Scripture & Theology

Where I have some evaluative comments of my own to intersperse, these shall be in bold italics.

The Bible and the University (2007)

There is to my ear a slight discord in what Bartholomew writes in the preface and William Abraham echoes in his paper: it is all about paying attention to Christ (which all accept) and recovering biblical literacy and seeing these two things as almost the same thing. Are they? The SAHS project rightly refused to leave faith ‘at the door’. Biblical studies has operated ‘too much in isolation from the other intellectual disciplines of the university’ (Lyle Jeffrey, 2) There is a pronounced dislike of the Humboldtian making the theology department into a self-referential world of its own. What is the alternative? D. Lyle Jeffrey traces the Judeo-Christianizing of Hellenistic culture. (Extra ‘s’ s seem to have crept in to the name of Robert Wilken on p4 and the Latin homines, although that it what my spell- checker wants to do with it too!) Ricoeur also gets mis-spelled (11). More importantly, is Boethius’s Lady Philosophy really Lady Chôkma of the biblical Proverbs, as Lyle Jeffrey claims? As often the angel is in the detail: in what way did Bonventure turn the learning hierarchy of the seven liberal arts around? Was it that they were not to be worked through in order to qualify for theological knowledge, so much as their already receiving theology through the study of creation, even if the arts can be traced back to ‘the ultimate soured of our knowledge, human and divine, namely Scripture as articulated divine Word’ (8)? Or in Martianus Capella (not Cappella) ‘the predominant riches of the biblical stadium to become a constantly flowing fountain, irrigating all of the other arts.’ In other words all knowledge (all discourse?) is Scripturesoaked, even when or perhaps most supremely, when the Bible is explicitly under attack; as in the case of Goethe. Yet he admits that biblical illiteracy is rampant and we need to learn from Mary whose preparation came from reading Scripture (at least in the imagination of the Flemish painter Campin whose depiction of the Annunciation adorns the front cover of the book.) However, there has been a loss of an anchoring central story since Matthew Arnold. ‘The problem is that readers so bereft cannot relate any of these imaginative works to a coherent cultural conversation or ongoing dialectic across the disciplines, in which all the major works play a part. To put this in another way: such readers cannot ‘see’ the degree to which the greatest texts in English literature are already part of a conversation whose dialectical ‘in principium’ was a Word from God’. The biblical canon is the rule of recognition for all subsequent canons.

Dallas Willard laments the state we are in. The myths which are seen to be behind Christianity as an oppressive institution are replaced by all-knowing secular myths. Yet only Christianity can give the big picture or story and a reason for being ‘genuinely good’. The modern university cannot judge between good and evil, whereas ‘the good person, on the biblical view, is the person who is permeated by agape love.’ But in the secular university what belongs to tradition cannot be knowledge (there is a helpful overview of a number of ‘why the American education system is literally worthless’ e.g. by Marsden and by Reuben), preferring what is challenging and provocative to what is true, with research as a kind of ‘social ferment’ which promotes arrogance along with the false modesty of something only being ‘true for me’. I think the most useful part of Willard’s chapter is his emphasis on the style of the bible as a gentle one and encompassing one, reflecting the character of Christ. ‘It does not just state truths and invite us to verify and know them; it uses every possible mode of projection and presentation to draw us into the reality of which it speaks: image, story, art, metaphor, ritual, event, not just in the bible, but projected from it into the rich texture of life around it.’ (36) Towards the end of this paper, Willard seems to oscillate between claiming all for Christian truth and realising that the latter is not ‘scientific knowledge’.

William Abraham contends that there are other resources for theologians which function as means of grace, soteriologically not epistemologically. The bible as one of these means does not suit what even the best-intentioned biblical scholars tend to do to it. Incredibly naïve statements are issued along the way: ‘The gospel becomes simply one more option among others rather than being the radical, transforming Word of God.’ It is always nice to have a scapegoat. That biblical studies has cut theology off from its constitutive norm may well be an accurate diagnosis, but how else are we to hear from that norm? Bart Ehrman’s loss of faith is seen as the result of wanting too hard to find Christ through the Scriptures when all there is to learn is the variety of opinions about meaning. ‘Rather than give us food for the soul it offers elaborate menus and recipes’ (well there are healthy and unhealthy diets.) Having just blamed theology at p52 he writes that Theology needs to reclaim Scripture. On p53 he deals with Gabler who had the right idea even if he didn’t know how to put it into practice. ‘Speaking of exegeting the apostles, he confidently notes that “it may be finally established whether all the opinions of every type and sort altogether, are truly divine, or rather whether some of them which have no bearing on salvation, were left to their own ingenuity.’ The key phrase here is ‘which have no bearing on salvation,” a feature of the text which Gabler identifies with the truly divine.’ Abraham seems to think that very few biblical scholars are doing this, or that they would not know what was ‘divine’, whereas I would imagine that the historically informed exegete is exactly the person to trust for a judgement on what is essential and non-essential in the scriptural message.

