Schools of Faith: Essays on Theology, Ethics and Education in Honour of Iain R. Torrance 9780567667939, 9780567667960, 9780567667946

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Schools of Faith

Schools of Faith Essays on Theology, Ethics and Education in Honour of Iain R. Torrance Edited by David Fergusson Bruce McCormack

T&T CLARK Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA   BLOOMSBURY, T&T CLARK and the T&T Clark logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc   First published in Great Britain 2019   Copyright © David Fergusson, Bruce McCormack, 2019   David Fergusson and Bruce McCormack have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work.   For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xii constitute an extension of this copyright page.   All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.   Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes.   A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.   A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.   ISBN: HB: 978-0-5676-6793-9 ePDF: 978-0-5676-6794-6 eBook: 978-0-5676-6795-3   Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents List of Contributors Acknowledgements

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Introduction: Very Rev. Professor Iain R. Torrance  David Fergusson 1 1 West Midlands Foray  Nicholas Peter Harvey 7 2 The Life of the Text  David Parker 13 3 Creation: A Catalyst Shaping Early Christian Life and Thought  Frances Young 23 4 Theodore of Mopsuestia and the Allegorical Method in Liturgical Commentaries  Bryan Spinks 35 5 Study as Spiritual Formation  Ellen T. Charry 47 6 The Logic of Incarnation and the Problem of the Extra Calvinisticum  Ian A. McFarland 59 7 The King James Bible in Scotland  David Fergusson 69 8 Jonathan Edwards: Panentheist or Pantheist?  Oliver D. Crisp 81 9 Scotland and Princeton  Gordon Graham 91 10 Schleiermacher’s Trinitarian ‘Realism’  Bruce McCormack 101 11 The Place of Prayer in Theological Method: A Conversation with Sarah Coakley  James F. Kay 117 12 Christian Self-Formation and the Meaning of Baptism  Kathryn Tanner 129 13 Real Insights along False Paths: With Karl Barth and Against the Stream in Theological Ethics  Paul T. Nimmo 137 14 Telling the Story of Gaudium et Spes: George Lindbeck and the Catholic Rediscovery of Eschatology  Francesca Murphy 147 15 The Divine Action ‘Problem’? An Eastern Orthodox Challenge to Science and Theology  Sarah Lane Ritchie 159 16 Christianity and China: Looking Forward  George Newlands 171 17 Mainstream Minority: The Public Identity of the Church of Scotland  William Storrar 181 18 Can We Trust the Church?  Linda Woodhead 193 19 Military Chaplaincy, Christian Witness and the Ethics of War  Nigel Biggar 203

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20 Religious Discourse and the Public Forum  Phee Seng Kang 21 God, Discipleship and Meaning in Rainer Maria Rilke and Abu Hamid al-Ghazali  Mona Siddiqui 22 The Theological and Educational Promise of Scriptural Reasoning  David F. Ford 23 The Minister: Some Literary Perspectives  Alison Jack 24 The Significance of New Humanities for Current Theological Education in the Context of the Korean Church  Young-Sang Ro 25 Searching for Gravitas  M. Craig Barnes 26 Wisdom in a Wikipedia World: Education, Ecumenism and Leadership in an Age of Globalization  Neal D. Presa

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Index

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213 225 235

259 269 279

Contributors M. Craig Barnes is the seventh president of Princeton Theological Seminary. Before becoming president of Princeton Seminary, Barnes was a chaired professor at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary while also serving as the pastor and head of staff of Shadyside Presbyterian Church. His major publications include Body and Soul:  Reclaiming the Heidelberg Catechism (2012)  and The Pastor as Minor Poet (2008). Nigel Biggar is Regius Professor of moral and pastoral theology, and director of the McDonald Centre for Theology, Ethics, and Public Life, at the University of Oxford. He is also a Canon of Christ Church Cathedral and a former Chaplain of Oriel College, Oxford. Among his most recent books is In Defence of War (2013). Ellen T. Charry is the Emerita Margaret W. Harmon Professor of Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary from 1997 to 2018. Her major publications include By the Renewing of Your Mind:  The Pastoral Function of Christian Doctrine (1997), Inquiring after God:  Classical and Contemporary Readings (2000), God and the Art of Happiness (2010), The Austin Dogmatics of Paul M van Buren (2012), The Sighs and Songs of Israel:  1–50 (2015). She is currently working on ‘For God’s Sake: The Wall of Hostility Has Come Down’. Oliver D. Crisp (PhD from King’s College, London, and DLitt from the University of Aberdeen) is Professor of Systematic Theology in the School of Theology, Fuller Theological Seminary, and a professorial fellow of the Institute for Analytic and Exegetical Theology, University of St Andrews. He is an editor of the Journal of Analytic Theology and organizes the Los Angeles Theology Conference series with Fred Sanders. He is also the author of numerous books, including Deviant Calvinism, Jonathan Edwards Among the Theologians and The Word Enfleshed. David Fergusson is Professor of Divinity at the University of Edinburgh. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. His most recent publication is The Providence of God (2018). A minister of the Church of Scotland, he served as principal of New College from 2008 to 2018.

