Signs of Life. Rick Fabian
today over many issues beyond the Eucharist. It calls for fresh reflection on what we do together in church, and on all those rites classically called signs of grace.
Consulting the Bible today requires historical learning and language skill. Readers will encounter here the important name “Septuagint” marking an ancient Alexandrian translation of Hebrew scripture by Greek-speaking Jews. All New Testament writers knew the Septuagint, although Jesus and his Aramaic hearers likely did not. The name is Latin for “seventy,” so abbreviated by the Latin numeral LXX. It springs from a legend that seventy Hebrew translators emerged from seventy locked rooms with seventy identical Greek texts, proving divine guidance. Jewish scripture scholar Nahum Sarna quips, “It would have been a greater miracle if seventy rabbis meeting in the same room had come up with one translation!” This book will draw from four English versions sharing a critical approach.3 For simplicity, God’s Hebrew name will appear here in consonants YHWH as received, without adding conjectured vowels.
These chapters will also touch upon Christian apologetic among world religions, as parishioners increasingly require. Ecumenical dialog has influenced our ritual talk before now. Church discourse tracked ancient Hellenistic philosophers for centuries through Renaissance schisms, but now it lacks a missionary future without engaging other faiths as broadly. Christians want allies in today’s secular world, and may have more allies than our forebears knew.
Today the very text reshapes our troop lines on land. A century’s critics have striven over what sayings prove Jesus’s “authentic” authorship and on what grounds, like an old battlefield where new-cut paths pass live buried materiel. Other scholarly terrains have also been lumbered and charted anew during the past century. Rehearsing so many campaigns would treble this book’s length. Instead let me adapt the Komodo dragon’s hunting strategy to worship renewal. Earth’s grandest reptile (see illustration), the Komodo dragon bites just one limb; then she waits for her prey to succumb to the spreading infection. I hope that instead of corrupting readers’ faith, my single bites will spread desire to explore further so many island jungles of knowledge.
Where my opinion counters others longer or more widely held, I revere the faithful intent that shaped those. Revisionism diverges by definition; nevertheless my predecessors’ devotion toward the Bible and our classical Christian conversation matches any today. And their industry so far surpasses my own that I must end this Introduction with my thanks.
Richard Fabian
Rounding Cape Horn, Patagonia, southern spring 2017
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1. Francis Bacon, “Of Truth,” Essays or Counsels Civil and Moral, ed. Richard Foster Jones (New York: Odyssey, 1937), 4.
2. CR: The Anglican monastic Community of the Resurrection at Mirfield, Yorkshire, UK, includes several eminent scholars and a theological college seminary.
3. New Revised Standard Version (NRSV), New English Bible (NEB), New American Bible (NAB) and New Jerusalem Bible (NJB), and rarely my own renderings.
CHAPTER ONE
JESUS’S SIGN:
THE WELCOMING TABLE
The Lord’s supper takes place on the basis of an invitation which is as open as the outstretched arms of Christ on the cross. Because he died for the reconciliation of “the world,” the world is invited to reconciliation in the supper. It is not the openness of this invitation, it is the restrictive measures of the church which have to be justified before the face of the crucified Jesus. But which of us can justify them in his sight? The openness of the crucified Lord’s invitation to his supper and his fellowship reaches beyond the frontiers of the different denominations. It even reaches beyond the frontiers of Christianity; for it is addressed to “all nations” and to “tax-collectors and sinners” first of all. Consequently we understand Christ’s invitation as being open, not merely to the churches but to the whole world.1
—JÜRGEN MOLTMANN
The practice of Open Communion or “Open Table” spreads among churches today amid debate. Opponents criticize its defection from millennia of tradition, or object that instead of theological reasoning, proponents appeal to modern social fashion. Here we will seek to ground an Open Table theology upon modern critical study of Jesus’s teaching in the New Testament gospels, and its deeper Hebrew Old Testament foundation. In crucial ways, Jesus’s own voice was conservative, against ascendant sectarian fashion. By practicing an Open Welcoming Table like his, we moderns actually imitate classic Christian writers, who sought above all to follow Jesus faithfully. Happily for us, Jesus’s Open Table meets the evangelical challenges of our own day, as my own urban parish has found.
St. Gregory of Nyssa Church Altar & Font.
David Sanger
Upon first entering St. Gregory Nyssen Episcopal Church in San Francisco, you will see a sanctuary distinctively arranged. Immediately before you stands an altar table in an open space, and rising beyond it in a bright courtyard, a rocky baptismal font. Nave seating for worshippers stretches off to the right.
St. Gregory’s altar table before you bears two inscriptions. One pedestal facing the entry doors reads in Greek from Luke’s gospel, “This guy welcomes sinners and eats with them.”2
Not former sinners, not repentant sinners; sinners. Gospel critics agree that such insults and scandalous charges, especially those embarrassing to the church, are our most reliable evidence about Jesus. Mainline Christian tradition has always upheld Jesus on this point. The Christian Eucharist may be the world’s only religious meal where all the diners are officially declared unworthy to eat, every time they eat. Nor does eucharistic sharing set Christians apart as unlike others. The opposite altar table pedestal facing our font quotes Isaac of Nineveh:
Did not the Lord share the table of tax collectors and harlots? So then—do not distinguish between the worthy and unworthy. All must be equal in your eyes to love and to serve.
Our architectural plan expresses our sacramental custom, and both reverse widespread Christian order: we welcome all to Communion at Jesus’s table, and invite any unbaptized to Baptism afterward. Our rationale at St. Gregory’s rises from a revised reading ofJesus’s teaching ministry and death, to which we intend the same faithfulness that ancient Christians always intended. We express that same faithfulness in a modern way, just as all churches without exception must do today.
Modern History and Jesus
The religious sociologist Peter Berger distinguished “modern” from traditional societies. In modern societies all is done by rational choice, not taken as given: therefore every choice demands explaining. (Let me sidestep the term “post-modern,” which suggests faster intellectual change than human society can demonstrably achieve. On Berger’s terms the modern world began at the European Renaissance, and is still going on.)3
Moderns must criticize the past, not merely purge the past. Our Western sixteenth-century Reformers preached faithfully against superstition; yet they mistakenly destroyed much that was beautiful, truthful, and indeed primitively Christian. We must allow that in every age Christians have intended faithfulness to Jesus’s teaching and example. The architects of conventional sacramental policy built for no other purpose. Nevertheless, our knowledge of Jesus has shifted sharply today, and faithfulness to Jesus compels us to shift our practice too. Otherwise we launch something that would truly shock our forebears: an anti-Jesus counterrevolution.
Over a century ago, scripture critics began distinguishing the “historical Jesus” from the “Christ of faith” our written gospels portray. At first, the critics’ goal was “positive history.” As the German historian Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886) labeled it, wie es eigentlich gewesen ist: telling the past as it really was. That project produced a remote and puzzling Jesus, however, variously