Tag Archive for 'Bulgakov'

AAR, Literary Theory and the Bible

Published
by
DWM
on November 8, 2008
in Bulgakov, Culture, Hermeneutics, Literature, Scripture and Theology and other
. 1 Comment

I’m sorry we’ve been so absent lately. I know you miss us, a lot. But we’ve been really busy, and we know you’re a patient folk. Besides, we gave you that lovely Bulgakov Blog conference, and we know you still haven’t read every post yet, and you certainly haven’t read every comment made by your fellow readers. Come now, can’t you make at least one comment yourself?

This would be an excellent opportunity for me to offer my sincere thanks to everyone who contributed to the conference. Whether you made a large or small contribution, we are in your debt for what turned out to be a fascinating and thought provoking event!

In any event, we were busy. I was in Chicago with many of you at AAR. However, Aron seems to have joined that contentious group of protesters who haven’t quite come to terms with the AAR/SBL estrangement. Fear not, they’re getting back together, maybe even by 2011. Aron made up for his absence by attending the Chesterton Conference in Niagra, Ontario. Look for his paper to appear here soon once I steal it from his laptop.

I’ve recently become interested in the Bible again after reading Irenaeus’ Against Heresies and teaching the Revelation unit in my advisor’s Seminarian course a couple times.I’m currently writing a paper on the regula fidei, and at Joshua’s suggestion began reading up on some literary theory, including Northrop Frye (although I wonder what you had in mind when you made that recommendation, JADR). Anyway, I stumbled across this bit in Frye that made me laugh, and for lack of anything substantial to post at the moment, I thought I’d toss this one out there:

It took me some time to hit on the right formula for a course in the Bible. I consulted the curricula of other universities, and found that they gave courses called “The Bible As Literature,” which involved chopping pieces out of the Bible like the book of Job and the parables of Jesus, saying, “Look, aren’t they literary?” that approach violated all my instincts as a critic, because those instincts told me that what a critic does when he is confronted with any verbal document whatever is to start on page one at the upper left-hand corner and god one reading until he reads the bottom right-hand corner of the last page. But many people who have attempted to do that with the Bible have flaked out very quickly, generally somewhere around the middle of Leviticus.

- Northop Frye from Northrop Frye and Jacy McPherson, Biblical and Classical Myths

 

Bulgakov Blog Conference, Day 14 - FINAL POST

Published
by
DWM
on October 28, 2008
in Bulgakov
. 0 Comments

“A Discussion in Sophiology and Magic:  Renaissance Precursors to Bulgakov” — PART FOUR

By Janet Leslie Blumberg (Deep Grace of Theory)

Wow, Joshua. You responded to every issue I raised, only more succinctly than I had managed to raise them. (In fact, I had to throw away two previous responses, because I discovered I hadn’t read your reply deeply enough yet.)

I find myself much won….

As you say, surely, what is most important is to think through the application of sophiology in contemporary culture. And that means most of all thinking how Bulgakov helps us to “maintain our openness to knowing that we are known by God.”

Continue reading ‘Bulgakov Blog Conference, Day 14 - FINAL POST’

Bulgakov Blog Conference, Day 13

Published
by
DWM
on October 27, 2008
in Bulgakov, Creation, Grace and Nature
. 0 Comments

“A Discussion in Sophiology and Magic:  Renaissance Precursors to Bulgakov” — PART THREE

By Joshua Delpech-Ramey (The Land of Unlikeness)

The question Janet raises about whether Renaissance humanism, as found in Pico and Bruno, is really human enough, is very important to think through in terms of what we could call the application of sophiology in contemporary culture.

Pico’s emphasis on the polyvalent or indeterminate status of the human essence is not so much opposed to the Augustinian duality of divinity/humanity as the defining feature of human life as it is a setting of that duality in an epistemological situation that has complexified.  Augustine was adroitly skeptical about tying theology to the current dogmas of natural inquiry, whether it be inquiry about the difference between animals and humans or about the number of fixed stars or about any other subject of natural knowledge, including Biblical interpretation, where he advised much more caution about fixing the meaning of Biblical sense than future commentators would. Continue reading ‘Bulgakov Blog Conference, Day 13′

Bulgakov Blog Conference, Day 11

Published
by
DWM
on October 18, 2008
in Bulgakov and Theology and other
. 2 Comments

“A Discussion in Sophiology and Magic:  Renaissance Precursors to Bulgakov” — PART TWO
From Janet Leslie Blumberg to Joshua Delpech-Ramey:

Joshua,
So many rich ideas here in your own oration, Joshua:  An Oration on the Dignity of Sophia — the creaturely Sophia, that is. (As if she ever could be kept apart from the divine Sophia for very long…but we’ll try.)

I must choose just a few threads, out of this closely woven tapestry of yours….

