Philip Ritchie has raised some stimulating questions in response to my Not cherry-picking, but 'Open' post. Each one needs alot of thought and I have only had a chance to respond to the first two as yet. But, for what it is worth, these are my current thoughts in response:
1. Where do you see yourself standing between these two poles [Richardson and Rollins]?
I’m closer to Rollins than to Richardson and the principal reason for this is my thinking about the form of scripture. I think that the form in which scripture has been received is a much neglected area of biblical study and reflection and one that some of the theologians and scholars that I find most interesting and convincing have begun to address in their writings. I think it is significant because it should impact on evangelical views of the inspiration of scripture.
My view is that scripture is inspired both in its form and content; that God determined the form in which we have received scripture and that in order to understand and use scripture as he intended we have to use and not abuse the form in which we have received scripture. This, I think, leads to an essentially open view of scripture. Closed forms are those which move coherently towards a clearly stated resolution or conclusion. These could include, for example, a legal document, a lecture, or a traditional novel with a beginning, middle and end. Open forms are those which involve internal debate and dialogue (often both in content and genres used) and which do not arrive at a clear resolution or conclusion. Examples include Tristram Shandy, Ulysses, and The Waste Land. While the Bible contains a number of books written using closed forms, in its overall form it seems to me that it is open.
2. Does Christianity have a meta – narrative? I believe it does and I think scripture itself bears witness to this. I accept what Rollins is saying about the ‘wrestling with God’ aspects of scripture but these are much more evident in the Old Testament than the New Testament. The examples from Rollins you quote are OT e.g. Moses and Jacob. We do see a wrestling in the NT but there is also a great deal of resolution within the canon which begins to emerge e.g. the place of Gentile Christians, law, circumcision, food laws, Temple etc. I am reading through Acts at the moment and it does seem to me that early on in the life of the emerging church a meta-narrative began to develop centred on Christ. The Old Testament witness is then interpreted in the light of this. The speeches in Acts contain meta-narratives in which scripture is presented as pointing to Jesus as both Lord and Messiah. Peter in Acts 2, Stephen in Acts 7 being two examples.
There are two questions here and I’ll start with the latter which is, isn’t the NT more about resolution than wrestling? Interestingly the idea that the NT is more about resolution than wrestling is the conclusion reached by Gabriel Josipovici, one of my favourite writers on the Bible, who argues that the Jewish scriptures are an essentially ‘open’ collection of texts that don’t achieve or seek resolution while the forward thrust of the narrative conception underpinning the structure of the combined Old and New Testaments means that the Christian scriptures to seek and achieve resolution. Josipovici argues that:
“The Christian Bible leads to the end of time, to the fulfilment of time. When time is fulfilled everything will have been revealed … but by and large the Hebrew Bible chose a different path. It chose not to stay with the fulfilment of man’s desires but with the reality of what happens to us in life. We all long in our daily lives for an end to uncertainty, to the need for decisions and choices, with the concomitant feeling that the choices we have made may have been the wrong ones. Yet we also know that life will not provide such an end, that we will always be enmeshed in uncertainty. What is extraordinary is that a sacred book should dramatize this, rather than be the one place where we are given what we desire. But that is precisely what the Hebrew Bible does … What we have to say is that Christianity expresses profound desires and suggests that these can eventually be fulfilled. The Hebrew Bible refuses that consolation.”
That is essentially an alternative way framing the argument you make in your question. I want to nuance this response rather more than you or Josipovici.
So where do we find wrestling with God in the New Testament? I would rather want to ask where do we find conversation or dialogue with God in the New Testament? Let’s begin with Jesus and his dialogue within the Trinity. Jesus as God’s Son is in conversation with both God the Father and with God the Spirit. The Son claims that he hears from the Father and speaks just what the Father has taught him (John 8: 26 – 29). He also claims that his relationship with the Father is not just one way, rather the Father also always hears the Son (John 11: 41 & 42). Similarly, he says that the Spirit will not speak on his own but only what he hears (John 16: 13). The Spirit is sent, like the Son, by the Father, but comes in the name of the Son to remind the disciples of everything that the Son said to them (John 14: 26 & 27). This interplay or dialogue within the Godhead between Father, Son and Spirit can be summed up in the words of John 3. 34-35: “For the one whom God has sent speaks the words of God; to him God gives the Spirit without limit. The Father loves the Son and has placed everything in his hands.” Stephen Verney calls this interplay between Father, Son and Spirit, which he believes we are called to enter, ‘the Dance of Love.’ We are allowed small peeks into this ongoing dialogue through Jesus’ prayers immediately prior to his passion; his prayer in Gethsemene and his prayer for unity. There we find genuine debate in the dialogue within the Godhead.
