Something Worth Sharing

 

Together with Inclusive Church, St Martin-in-the-Fields and Accessible Synod, HeartEdge supported the launch during General Synod of 'Something Worth Sharing', a booklet sharing the fruit of an annual conference on disability and church.

Talks from the launch event by Fiona MacMillan, Emily Richardson and Tim Goode can be read here.

Read more about the conference, its approaches and learning from it in recent articles for anglican focus and The Plough:

• anglican focus: “If the Church is to be renewed from the edge it must make space for the edge to come to the centre. That space needs to be open to disruptive prophets and uncomfortable conversations – and accessible.”
• The Plough: Disability asks us questions that only more questions can answer.

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St Martin's Voices - A New Commandment.

The Bible - open or closed? (3)

3. Is God just a mystery to participate in? Again the witness of the NT seems to suggest not. The Christian faith is founded on the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and witnessed to by the apostles from that first Pentecost. God has spoken through his Son, the Kingdom of God is proclaimed and people are called to respond. That does not of course mean that we have all the answers tied up in a neat systematic package, nor can we claim that we know all there is to know about God, we do see through a glass darkly, but it does mean that we can proclaim a faith that is based on something that really happened not just a collection of mystical musings.

‘God as a mystery to participate in’ is a phrase from Peter Rollins. I used it in describing my understanding of what he has written but that doesn’t mean that I necessarily agree in full or in part with the phrase.

Before we get to that, however, it is important to understand a little of what Rollins seems to mean by it. He would, I think, see God as a mystery to participate in for two main reasons.

First, God is revealed in events or happenings which are non-repeatable micro-narratives. This would seem to mean that there are a constant series of revelatory events and we cannot participate in them all so cannot receive a full revelation of God. The event is the first order experience and any writings about the event, as in the writings in scripture, are a second order experience at one remove from the event itself and (as I know from my own experience of writing) an activity in which the experience is changed as well as recorded (i.e. elements may be left out, descriptions/metaphors open up other interpretations etc.). Propositional statements then drawn from such writings are at a third remove. So, events or happenings are where God is most fully revealed and as we cannot participate in all such events God is always beyond and a mystery. Second, and this is a related point, God is always more than any record, description, image or event of him or his activity. Here Rollins is essentially restating classic apophatic theology as it is commonly found in Christian mystics.

Apophatic theology, the Christian mystics and Rollins pose important issues that cannot be countered simply by stating that the witness of the NT is that God has spoken through his Son, the Kingdom of God is proclaimed and people are called to respond.

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. As a result, theology must, I think, be dialogical responding both to the open and the closed aspects of scripture.

4. Is systematic theology a product of the Enlightenment? It depends on how you define systematic theology. I would argue not. In the New Testament we see Paul developing a systematic approach to his writing about God in his letters. He reflects on the nature of God as revealed in the person of Jesus, presents arguments and draws conclusions which he applies to the everyday life of the emerging churches. The apologists present reasoned structured arguments to give account of their faith in the midst of persecution e.g. Justin Martyr. The patristic period is full of systematic theology as the church wrestled with questions of how it should speak about faith. Was Augustine a systematic theologian? What about Anselm, Abelard, Luther, Calvin, Pascal …….

I think there are two issues with this. First, systematic theology per se may not be a product of the Enlightenment but most systematic theology written today probably is. I certainly think that is the case on the Conservative side where harmonisation is used to create an order and coherence to scripture that it simply does possess in the form in which it has been received by us and on the Liberal side where historical criticism is used to try to identify a consistent core of original material about which we can be historically certain. I think both are driven by the Enlightenment’s methodology of evidence-based logical reasoning and therefore attempt to screen out or explain away all that is contradictory, strange, unchronological etc. in scripture. I think Walter Brueggemann and N.T. Wright in different ways are very strong in demonstrating the problems of these approaches which I think have a common core in seeking consistency and coherence above all else and therefore are unable to accept the tensions of the dialectic that is actually found in scripture.

Second, Paul’s development of a systematic approach to his writing about God in his letters occurs within an unsystematic form. His letters are a debate or conversation (not a story) with the churches to which he wrote about issues of concern to him and matters on which the churches had written to him for advice. We don’t have the letters which the church members wrote to Paul or all the letters which Paul wrote to the churches 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.

