simple statement is advanced by way of retrieving and (re-)constructing a premodern doctrine of divine pedagogy found in commentary on 1 Corinthians 1–4 from Origen through the Reformation. Each of these aspects calls for some explanation in turn: First, an overview of themes in the doctrine of divine pedagogy, God’s teaching, in the history of theology; though by no means a full history, it will serve as orientation for the next section.³ Second, the recovery of certain themes from the doctrine in recent Protestant and Catholic theology, with an eye toward ecumenical recovery and convergence. Third, an introduction to Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, the themes present in the first four chapters, and why theologians have often turned there when speaking about the nature and practice of theology. Fourth, a discussion of the method undertaken in this work, which is the constructive theological use of comparative historical exegesis, and the reason for turning to premodern commentary. Fifth, a brief history of the Greek and Latin commentarial traditions and the most important figures within them. Finally, a short overview of the work’s structure, which is organized, not according to the biblical text or historical chronology, but according to theological themes in the doctrine of divine pedagogy.

THEMES IN THE DOCTRINE OF DIVINE PEDAGOGY

This section, in place of a full history, highlights and introduces major themes in the doctrine of divine pedagogy as it developed out of scripture and theological reflection. In the gospels, to begin, Jesus is portrayed in his ministry as a rabbi surrounded by his disciples, teaching them and answering their questions. Yet other crucial biblical themes, such as Christ as the one teacher (Matt. 23:10), the Spirit of truth (John 14:17; 15:26; 16:13), and the Logos who enlightens every human being (John 1:9), led bishops and other teachers in the early church to understand God’s entire work of revelation and salvation through history as pedagogical, as a form of divine teaching. Thus the divine pedagogy involves much more than the earthly teaching of the incarnate Word; it encompasses all of God’s communicative activity from the beginning, in Israel, in Christ, and in the ongoing life of the church.

At the heart of this vision stands Christ the one teacher of all, the center of God’s revelation and salvation. His teaching unfolds in line with God’s economy, the divine plan in history. The substance of this teaching is characterized as divine wisdom. People become students of this wisdom by coming to faith in Christ the teacher. Their learning is not simply intellectual, but in the first place moral and spiritual formation. God provides illumination to these students to understand what is taught. After Christ’s earthly ministry, death, resurrection, and ascension, Christ continues to teach mediately, through teachers of theology. Like Christ’s own teaching, teachers of theology practice accommodation, adapting their teaching to the needs of their students. The divinely intended goal of this pedagogy is human salvation.

According to Matthew’s gospel, Christ is the one teacher of all (23:10). In Clement of Alexandria (ca. 150–215), Christ is ὁ μόνος διδάσκαλος not only in his earthly life but after his resurrection and ascension as well. He continues to teach his church, which functions as his school (διδασκαλεῖον).⁴ Such a theme predominates in the medieval period, being taken up by Bonaventure (1217–74) in his influential University sermon Christus unus omnium magister.⁵ Yet unlike his earthly pedagogy, this is not a teaching that Christ undertakes visibly and audibly: Christ teaches invisibly through his Spirit and mediately through human teachers.

Christ’s teaching is economic in shape: that is, it unfolds in line with the divine οἰκονομία or history of salvation.⁶ Thus there are different stages in the divine teaching, corresponding to different periods in God’s covenant relationship with his people or different ages of the world. God teaches Adam differently than Moses, and differently again than the apostles. In East Syrian tradition, even heaven itself was conceived of as a classroom with the angels God’s students in creation.⁷

The stages of the divine pedagogy are important for Irenaeus (ca. 130–200) in arguing for the unity of the Old and New Testaments in the one God: for it was appropriate for certain things to be announced beforehand by the fathers in a fatherly way, others to be prefigured by the prophets in a legal way, and others to be described in line with the form of Christ by those who had received adoption; yet all things are shown forth in the one God.⁸

The center of this history of divine pedagogy is found in the Incarnation, in which God comes to teach us in person.⁹ According to Thomas Aquinas (ca. 1225–74), in sending his Word to us, the Father acts as a teacher, speaking and leading humanity to his Son.¹⁰ God’s teaching here culminates the history of his instruction of his people and is normative for all that follows in the history of the church. All learning from God is a form of learning Christ, his Word, delivered differently in the Law, in the prophets, and now, definitively, in the ministry of the incarnate Christ.