Next, as Tom Wright has set out so well in his major writings, Jesus’ ministry involves the retelling of the story of Israel in terms of himself and his ministry. This means that Jesus’ actions and teaching are, in full, a conversation with the narratives of the Jewish scriptures which involves a reinterpretation of those stories in terms of himself and his ministry. This dialogue with the Jewish scriptures and the retelling or reinterpretation of its narratives continues throughout the New Testament with Paul’s reworking of the Hagar and Sarah narrative, Hebrew’s reinterpretation of the sacrificial system, and Revelation’s reworking of apocalyptic narratives in terms of the politics of the day being some of the stand-out examples. Rollins uses Peter’s vision of non-kosher foods as a NT example of wrestling with God and the whole debate on the place of and approach to Gentile Christians (including the arguments between Peter and Paul on the issue) is the perhaps the major example of such dialogues in the NT.
This raises the question of why these dialogues and debates are recorded. Traditionally, the Church has said, as you do in your question, that they are there to show how meta-narratives emerged becoming accepted in the Early Church period and later fixed in Church tradition as doctrinal beliefs. Rollins, however, makes a different point. His argument is that the sense that the Bible is composed, in form and content and in OT and NT, of conversations, dialogues and debates (i.e. wrestling with God) is there in order to draw us into the process of wrestling with God or, as I would prefer to put it, into the dialogue and exchange that is at the heart of the Godhead. One approach leads towards essentially closed propositional statements while the other leads towards an open, ongoing conversation.
The latter would seem to suggest (and this would be my understanding of Rollins’ position) that there can be no meta-narratives because God is always more than any particular articulation or expression of him. My view (and this would be my contribution to a critique of Rollins) is that the form of scripture is not solely open; that what we find within individual books and narratives are a combination of open and closed forms and that, in the Christian scriptures, we have both a diversity of forms and a narrative threaded through that diversity in the way that a patchwork quilt can be held together by a single thread. This is where we return to Josipovici who emphasises this narrative conception holding the Christian scriptures together:
“It’s a magnificent conception, spread over thousands of pages and encompassing the entire history of the universe. There is both perfect correspondence between Old and New Testaments and a continuous forward drive from Creation to the end of time: ‘It begins where time begins, with the creation of the world; it ends where time ends, with the Apocalypse, and it surveys human history in between, or the aspect of history it is interested in, under the symbolic names of Adam and Israel’. Earlier ages had no difficulty in grasping this design, though our own, more bookish age, obsessed with both history and immediacy, has tended to lose sight of it. Neither theologians nor biblical scholars have stood back enough to see it as a whole. Yet it is a whole and quite unlike any other book.”
This same sense of an over-riding narrative also features in Tom Wright’s suggestion that the Christian narrative is like a five act play with Act 1 being Creation, Act 2 the Fall, Act 3 Israel and Act 4 Jesus. The writing of the New Testament then becomes the first scene in Act 5 and also gives us hints of how the play will end principally through Revelation. This image combines an over-arching narrative with space for openness in that Christians are actors in Act 5 improvising our scenes on the basis of what has gone before and how we know the story will end. Christian theology needs to be able to hold together both the open and closed aspects of the Bible. Wright’s image does this, although for me, the image emphasises the over-arching narrative more than it does the space for openness. I think that the form of the Bible has the emphasis the other way round with the narrative being threaded through the diversity instead of the diversity being held within the framework of the narrative. It is vital in this respect to be real about the non-linear, non-chronological, circuitous and fractured way in which the story in the Christian scriptures is actually told because that is where the openness in scripture is found.
So, yes, I do think that there is a narrative that unfolds through and within scripture but I think that we have extracted that narrative from the form of scripture in order to make it something that it is not i.e. consistent, linear and chronological. I think that the narrative can only be understood within the form in which God’s inspiration has ensured we have received it. As a result, theology must, I think, be dialogical and that is one reason why I respond positively to the Old Testament scholarship and broader theological reflection of Walter Brueggemann, whose great achievement seems to me to be to have found in the concepts of the core and counter testimony a means of expressing the real debates about the nature of God that occur throughout the diversity of the Old Testament.
