Volume 1, Tome II: Kierkegaard and the Bible - The New Testament

Lee C. Barrett, Jon Stewart

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351875479
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Exploring Kierkegaard's complex use of the Bible, the essays in this volume use source-critical research and tools ranging from literary criticism to theology and biblical studies, to situate Kierkegaard's appropriation of the biblical material in his cultural and intellectual context. The contributors seek to identify the possible sources that may have influenced Kierkegaard's understanding and employment of Scripture, and to describe the debates about the Bible that may have shaped, perhaps indirectly, his attitudes toward Scripture. They also pay close attention to Kierkegaard's actual hermeneutic practice, analyzing the implicit interpretive moves that he makes as well as his more explicit statements about the significance of various biblical passages. This close reading of Kierkegaard's texts elucidates the unique and sometimes odd features of his frequent appeals to Scripture. This volume in the series devotes one tome to the Old Testament and a second tome to the New Testament. As with the Old Testament, Kierkegaard was aware of new developments in New Testament scholarship, and troubled by them. Because these scholarly projects generated alternative understandings of the significance of Jesus, they impinged directly on his own work. It was crucial for Kierkegaard that Jesus is presented as both the enactment of God's reconciliation with humanity and as the prototype for humanity to emulate. Consequently, Kierkegaard had to struggle with the proper way to explicate persuasively the significance of Jesus in a situation of decreasing academic consensus about Jesus. He also had to contend with contested interpretations of James and Paul, two biblical authors vital for his work. As a result, Kierkegaard ruminated about the proper way to appropriate the New Testament and used material from it carefully and deliberately. The authors in the present New Testament tome seek to clarify different dimensions of Kierkegaard's interpretive theory and practice as he sought to avoid the twin pitfalls of academic skepticism and passionless biblical traditionalism.

PART I

Individual Texts and Figures

Simeon and Anna:

Exemplars of Patience and Expectancy

Lee C. Barrett

I. Introduction

Simeon and Anna make a single and rather brief appearance at the end of the birth narrative in the Gospel of Luke. In Luke 2:25–38 Simeon is described as a righteous and devout man who looked forward to the consolation of Israel (Luke 2:25), and Anna is characterized as a prophetic widow who prayed ceaselessly in the temple (Luke 2:36–7). Both Simeon and Anna recognize and celebrate the salvific identity of Jesus when the baby is brought into the temple by Mary and Joseph for the ceremony of the consecration of the first-born son. Having announced the redemptive and messianic mission of Jesus, Simeon and Anna disappear from the pages of the Bible. In spite of the fact that they make just one cameo appearance in just one of the Gospels, the two characters attained more prominence in the worship of the church than their minor role in the narrative would ordinarily have warranted. In the Middle Ages Simeon’s prayer of praise, known in Latin as the Nunc Dimittis because of the first two words of this passage in the Latin translation of the Vulgate, became part of the service of Compline in the daily office. During the Reformation the church order for northern Germany and Denmark developed by Johannes Bugenhagen (1485–1558) in 1537 included an order of worship for Vespers that contained the Nunc Dimittis. Although the practice of the daily office declined in Lutheran congregations during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it remained part of the official liturgical heritage of the Lutheran churches.¹ More importantly, in the lectionary of the Danish Church the text narrating the story of Anna and Simeon, Luke 2:22–40, was designated as the gospel reading for the first Sunday after Christmas. As a result, Simeon and Anna were not obscure names for a Lutheran theological student in nineteenth-century Denmark.

Kierkegaard’s attention to the two characters reflects their dramatic but brief role in Scripture. Apart from popping up in Kierkegaard’s authorship as incidental illustrations of general themes, Simeon and Anna make only one sustained appearance in only one upbuilding discourse. However, as in the New Testament that single appearance is fraught with significance. Although the space in Kierkegaard’s corpus devoted to the two characters is tiny, they perform a vital function in drawing together and encapsulating crucial themes from both the discourses and the pseudonymous literature.

II. Kierkegaard’s Exegetical Context

The story of Anna and Simeon was not a particularly important focal point for theological or exegetical debate in early modern northern Europe. It was generally eclipsed by the furor surrounding the more dramatic and controversial birth narrative in Luke that preceded it. However, questions about its historicity and, more significantly, its theological significance were raised.

Following the lectionary, Martin Luther had used Luke 2:33–40 as the text for two published sermons for the first Sunday after Christmas.² In many ways, these sermons established the basic framework for Lutheran engagement with the passage. In general, the story of Simeon and Anna functioned as a trope in Luther’s anti-Pelagian polemic. Simeon and Anna who waited for God to initiate redemptive action became paradigms of the appropriate Christian reliance upon God’s grace rather than upon self-generated works. Luther stressed the joy that is stimulated by the confidence in God’s victory over sin and death and the wonder at God’s mercy that is evoked by grace. In spite of this dominant joyful note of the gratuity of salvation, Luther introduces a more somber theme, observing that this glorious good news of God’s grace will offend many, as Simeon had predicted. God’s presence in Christ is hidden in lowliness and cannot be perceived by those who trust in their own spiritual prowess. Therefore, those who proclaim the gospel of justification by grace will encounter opposition from a world enamored with works-righteousness. Applying the text to his own situation, Luther claimed that the priests of the Roman church were among the enemies of the gospel predicted by Simeon, and that the proclamation of grace through Christ had evoked their lethal hostility and thereby exposed it to public view.

