The Seven Penitential Psalms in the Allegorist’s Hands

7 November, 2024

We are deeply honoured to welcome Revd Dr Jason Byassee, Author of Reading the Psalms with Augustine, to lead the Psalms in Interfaith Contexts Reading Group session.

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Here are more details of this fascinating event.

Topic: The Seven Penitential Psalms in the Allegorist’s Hands (Pss: 6, 32, 38, 51, 102, 130, and 143)

Abstract: St. Augustine’s approach to the psalms is the most thoroughly and rigorously Christological hermeneutic we have from the early church. Other Christian interpreters apply such a hermeneutic occasionally, most often to “rescue” a psalm from theological trouble. Augustine always sees the psalm through the lens of the totus Christus, the whole Christ, head and members. In some psalms, Christ speaks in his “own” voice—especially in psalms that offer praise and adoration. In others he speaks in “ours,” especially those that confess sins. The hermeneutic can have a dramatic impact—as when he reads imprecatory psalms as prayers to turn enemies into friends.
What does he do with the psalms that would become the church’s seven great psalms of penitence? These should read simply enough as expressions of “our” distance from God and need for forgiveness, and suit his latter-career polemic against the Donatists and Pelagians quite well. But the literal, for Augustine, is not simply the literal as we or other ages in interpretive history would have it. The letter often refers, without allegorical embellishment, to Christ. What then does he make of a letter that needs no hard correction?

Speaker’s biography: Revd Dr Jason Byassee is the senior pastor at Timothy Eaton Memorial Church in Toronto, Canada. He previously taught preaching at the Vancouver School of Theology in British Columbia, where he held the Butler Chair in Homiletics and Biblical Hermeneutics. His primary vocation is to reinvigorate today’s church with the best of ancient and contemporary wisdom for creatively faithful living. He is a contributing editor at Christian Century magazine, and has written widely on church and culture in such places as Sojourners, Christianity Today, and the Vancouver Sun. He is a native of North Carolina, where he pastored Boone United Methodist Church during a period of growth from 2011-2015. His recent books have engaged questions of church revitalization in specific geographies (Northern Lights: Resurrecting Church in the North of England and with Ross Lockhart, Better Than Brunch: Missional Churches in Cascadia), reading the bible for preaching and life (Surprised by Jesus Again and Psalms 101-150), and technology and ministry (Following: Embodied Discipleship in a Digital Age, with Andria Irwin). He and his wife Jaylynn are ordained elders in the United Methodist Church, and have served in ministry together in BC at Tenth Church, a multi-site megachurch, and at First Baptist Church in Vancouver. He was recently a visiting fellow at St. John’s College at Durham University in the UK. He was also preacher to the English-speaking congregation at Vancouver Chinese Presbyterian Church, from which his work on Christianity: An Asian Religion in Vancouver (with Albert Chu and Ross Lockhart) emerged.
More information is available on Revd Dr Jasob Byassee’s website at www.jasonbyassee.com.