To learn Christ is often characterized as becoming wise, learning the divine wisdom. Augustine’s presentation of this theme was particularly influential. For Augustine, the two natures of Christ, his humanity and divinity, represent knowledge and wisdom respectively. Yet we attain the wisdom he is only through his humanity, since in our sinful state we cannot perceive his divinity. We follow the Son by living wisely and thus are purified to contemplate the eternal Wisdom of God.¹¹ In sending his Son or Wisdom to become human, the Father thus teaches humanity his wisdom. Yet learning the divine wisdom is possible only for those who are spiritually transformed, since it takes the foolish form of the crucified Christ.

To become a student of the divine pedagogy is thus to come to faith. To become a disciple of Christ is to trust in him, and love him, for one cannot learn anything from a teacher one does not first trust to be truthful.¹² Thus a student of God must first trust Christ, who is himself the Truth and Wisdom. In learning from him, a student of God grows not only intellectually but also morally and spiritually. Clement of Alexandria considers moral and spiritual formation integral to, and even a necessary preparation before, instruction in Christian doctrine, which is reserved for more advanced students. Christ acts first as a παιδαγωγός, he says, training persons toward moral perfection, and then as a διδάσκαλος who explains matters of doctrine.¹³

This can take quite an elaborate form. Origen of Alexandria (ca. 186–255), for instance, understands the forty-two stages of Israel’s desert wanderings in Numbers 33 in terms of Christ’s descent through forty-two generations into the world and the Christian’s ascent through forty-two stages of moral and spiritual growth.¹⁴ But more generally, it shares in the developing virtue and vice tradition from the New Testament onward, in which particular vices (e.g., pride, envy, presumption, lust) are seen as inhibiting spiritual knowledge and particular virtues (e.g., faith, love, tranquility, humility, teachableness) are seen as encouraging it. These are the moralspiritual dispositions that either hinder or aid learning from Christ.

Students, even those who are morally and spiritually advanced, require ongoing divine help in order to understand divine things. This is usually described as divine illumination, God’s enlightening the eyes of a person’s heart to understand (cf. Eph. 1:18), and is associated with the present, invisible work of Christ and/or the Spirit. It appears in Augustine’s De magistro and onward as a general theory of knowledge,¹⁵ but most usually in the theological tradition it is related specifically to God’s teaching of humanity about divine things, that is, about theology. In theological education, illumination is the inward work of the Holy Spirit in students while they listen to teaching or preaching outwardly.¹⁶ This is further embedded within the totality of the divine economy: illumination is not enough, in and of itself, to secure a theological account of knowledge.¹⁷

God’s teaching is not simply invisible and inward; it is mediated outwardly by human teachers of theology. This is a particular concern of this book. Because the divine pedagogy is economic in shape, God also makes use of οἰκονόμοι, administrators who act under his guidance and intentions toward his ends. The apostle Paul had already described his commission from the Lord in these terms (1 Cor. 4:1; cf. 1 Cor. 9:17; Eph. 3:2).¹⁸ While all the people of God are called to share the gospel in varying degrees and circumstances (Vatican II, Lumen Gentium §35), there are those whom Christ gives more particularly as teachers to the church (Rom. 12:7; 1 Cor. 12:28; Eph. 4:11).

Teachers of theology become, through God’s working, mediate causes in God’s own economy of teaching: he calls, gifts, and empowers certain people to teach others in line with definite methods, structure, and purposes. God, in other words, does not make use of theologians in an occasional and punctiliar fashion, assisting them only in the moment of teaching, but in a much more basic and thoroughgoing way.¹⁹ This is because God, so to speak, makes theologians: certain people are caused to take up a form of life and activity appropriate to the teaching of theology.²⁰

Both Clement and Origen saw teachers of theology as participants in the divine οἰκονομία, as in some way sharing the role of God the teacher.²¹ Clement says the Christian teacher is a living image of the Lord, . . . Because he symbolizes the Lord’s power and because of the similarity of his preaching.²² A human teacher thus shares in the divine οἰκονομία, the execution of God’s plan to bring human beings to salvation.