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David F. Ford is the Emeritus Regius Professor of divinity at Cambridge. He has previously held posts at Birmingham and St John’s College, Cambridge. His major works include The Future of Christian Theology (2011), The Modern Theologians Reader (2011), Shaping Theology: Engagements in a Religious and Secular World (2007), Self and Salvation: Being Transformed (1999) and many others. Gordon Graham is Emeritus Henry Luce III Professor of philosophy and the arts at Princeton Theological Seminary, having previously taught philosophy at the Universities of St Andrews and Aberdeen. He is the founding editor of the Journal of Scottish Philosophy and general editor of the Oxford History of Scottish Philosophy. His most recent books include Wittengenstein and Natural Religion (2015) and Philosophy, Art and Religion (2017). Nicholas Peter Harvey taught moral theology/Christian ethics at Downside Abbey and in three Birmingham institutions:  the Queen’s College, Newman College and the University. He is a sometime president of the Society for the Study of Christian Ethics. He also served for thirty years on the English Anglican-Roman Catholic Committee. His publications include The Morals of Jesus (1991). Alison Jack is Senior Lecturer in Bible and Literature at the School of Divinity and assistant principal of New College, University of Edinburgh. Her publications include Texts Reading Texts, Sacred and Secular (1998), Scottish Fiction as Gospel Exegesis: Four Case Studies (2010) and The Bible and Literature (2012). Her current writing project is a monograph for Oxford University Press on the Prodigal Son in Literature in English. James F.  Kay is the Joe R.  Engle Professor of Homiletics and Liturgics at Princeton Theological Seminary, where he was appointed academic dean during the presidency of Iain Torrance. He is the author of Christus Praesens: A Reconsideration of Rudolf Bultmann’s Christology, a collection of meditations, Seasons of Grace: Reflections from the Christian Year and a homiletics textbook Preaching and Theology. With Jane Dempsey Douglass, he co-edited an essay collection from Princeton colleagues on Women, Gender, and Christian Community. A Presbyterian (USA) minister, Kay is the former editor of both The Princeton Seminary Bulletin and Theology Today. He currently serves on the executive committee of the American Theological Society. Bruce McCormack is the Charles Hodge Professor of Systematic Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary. His major works include Karl Barth’s Critically

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Realistic Dialectic Theology: Its Genesis and Development, 1909–1936 (1995) and Orthodox and Modern: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth (2008). Ian A. McFarland is the Regius Professor of Divinity at the University of Cambridge, having previously taught at the University of Aberdeen and Emory’s University’s Candler School of Theology. His books include The Divine Image:  Envisioning the Invisible God (2005), In Adam’s Fall:  A Meditation on the Christian Doctrine of Original Sin (2010) and From Nothing: A Theology of Creation (2014). Francesca Murphy is Professor of Systematic Theology at the University of Notre Dame. Her research interests include theological aesthetics, theology and the arts, von Balthasar, de Lubac and Ratzinger. Some of her major publications include Illuminating Faith:  Invitation to Theology (2014), I Samuel, Brazos Theological Commentary (2011) and Christ the Form of Beauty:  A Study in Theology and Literature (1995). George Newlands is Professor Emeritus of Divinity in the University of Glasgow and an honorary fellow of New College, University of Edinburgh. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, he has published extensively on Christian theology and ethics in a pluralist context. Paul T.  Nimmo holds the King’s Chair of Systematic Theology (1620) at the University of Aberdeen, having previously worked at the Universities of Edinburgh and Cambridge. He is the author of numerous works on Karl Barth, including Being in Action:  The Theological Shape of Barth’s Ethical Vision (2007)  and Barth: A Guide for the Perplexed (2017), as well as on Reformed theology more generally, on which theme he co-edited The Cambridge Companion to Reformed Theology (2016). He was the recipient of a John Templeton Award for Theological Promise and is senior editor of the International Journal of Systematic Theology and series eo-editor of Explorations in Reformed Theology. David Parker is Professor of Digital Philology at the University of Birmingham. A Fellow of the British Academy, he has been executive editor of the International Greek New Testament Project since 1987 and is currently leading a project on the critical editions of the Gospel of John. His publications include Textual Scholarship and the Making of the New Testament (2012). Phee Seng Kang has served as vice president and director of the Centre for Faith and Public Values at the China Graduate School of Theology in Hong Kong. Prior to that, he was Professor of Religion and Philosophy at Hong Kong Baptist