So…you begin with precursors of sophiology in the German Romantic tradition; they had a direct influence on the Russian sophiologists. Then… you work your way back into the Great Unknown, back into the darkness of that more ancient tablet of the West which, according to Bulgakov, is a blank slate with respect to Sophia — at least insofar as her importance to theology is concerned. (But no one, including Bulgakov, should ever be expected to be acquainted intimately with everything, or be made to suffer indignity because of not being.)

So you say, Joshua, that the thinking of the creaturely Sophia was not absent in the West – at least among the poets and philosophers, although “at the level of systematic theology“ you accept Bulgakov’s judgment. But then I notice that after your wonderful “deregulation of nature” (Schelling’s liberation of the physical world from some of the rigid enclosures effected by early-modern epistemologists) –- that you make your transition back in time to the Renaissance not by explicitly citing Pico or Bruno as sophiologists, but instead by using Goethe’s Faust to raise a crucial modern problem, the way that knowledge has been drained of eros and set against love in our scientific, post-Newtonian thoughtworld, so that we are forced to choose one as against the other…. Continue reading ‘Bulgakov Blog Conference, Day 11′

Bulgakov Blog Conference, Day 10

Published
by
DWM
on October 15, 2008
in Bulgakov
. 0 Comments

Our final installation in the Bulgakov Blog Conference is a dialogue, which I think you will find highly illuminating. The dialogue will be published over the next couple days until we have posted it all.

“A Discussion in Sophiology and Magic:  Renaissance Precursors to Bulgakov” (PART ONE)
Between Joshua Delpech-Ramey (The Land of Unlikeness) and Janet Leslie Blumberg (Deep Grace of Theory):

Hello Joshua –
I have an opening question for you, having just finished Sophia, The Wisdom of God and being filled with its wise and gentle music…. Bulgakov says that Sophia, as the ousia of God, is “not a fourth” with respect to the Trinity. Not a quaternity. But via the Marian dimension of Sophia, he does bring into view an additional dimension to the efficacy of the Godhead, in terms of that special human nature that was Mary’s first, and then, through Mary, Christ’s. This humanity “possesses the Adamic nature” and is therefore capable of sin, but sinfulness is effectively reduced to nothingness by the holy life produced by the Holy Spirit with the full consent of the human agent.

I’m wondering, since you know much more about Pico della Mirandola than I do, how you would compare Bulgakov’s vision with Pico’s famous vision of a divinized humanity (a vision, by the way, somewhat qualified and brought down to earth by Shakespeare in the person of Prospero, in The Tempest). Continue reading ‘Bulgakov Blog Conference, Day 10′

Bulgakov Blog Conference, Response to Congdon & Bennett

Published
by
DWM
on October 13, 2008
in Bulgakov
. 1 Comment

“How Far Can You Go With Sophiology?”
by Brendan Thomas Sammon, The Catholic University of America

In chapter five of Catholicity and Orthodoxy, Eastern theologian John Myendorff insightfully inquires how the historical development of Western Christianity during the Reformation would have gone had there been a stronger Eastern Orthodox presence.  Reading David Congdon’s and Kyle David Bennett’s lucid presentations on Bulgakov’s sophiology reminded me of Myendorff’s insight; Congdon is, by his introductory admission, a Western Protestant, while Bennett offers a comparative analysis between Bulgakov and the Western Protestant theologian J. Moltmann.  The Eastern Orthodox/Western Protestant conversation, while interesting, inspiring and important, is unfortunately infrequent if not rare among theologians today.  That these two thinkers agreed to pursue Bulgakov is admirable and courageous.

Consequently, it was somewhat refreshing to read these two thoughtful reflections on the enigmatic doctrine of Sophiology as found in the thought of Sergius Bulgakov.  Both reflections offer praiseworthy considerations that help to draw out the beauty of this Eastern thinker.  At the same time, both offer points that merit critical attention. Continue reading ‘Bulgakov Blog Conference, Response to Congdon & Bennett’

Bulgakov Blog Conference, Day 6

Published
by
DWM
on October 9, 2008
in Bulgakov
. 0 Comments

The Burning Bush and Bulgakov’s Kataphatic Theology
M. S. Compton (all rights reserved)

Rowan Williams has observed that, in The Unfading Light,  Bulgakov expounds upon the Palamite doctrine, and finds “not only the foundation of the theology of negation…but also a vision of the transfiguration of the cosmos by the penetration of divine energy.” (1) Although Wisdom-Sophia is “not God” (i.e., a 4th hypostasis,) she is “the first principle of the new created plurality of hypostases…human and angelic…existing in sophianic relation to the divine.” (2) Bulgakov, in essence, says: “The mystery of the world is this femininity.” (3) Bulgakov’s Mariology, wherein the sacred feminine dimension of his theology is perhaps most explicit, is outlined in the second book of his first sophiological trilogy, The Burning Bush, the English translation of which will be available November, 2008 by Eerdmans. Continue reading ‘Bulgakov Blog Conference, Day 6′