My argument then is that we have a both/and in scripture; the systematic and the unsystematic, the closed and the open. A dialogue occurs between them and to be true to scripture we must maintain that dialogue in our reading of scripture not resolving it in terms of either open or closed forms alone. My complaint with systematic theologies is that they tend not to maintain the dialogue and privilege closed approaches.

5. For me the problem comes when one systematic theology is presented as the only legitimate way of speaking about God and this appears to be the issue which you are raising with regard to Richardson. For example, if penal substitution is presented as the only legitimate way of speaking about atonement, then I would question whether that is true systematic theology. Why? Because scripture itself draws on a whole range of ways of understanding what Christ has done for us on the cross. However, I am also suspicious of those who reject penal substitution as a way of understanding the cross for the very same reason.

I fully agree.

6. What does it mean to be open to scripture? I agree with you that there is an ongoing dialogue with scripture in which we are called to engage but does this mean everything is up for grabs? This dialogue does not take place in isolation and I am suspicious of the reader response approach which is reflected in some post modern engagement with scripture. Tradition and reason both have their place and we would be foolish to dismiss 2,000 years of faithful Christians wrestling with scripture. Engagement with scripture as a corporate activity within the worshipping community is also important and I guess my question to Rollins and Richardson would be what weight they give to this and what sort of boundaries do they draw on who is part of that community?

I put several questions to John Richardson (which he has yet to answer) and which touch on the questions and issues that you are raising here. They included:

• You say "that new developments may indeed be possible in theology." Can you give an example of a new development that you think has come in theology and of how that new development was appropriately tested by being brought to the bar of systematic theology?
• How does the process of appropriately testing a new development in theology that you envisage differ from the debate that is currently happening within the Anglican Communion over the issue of homosexuality? Is this debate not a means of testing a new development in theology and are the problems we currently face perhaps being exacerbated by people on both sides of the argument trying to cut short the testing process?
• How could the approach that you are advocating ever respond positively to a genuine paradigm shift in theology?

In his original post Richardson wrote about the way in which the Trinitarian Creeds were developed and accepted by the Church and this, I think, is an example of the openness in the Bible and of the Church being open to scripture.

The doctrine of the Trinity is not developed or articulated doctrinally within the pages of scripture (although it can be argued that it is assumed). However, the way in which the relationship between the Father, Son and Holy Spirit is described and the way in which a Christology is developed in scripture both leave the reality of the Trinity an open possibility that the Church has then explored and articulated in response both to scripture itself and to its own experience of relationship with God through Jesus in the Spirit.

The both/and nature of the scriptures (containing both the open and the closed and seeking to maintain that dialogue) mean both that the Church (as the interpretive community) can arrive at generally accepted articulations of God as Trinity while constantly living with the tension (never more so than in the case of the Trinity) that all such articulations are provisional and that God is always more than any human articulation of his nature and being.

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Jim White - Static On The Radio.

The Bible - open or closed? (2)

Thanks again to Philip for his 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 I had been asked to give my views on the issue. In my original post I was trying to summarise the arguments made by John Richardson and Peter 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 I was asked for my view on the issue of wrestling with God then 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.

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Stravinsky - Symphony of Psalms III.

The Bible - open or closed?

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.

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Lifehouse - Disarray.

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.

A narrow FOCA?

One of the problems I have with the GAFCON conference and the resulting Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans (FOCA) is the way in which their arguments deny the existence of any valid Biblical schlarship other than their own.

They begin by setting up a stereotype of liberal scholarship as a strawman against which to rally their troops:

"The first fact is the acceptance and promotion within the provinces of the Anglican Communion of a different ‘gospel’ (cf. Galatians 1:6-8) which is contrary to the apostolic gospel. This false gospel undermines the authority of God’s Word written and the uniqueness of Jesus Christ as the author of salvation from sin, death and judgement. Many of its proponents claim that all religions offer equal access to God and that Jesus is only a way, not the way, the truth and the life. It promotes a variety of sexual preferences and immoral behaviour as a universal human right. It claims God’s blessing for same-sex unions over against the biblical teaching on holy matrimony. In 2003 this false gospel led to the consecration of a bishop living in a homosexual relationship." (from the GAFCON declaration)

Then this is set against the clarity and undeniable truth of their position. So, for example, Archbishop Peter Jensen said at the post-GAFCON meeting at All Souls Langham Place (taken from summary notes posted by John Richardson):

"First, brothers and sisters, the Bible is clear and the Liberals know it is clear.