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University. He has published extensively on Christian doctrine, public theology and on the interface of science and religion. Neal D. Presa PhD is associate pastor of the Village Church in Rancho Santa Fe, California, Adjunct Assistant Professor of Worship for Fuller Theological Seminary, and former moderator of the 220th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA). He has served the executive committees of both the World Alliance of Reformed Churches and the World Communion of Reformed Churches, leading their Caribbean and North American Area Council. His publications and scholarship are in the area of liturgics, ecumenics, homiletics and pastoral theology. Sarah Lane Ritchie is Lecturer in Theology and Science at the University of Edinburgh, having previously worked as a research fellow in the University of St Andrews. She completed her PhD in science and religion at the University of Edinburgh, also holding an MSc from Edinburgh and an MDiv from Princeton Theological Seminary. Sarah’s work focuses on theological issues surrounding human consciousness and brain functioning. Young-Sang Ro is professor at Baekseok University, president of the Korean Association of Christian Studies and formerly president of Honam Theological University and Seminary. He is also Chairman of the Board of Korea Songsil Cyber University. Mona Siddiqui is Professor of Islamic and Interreligious Studies, assistant principal for religion and society and dean international for the Middle East at the University of Edinburgh. Her areas of research are in classical Islamic jurisprudence and ethics and Christian-Muslim relations. Her most recent monograph is Hospitality in Islam: Welcoming in God’s Name (2015). Professor Siddiqui is well known internationally as a public intellectual where she engages on issues of faith, politics and ethics. She is a regular commentator in print and broadcasting media, and also chairs the BBC’s Religious Advisory Committee. She is currently listed in the Debrett’s 500 most influential people in the UK. Bryan D. Spinks is Bishop F. Percy Goddard Professor of Liturgical Studies and pastoral theology at Yale Divinity School and Yale Institute of Sacred Music. The author of over twenty books and more than a hundred essays and articles on aspects of Christian worship, his most recent publications are Do This in Remembrance of Me. The Eucharist from the Early Church to the Present Day (2013) and The Rise and Fall of the Incomparable Liturgy. The Book of Common

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Prayer 1559–1906 (2017). He has served on the Church of England Liturgical Commission, and is a former president of the Church Service Society and the Society of Oriental Liturgy. William Storrar is director of the Center of Theological Inquiry in Princeton, New Jersey. He is a minister of the Church of Scotland. He served in parish ministry and convened the General Assembly’s Board of Ministry. He taught candidates for the ministry at the universities of Aberdeen, Glasgow and Edinburgh. His publications in public theology include A World for All? on global civil society (2011), and Yours the Power, on faith-based organizing in the United States (2013). Kathryn Tanner is the Marquand Professor of Systematic Theology at Yale Divinity School. She is the author of the forthcoming book, Christianity and the New Spirit of Capitalism (2019), and other books that include Christ the Key (2009) and Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity (2001). Linda Woodhead is Professor of Sociology of Religion at Lancaster University. She holds honorary doctorates from the Universities of Uppsala, Zurich and MF Oslo. Her recent books include That Was the Church That Was: How the Church of England Lost the English People (with Andrew Brown, 2016), A Sociology of Prayer (edited with Giuseppe Giordan, 2015)  and Christianity:  A Very Short Introduction (2nd revised edition, 2014). Frances Young, now retired, was Edward Cadbury Professor of Theology in the University of Birmingham from 1986 to 2005, having taught New Testament and Early Christian Studies there from 1971. Her publications include From Nicaea to Chalcedon (1983, 2010), Biblical Exegesis and the Formation of Christian Culture (1997) and God’s Presence. A Contemporary Recapitulation of Early Christianity (2013).

Acknowledgements We are pleased to record our thanks to several people who have willingly assisted with the production of this Festschrift volume for Iain. Cory Brock has provided expert assistance with editorial work and Andrew Johnson with the index, while Sandy Forsyth has corresponded regularly with contributors to ensure that the project remained on schedule. Anna Turton at T&T Clark has offered support and guidance from the outset. Robyn Torrance has generously provided a photograph of her father. Our fellow contributors have responded cheerfully to numerous promptings. We are grateful for their willingness so readily to participate in this celebratory volume. And finally, we are indebted to Mrs Heather Haaga, member of the Board of Trustees of Princeton Theological Seminary, for her generous financial support. David Fergusson and Bruce McCormack

Source: Reproduced by permission of Robyn Torrance.

Introduction: Very Rev. Professor Iain R. Torrance David Fergusson

This volume of essays celebrates one of the most distinctive and distinguished theological figures of our generation. Though his name will forever be associated with his father, Thomas F. Torrance (1913–2007) (TFT), Iain has followed his own path through parish ministry in Shetland, as academic teacher in Birmingham and Aberdeen, as president of Princeton Theological Seminary and, lately, in pursuing a clutch of commitments in his Scottish ‘retirement’. Along every step of the way, he has been faithfully accompanied by Morag, without whose strength and support all of this could not have been achieved. Born on 13 January 1949 in Aberdeen, during his father’s ministry at Beechgrove Church, Iain later attended school in Edinburgh and Bath. After taking his MA in philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, he studied for his BD at St Mary’s College, St Andrews, where he specialized in the New Testament under Matthew Black. His doctorate was written at Oriel College, Oxford, on the monophysite Christology of the early sixth-century theologian Severus of Antioch. Supervised by Sebastian Brock, this required the acquisition of Syriac for the study of primary source materials. His research project eventually led to the publication of Christology After Chalcedon (1988). In 1982, Iain was inducted as the Church of Scotland minister at Northmavine Parish Church in the Shetland Islands. Remaining there for four years, he and Morag adapted to the challenges of rural church life. I have always had the sense that the complexity of the pastoral situations he encountered in Shetland shaped his later thinking on Christian ethics and doctrine, as perhaps also did the later influence of his children who represent the views of a younger generation. His arguments for a porous boundary between church and world, for an ordering of grace before law and for a polity of constrained disagreement within the body

