Receiving 2 Thessalonians

Theological Reception Aesthetics from the Early Church to the Reformation

Andrew R. Talbert

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781532673726
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

Epochal voices in the reception history of 2 Thessalonians: an invective against the proud from the dais of a basilica in Constantinople; an indictment of clerical simony in a Carolingian monastery that nearly faded from historical memory; a theologically integrative vision of the epistle from Reformation Zurich. These readings participate in "beauty" all the while opening up new questions for later readers of Paul's letter, and their "meaning" is located in their fittingness to the form of Christ. This work offers a truly interdisciplinary methodology that brings together the wayward children of biblical and theological studies.

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Introduction

The Antichrist will go forth from the lower regions and the chasms of Hades. And he will come into a small garidion fish. And he is coming into the broad sea. And he will be caught by twelve fishermen. . . . He comes into Jerusalem and becomes a false teacher. And he will appear quiet and gentle and guileless. (Apoc. of Dan. 9:1–16)1

“Antichrist”—the malevolent herald of Christ’s Second-Coming (and, incidentally, an enticing hook-word for beginning a book), but also a word of great importance that wends its way through the interpretation history of 2 Thessalonians. The inquiry into this figure has raised questions of great and ongoing ecclesiological import (“Do Calvin’s or Luther’s association of this figure with the papacy persist?”), the theologically mundane (“Will the Antichrist install his throne on the Mount of Olives?”), and even the typological oddity (“Will this Antichrist be circumcised?”). These parenthetical questions, and a great many more, are part of the nearly 2,000 year history of the aforementioned epistle, despite the fact that the term of interest does not even appear in 2 Thessalonians, let alone the Pauline corpus.

The book in progress charts the aesthetic-receptive history of 2 Thessalonians as it relates to the question-generative pressure of this letter and the broader hermeneutical frameworks within which these questions are put into play. With few exceptions in fundamentalism and broader evangelicalism, hermeneutical scholarship has demonstrated the polyvalency of the Christian scriptures without a requisite Hirschian distinction between “significance” and “meaning”2 or a devolution into the relativism of Nancian “sense.”3 Our project, then, is to consider a holistic hermeneutic that does justice to meaning-surplus in, through, and with history as it relates to the interpretation of 2 Thessalonians—a hermeneutic that does justice to biblical meaning both spatially and temporally. Such a holistic hermeneutic must simultaneously take seriously socio-historical contexts, theological trajectories, and the canonical form of scripture, but it must also exhibit a robustness that can place differing interpretations and methodological assumptions in dialogue while being a theological hermeneutic.

In many, if not in all of these ways, the literary-hermeneutical approach of Rezeptionsästhetik developed by Hans Robert Jauss provides precisely such an approach. Adopting and adapting this model, we seek not simply to record a history of interpretation of 2 Thessalonians, but to explore how particular actualisations, or concretisations, of the epistle have shaped the history of interpretation—so that the old continues to speak through the new4—and how the interpreters from various time periods unveil the truth-disclosive power of 2 Thessalonians in shifting contexts. “Reception” is taken over in this work as a theological category from the reader’s perspective that corresponds to the divine acts of revelation and providence.

Rezeptionsästhetik is a summons to remain open to the content and claims of the text, to perceive the questions that the text and interpretations open for later generations, and to recognize the reader’s role in meaning-production. These aims are a sharpening of the proposals mentioned above. As the hermeneutical framework of this project, Rezeptionsästhetik receives more detailed attention in due time.

Though the bulk of this work concentrates on the interpretation of 2 Thessalonians during discrete historical occasions, it would be insufficient to explore these actualisations without first articulating several critical issues and a methodology that propel this project. Additionally, the scope of this work requires a selection of pre-modern representatives. Therefore, the figures that follow have been selected from general periods of church history to demonstrate influential perspectives from their respective eras, and to situate them in the exegetical contexts in which they arose through dialogue with contemporaries: John Chrysostom, Haimo of Auxerre, and John Calvin. The selection of these three readers of 2 Thessalonians has to do with their place in its history as “epochal” interpreters. That is, they have exerted significant influence in the reception history of 2 Thessalonians, including on each other.

The first chapter concentrates on Rezeptionsästhetik and the idea of “reception” as a theological category for a program to explore the historical receptions of a text and as a model that provokes any actualisation of a text with the expected, positive outcome of expanding one’s horizon of understanding. In so doing, Rezeptionsästhetik illuminates the continuity between the historical eras of biblical interpretation, foregrounds exegetical conclusions reached in the history of interpreting 2 Thessalonians, and considers the roles that time, place, and culture play in a theology of reception and revelation.

The three chapters that follow engage with pre-modern exegetes in a pattern that attempts to disclose the “aesthetic value”5 of their readings in their “horizon of expectation”6 through dialogue with their contemporaries. Therefore, chapter 2 introduces John Chrysostom—the primary example of patristic interpretation of 2 Thessalonians. In this chapter, we explore a number of his interpretive assumptions (e.g., biblical inspiration and canon) as well as his exegetical decisions in both his homilies on 2 Thessalonians and other texts in which he incorporates the epistle.

Haimo of Auxerre represents a medieval voice in chapter 3. His brief commentary on the epistle became a standard of interpretation in the generations that followed, and his ability to blend patristic thought with his own insights make his work an “epochal” moment in the history of 2 Thessalonians. The combination of the fact that few modern biblical scholars are familiar with his work and his perspective as a monk at the height of the Carolingian era who asks historically-shaped questions of this biblical book provides a provocative engagement with modern horizons of expectations as they relate to 2 Thessalonians.

By the Reformation, we turn to the work of the man of Picardy, John Calvin, on 2 Thessalonians. This includes a discussion on his historically-effected reading of the epistle, as well as an exploration into how Calvin interprets 2 Thessalonians in The Institutes, his commentary on the letter, and other theological works.

The concluding chapter remarks on the importance of reception history for biblical studies and the insights that the respective scholars bring to the interpretation of 2 Thessa...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: The Early Church
• Chapter 3: The Medieval Church
• Chapter 4: The Reformation
• Chapter 5: Conclusion
• Bibliography