This mediation receives a particular inflection in the writings of pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (6th cent.). In his neo-Platonic vision, the light of divine knowledge flows down from God himself, through the various ranks of angels, to the ecclesial priesthood and the simple believer. Each rank reflects God’s light to those further down the hierarchy.²³ The Christian’s goal is to rise through the symbols of the scriptures and sacraments to the vision of Light itself.²⁴ Such a vision was influential in the Middle Ages and can be found in Aquinas’s inaugural sermon Rigans montes.²⁵ In this text, knowledge of God flows down from the mountains (i.e., theologians in contemplation) to water the earth below (i.e., their students).

Differing levels of students and differing stages of divine revelation require accommodation and progression. Augustine writes of Jesus’s conversation with the Samaritan woman in John 4, how Jesus speaks to the woman guardedly, and enters into her heart by degrees.²⁶ Clement sees the human teacher mirroring these features of the divine Logos’s teaching. According to him, the Logos taught the law and philosophy before becoming incarnate, sharing knowledge of himself in a way the Jews and Greeks could understand. Similarly, a human teacher first gives instruction in the literal sense of scripture before more advanced training in its symbolic interpretation.²⁷

Attention is often given in this connection to issues of style, rhetoric, and differing grades of study material appropriate for different levels of students. Certain accounts have made this the predominant theme in a theology of divine pedagogy.²⁸ But they sometimes do so in a way that overlooks the realism in this description of divine activity: it can become a root metaphor or imagery rather than a realistic account of the divine economy of revelation.²⁹

Finally, the end of the divine pedagogy, the reason it was undertaken, is human salvation. In short, Christ teaches humanity what they need to know in order to be saved: how to escape from sin and come to know God. Thus the center of Christ’s teaching is found in his cross, by which he provides salvation for the whole world. The cross provides forgiveness of the sin that prevents knowledge of God. So Aquinas can write, following Augustine, that "Christ hung from the cross the way a teacher sits in his chair [sicut magister in cathedra]."³⁰

These themes in the doctrine of divine pedagogy, one will note, cover a range of elements usually taken to be part of separate doctrines: the person and work of Christ; the history of salvation; revelation and its mediation or transmission; sanctification and soteriology. The tendency toward abstraction in modern theology has isolated one or another of these elements as decisive (illumination or accommodation, in particular), extracting it from the broader divine economy from which it takes its shape. This could be ameliorated by the recovery of a more organic understanding of the doctrine of divine pedagogy, such as it was presented in the premodern period.

A particularly apt and beautiful summation of this patristic and medieval tradition, which can serve as a conclusion to this survey, comes from Julian of Norwich (ca. 1342–ca. 1416). She writes: God shewde fulle gret plesance that he hath in alle men and women that mightly and mekely and wisely take the preching and the teching of holy church. For he it is, holy church. He is the grounde, he is the substance, he is the teching, he is the techer, he is the ende, and he is the mede wherfore every kinde soule traveleth.³¹ God’s teaching is an encompassing economy, in which God himself is present and active, mediated by the preaching and teaching of the church. Those who mightly and mekely and wisely attend to the teaching of theology will find that God is present there as both teacher and teaching, means and end.

The divine pedagogy is thus a doctrine that encompasses a wide range of realities and activities. In the modern period, the work done by this doctrine has tended to fall upon revelation and scripture and/or tradition. By this displacement, the discussion usually devolves upon a divine work of revelation that finished in the past (whether in the inspiration of scripture or the death of the last apostle) and is now received through the preaching of the Word and/or the authoritative handing on of ecclesial tradition, which may or may not be understood as empowered by present divine agency. This need not be the case, however.³²

More recently, concerted efforts have been made by theologians, both Protestant and Catholic, to recover an account of the divine economy of revelation within which theologians find their rightful place vis-à-vis scripture and tradition. We thus begin with important Protestant developments in relation to scripture, before moving to Catholic theologies of tradition and the magisterium in and around the Second Vatican Council, when they experienced a great renewal. These theological labors, as we shall see, are converging toward an ecumenical consensus that this work seeks to encourage.