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of Christ are all related in some ways to those years of ministry in the far north. Without this early exposure to church life on the ground, Iain’s theological trajectory might have been rather different. Moving to Birmingham in 1985, Iain took up a post as tutor at Queen’s College and then as lecturer in patristics and New Testament at the university. In the essay that follows, Peter Harvey, his former colleague, has written with much insight about this period. But, suffice it to say, during his time in Birmingham, Iain’s reputation as a formidable polymath developed. In particular, he turned his energies towards the teaching of Christian ethics. Unable ever to dabble in any subject, he concentrated intensively on the task and emerged as an authority in the field. This range of interests enabled him to secure the vacant lectureship in Christian ethics and practical theology in the University of Aberdeen in 1993. At that time, we became colleagues and firm friends, occupying adjacent offices in the corridor at the front of King’s College. Iain’s energies were apparent in different spheres of activity – in teaching, church life, pastoral care of students and in university administration. Unlike most academics, he relished the work of committees, management and institutional processes. With promotion to a senior lectureship and then a personal chair in patristic and Christian ethics in 2000, his career development was rapid. Soon afterwards, he served as dean of the Faculty of Arts and Divinity (2001) before being appointed president of Princeton Theological Seminary (2004). What is most remarkable about this timeframe is that it also coincided with his major contribution to church life. Iain served inter alia as chaplain to the Territorial Army (1982–1997), as convener of the Church of Scotland’s Armed Forces Chaplains Committee (1998–2002), as chaplain in ordinary to the Queen in Scotland (from 2001) and then as moderator of the General Assembly (2003–2004), a gruelling year for any incumbent. This list alone signals his extraordinary work ethic allied to a capacity to work without respite long into the night. The move to Princeton involved a major domestic upheaval for Iain and Morag, and also for Hew and Robyn who elected to remain in the United Kingdom. The challenges of leading a seminary in a different academic, ecclesiastical and social environment were manifold, not least with the pressure to enter into numerous speaking engagements across the United States and overseas, while also overseeing life on the campus and promoting the seminary’s fundraising activities. Several features of Iain’s presidency are evident from this side of the Atlantic. With his fiscal prudence he prepared the seminary to cope with the fallout from the banking crisis in 2008. Presiding over some key academic appointments, he strengthened the faculty to consolidate its position

Introduction

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as the world’s leading Reformed institution. And, most visibly, he promoted and oversaw the building of the magnificent seminary library with its state-of-the-art facilities and striking architectural appearance on Mercer Street. Having recently spent a year’s research leave in Princeton, I met many people who confessed that, having originally doubted the wisdom of this project, they were now persuaded of its outstanding success. It seems fitting that the Iain R. Torrance Atrium can host a range of public events at the centre of this inspiring building. Since his return to Scotland early in 2013, Iain has served as pro-chancellor of the University of Aberdeen (2013–), as dean of the Chapel Royal (2013–) and dean of the Thistle (2014–). These appointments have enabled him to play an important role at the heart of Scottish church and public life. During this time, he has also convened the Church of Scotland’s Theological Forum, steering it through some choppy waters, particularly on issues of human sexuality. That the Church of Scotland has now reached a positon of ‘constrained difference’ with respect to clergy in gay marriages has much to do with Iain’s judicious contributions to the General Assembly. Sometimes sharp and often angular, his wise responses to questions and challenges from the floor of the assembly have earned the appreciation of commissioners from around the country. His manifold contributions to higher education, theology and church life were fittingly recognized by the award of a knighthood in the Queen’s New Year Honours list in 2018. Much, much else could be said of Iain’s achievements. But rather than dwell on other academic honours, let me offer in conclusion some words of appreciation on his theological style and commitments. As the editor of the Scottish Journal of Theology (1982–2015) (SJT), Iain has had a close-up view of the trends and debates within the guild. Throughout this time, he has been assiduous in commissioning, reviewing and selecting materials for publication. Now published by Cambridge University Press, the SJT has consolidated its position as one of the leading international journals in the field. How Iain has accomplished this work, given his other commitments, is hard to say. Unquestionably, Morag’s editorial support has been a conditio sine qua non in this, as so much else in his life. And his elder brother Thomas, who chaired the SJT board with great acumen for many years, has also lent important assistance. Through their teamwork, the journal’s intellectual success and economic sustainability were assured. And it continues to flourish under its new editor, Ian McFarland. Iain’s own published work has been restricted by the sheer quantity of his other commitments. Yet he has produced a steady stream of articles and chapters