I am just beginning to read some socio-rhetorical theology and think that the intent behind this approach to theology is where theology needs to be focussed (whether socio-rhetorical theology actually achieves this intent is something on which I have yet to make up my mind): “... one of the critical achievements of socio-rhetorical analysis is that it provides a profoundly dialogic, interdisciplinary approach by which we can interpret various texts, as well as our own and others’ interpretations of these texts ... our scholarly endeavours are never truly independent of the work of other scholars, and, in fact, our own efforts are actually incomplete without a dialogic response to those other positions ... we should ‘develop approaches that celebrate dialogue, that show interplays of closure and openness, and that encourage us to announce our agendas in public forum and to listen as people show us the implications, limitations, and biases of these agendas’ ... we should continue to expand the boundaries of interpretation, to extend the dialogues, and to broaden the avenues of discussion.”
Hopefully, I'll find time to respond to the other questions in due course.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Lifehouse - Disarray.
2 comments:
Hi Jon,
Thanks for your very detailed and considered responses to my questions. Just a few comments on your second answer.
I think that you have changed the argument by moving from 'wrestling' to 'conversation' and 'dialogue', they are different things and I am in more agreement with you when you frame the argument in those terms. I believe we are called to be in dialogue with the scriptures as we seek to build the bridge between the context/contexts of the passages and our context/contexts today.
I am not sure what point you are making in quoting the passages from John's Gospel. They aren't evidence of wrestling but of communication and of interdependence and mutuality focussed on the shared mission of God as Trinity. These pasaages seem to emphaises the unity of purpose not a debate or wrestling about that purpose.
We do see wrestling in the Gethsemane prayer - but it is wrestling with the will and purpose of the Father that is resolved in submission by the Son. We can't just take the wrestling bit and ignore how the account ends. This to me highlights the problem with Rollins' approach. He picks the bits of the narrative that fit his argument and ignores the bits that don't fit in order to draw his conclusion.
I think one can make the same criticism of Brueggemann, though I am more convinced by his testimony / counter testimony thesis and find it helpful when reading and preparing to preach on the Old Testament. There are times when Brueggemann cites passages of the O.T. as counter testimony but stops the quote at the point when the passage often resolves back into testimony.
I disagree with the claim that one approach (the belief in a meta narrative) leads to closed propositional statements (it can do but it doesn't have to) while the other leads to open, ongoing conversation. For example, I believe that the New Testament witness is that Jesus is Lord and Messiah (the meta narrative) but that doesn't close off the dialogue. The dialogue is what does this mean for me, for the church and for the world today?
'It is vital in this respect to be real about the non-linear, non-chronological, circuitous and fractured way in which the story in the Christian scriptures is actually told because that is where the openness in scripture is found.' I think you need to be clearer about which passages of scripture you are referring to when making this statement and to give some examples and in what way they lead to openness.
Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of bits of the Bible I wrestle with and struggle to make sense of. There are other bits I find very uncomfortable and some bits I wish weren't there.
My concern is that if we make the wrestling the primary hermeneutic then we are in danger of not taking seriously those aspects of scripture that don't invite discussion but response.
Once again thanks for your posts and for the very stimulating issues they raise.
Thanks again Philip for your helpful response to my post and for the conversation that we are having on these issues and ideas. I’m certainly finding it stimulating.
On changing the argument by moving from 'wrestling' to 'conversation' and 'dialogue', I did this because you asked me to give my views on the issue. In my original post I was trying to summarise the arguments made by Richardson and Rollins in order to contrast them and show that an ‘open’ approach to theology was no less serious about scripture than a ‘conservative’ one.
When you asked for my view on the issue of wrestling with God that I have to broaden the discussion because I think that conversation is the best descriptor we have for the form in which we have received the Bible and for the way in which that form works within the whole canon of scripture.
Wrestling with God is one element within this broader picture. It is by no means the whole, although it can be a useful entry point into the argument that I am making in these posts and have made previously in other posts and in my NTMTC essays. I think too that I am framing the argument in a way that I have not encountered in quite the same way in the writings of others.
