Geoffrey Chaucer (ca. 1343-1400) loved Boethius (480-524). Not only did Chaucer make a complete translation of “Boece’s Concolacione Philosophie,” he cited Boethius frequently. Partly to prove he was a learned man, Chaucer would haul out a few lines of Boethius anytime he needed a character to say something philosophical.

So it’s no surprise that at the end of “The Knight’s Tale” from The Canterbury Tales, when Theseus, Duke of Athens, makes an important speech, the philosophy of Boethius figures prominently in it. What’s funnier is that in “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” when Chanticleer, the tricky chicken, hops up on a fence and makes a speech, he also cites Boethius.
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In the fullness of time, the one God revealed that he eternally exists as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and the doctrine of the Trinity is a biblical doctrine. But if you ask where the Trinity is clearly declared in scripture, you should take care to avoid certain common errors. One error is to dive immediately into prooftexting the doctrine by trying to locate verses which explicitly teach it.

The reason this is a mistake is that it ignores the kind of revelation the New Testament is. The New Testament is the inspired record of the apostolic generation looking back from its own time to the time before Jesus Christ ascended. Because of that, the New Testament is constantly referring backwards to the decisive events which took place in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. A brief summary of those events: God sent his son to save sinners. The authors of the NT are all pointing back to an event in the past and saying, “What happened there is that God sent his son to save us.”

By the way, God has a son. A unique son, an eternal son, a son who is part of the definition of God. A son who never came into being, but always was, in communion with the Father and the Spirit.
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To ask about Chaucer’s religion is a little thickheaded, because the main thing about Chaucer is his distance from religion. He’s important in the history of English lit partly because he’s “the first great secular poet in English,” and if we wanted to read religious literature from the 14th century, we could go read that instead of “the first great secular poet” Chaucer. This seems to be the dominant point of view in Chaucer studies, and it’s almost right.

But Nicholas Watson argues something much more interesting in a recent article (”Chaucer’s Public Christianity,” Religion & Literature 37:2 (Summer 2005), 99-114). Having gone out and read all that old religious literature, Watson locates Chaucer’s position within some intriguing 14th-century debates about the piety appropriate for laypeople.

Chaucer, it seems, was doing his best to be a mediocre Christian.

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Last Friday I had the chance to get together with the other profs in my department, including adjuncts and a few teachers from Torrey Academy and talk about King Lear for three hours. We call these meetings “High Table” meetings, because in them we do exactly what our students do, with the same texts for the same length of time using the same rules of conversation, but we do it as a faculty. So the table is higher, and we hope the discourse is also at an exalted level.

I didn’t take notes, but here are a few thoughts that stuck with me.

The redoubtable Miss Schubert was our leader, and her opening question was: “In Act I, Scene 1, Cordelia refuses to make the expected speech. Is her refusal blameworthy or praiseworthy?”
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When a theologian comes up with a way of structuring the presentation of Christian doctrine, sometimes it just catches on and gets used by theologians of very different traditions. Take as an example John Calvin’s way of describing Christ’s work as the mediator: reflecting on “Christ” as “the anointed one,” Calvin asked, “what kind of person gets officially anointed?” His answer, straight from Old Testament theology, was “Prophets, Priests, and Kings.” Though Calvin wasn’t the very first to say this (it goes back to Eusebius in the late 3rd century, I think), he was the first to use the idea of Jesus Christ’s triplex munus, threefold office, as a way of organizing a great deal of theological material.
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One mis-step on Google and I stumbled into a land of paranoid sedevacantist Roman Catholics who argue that Benedict XVI is a liberal, a protestant, and other things which are terms of abuse in their belief system. Okay, I can sympathize with what it would be like to live under a sky of that color. I’m unpersuaded, but I can at least make the imaginative leap of being such a conservative Catholic that you think a Manchurian Cardinal had snuck into the See of Peter. But what cracked me up is that they managed to find the most evil-looking photo of Ratzinger/Benedict I’ve ever seen. Wow! I knew cameras didn’t love the current pope like they did JPII, but this is really a remarkable photo.

The Washington Post ran a story recently about Rick Warren, bestselling megachurch superpastor. What caught my ear was one of the Warren lines quoted in the piece: “One of my goals is to take evangelicals back a century, to the 19th century,” said Warren … “That was a time of muscular Christianity that cared about every aspect of life.”

There are at least three good mini-soundbytes in there, but I’m drawn to the part that says “take evangelicals back a century.” I’ve been doing a lot of reading in evangelical literature from around 1885-1915, and have become very excited about what a great movement evangelicalism was. I suppose we were riding the D. L. Moody wave, and had not yet crashed into the modernist crisis in the schools and churches, never mind taken the public flogging of the Scopes trial.

Compared to the contemporary scene, I am astonished at how doctrinally informed, spiritually alive, socially engaged, historically aware, evangelistically driven, ecumenically collegial, and culturally savvy this movement was. It bleeds through all their publications. My personal favorite for monthly publications is the Biola journal The King’s Business, one decade of which is available here.