While sharing many common motifs with Luther’s interpretation, John Calvin’s exposition of the Simeon and Anna story diverged in emphasis from Luther’s and more closely anticipated Kierkegaard’s engagement with the narrative. Like Luther, Calvin highlights the passage’s implicit theme of reliance upon grace. In fact, the purification of Christ points to the fact that Christ took upon himself the uncleanness of human nature, an uncleanness that can only be purified by God’s unmerited grace.³ However, Calvin devotes much more attention to Simeon and Anna as exemplars of faith. Simeon was said to be both pious and just, thereby suggesting that he respected and obeyed the two tables of God’s law. Moreover, both characters were not only devout but also humble, not part of the priestly elite. The theme of lowliness (which Luther had also stressed) is reinforced in the text by the fact that Mary and Joseph offer two turtledoves, which in Leviticus 5:7 is the recommended sacrifice for those who cannot afford a sheep. It is these humble people who trust in the promises of God. Simeon and Anna, having put aside worldly ambitions, can perceive the glory of Christ hidden under the humble circumstances of his family. Calvin proceeds to emphasize Simeon’s and Anna’s virtues of expectation and hope directed toward the anticipated redemptive acts of God. In Calvin’s account, the virtue of hope is linked with the virtue of patience. The Christian who trusts in God’s grace must be prepared to encounter the world’s opposition and patiently endure present afflictions. Calvin associates this patient endurance with Anna’s decision to abstain from a second marriage, a theme that would be crucial for Kierkegaard. For Calvin, more so than Luther, Simeon and Anna function as paradigms of patient expectancy.

Because this pericope was embedded in the cycle of Luke’s nativity stories, its origin was part of the general debate concerning the sources of the Gospels that had been spawned by the rise of higher criticism. Wilhelm Martin Leberecht de Wette (1789–1849), whose introductory text on biblical studies Kierkegaard frequently consulted, claimed that Luke had utilized three types of sources: a common oral tradition as proposed by Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), a variety of fragmentary writings derived from that tradition as suggested by Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), and the Gospel of Matthew.⁴ De Wette noted the distinctiveness of Luke’s pervasive concern for the poor and oppressed and his opposition to the rich. He also identified in Luke a Pauline tendency to stress the universal scope of God’s redemptive activity. De Wette concluded that Luke had been born a gentile and intended his Gospel for a gentile audience. He opined that Luke had been composed by a friend of Paul, although it had probably not been written under the direct supervision of Paul.

De Wette dealt more explicitly with the Simeon and Anna story in his brief commentary on Luke.⁵ He argued that Simeon was probably not the son of Hillel or the father of Gamaliel, a theory that had gained some currency. Oddly, de Wette devoted very little attention to Anna. He did stress the role of Mary as the “mater dolorosa,” a role rooted in the fact that her son would be “a sign that will be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed” (Luke 2:34–5). In general, de Wette treated the story as a component of the prehistory of Jesus, and noted the striking contradictions between Matthew and Luke concerning this prehistory. With typical caution, de Wette concluded that it is difficult to determine exactly what actually happened.

Hermann Olshausen (1796–1839) had studied with de Wette and shared his opinions about the Pauline universalizing dynamics in Luke’s Gospel, but was more conservative than de Wette on matters of authorship and historicity.⁶ He proposed not only that the author of Luke was indeed the friend and traveling companion of Paul mentioned in Acts, but also that Paul had probably supervised the composition of the Gospel. Influenced by Friedrich Schleiermacher, Olshausen emphasized the theme that Jesus’ human personality developed according to the general laws of human nature. Therefore, the purification in the temple and the blessing was entirely appropriate, for Jesus’ solidarity with sinful human flesh made such rituals of transformation necessary. To make sense of Jesus’ participation in human vulnerability and the need for growth, Olshausen articulated the theme of kenosis, the radical self-emptying of Jesus. For Olshausen, Luke 2:22–38 was framed by the pervasive motif that Jesus must humble himself and suffer in order to raise his brothers and sisters to a new spiritual level. The deliverance of humanity from sin and suffering could only be accomplished through the condescension of Jesus. The entire passage is an allusion to the future suffering of Christ and the suffering caused by Christ. Simeon accurately foretells that Christ will be a stumbling block to many, that the cross will confront individuals with the choice of accepting its message of self-emptying love or succumbing to offense, and that it will provoke widespread opposition. The crucifixion of the messiah confronts the individual with the need to make a d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• List of Abbreviations
• PART I INDIVIDUAL TEXTS AND FIGURES
• PART II OVERVIEW ARTICLES
• Index of Subjects
• Index of Persons