My understanding of being in dialogue with the scriptures goes beyond seeking “to build the bridge between the context/contexts of the passages and our context/contexts today” and beyond those bits of the Bible that we might wrestle with and struggle to make sense of. As a result, I am arguing for making conversation the primary hermeneutic and this why the argument is about the broader form of scripture and not just about particular passages.
This is also why I referred to passages from John’s Gospel as they reveal that Jesus was part of an ongoing conversation within the God into which we too can be drawn. Sometimes this involves wrestling with God, as it did for Jesus in Gethsemene (and also for Abraham, Jacob, Moses, Job, Jeremiah, Habakkuk, Jonah, Peter in the vision of non-halal foods, and Paul in his prayers over the ‘thorn in his flesh’), but it also involves conversation, dialogue, sharing and exchange which is not about wrestling and may well be about submission and love.
This is particularly apparent in John’s Gospel where we have particular verses that reveal the ongoing conversation between Jesus and the Father within the Godhead together with Jesus’ teaching being characterised in this Gospel by conversation e.g. the conversations with Nicodemus and the woman of Samaria. Even in the other Gospels, where by contrast narrative is the primary medium for Jesus’ teaching, the parables that Jesus tells often arise out of dialogue with those he encountered. A parable will often be told in response to a question and will be the means by which Jesus asks a question of his questioner.
My argument though is not solely based on the content of particular passages but also about the forms of particular passages/books and the form that the whole canon of scripture takes. Virtually all the Psalms, for example, are conversations where it is assumed that the hearer is either God or the people of Israel. Some of the Psalms are actually written as conversations e.g. Psalm 12. In verses 1-4 the Psalmist cries out to God for help, in verses 5-6 God answers and in verses 7-8 the Psalmist responds by expressing confidence in God. Psalm 77 is the record of a similar conversation with God. In verses 1-6 the Psalmist tells us how he cried out to God, in verses 7-9 he tells what he cried out, in verses 10-12 he tells us how God answered his cry, and in verses 13-20 he tells us of his response to God’s answer.
Similarly, all the Epistles are one side of a conversation in that they are either responses to the writers having been in particular churches and feeling the need to contribute to ongoing discussions within those churches when absent from them or specific responses to letters received from those churches. Revelation is also structured with a significant element of conversation with the writer being questioned by various characters in the vision and in turn asking questions of those same characters.
Conversation therefore features strongly in the content of passages/books and in the form of many passages/books. However, it has been strangely overlooked as a hermeneutic for theology and it is primarily postmodernism that is revealing it as an significant tool or lens for understanding scripture.
The argument does not stop there however because we have set to consider the overall shape or form in which we have received scripture. If we are going to be honest about that overall form in which we have received the Bible then we have to describe it as Mike Riddell, for example, does as “a collection of bits” assembled to form God’s home page or as Mark Oakley does when he uses a more poetic image to speak of the Bible as “the best example of a collage of God that we have”. Riddell and Oakley both develop their images of the Bible from the recognition that the whole Christian Bible contains, as Oakley says, “different views, experiences, beliefs and prayers” drawn “from disparate eras, cultures and authors” which are not systematic in their portrayal of God. As Riddell states: “The bits don’t fit together very well – sometimes they even seem to be contradictory. Stories, poems, teachings, records, events and miracles rub up against each other. They come from all over the place, and span at least 4,000 years of history.”
This is not surprising when there are four Gospels not one, when there are at least two different accounts of Paul’s conversion and ministry, and when the principal form of the New Testament – the letter – is the form of long-distance, written conversation.
The Bible, then, does not move forward in the smooth linear style of, for example, a nineteenth century novel, an academic thesis, a sermon or a systematic theology. Reading the Bible in terms of linearity or chronology is a stop-start process involving multiple perspectives on the same key events or characters and extensive wastelands where little or nothing of significance happens or is recorded. We can learn about the Church in Ephesus, for example, from Acts, Ephesians, 1 Timothy, Revelation and, possibly, the Johannine letters but nowhere do we find a full, chronological telling of the story of that Church. The same can be said of all the Churches which Paul founded, including the Church at Corinth. The founding of this Church is recorded in Acts and the story then jumps to Paul’s letters to this Church. These letters are a debate or conversation (not a story) between Paul and the members of the Corinthian Church about issues of concern to Paul and matters on which the Church had written to Paul for advice. We don’t have the letters which Church members wrote to Paul or all the letters which Paul wrote to the Corinthian Church so the conversation as we have it is a little one-sided and incomplete, although we can infer some of the points made by the Church members from Paul’s record of and response to them.
