Tuesday, May 16, 2023

Steven Nemes on Matthew 23:8-10

  

But be not ye called Rabbi: for one is your Master, even Christ; and all ye are brethren. And call no man your father upon the earth: for one is your Father, which is in heaven.  Neither be ye called masters: for one is your Master, even Christ. (Matt 23:8-10)

 

In this week’s Come Follow Me Reading, Matt 23 is one of the chapters we will be reading, and the above passage is sometimes used as a “proof-text” against Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. However, I do not believe it to be a valid text used against these groups. This morning, I read the following from Steven Nemes (no friend to Catholic theology!) on this passage which was pretty insightful:

 

These commands addressed to his disciples are very provocative, but it is important not to get distracted by facile and confused misreadings of Jesus’s words here. He very clearly does not principally have in mind the mere use of certain titles to describe certain persons within the community of his followers. He will later refer to the “prophets, sages, and scribes” (v. 34) to be sent by him whom the Pharisees would kill. There are even loftier titles than “rabbi,” “father,” and “instructor.” Paul also would later say that Jesus left “teachers” in the church (Eph 4:11). And he elsewhere says that he became a “father” to the Corinthians whom he evangelized (1 Cor 4:15). Presumably he does not mean to contradict Jesus—although it is admittedly one thing to describe a person as a teacher or as a figurative “father” and it is quite another to adopt those words as titles. The mere use of certain words is therefore irrelevant to Jesus’s point. He is not forbidding his disciples from even uttering the word “father” or “instructor” with respect to other persons. Neither does he mean to say that it would be illegitimate for children to address their male parents by the name “father,” which would be ridiculous. All such considerations are entirely irrelevant to the real point that he means to be making. (Steven Nemes, Theological Authority in the Church: Reconsidering Traditionalism and Hierarchy [Eugene, Oreg.: Cascade Books, 2023], 27-28)

 

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