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in edited collections, while also serving as co-editor of several monograph series and of the Cambridge Dictionary of Theology (2011). Allied to an attention to detail, his astonishing breadth of knowledge and scholarly precision have always been evident. These qualities have served him well as an editor and critic of other people’s output. As a teacher, he has proved unfailingly generous in his judgement of student work. On one occasion, I  recall him passing a doctoral thesis with minor corrections which included the deletion of around 100K words. This was adjudged ‘minor’ by virtue of the ease with which one could strike the delete key. In any case, I rather suspect that Iain was indifferent as to which words were to be excised! Within the ecumenical church, he has continued the work of his father in the Reformed-Orthodox dialogue. From 1995, he served as co-chair of the dialogue between the World Alliance of Reformed Churches and the Orthodox Churches and did much to stimulate the publications that emerged from these talks. In more recent years, he has contributed to several interfaith conversations, including those that emerged from A Common Word (2007). His commitment to Christian-Muslim dialogue was recognized by his election in 2010 to the C1-Religious Leader Commission which promotes dialogue between the West and the Islamic world. Iain has always been able to see more than one side of an argument. This has resulted in some theological mobility on his part with a willingness to revise earlier assumptions and a readiness to absorb new insights wherever these are encountered. Thomas F.  Torrance was one of the most formidable theologians of the twentieth century. For Iain, I assume that having such an illustrious father was both an advantage and a disadvantage. He never lacked theological reading or instruction from his early years, and he was personally acquainted with many of the great figures of the age. But the shadow of his father’s reputation created expectations and constraints, and perhaps also ill-informed assumptions that he would lack independent judgement. Yet, while remaining steadfastly loyal to his father’s reputation, Iain has also set his own theological course in relation to a different set of circumstances and a fresh agenda of problems. One thinks here of his receptiveness to gay partnerships, recognition of the necessity of interfaith conversation, awareness of biblical criticism, immersion in the tasks of institutional leadership and an appreciation of literature and the visual arts. These have set him apart from the path followed by his father but in ways that have complemented, extended and even corrected TFT’s work for another day and generation.

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And, of course, humour has never been far away, whether in these terse but wry email observations, in his amusement at ecclesiastical and academic amour propre or in the comic situations in which he himself has sometimes been placed. I recall one sunny day when the Bishop of Aberdeen and Orkney suddenly appeared in the King’s College quad. Iain and I were discussing some minor academic matter, while his two dachshunds roamed the lawn. The bishop was a good friend and we attempted some conversation. But the dogs barked so furiously at him that it proved futile. With a shrug of his shoulders and a wave, the bishop departed to a crescendo of barking, reverberating around the quad. As the silence quickly returned, Iain remarked, ‘David, I’ve trained these dogs to be good Presbyterians.’ Needless to say, this volume of essays has more than a few Presbyterian contributions. The scholars represented here are Iain’s friends, but they also represent diverse expressions of faith in different parts of the world  – the plurality in the title has been deliberately chosen. We offer these essays to Iain in celebration of his multiple achievements and in gratitude for his friendship. And we extend our thanks to Morag, Hew and Robyn for the vital part they have played in Iain’s life and work. Apart from them, he would not wish to be honoured.

1

West Midlands Foray Nicholas Peter Harvey

Iain came to the Queen’s Theological College in Birmingham from the Shetland Islands, where he had been a minister, with interesting tales to tell of his pastoral experience there. This, to our landlocked habits of mind, was already rather an exotic world. In any case, Iain was not an obvious fit with the college, for the Kirk was not otherwise represented there, the nearest to it in churchmanship being an occasional student from the URC. Iain plunged into the life and work of the place with such remarkable and sustained intensity that a senior colleague soon became seriously concerned about his health. Whether or not Iain knew of this concern he was undeterred. Tutors at Queen’s, as in other theological colleges, were expected to do much more than lecture. This is where Iain came into his own, expending an extraordinary amount of time and energy in pastoral care of students. His teaching subject at that time was the New Testament, but he was already exhibiting a polymathic tendency, epitomized in the words of the principal Gordon Wakefield:  ‘He knows everything’. This dramatic overstatement was typical of one side of Gordon’s character: it would have been more accurate to say of Iain that he could take us all by surprise with the scope of his informed opinions. His ecumenical sympathies were never in doubt, indicated, among other things, by the range of his friendships and the eclectic nature of his reading. He was impossible to pigeonhole in any theological or ecclesiastical frame of reference. One manifestation of this was the Scottish Journal of Theology, which he edited from Queen’s. This was in no sense a parish pump production. Indicative perhaps of pressure behind the scenes which he had to withstand was a particular response to my article ‘Christian Morality?’ published in the journal, which argued that Jesus was unconcerned with morality in any of the usual senses of

