Not cherry-picking, but 'Open'

I'm currently reading The Fidelity of Betrayal by Peter Rollins, which I am finding a very stimulating read, and have been comparing and contrasting what Rollins writes with an address given by John Richardson to the Annual Meeting of the Lincoln branch of Forward in Faith (and posted on his blog) in which he asks whether Conservative Evangelicals and Traditional Anglo-Catholics can work together.

In his address Richardson is critical of Open Evangelicals. He states that there is a "growing gap between Conservative Evangelicals and those now calling themselves Open Evangelicals" shown in that, "in many cases, Open Evangelicals have also been quite hostile to GAFCON, and could certainly not be said to have wished this coalition well." In his view, "Open Evangelicals are willing to entertain, and often to side with, doctrinal and practical positions quite opposed to what was once the agreed Evangelical heritage" because "for the Open Evangelical the final arbiter in spiritual matters is private judgement" and this leads Open Evangelicals to "the view that every tradition may offer something which I can cherry-pick as seems fit."

Although written as though it is Open Evangelicals that are hostile to Conservative Evangelicals, one can sense from this summary the strength of Conservative Evangelical distaste and disappointment with Open Evangelicals. I am certainly aware of people within the Reform stable who think of non-Reform evangelicals as in some sense 'the enemy' because they are betraying evangelicalism (or even the gospel)! It is certainly not the case that hostility, where it exists, is only on one side (that of the Open Evangelicals) and the case for mutual understanding is not well served by caricaturing the Open Evangelical approach as one of cherry-picking what seems fit.

Richardson's argument that Open Evangelicals use private judgement as the final arbiter in spiritual matters and therefore cherry-pick what seems fit is another way of stating the Conservative Evangelical mantra that others are not serious about scripture or part of Bible believing Churches because a Conservative Evangelical interpretation of scripture is not followed. I am sure that Peter Rollins would not want to be labelled as an Open Evangelical, yet his theology would be well described as being 'open' in the sense used by Richardson i.e. open to the insights of other traditions (both Church and faiths/beliefs) and open to new approaches to scripture. By contrasting elements of Rollins' approach to scripture with that advocated by Richardson, I think we can see important differences between 'Open' and 'Conservative' approaches to scripture at the same time as seeing that the 'Open' approach is no less serious about scripture than the 'Conservative'.

Richardson begins by stating that "the idea that the Bible may be understood equally by everyone is not only demonstrably untrue but unscriptural." He then suggests that "Scripture teaches us there is a tradition to be handed on by the faithful and, just as importantly, received by the disciple — the mathētēs, or learner, of Christ." He equates this tradition with systematic theology and gives as an example the resolution of the Arian controversy by the power of Trinitarian theology. "Why ... do the Trinitarian Creeds retain their central place within the Church?" he asks. "The answer is surely because, after centuries of debate, discussion and even division, this doctrine retains its explanatory power in the face of other, competing, approaches to the wide and varied witness of revelation." He suggests, therefore, "that the solution to mere private judgement lies in bringing interpretation to the bar of systematic theology and that the perspicuity of Scripture will only truly be experienced when we apply the insights of systematic theology to our reading."

Richardson seems then to be suggesting that traditionally accepted doctrines of the Church form a systematic theology against which all new developments can then be judged (and presumably disproved). He argues that systematic theology does not have to imply a rigid system but the implication of what he writes seems to be more in favour of supporting established views than exploring new understandings. Finally, he suggests an "analogy between systematic theology and the scientific method", in that: "The scientist does not require a complete explanation of everything to accept a theory as well-established. Rather, the aim is to produce an increasingly better fit between the evidence and the theory." Again, the bias of this statement is in favour of justifying the existing theory rather than questioning it or exploring alternatives.

Rollins sees all this as part of the problem rather than the solution. He argues that the present popular debates concerning Christianity, with "individuals such as Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Sam Harris arguing that the truth claims of Christianity are not valid, while on the other side there is an army of religious apologists publishing books in an attempt to prove them wrong," reveals "that, at a very basic level, both sides implicitly affirm the idea that the truth claims of Christianity take the form of assertions about reality that can be reflected upon, considered, and judged according to reason and empirical research."