Bulgakov Blog Conference, Day 5

Published
by
A.D.
on October 6, 2008
in Bulgakov and Theology and other
. 13 Comments

“Sophiology: Divine Sophia”
By Aron Dunlap, Temply University

In the hands of Bulgakov Sophia is described under two general forms, Divine Sophia and Creaturely Sophia. Divine Sophia goes under many names, one being that of the ousia, the Being, of the very Godhead, in distinction to the persons, the hypostases of the Father, Son and Spirit:

The first part of the dogma, that is, the doctrine of the relationship between the three hypostases with their hypostatic qualities and distinctive features, has been to a certain extent elucidated in the process of the Church’s dogmatic creativity.  But the other side, the doctrine of the consubstantiality  of the Holy Trinity, as well as the actual conception of the substance or nature, has been far less developed and, apparently, almost overlooked.1 Continue reading ‘Bulgakov Blog Conference, Day 5′

  1. Bulgakov, Sophia: The Wisdom of God, 24.↩

Bulgakov Blog Conference, Response to Karlson and Bruce-Aragon

Published
by
DWM
on October 5, 2008
in Bulgakov and Christology
. 4 Comments

“Orthodoxy, Heresiology, and Why We Should Care:
A Response to the Essays on Bulgakov and Apollinarius”
by Anthony D. Baker
Seminary of the Southwest
Austin, Texas

Rarely is new research on heresiarchs of the ancient church of any real theological interest.  Whether or not Augustine was right about what Pelagius meant is an archeological matter, since he was certainly right about the disasterously contractual conception of grace that his “fictive Pelagius” offered.  One of a small handful of exceptions to this rule is Rowan Williams’s Arius, which digs deeply into the source materials of fourth century Christology in order to deliver a punchline not so much about what we are to do with Arius, but about the relation of a creative theologian to the church, especially the church in a time of great doctrinal ambiguity.

As another exception to this rule, though, we must surely count Bulgakov’s reassessment of Apollinarius, part of a beautifully-crafted 88-page essay on Patristic Christology.   As Mr. Bruce points out here, this now seventy-five year old thesis holds up remarkably well alongside the recent work that has been done on Apollinarius, which must now cause teachers of Christology to stop assigning him that remarkably naïve notion that the human nature of Christ was void of a human soul.  In fact, as Bulgakov shows, the bishop of Laodicia understood quite well that what is not assumed is not healed, and so that a body and soul must both be assumed by the Logos.  What he lacked, however, was consistency of language and a thoroughly worked-out anthropology, leading later readers to make a rather insane caricature of his position in order to show the sanity of Cyril’s. Bruce points out very helpfully the crude scholarship of 19th century dogmatic histories on this point, and this makes Bulgakov’s rise in popularity over the last decade even more timely, since only now are these broadly sweeping and almost universally inaccurate tomes finally being exiled from seminary and undergraduate lecture halls. Continue reading ‘Bulgakov Blog Conference, Response to Karlson and Bruce-Aragon’

Bulgakov Blog Conference, Day 4

Published
by
DWM
on October 4, 2008
in Balthasar, Bulgakov and Christology
. 2 Comments

Bulgakov and Apollinarius
by Henry Karlson
The Catholic University of America

Back in 1952, Hans Urs von Balthasar had some rather shocking words to say about Christology: “And what a dryness there is in the doctrine about Christ, which likewise has made scarcely any progress since Chalcedon, where an abstract formula has to answer for the central mystery. Once again the formula is excellent, but only if it is a skeletal structure that enables the living flesh of the word of revelation to stand and walk.”1 Not many years before, Sergius Bulgakov made a similar point. While Chalcedon must be recognized as normative, it should not have ended Christological discussion. Its declaration was mostly negative: it stated who and what Christ was not, but left much room as to who and what Christ is.  The expectation was that there would be theological development. To be sure, there were few theological developments at II and III Constantinople, but they were minor, and beyond them, there really has not been any significant development in Christology.2  It was not meant to be this way.

Bulgakov believed that Christian theologians have far too long neglected this dogmatic problem. Christology, as it is today, provides answers which no longer satisfy the questions brought to it by believers and skeptics alike. Continue reading ‘Bulgakov Blog Conference, Day 4′

  1. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Razing the Bastions. Trans. Brian McNeil, C.R.V. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993), 29.↩
  2. Sergius Bulgakov, The Lamb of God. Trans. Boris Jakim (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdman’s Publishing Company, 2008), 194-6. ↩