Secondly, this is crucial. Sexual immorality leads you outside the kingdom of God, just as does greed. It is not a second-order issue.

Thirdly, if you continue in fellowship you are endorsing the lie and are complicit in it ...

The answer was that we must be clear that the gospel of Jesus Christ is a transforming gospel, which does not leave you where you are — which is what Liberalism does in simply affirming you. The testimony matters. We want to hear you are committed to the path of light and repentance."

The final move is to claim that Evangelicalism is deeply divided (because not all evangelicals agree with the views of the GAFCON participants!) and that we must all unite (i.e. agree with the GAFCON declaration) against the common foe. For example, here is Peter Jensen again:

"English Evangelicalism is terribly divided. We cannot continue our tribal warfare. We need to advance, and it is the gospel and evangelism which will bring us together under godly focussed leadership."

Most of these same components were also in the speech that Archbishop Greg Venables made to the All Souls meeting:

"The doubt being cast on the gospel and the person of Jesus is not the result of modern knowledge, it is the result of what the serpent said to Eve in Eden: ‘Did God say?’ Eve took a ‘modern’ approach: ‘I am modern, I know better than my husband.’ Thank God for those who have taught us to stay faithful to the word of God.

The modern doubt did not begin with modernism and the search for the historical Jesus. It began when the same tempter came to Jesus in the wilderness saying, ‘If you are the Son of God.’ Either Jesus is the Son of God or he is not. If not, Christianity is a sham. CS Lewis: Jesus is mad, bad or God.

In recent times it is about a shift from a biblical paradigm to rationalism, not under the authority of God and his word. The shift was from an open universe, where God can intervene, to a closed universe, where we are subject to determinism and religion is a subjective event for you.
Also a shift from universe where truth and non-truth are opposed to one where truth and non-truth can be brought together to find a new truth. Synthesis is not the way God works.

When the Global South came together they read the word of God together from Galatians 1, ‘I am astonished you are deserting him ...’ This is not about inclusion but about walking away from the gospel. If you want to understand this, go to Packer’s Fundamentalism and the Word of God written fifty years ago: the uninhibited character of American liberalism ... God’s character is one of pure benevolence, sin separates no-one from God, Christ is man’s saviour only as a perfect teacher and example, not divine, God only in the sense of God-conscious, no miracles, Christianity differs from other religions only as the ‘best and highest’, the Bible is not a divine record of revelation, doctrine is not the God-given word.!"

One problem with all this is that committed, responsible Biblical scholarship does exist which arrives at totally different conclusions to those of the GAFCON participants and the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans (FOCA) emerging from GAFCON. Examples of some such approaches can be found here and here and here and here and here and here (and these are just a few easily accessible internet based examples from a much larger pool). However, this scholarship is either ignored by FOCA advocates or dismissed as being part of the liberal stereotype that is perceived as 'the enemy.'

Last Wednesday I was at a service in St Paul's Cathedral to launch St Mellitus College (a report of what was a wonderfully creative service has been posted at Philip's Tree House). In his sermon Bishop Richard Chartres said the following, which I understand to be a critique of the narrow understanding of the Bible and biblical scholarship that underpins GAFCON and its aftermath:

"We can understand this better if we consider the nature of the Bible which is where we say faith “is uniquely revealed”. We want neat orderly systems which our minds can comprehend and God gives us Himself in the answer he gave to Moses – simply “I am”. We want absolute truth nailed down in propositional form and we are given a huge drama, a symphony of the many ways in which God has related to human kind. We want bottom lines for life and God gives us those and then moves beyond them to the law of love. We want programmes to follow, preferably with SMART objectives and the Bible teaches us to follow closely after God when he calls. We want something tangible and the Bible instructs us to have faith in the unseen. The Bible reveals truth, tragic and glorious; bloody and violent; nurturing and inspiring by breaking in upon our understanding from another realm and taking us by surprise."

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Buddy Miller - With God On Our Side.