Abraham wants to resist the bible as foundation in the sense of giving us facts, not as providing epistemological lenses. We should forget epistemology whether Scriptural or any other version, theology should not be a slave to historical investigation or philosophical investigation for that matter. The theologian can affirm the great truths of the faith whatever history is saying. We should think of the canon in a life and wisdom-love giving way. ‘Ancillary to this we need to develop a new sub-discipline I theology and philosophy, namely the epistemology of theology, in order to address the issues that first generated the vision of Scripture as a criterion of truth in theology’.

Al Wolters tells us that how we conceive of the relationship of nature and grace will determine how we interpret Scriptures like Proverbs 31 as to what biblical ‘fear’ means, or 2 Pet 3:18 about the end of the world. His position is gratia intra naturam (which he contrasts with three other possibilities, including a caricature of Aquinas’s position). Unlike Abraham he is clear that methodology and the getting right thereof through confessing our own philosophical presuppositions is crucial. On his model, biblical scholarship (like ‘nature’) is to be renewed by the ‘grace’ of theology’ which reminds it of the unity of the bible, or at least the story behind it and helps to explicate certain biblical concepts, such as ‘creation as separation’: this however looks like the bible shaping philosophy rather than vice-versa. As grace to nature, theology should sit alongside, within other ‘sister’ disciplines.

With Scott Hahn and Pope Benedict XVI, theology in the bible comes out of a habitat of faith and worship (especially as even in the Platonic Academy) but scientific exegetes seem to ignore that and only wish to reduce it, explain it away. Faith is a legitimate source of knowledge and enquiry. Unless we see that Scripture is the product of the Church then we will not be so ready to interpret it ecclesially. For Benedict the Church is the ‘living historical subject’ of God’s Word (91), or more fully from Spirit of the liturgy, 168, in the footnote: ‘the faith of the Church does not exist as an ensemble of texts, rather, the texts-the words-exist because there is a corresponding subject which gives them their basis and their inner coherence. Empirically speaking, the preaching of the apostles called into existence the social organisation “Church” as a kind of historical subject.’) There appears to be no felt contradiction in these two sentences; the words are a means to produce the life that is the church; events are the content of the Word. The Church is the place where faith from the past is brought into the present and oriented towards the future (95): theology lives out of the Church’s remembrance, as love seeks understanding. Benedict’s Principles of Catholic theology witnesses to a high view of Scripture as normative theology. He favours a biblical theology of ‘covenant’; this means that the OT is read as shaped crucicentrically so that the bible comes to speak through the liturgy in the eucharistic Mass. In my view the argument rather loses its way in rhetoric as we come to the end of this account by Hahn. But it is a very useful contribution. Glenn Olsen’s is another Catholic convert who thinks that without a magisterium we will end up with a flux of interpretations; this is against R. Longenecker’s view that the only sensus plenior allowed is when the NT does this with the OT. Here there seems a bit of a confusion. When we look at the Church fathers it is not the case that we need to think of postbiblical events fulfilling the OT (Eusebius would be an exception here) but of Origen, Augustine et al thinking that there is fulfilment of the OT in the NT which the NT was not explicit about; the case of whether God was (e.g.) on the side of Joan of Arc does not really concern the fulfilling of prophecy as such. In any case his point is that the magisterium can stop any claims about events in church history being ridiculous and partisan. He is appreciative of O’Keefe and Reno’s 2005 Sanctified Vision as to the way in which allegorical readings are not imposing but discovering depth dimensions of the text, but reserved about their pre-modern/modern.

The essays by Robert Roberts and Robert Cochran are about as far as one gets from the flavour of ‘Scripture and theology’ throughout the whole project. Roberts writing on ‘situationism and the NT psychology of the heart’ makes use of various experiments in which people’s true colours were exposed by being part of a group in response to a crisis or threat. He concludes that it was not just the situation that made ‘good’ people act strangely badly but that the unvirtuous dispositions were largely already there. Virtue is sometimes skin-deep when not personally chosen in an atmosphere of learning: Nero stopped being the good Stoic when the reason for behaving (his bullying mother Agrippina) died. Christians need to think for themselves and know themselves. A NT psychology offers the hope of transformation, a re-training of the heart in the church, just as Aristotle admitted that one could not hope to be virtuous in a city state that had failed. Cochran on ‘the Bible, positive law and the legal academy’ argues that power is not necessarily a bad thing (according to O’Donovan’s Thomistic notion) and thinks that Christians should try to bring the law of a state closer to the ideal enunciated by Jesus without becoming so enforcing that it will be too much and become counter-productive. Yet the law should educate and lead to the virtue of Christ, as a good and gentle schoolmaster, presumably. God remains unchanged and people are just as morally hardened as they were in Moses’ and Jesus’ time, so divorce laws (e.g.) should make such a thing more difficult though not impossible. Christian lawyers will have to go against the grain and the secular elite for whom the First Amendment is appealed to as soon as Christians even try to raise the issue. As Roberts previous essay argued, the myth of the Kantian individual being free to be moral is just that – a myth, but it continues to be a powerful one. He quotes the jurist Blackstone to urge that ‘natural law’ always needs reinforcement by revealed law and proposes: ‘the law should work to protect intermediate institutions and should encourage individuals in society to care for one another.’ I found these two chapters refreshing and instructive.