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the word. Soon afterwards I  received by post a copy of his father’s pamphlet against abortion, accompanied only by the author’s compliments slip. This can hardly have been intended as a compliment. Iain’s lively interest in questions of Christian ethics found another focus with my departure from the college. There was a hitch in the process of appointing an ethics tutor to succeed me, so Iain relieved the principal’s anxiety by volunteering to step into the breach. This was typical of his intrepidity in taking on unfamiliar tasks and challenges. Likewise, he became secretary of the Society for the Study of Christian Ethics, a body founded to promote that study in theological colleges, and therefore among the clergy, at a time when interest had seemed to be on the wane. As so often in such institutions it was the secretary who did the lion’s share of the work of planning and administration. Iain formed an effective partnership with Oliver O’Donovan as president. Iain’s characteristic energy and efficiency were most dramatically demonstrated on the day of Princess Diana’s funeral. The society’s annual conference was taking place, and the televised funeral was just drawing to a close, watched by a tearful throng, when Iain, mindful of the conference timetable and his secretarial responsibility, stalked in and turned off the television. A supreme irony was provided by the fact that the following lecture, which Iain was not prepared to delay or cancel, was on the subject of euthanasia. Whether this decision was quite fair to the unfortunate lecturer is a moot point. In any case, a significant number of us were not quite in the mood! Iain’s approach to the subject matter of Christian ethics was complex. On the one hand, he relished recommending my book The Morals of Jesus especially to students inclined to fundamentalism in the name of the Bible. Yet he once told me that his starting point was ‘somewhere between Stanley Hauerwas and Jonathan Sacks’, both from my point of view distinctly conservative thinkers. His much more recent work as convener of the Church of Scotland’s Theological Forum, where he is reported as finding no theological reason against same sex marriage, suggests further development. Meanwhile, in his time at Queen’s, he did not flinch from engagement in necessary conflicts. Two examples, one theological and the other practical, will serve to illustrate this. He had considerable reservations about some ways of contextualizing theology fashionable in the college at that time. The tension generated at staff meetings by this concern was described by Iain as ‘locking horns’, a phrase that shows he was up for the fight, but also that he never lost a sense of proportion. The practicality over which he was embattled was the conversion of the college administration to computers. Iain was strongly in



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favour of the change, while our bursar, Duncan Fairfax-Lucie, stoutly opposed it. This conflict was conducted largely indirectly, with scrupulous politeness on both sides. A dispassionate observer inclined to betting would certainly have put money on Iain, but Duncan had remarkable reserves of stamina and resilience. On a lighter note, there was an occasion when the entire resident population of Queen’s was invited to the farewell party of a teaching colleague who was a strict teetotaller. I was uncertain how to cope with this, so I was invited to Iain and Morag’s flat for gin and tonics immediately beforehand. I gladly acceded to this before floating across the lawn to our departing colleague’s house. It was a lovely summer evening. On arrival, I  started and led improvised community singing which continued more or less throughout the party. Our host did not seem best pleased but could not swim against the tide. One of our Methodist students artlessly commented on how pleasant it was to enjoy such festivity without a drop of alcohol. The contributions of the Church of Scotland to the corporate life of Queen’s were not always fully transparent. From the benign vantage point of the Department for Continuing Studies at Birmingham University, the great biblical scholar Michael Goulder opined that the period when Iain, David Parker and I were together at Queen’s was a golden age for the college. Karen, David’s wife, lest we should succumb to narcissism, spoke of us less benignly and certainly less reverently as ‘the Three Wise Men’, while David himself pointed out that the period was very brief. Iain was restless, and having considered other possibilities, found a job in the University of Birmingham, reverting to the New Testament as his main teaching subject. Here, he continued to demonstrate his capacity and readiness for learning new things. Especially noteworthy is what he wrote to Michael Goulder: ‘I enjoyed marking your students’ papers, and learned from them’. The papers referred to were written by students in the Black and White Partnership, a project designed primarily for pastors of independent black churches in the city, of which by this time there were many. Michael taught New Testament for the partnership, and Iain was the university’s double-marker in this subject. ‘So generous a compliment might be unique’, wrote Goulder afterwards, with reference to Iain’s tribute.1 Apart from other implications, it was not commonplace at that time for academics to acknowledge that they had learned anything from students’ essays. One colleague of mine even went so far as to claim never to have learned anything from a student’s essay. Such a frame of mind presumably reflects a conviction that a teacher’s authority is somehow impugned by allowing such a possibility. Iain in Birmingham was light-years away from that form of self-imposed academic imprisonment.