So, in terms of their understanding of 'truth' many atheists and Christians are on the same side but the biblical text, Rollins argues, "seems to be hinting at a different understanding of truth, one which questions the ubiqituous interpretation that we take for granted today."

His way into this different understanding is firstly by looking at "how parts of the Judeo-Christian narrative are marked by a wrestling with God" and "how the reader is regularly confronted with rather chaotic and contradictory expressions of God that are often in conflict both with our own expectations and with the wider biblical context." The result "is an unnerving sense that biblical narrative is marked by a series of fissures and conflicts that render it fractured, fragmented, and incomplete." The narrative itself seems to be "inviting us to wrestle with it, disagree with it, contend with it, and contest it - not as an end in itself, but as a means of approaching its life-transforming truth, a truth that dwells within and yet beyond the words." This is then an approach that is seeking to take seriously the form as well as the content of scripture. It is an 'open' approach because in order to accept the Bible we need to "reject any interpretation as final, being ready to engage in an ongoing, open-ended dialogue and discussion with it."

Second, through consideration of the name of God as revealed in Moses' encounter at the burning bush and that of Jacob wrestling with God, Rollins suggests that the biblical narrative reveals God as a happening or event. This "means that the truth affirmed by Christianity is not primarily related to some external facts such as the age of certain Gospels or the particular facts contained in them ... Rather, it refers to a happening testified to within the Bible that cannot be reduced to words, confined in concepts, or divulged by definitions." God is, therefore, "not a problem to be solved but rather a mystery to participate in." Again, this is 'open' theology "for the God who brings us into new life is never the God we grasp, but always in excess of that God."
Richardson and Rollins are at opposite poles of the theological spectrum with Richardson accepting scientific methodology and Enlightenment rationalism in his attempt to gather all the strands of scripture and tradition together in one coherent and systematic theology and Rollins accepting the post-modern suspicion of meta-narratives in order to experience God in an ongoing dialogue fired by specific encounters. Richardson's approach is 'closed' in that it attempts to find an over-arching system that explains everything while Rollins' approach is 'open' in that it engages in an ongoing dialogue with a God who is always more than we can grasp.

The point that I ultimately want to make in this post however is that by being 'open' Rollins' approach is not less serious about scripture than that of Richardson or more open to the accusation of cherry-picking from tradition as seems fit. Both positions can and should be critiqued, rigorously and fairly, but it would, it seems to me, be unfair to characterise Rollins' engagement with the diversity of form and content in the Bible as somehow less serious than that of Richardson. In fact, it could be argued that Richardson's approach seeks to tame or neuter the diversity of form and content in scripture in favour of overall coherence and may therefore be engaging less seriously with that real diversity which Rollins' approach seeks to maintain, use and interpret.

The debate between those with 'Conservative' and 'Open' theologies is not well served by stereotyping of the position held by either and, in my view, that is what Richardson's address does to the position of Open Evangelicals. It is therefore unsurprising that he finds a growing gap between Conservative and Open Evangelicals when the 'open' approach to scripture is caricatured instead of engaged with as a different but still serious approach to scripture.

Anyone interested in my other musings on Rollins' writing could look here, here, here and here.

A final, more frivolous thought, is that when I wrote my first post of Rollins, I suggested that Jim White is the bard of the emerging conversation out of which Rollins writes. Now I think that White may have been joined by Noah and the Whale to judge by these lines from Shape Of My Heart:

"For your heart is like a forest, it grows,
and its the rain not just the sun that lets it bloom,
and you don’t know how it feels to be alive,
until you know how it feels to die.

If there’s any love in me, don’t let it show,
oh and if there’s any love in me, don’t let it grow.
If there’s any love in me, don’t let it show,
oh and if there’s any love in me, don’t let it grow."

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Noah and the Whale - Shape Of My Heart.