SCRIPTURE, TRADITION, MAGISTERIUM, AND THEOLOGY

There is a recognition in contemporary Protestant theology that in the modern period accounts of the Bible’s nature and properties have become too abstract and too detached from their relation to God and God’s economy. Protestant accounts of theological education have suffered from a similar lack of theological density.³³ Efforts to undo this abstraction have been quite fruitful. Stanley Grenz, for instance, formally overcomes this shift in his relocation of the doctrine of scripture from prolegomena to a subsection of pneumatology, placing it more organically within the field of the Spirit’s work.³⁴ More material proposals, particularly in what is called the theological interpretation of scripture, have attempted to resituate the reading of scripture within the wider sphere of the church, Christian interpretive tradition, and the moral and spiritual formation of readers.

The most fruitful body of work in this area comes from the late British theologian John Webster (1955–2016). Beginning with a call to attend to divine agency in theological study, Webster progressively developed a strong account of the economy of divine pedagogy within which scripture and its reading find their origin, nature, and end. Nevertheless, he for the most part focused on the individual theologian being instructed by God through scripture, or an undifferentiated community of hearers and readers of the Word. Only in his later essays did Webster argue that the divine work of instruction is a mediate work, making use of creaturely assistants through whom the missions of Son and Spirit reach their human goal in a social economy of human teachers and students.³⁵

In his inaugural lectures at Wycliffe College, Toronto (1995), and at Oxford (1997), John Webster emphasized the need to speak of God and God’s actions to describe what a theologian properly does.³⁶ In his Oxford lecture, Theological Theology, Webster states, The distinctiveness of Christian theology lies . . . In its invocation of God as agent in the intellectual practice of theology. In order to give account of its own operations, that is, Christian theology will talk of God and God’s actions. Talk of God not only describes the matter into which theology enquires, but also, crucially, informs its portrayal of its own processes of enquiry.³⁷ Thus the individual, as she sets out to speak of God, is also accompanied and aided by God, whose active presence has an effect on the intellectual operations of the theologian. This crucial recovery of God as the primary agent in theology drives the rest of Webster’s development.³⁸

In the following years, Webster would give expression to the place of scripture in relation to God and God’s present work but with greater descriptive density. It is now no longer characterized barely as agency but as God’s saving economy.³⁹ The practice of theology here becomes an aspect of the sanctification of reason, taking place within God’s revelatory, communicative presence.⁴⁰ Scripture is one of God’s creaturely instruments through which God reveals himself in the present.⁴¹ Thus he begins to give a much greater specificity to the nature of scripture and its relationship to divine agency, as the latter is itself specified in both the Trinitarian missions and the history of salvation.

Scripture comes to be what it is, and is what it is, within the formative economy of the Word and Spirit of God, that is, in light of the particular missions of the Son and Holy Spirit.⁴² Important essays would thus be given over to describing the place of scripture in relation to the work of the active, risen Christ and the Spirit’s past inspiration and present illumination.⁴³ Webster’s most developed account comes in his opening essay to his collection of the same name, The Domain of the Word. It commences as follows:

Holy Scripture and its interpretation are elements in the domain of the Word of God. That domain is constituted by the communicative presence of the risen and ascended Son of God who governs all things. His governance includes his rule over creaturely intelligence: he is Lord and therefore teacher. In fulfilment of the eternal purpose of God the Father (Eph. 1.9, 11), and by sending the Spirit of wisdom and revelation (Eph. 1.17), the Son sheds abroad the knowledge of himself and of all things in himself. He completes his saving mercies by making known to lost creatures their true end in the knowledge, love and enjoyment of God. In the domain of Christ’s rule and revelation, Holy Scripture is the embassy of the prophets and apostles. Through their service, and quickened to intelligent and obedient learning by the Holy Spirit, the communion of saints is instructed by the living Christ. And so it is in terms of their occupancy of and function in this domain—in the economy of grace and revelation—that we are to consider the nature of Scripture and what may fittingly be expected of those who hear it in faith.⁴⁴

It is within this sphere of divine activity and works that the theologian takes up her task. Yet an exposition of the theologian’s task of teaching is only hinted toward in Webster’s final essays.