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Iain’s positive link with Goulder is also of interest in another sense. When Michael resigned his orders as an Anglican priest and declared himself an unbeliever, while continuing to teach New Testament, he acquired a certain notoriety. The pastors in the partnership were consulted as to his continuing suitability to teach them. They decided that as faith is a gift it cannot be demanded of anyone. Michael tells the story slightly differently, saying that the bargain was that he should be allowed to continue to teach while they would try to convert him.2 The Birmingham theology department in those days included some selfappointed guardians of Christian orthodoxy whose attitude put Michael under some pressure, but Iain was not among them and clearly wanted to support Michael as an independent voice. Scarcely mentioned so far in these impressionistic reflections is one name: Morag. Living on the Queen’s site, with two young children in tow, she had virtually no public profile in the college, whether by accident or design. Iain, after all, was already very anglicized in virtue of having been to Monkton Combe School in Somerset and later to Oxford. Morag lacked these advantages, if such they were, but more than compensated for them by the strengths of character which made her vital to keeping Iain’s show on the road and the family together. Of course, there was and is much more to Morag than that, but my task here is to write about Iain, who once told me that Morag is the only person whose opinion he takes fully seriously. It would be impossible to overrate her hidden role in the story I am telling. What then are my concluding reflections on Iain in the years of this all-toobrief foray into the West Midlands of England? He was an outstanding colleague, with great gifts of encouragement. When he directed his full attention towards you, it was both flattering and taxing. Flattering because you were left in no doubt that you were being taken seriously. Taxing because such concentrated attentivity necessarily makes demands. Iain’s disapproval was expressed with a mixture of directness, clarity and proportion which made it difficult to disagree, or to fail to learn something helpful about oneself. I did not know what to make of him when he first arrived among us. But he became and remains a very dear friend. Maybe we were thrown together by the accident of belonging to minority denominations at Queen’s, Iain to the Kirk and I to the Roman Catholic Church. He certainly adapted very well to the joint course between Queen’s and the seminary at Oscott, which now alas no longer takes place. To end in a more Bellocian/Chestertonian vein, there is no better man with whom to consume barley brew – or gin for that matter. Ad multos annos.



West Midlands Foray

Notes 1 Cf. Michael Goulder, Five Stones and a Sling: Memoirs of a Biblical Scholar (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2009), 88–89. 2 Ibid., 88.

11

2

The Life of the Text David Parker

Those students of divinity at St Andrews who sat in Matthew Black’s lectures on the Double and Special Tradition in 1972 will recall that he described B. H. Streeter’s theory of the relationship between the Synoptic Gospels as ‘one of the few assured results of modern scholarship’. Forty-five years later, there are several reasons why one might feel less confident, without one’s respect for the speaker being in any way lessened. Apart from alternative theories,1 it is arguable that in 1972 the techniques for studying the Gospels and their development, as well as methodology in editing the Greek New Testament, had not significantly changed since Streeter published his famous work half a century earlier.2 As a matter of fact, in 1972, Roland Barthes’s ‘La mort de l’auteur’ was already five years old, and the first work applying computers to the study of the New Testament (Ellison’s text-critical work on manuscripts of Luke’s Gospel) had been completed a decade earlier.3 But so far as study of the Gospels was concerned, the opportunities for new ways of imagining both their emergence and ways of recreating and analysing them were all in the future. Both critical theory and the computer have had a profound impact on our attitude to the written word. And a third change, also highly significant for textual analysis, has been changing many aspects of human life and thought: genomics. Approaches to the task of editing the Greek New Testament, and thus of providing a published text of writings with a central role in schools of faith and in theological and ethical reflection, have diversified during this period of time. Almost every aspect of it has been challenged, most notably the concept that there is a single authoritative form of text to be recovered.4 It might be thought that this approach, in which the equal significance of different (even incompatible) wordings for interpreting scripture, played havoc with the traditional view that the task of the textual critic is to recover

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a definitive and authoritative form of the text. The reality is more complex, not least because of the new ways of considering the data that are available to modern researchers. The editors of the major critical edition of the Greek New Testament currently in production (the Editio Critica Maior) are dealing all the time with textual questions in a complex theoretical framework.5 The computer makes it possible for modern scholars to access more information and to scrutinize their own theories much more carefully than ever before. Before discussing the significance of this, a brief explanation of the way it is achieved is necessary. The examples will all be taken from the Gospel of John, which the writer is editing. The process begins with making an electronic transcription of the text of each manuscript that is included. This transcription contains the precise wording of the witness, with corrections indicated, labelling the first hand and each separate corrector with its own tag. With further tags to mark every page, column and line break, as well as markers for the beginning and end of every verse, we have the data both to publish an accurate transcription of the witness, and to compare it with every other witness. The full set of transcriptions is then collated automatically, verse by verse, using a program called CollateX.6 The output is then refined using a front end that gives the editor a full set of options to refine the collation as necessary. This includes screening out spelling variations and spelling mistakes (obvious ‘noise’) and setting the length of variation units. When this is complete, the result can be sent to a database that records the reading of every witness at every variation unit. This data can be used to compare each witness with every other witness. For example, we can know that two manuscripts agree in 92.381 per cent of the variation units in the Gospel of John (4,874 out of 5,276 where both are extant).7 The following stage consists of studying each variation unit and making a preliminary decision as to the probable relationship between each form of text. The methodology used has been developed in the Münster Institute and is known as the Coherence-Based Genealogical Method.8 For example, if one late manuscript reads λέγει instead of εἶπεν, we might start with the theory that the latter (labelled a) is the source of the former (labelled b). This information is recorded in the database. Carrying on and performing the same process for every place where we are able to find a hypothesis, we end up with a provisional statement of the development of the forms of text at each place of variation. In order to achieve this, we use traditional philological canons, in particular that the reading must be anterior which best explains the emergence of the other