I pass over the rather idiosyncratic chapter by David I. Smith which tries to employ Comenius to help us with our method in Christian education. John Sullivan as one of the minority of British- European contributors. He promotes the idea that exegesis works from the inside in sympathy with the text of the community and that interpretation means adjusting and opening one’s personal self up to receive the meaning, a sort of ascetic reading. He rejoices in Lesley Smith’s challenge to Leclercq’s positing of a sharp monastic/scholastic contrast in theological method. He deplores the utilitarianism in the British educational system with instrumental reason replacing contemplative. No Christian institution should over-react by allowing Christian orthodoxy to function as an ideology. (234) He promotes an umbrella which creates an environment congenial to Christian thinking, but also to non-Christian thinking. ‘the Christian university prompts a reading of self, scholarship and faith that is generously outward-looking: the life of the mind for the good of the world’. Yet one wonders if it is only commercialising managerialism that the Christian university has to fear. If it will not act the Christian university in more positive ways, by promoting Christian initiatives, who then will?

Byron Johnson’s essay on biblical literacy in America is full of useful statistics and a conclusion that it is not as low as has been suggested as well as the interesting finding ‘Frequent bible readers are far less likely than the average person to have read The Da Vinci Code.’ (251)

Roger Lundin’s essay tells the story of Emersonian subversion of Scriptural rhetoric (in Thoreau and then Whitman and applauded by Northrop Frye) while Melville and Hawthorne appreciated the darker side of the biblical message as it accorded with how the world truly seemed to be, and Emily Dickinson saw the bible offering ‘rich alternatives to the poverty of modern thought’ (273) To their questions Lundin offers a renewed Barthian theologia crucis as the only way to a theology of resurrection glory.

Stephen Evans ‘Afterword’ is really a summary of the various essays. It is Lyle Jeffrey who gets to offer the last substantive chapter freedom is only a good if it serves truth and the good of the community). But none of this really works well as a conclusion in the sense of marshalling the voices, although on the very last page (310) Evans does try to leave us with three points out of the tapestry of these essays. 1. In Christian institutions the Christian narrative should define the institution. Amen! 2. W e must read the bible as a whole and as the Word of God. 3. This is because ‘knowing’ is a function of the whole person, not just the intellect, and is shaped by communities and practices. This is particularly true for moral and religious knowledge.’ To my mind there is a slight non sequitur here. How does it follow that because knowing is holistic for a person hence the bible should be read as a whole? There are better reasons for reading the bible as a whole.

Conclusion to Vols IV–VIII (2003–2007)

Over these [last] five volumes there is a huge amount of material for reflection and discussion. Everyone is given a say to the extent that premature ‘general conclusions’ are largely avoided. Plaudits to Craig Bartholomew for having the vision and for managing to keep the whole thing together and to Tony Thiselton for acting as a highly competent lieutenant. www. sahs-info.org should help us to find out where the project goes after the completion of this series. If anything we can trace a bit of continental drift as the sponsors moved from being the British Society and the project being based in Cheltenham to the involvement of Baylor University and others along with the relocation of the general editor, although the appointment of Thiselton around the time of Volume 5 helped to keep the British connection. But it has to be seen as a transatlantic project. Nothing wrong with that (except that I feel that the Reformed epistemologists and the Christian literary heritage specialists have other and better places to publish), not least when it brings us (e.g) the voices of Childs and Seitz, Reno and the two Roberts (Cochran and Roberts) in the last volume. Yet something of its usefulness for the European situation might be lost. I say this as one who believes in the internationalism of theology and biblical studies. However I am aware that the currents of influence and engagement are complex ones and it cannot be assumed that the problem of the Enlightenment for faith and the question about the Bible as the Word of God – for that is what this project is all about – is best dealt with while largely ignoring the cultures in which the Enlightenment and its developments and it shaping of biblical theology, for better and for worse, mostly took place. Perhaps there could also have been a slightly stronger editorial control to unify the contributions without extinguishing the fresh creativity which is evident. In this project for all its smorgasbord of riches, the sum of the parts seems greater than the whole.