In his account of scripture, as receiving its determinate being and character from the missions of Son and Spirit, Webster has developed the resources needed to describe the work of theologians as teachers mediating Christ’s own teaching. This he, in fact, begins to do in his inaugural lecture at the University of St. Andrews (2014). Divine instruction, Webster states: is not immediate but mediate, served by creaturely assistants and accommodating itself to the forms of creaturely intelligence. These assistants are, principally, the prophets and apostles and then, secondarily, other human teachers who repeat and apply the heavenly doctrine which they have received from its prophetic and apostolic ambassadors. With these embassies, the revelatory missions of the Son and Spirit reach their human goal.⁴⁵ Primary, then, among the mediations of divine teaching is scripture itself (the prophets and apostles). Decidedly subsidiary to them are those other human teachers who expound upon scripture. The Son and Spirit instruct God’s people through the teaching of these teachers, thereby attaining their human goal.

There are other, slightly earlier hints in this direction: Webster, for instance, will speak of theology’s apostolic task of speaking the truth to others in love, or God’s institution of a social realm for revelation’s reception, transmission and explication.⁴⁶ Ever preserving God’s priority in the economy, Webster is insistent that the teaching church is first and foremost the hearing church; the teacher or preacher does not make effective an essentially inert or absent Word, but rather enters a situation which already lies within the economy of reconciliation, in which the Word is antecedently present and active.⁴⁷

Therefore, Webster recovers and develops an extraordinarily rich account of the divine pedagogy and of the place of scripture and theologians as mediations of the risen Christ’s teaching of his people by the Spirit’s illumination. The role of theologians as teachers is left sketchy and underdeveloped in his work but could readily be developed in the same vein as his ontology of scripture—albeit with due subordination to scripture. Instead of this, we look to developments in twentieth-century Catholic theology, where one would expect to find detailed accounts of the teaching of the knowledge of God under the themes of tradition and the magisterium, the ecclesial teaching office.

The decade in and around Vatican II (1962–65) saw a series of significant studies on the themes of tradition and the magisterium by some of the twentieth century’s most important Catholic theologians. The church as a whole sought to say something about their role that would take account of the now widely accepted development of dogma, would resolve issues arising from Trent’s definition of tradition (which seemed to imply that scripture and tradition were two separate sources), and would draw more fully on the Bible and the fathers for its expression. This reflection resulted in Vatican II’s Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, Dei Verbum (1965), which situated tradition and the magisterium more organically than before within the divine economy of revelation (§§7–10).

In the many studies preparatory to and surrounding this conciliar pronouncement, Catholic theologians turned back to scripture, the fathers, and earlier councils such as Trent to reconceive the nature and task of tradition and the magisterium. Here one finds an attempt, parallel to Webster’s and equally inspired by premodern sources, to resituate tradition and the magisterium within the broader divine economy of revelation. We will focus particularly on the contributions of Congar, Schmaus, and Rahner.

The historical theologian Yves Congar (1904–95) wrote two influential volumes on tradition in the early 1960s, one historical and the other theological.⁴⁸ In these works, Congar set out to recover the understanding of tradition present in the patristic and medieval periods. What he found was a strong sense of the ongoing work of the Spirit, particularly in the church. The whole of the church’s work in passing on the faith, in the sacraments, in the preached Word, and in its forms of common life and cultural expressions, is made effective by the present and active Holy Spirit.⁴⁹ For this reason he can be called the transcendent subject of tradition, making the teaching of the church ever new and saving, and thereby connected to the initial proclamation of the gospel.⁵⁰ There is, Congar writes of the premodern period, the constant conviction that Christ never ceases to teach his Church by the gift of the Spirit.⁵¹ For this reason, revelation was thought to be, in some sense, ongoing in the church’s teaching.⁵²

The dogmatician Michael Schmaus (1897–1993) connects such a vision more explicitly to the work of Christ as teacher through the teachers of the church. In a little essay written before Vatican II, Schmaus already speaks of Christ as the one teacher of the church (citing Matt. 23:10). The apostles and their successors continue the mission committed to [Christ] by the Father and teach in his place; in this way, they participate in his own magisterium.⁵³ But it is not as if they continue Christ’s mission of teaching in lieu of him; rather, Christ wills to be invisibly present in their midst . . . not passively but actively, as the head teacher acting in the teachers chosen and called by him and through them as free instruments. Thus it is Christ who speaks through the teachers he sends.⁵⁴ It is within this field of the divine revelations of Jesus Christ that the nature of theological teaching, and the dependent matter of infallibility, must be understood.⁵⁵ Schmaus would develop this further in sections of his major work, Dogma.⁵⁶

