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.

Evangelicals have long wrestled with the problem of having the doctrine of the Trinity functioning in their lives as an intellectual problem rather than as the confesion of an experienced reality (see previous posts on Bunyan and Watts). This tension has come to expression repeatedly in the devotional life of evangelicals. As I have scanned our history in search of a trinitarian spirituality, one of my favorite discoveries is the experience of American Holiness evangelist Amanda Smith (1837-1915), recorded in her autobiography The Story of the Lord’s Dealings with Mrs. Amanda Smith, the Colored Evangelist.

The full text is online, and is well worth reading for a number of reasons. Smith was redeemed out of slavery as a child by her father, a freed man who spent the rest of his life earning money to buy his own family. Amanda Smith had a powerful ministry in the Holiness tradition, and her spiritual emphasis will be familiar to anyone who has read Phoebe Palmer. Smith’s tone of voice is singular and striking. She had several intriguing visionary experiences, rebuked the devil, and preached salvation and sanctification all over.

Without explaining what provoked her, Smith records that she “became greatly exercised about the Trinity.” “I could not seem to understand just how there could exist three distinct persons, and yet one. I thought every day and prayed for light, but didn’t seem to get help. I read the Bible, but no help came.” Smith records the two weeks during which her anxiety mounted and she felt guided toward a definite experience of personal revelation, a kind of intellectual counterpart to the experience of entire sanctification expected by Holiness people in America. Encouraged that “every blessing you get from God is by faith,” Smith asked herself, “if by faith, why not now?”

I turned around and knelt down by an old trunk that stood in the corner of the room, and I told the Lord that I wanted to understand the Trinity, and that I was afraid of fanaticism, and I wanted Him to make it clear to me for His own sake. I don’t know how long I prayed, but O, how my soul was filled with light under the great baptism that came upon me. I came near falling prostrate, but bore up when God revealed Himself so clearly to me, and I have understood it ever since. I can’t just explain it to others, but God made me understand it so I have had no question since. Praise the Lord! Then He showed me three other things…

Smith undeniably had a powerful spiritual experience centered on the doctrine of the Trinity, but it is equally clear that the problem her experience solved for her is the problem of how the doctrine itself can make sense. In a single ineffable moment, a “great baptism,” she leapt the divide between doctrine and life. Perhaps if she had been able to “explain it to others,” her explanation would have laid bare the evangelical sub-structure of trinitarian commitment; perhaps this is what God made her understand to her own intellectual satisfaction. As it stands, however, the implicit advice from Smith’s experience seems to be that troubled believers should likewise “pray through” to clarity and peace over this teaching. That is what you could expect a Holiness preacher to advocate, since that tradition empahsizes acts of total consecration, praying through to a definite experience, instantaneous gifts given by God which take you to another level of spiritual experience. In this case, the experience is comprehension of a hard doctrine.

Isaac Watts (1674-1748) is demonstrably a trinitarian, but he felt a tremendous tension over the doctrine. In his time there had been considerable debate about whether this hard doctrine was truly scriptural (for a blow-by-blow account of trinitarian fights in English in the seventeenth century, see Philip Dixon’s book Nice and Hot Disputes). Watts was as submissive to scriptural revelation as anyone, but was deeply troubled about what doctrine he was being asked to submit his understanding to:

“Dear and blessed God, hadst thou been pleased, in any one plain scripture, to have informed me which of the different opinions about holy Trinity, among the contending parties of Christians, had been true, thou knowest with how much real satisfaction and joy, my unbiased heart would have opened itself to receive and embrace the divine discovery.”

If only God had shown “plainly, in any single text, that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, are three real distinct persons” in one divine nature, Watts says, “I had never suffered myself to be bewildered in so many doubts, nor embarrassed with so many strong fears of assenting to the mere inventions of men, instead of divine doctrine; but I should have humbly and immediately accepted thy words, so far as it was possible for me to understand them, as the only rule of my faith.”

Nowhere in his impassioned prayer does Watts give the impression that he is grappling with a mystery of salvation; his angst all stems from the situation of being faced with a doctrine lacking the kind of direct biblical support which would bind it on his conscience as an article of faith, and its sheer intellectual difficulty. “How can such weak creatures ever take in so strange, so difficult, and so abstruse a doctrine as this?”

Midrash Tehillim, the set of medieval rabbinic comments on the Psalms, sometimes delivers powerful and illuminating insights into the Psalms. Other times, it delivers powerful and illuminating insights into something else altogether –other parts of scripture, apparently unrelated except maybe by one verbal parallel. The rabbis knew how to do commentary on literal meaning, but this midrash tradition is about something else, like exploring “the seventy aspects” of each text. To say it midrashically: R. Moses of Kobryn said, “In each generation at least one man is given the means to understand the Zohar; but not even one man in a generation is capable of understanding Midrash, it being closed up and sealed … until the coming of Messiah.”

I turned to the Midrash Tehillim today for stimulation in understanding Psalm 28. I was expecting maybe some cross-referencing fun from verse 9, “Oh save your people and bless your heritage! Be their shepherd and carry them forever.” Either “heritage” or “shepherd” would be rich word studies, and just doing a concordance-drill for important occurrrences of those terms would be illuminating.

Instead I found frogs.

And here’s how they got into Psalm 28:

Hop to verse 3. It says, “Do not drag me off with the wicked.”

Hop to the root word in “drag me off” (be’alunu).

Hop to Isaiah 26:13, where the same root apparently also occurs in “other lords besides you have ruled over us.”

Hop to the rest of Isaiah 26:13, which goes on (in some translation), “even without thee we make mention of thy name alone.” That means, even when God did not do miracles of deliverance, his people were ready to die for the honoring of his name.

Hop to what that makes you think of: Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego talking back to King Nebuchadnezzar: “Our God is able to deliver us; he will deliver us… and if not, be it known unto thee, we shall not serve thy gods.” So Nebuchadnezzar getteth sore wroth and stoketh the oven times seven.

Hop to: An imaginative extension of the story, the three young men throw themselves into the furnace. Why would they do such a thing?

Hop to: Exodus 8:3, “The river shall bring forth frogs abundantly, which shall go up and come into… thine ovens, and into thy dough.”

When is dough next to an oven? When the oven is hot. Oven, hot, get it? And I quote:

Accordingly this verse proves that frogs came and threw themselves into ovens in order to hallow the name of the Holy One, blessed be He. And how did the Holy One, blessed be He, reward the frogs? All other frogs in Egypt died, as is said The frogs died out of the houses, out of the courts, and out of the fields (Ex. 8:9), but the frogs which went into the ovens to fulfill the decree of the Holy One, blessed be He, did not die, because they were willing to be burnt. And so the frogs sprang up alive out of the ovens and went back into the river, for it is said They alone shall remain in the river (Ex. 8:7)

The Midrash Tehillim goes in a couple of other directions from here, including offering alternative explanations of what the three young men were thinking when they leapt into the fire. I know it’s crazy stuff. As far as I can tell, Messiah has come and we still can’t do much with some of the Midrash. But even here with the frogs, there’s some take-away value. I can think of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego when reading this prayer. That helps me get a handle on the two-part structure of Psalm 28, which begins with a plea that God not be deaf to the speaker’s prayer (a point the Midrash does get to by way of Isaiah). I can connect it with the collective note struck suddenly in verse 9, “shepherd your people.” As usual, the Midrash is not exactly commentary, and a serious student would be sure to do some grammatical-historical work as the first order of business. But if your goal is to spend the day thinking about God and his ways, using Psalm 28 as your hopping-off point, the frogs don’t hurt.