To ignore the disparate nature and form of the Christian Bible is to run significant risks as Riddell warns us: “ … let us be aware that the assembled parts of the Bible are collected in a somewhat haphazard fashion. To push them into chronological order requires a great deal of scholarship, and runs the danger of doing violence to the material.”
What we have in scripture is, as Gabriel Josipovici has pointed out, “a collection of miscellaneous ‘writings’ … laid alongside each other, the narrative being built up by slotting these together where necessary”. Josipovici describes this as “an extraordinarily simple and an extraordinarily flexible system, which can lead from what could almost be described as shorthand to rich elaboration … Each new element … helps to bring into focus prior elements which we would have overlooked had we not been alerted to them by what follows.” In other words, the texts are in conversation with each other within the overall canon of scripture.
I tried to highlight this in my second post by writing about the way, for example, that Jesus’ ministry, as Tom Wright has set out so well in his major writings, involves the retelling of the story of Israel in terms of himself and his ministry. This means that Jesus’ actions and teaching are, in full, a conversation with the narratives of the Jewish scriptures which involves a reinterpretation of those stories in terms of himself and his ministry. This dialogue with the Jewish scriptures and the retelling or reinterpretation of its narratives continues throughout the New Testament with Paul’s reworking of the Hagar and Sarah narrative, Hebrew’s reinterpretation of the sacrificial system, and Revelation’s reworking of apocalyptic narratives in terms of the politics of the day being some of the stand-out examples.
What holds this collection of miscellaneous writings and the conversation between them in the canon of scripture is the narrative thread which is weaved through them. As I have been saying above this is not a linear or chronological narrative. As I wrote before, I think that it is vital to be real about the non-linear, non-chronological, circuitous and fractured way in which the story in the Christian scriptures is actually told because that is where the openness in scripture is found. The story, the meta-narrative, is embedded in the conversation and can only be understood by taking part in the conversation.
When the story is extracted from the form in which it has been given to us in order to make it linear, chronological and consistent then “violence is done to the material” and it becomes something other than the narrative as God revealed it us. This is actually something that Wright and Richard Burridge have both written about in criticising our Christmas and Easter traditions of (through the Nine Lessons, Seven Last Words, Stations of the Cross/Resurrection etc.) taking bits of the different stories told in the Gospels and elsewhere and fitting them together using a chronology taken from only one of the Gospels to tell the birth, passion or resurrection narratives in ways that ultimately are not those in which those stories have been given to us. Creating systematic theologies by harmonisation or using historical criticism to create ‘the Historical Jesus’ does, I think, similar violence to the text and the key issue is that by doing so we are not reading the narrative in the form in which it was given.
The final move here is to set out in what way the form of scripture keeps the story open. In doing so, it may be helpful to use an analogy. 1408 is a film in which the grieving central character visits haunted hotel rooms in order to deconstruct the narratives that these hotels are using to sell rooms. His motivation for doing so is his unresolved grief over the death of his daughter. When he enters Room 1408 he encounters a room that uses his unresolved grief to terrify and overwhelm him. The way in which film tells the story deliberately operates on two simultaneous levels so that we are never sure whether the central character is fighting real demons or the demons of his own mind. The resolution of the story maintains this ambiguity in that the central character destroys Room 1408, and in doing so also destroys himself, but we are left unsure whether the torment he has faced dies with the physical destruction of the room or continues in the lives of those he has impacted. 1408 therefore combines a narrative which reaches resolution with dual levels of interpretation which leaves us questioning what we have seen and which send us out from the film continuing to reflect on the effect of bereavement in contrast to the sense of satisfaction that comes from a narrative with a resolution that ties up all the loose ends and answers all our questions.
My contention is that the Bible works in a somewhat similar way because its narrative is embedded in a similarly open form. What we have in the Bible, I think, is a both/and - a linear narrative thrust combined with the laying of fragments side by side so that each fragment adds to and challenges the others. We cannot understand one without the other because this is the form in which God has chosen to give us the scriptures.
Post a Comment