Karl Rahner (1904–84), in his presentation in Foundations of Christian Faith (1976), attempts to overcome a view of the church’s teaching authority as established by bare divine fiat. To do so, he grounds it in a really Christological reason, namely, the absolute, victorious, unsurpassable self-revelation of God in Jesus Christ. On Rahner’s view, The church of Christ is the ongoing presence and the historical tangibility of this ultimate and victorious word of God in Jesus Christ.⁵⁷ The church and its teachers are made up of sinful human beings, but God wills for the Word of God in Christ to remain victorious and gracious even over sinful, dishonest people.

And here Rahner brings us helpfully to the point of greatest convergence and disagreement between Protestant and Catholic theology of the divine pedagogy. Christ, all agree, has promised to be with his church until the end of the age (Matt. 28:20) and to lead it into all truth by his Spirit (John 16:13). We can be certain that he wills the triumphant fulfillment of this promise in the church. Consequently, writes Rahner: "the controversial theological question between the Evangelical [i.e., Protestant] and Catholic understanding of the church cannot really be whether or not the church of Jesus Christ can lose the truth, but rather it can ultimately only be the question how in the concrete God triumphs in the church in his victorious presence and in his communication of the truth."⁵⁸ Does Christ so triumph, in other words, by Christ’s effective will to make his Word heard clearly through scripture in the church’s proclamation? Or by the Spirit’s maintenance of, and donation of infallibility to, a historically extended succession of bishops from the apostles onward, particularly in the pope their head? This work will not venture a particular resolution to this ecumenical impasse. But it does take as salutary Rahner’s recognition that there an understanding of the active and effective presence of the Word in the church can be held in common by Catholics and Protestants. The two sides more narrowly contest the concrete mode in which Christ the one teacher is victoriously present, whether by the indefeasibility of scripture’s witness or the supernatural infallibility of the magisterium.

Before we move on, however, a word is in order about the gradual divide between theologians and bishops in the Catholic Church, a divide that has become a source of great disorder in contemporary Catholic theology. Yves Congar, in a series of articles, detailed the fluctuating relationship between theologians and the magisterium through the church’s history. The origin of this divide is located in the establishment of the universities and the notion that the University chairs were seats of authority in their own right. Thus there were two kinds of magisteria: one of bishops and the other of professors.⁵⁹ At differing periods following, theologians overpowered the church’s bishops, and vice versa.⁶⁰ Originally, one exercised magisterium, teaching authority, and did so only as a minister of Christ’s magisterium; it was in the nineteenth century that the Catholic Church finally came to speak of the magisterium as the body made up of the pope and bishops in communion with him, rather than the derivative authority they exercised. As a result of this triumph of the pastoral hierarchy over that of University theologians, the latter now find themselves stranded somewhere on the margins of the economy of divine teaching.

Only the pope and bishops, on this view, have divinely instituted authority to teach the church, often expounded in its negative sense of promulgating canonical and Dogmatic definitions (which is properly secondary) rather than its positive sense of witnessing to the gospel (which is properly primary).⁶¹ Yet if only bishops are understood as the teachers Christ gives to the church, in what sense can theologians participate in Christ’s own teaching of his people? are they called or gifted to this task by Christ and the Spirit? The existing answers circle around conflict and collaboration, with theologians having a share in the divine pedagogy when and as they participate in the magisterium’s mission. These solutions are inadequate.⁶² There is an urgent need to press back to the divine economy by which both are encompassed and governed.

Both Protestant and Catholic theologians, therefore, need assistance in understanding themselves and their place within the divine pedagogy. Congar, Schmaus, and Rahner all see the need to situate the church’s teachers within the place assigned them by the Word and Spirit in the economy of revelation. Webster, who began by first asking after the place of the individual theologian in relation to the revelatory economy of Son and Spirit, ended by hinting toward this social, public aspect of the work of theologians as teachers. Thus one meets with a convergence between Catholic ressourcement on the theme of tradition and the magisterium around Vatican II and recent Protestant attempts to resituate scripture and theology in the broader economy of divine revelation. This work aims to aid this convergence and develop an ecumenical constructive theology of the divine pedagogy.

With the problematics and hopeful signs of recovery in view, let us look to this constructive work ahead. Both Protestant and Catholic theologians have turned productively to the Bible and premodern theology in recent decades in order to restore an understanding of the divine pedagogy. I too will turn to the Bible and the premoderns, but to an unexplored terrain: premodern commentary on 1 Corinthians 1–4. First, Paul’s letter itself.

FIRST CORINTHIANS 1–4

The so-called first letter to the Corinthians was not the first Paul sent to the church there, but the first that has survived (cf. 1 Cor. 5:9). It is a lengthy letter, written from Ephesus (cf. 1 Cor. 16:8) in the mid-50s AD,⁶³ in which the apostle addresses a number of issues arising in the church at Corinth. Some take Paul’s call to unity in 1 Corinthians 1:10 as a theme defining the whole letter,⁶⁴ but most agree that it deals with a multiplicity of disparate issues.⁶⁵ Some sections deal with troubling matters reported to Paul (1:11; 5:1; 11:18; 15:12); others respond to questions the Corinthians themselves raised in a letter, often introduced with the formula περὶ δὲ: now concerning . . . (7:1; 7:25; 8:1; 12:1). Thus the letter deals variously with divisions in the church (chaps. 1–4), sexual immorality (5–7), food sacrificed to idols and the Lord’s Supper (8–11), spiritual gifts (12–14), and the Resurrection (15).

The first four chapters are the focus of this work. Within the letter they function as a discrete unit, bound together by their concern with divisions in the church (1:10).⁶⁶ They are of particular relevance to developing a theology of divine pedagogy because these divisions, Paul states, are brought about by competing factions claiming allegiance to particular teachers over against others. Paul, in response, emphasizes the common lordship of Christ over all churches and all teachers of the church. They are not anything in themselves, the apostle will say, but are of value only through the divine work that makes their teaching fruitful. This divine work centers on God’s sharing of his foolish-looking wisdom in the crucified Christ and the revelation of this wisdom by his Spirit. The apostles, in dependence upon this work of Christ and the Spirit, are called and sent to preach the gospel as stewards of these divine mysteries. These chapters, therefore, constitute a significantly promising site for retrieval and exploration of the divine pedagogy in relation to the teaching of theology. As we shall see, when premodern commentators came to these chapters, they reflected on who they themselves were as teachers of theology.

In fact, in the history of thinking about the nature and proper method of theology, theologians have often turned to 1 Corinthians 1–4 to reflect on what they do. The very first sentence, for instance, of Aquinas’s Summa theologiae cites this passage: Since not only should the teacher of Catholic truth instruct the advanced, but it also belongs to him to educate beginners, according to what the apostle says in 1 Corinthians 3[:1–2], ‘as infants in Christ, I gave you milk to drink, not solid food,’ the practice of our intention in this work is to hand on those matters pertaining to the Christian religion in such a way as is suitable for the education of beginners (prooem.). Christopher Wells has argued that doctrina, for Aquinas, is always Corinthian in character, both in terms of explicit reference to 1 Corinthians 1–3 when he discusses it and in terms of its characterization by the themes found in those chapters.⁶⁷

Similarly, at the beginning of On the Trinity, Augustine describes the idolatrous difficulties into which human beings plunge themselves while trying to conceive of God. Like a wise teacher, the apostle Paul first presents Christ not in the divine strength in which he is equal to the father, but in the human weakness through which he was crucified. ‘Nor did I consider myself to know anything among you,’ he says, ‘except Jesus Christ, and crucified at that’ [1 Cor. 2:2].⁶⁸ Augustine thus begins with the visible Old Testament theophanies and the Incarnation in books 2 to 4, before moving to contemplation of what is invisible (though he never leaves the former behind).⁶⁹

The humanist and biblical scholar Desiderius Erasmus (ca. 1466–1536) likewise turns to themes from 1 Corinthians 1–4 in his preface to the New Testament to articulate a renewed approach to theological study and discourse, one differing sharply from Scholastic modes of theologizing dominant in the universities.⁷⁰ In reference to the content of the scriptures, he writes: This kind of wisdom, so extraordinary that once for all it renders foolish the entire wisdom of this world, may be drawn from its few books as from the most limpid springs with far less labor than Aristotle’s doctrine is extracted from so many obscure volumes. . . . [This philosophy] accommodates itself equally to all, lowers itself to the little ones, adjusts itself to their measure, nourishing them with milk [1 Cor. 3:1–2].⁷¹ In setting about this endeavor, he makes explicit and foundational reference to the first four chapters of 1 Corinthians. Indeed, Essary contends that the early chapters of 1 Corinthians are in many ways a microcosm of Erasmus’ entire theological program.⁷² The principles found in this part of Paul’s letter thus inform the theological pedagogy of Augustine, Aquinas, and Erasmus, among others.⁷³

Numerous contemporary examples can also be cited. Ellen Charry quotes from this passage at the very beginning of her work on the pastoral function of doctrine.⁷⁴ Mark McIntosh deals extensively with 1 Corinthians 1–4 in his essay on human rationality transformed in the Spirit to take on the mind of Christ (2:16).⁷⁵ Lois Malcolm develops an epistemology of the cross from 1 Corinthians 1–3 in the same volume.⁷⁶ J. Louis Martyn sees in the Corinthian correspondence (especially 1 Cor. 2:6–16 and 2 Cor. 2:14–6:10) an account of ways of knowing belonging to the old and new ages and their juncture at the cross.⁷⁷ David Yeago relocates the church’s unique knowledge of scripture within the Spirit’s working, as detailed in 1 Corinthians 2 in particular.⁷⁸ Paul Gooch addresses the relationship between faith and reason by reading 1 Corinthians 1–4 philosophically.⁷⁹ Nor is this list exhaustive.⁸⁰ A concerted exploration of these chapters, then, will engage epistemological, pastoral, spiritual, pedagogical, and theological questions, yielding a full and fruitful account of the practice and teaching of theology.

THE HISTORY OF EXEGESIS AS A THEOLOGICAL SOURCE

Yet rather than turning to contemporary commentators, this work looks to the history of exegesis, examining premodern commentary on 1 Corinthians 1–4 in depth.⁸¹ In investigating this stretch of historical biblical commentary, this work practices and extends a methodology that is a form of comparative historical exegesis. That is, this work compares the exegesis of several commentators on the same biblical text, noting theological differences and tracing out traditions. This mode of comparison allows, in Heiko Oberman’s judgment, for a precise recording of significant, at times even far-reaching variants, allowing for a controlled and accurate retracing of shifts in the interpretation of scripture.⁸² While this methodology typically involves comparing two or three commentators on the same text, bringing in their other writings for context, the commentarial tradition itself forms a relatively integral whole, so that long historical periods can be canvassed with interpretive precision and without extensive recourse to outside materials. Thus, rather than comparing only two or three figures, this work compares some fifty-six commentators from Origen in the third century through the death of John Calvin in the sixteenth. Since most of these primary sources are lesser known (and untranslated), I have sought to give as much space as possible to them, letting their voices be heard anew.

The result is that the ecumenical consensus in this interpretive tradition resounds, even between commentators who are historically or confessionally distant. As a prominent example from the many that will follow: premodern exegetes, including Catholics and Protestants of all sorts, universally understood Paul’s statement in 1 Corinthians 2:13, We speak not in words taught by human wisdom, but in those taught by the Spirit, to prescribe a Spirit-inspired way of speaking for those who taught divine truths. Harmonious expositions thus focused on what kind of teaching Paul was rejecting in words taught by human wisdom, how the Spirit gave these words, and what qualities these Spirit-given words possessed. In short, this exegetical insight was held in common between Catholics and Protestants, contributing to an ecumenical doctrine of the divine pedagogy in which theologians were called to teach with words taught by the Spirit.

Yet divergences in this history do exist. The revealing fire of 1 Corinthians 3:13, for instance, is interpreted variously as the final judgment, purgatory, or earthly trials in the Middle Ages, but as the Spirit or scripture among figures like Erasmus and Calvin. Similarly, the perfect of 1 Corinthians 2:6 are seen as those who simply have faith by Chrysostom and Lutheran commentators, but as those who exercise perfect discernment by patristic figures like Origen and Augustine, or as those who are perfect in faith and understanding by Aquinas. Each of these conceptions has implications for how one understands the various elements of the divine pedagogy. Does God, for instance, reveal the quality of a theologian’s work in the final judgment or in the