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readings. Such a reading may be harder, and thus likely to have been simplified or explained subsequently. It may be shorter, later tradition having expanded it in search of clarification. In the case of the Gospels, it may be less like the wording of a parallel passage, since the tradition often harmonized the wording of one Gospel to agree better with another. Once we have achieved this – a statement of the development of the variant readings  – the resultant database will contain a complete statement of all the relationships between all the witnesses. We can then determine which is the most probable ancestor of any witness. For example, on the basis of our decisions, the data indicates that the most likely ancestor for witness 02 is 044, since in the 303 passages where they differ, 044 has the earlier reading 212 times, twice as many as the number of places where 02 has what we considered to be the older reading. Thus, to the simple statement of the degree of agreement between 02 and 044 (92 per cent), we have been able to add a judgement as to the degree to which the text of the one is likely to be prior to the other’s. We can also construct a diagram showing, on the basis of this, the most likely ‘textual flow’ in every place of variation, starting from what we consider to be the most likely oldest form of the text. One of the advantages of this graphic representation is that it will give valuable hints where a reading seems to have emerged spontaneously on two or more occasions. Such (usually slight) changes are ones that are easy to make from error or might easily suggest themselves to a copyist, and do not indicate any genealogical connection between the witnesses. Thus, we are able to look for and distinguish between agreement that indicates a genealogical connection between witnesses and agreement that is random. We can then scrutinize our working hypothesis of the history of the variation to determine whether it ‘works’ or not. The database has provided an environment for checking data too difficult to process without it: the edition of the Gospel of John, a work of rather more than 15,600 words, contains over 200 Greek witnesses. Comparing them provides over 6,000 variation units and more than 12,000 variant readings. Across the whole work, we can look at the places where the full data suggests that we may have been inconsistent and revisit those. We can choose a different oldest form of text (‘Initial Text’) and see whether the results are more consistent or appear more probable. We can modify the relationship of development between the different forms of text where there are more than two. Thus, using databases, we can scrutinize our own theories more carefully than ever before. It is important to emphasize that the text-critical thinking of

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previous generations remains in place. The computer is not replacing traditional approaches; it is being used to assess them more thoroughly. And the use of the computer in the Coherence-Based Genealogical Method also highlights an important aspect of textual scholarship. The results can seem like historical theories, but the degree to which they are artificial may be illustrated as follows. Let us take an example of a place where the scribe of a manuscript wrote a word that is not found in any other witness, and that this was subsequently corrected to agree with the rest, and that this happened on enough occasions to have a significant effect on the figures. According to the database, the most likely ancestor of the original wording of the manuscript will be its corrector. In the actual sequence of events for the manuscript this is, of course, impossible:  the scribe wrote something, and the corrector changed that wording to something else. But in terms of the development of the text, the statement is accurate since the reading provided by the corrector is older than the reading created by the scribe. This statement draws our attention to a further artificiality in the theory: that even if a witness is unique in having a particular reading, we will only know that this is the doing of the scribe in the extremely rare circumstance that we also have the source manuscript. The fact is that the surviving copies we have are only a small proportion of the total number that existed. We are, thus,not creating full ‘family trees’ but trying to describe the way in which the few copies known to us are related.9 But bearing in mind the character of the data, we have been able to make significant advances in editing the text and in our understanding of the history of the text. For example, we now have fresh insight into another of Streeter’s hypotheses, the theory of Local Texts. This was a development of the concept of text types. According to this interpretation, a number of groups of texts emerged in different geographical locations. These came to be known as the Alexandrian, Western and Byzantine texts. The relationship between these ideas and developments in the natural sciences (notably the taxonomies of Linnaeus) has been vividly described by Lin.10 In dealing with Streeter, she compares his theory of Local Texts with Darwin’s insights. There is even an indication of this in his title (The Four Gospels: A Study of Origins . . .). She argues that Streeter refined the theory of text types as follows. First, he provided a new way of understanding it by applying the Darwinian theory of local development of species to show how a distinctive text form might emerge in a specific area, and then he redefined the areas of emergence as the main centres of early Christianity such as Rome, Alexandria and Constantinople instead of the broad geographical areas of the existing theory.



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As a brilliant reconstruction, taking Darwin’s work and applying it in a new field, Streeter’s work will always command respect. Where more recent thought has challenged it is in the degree to which it assumed that each Gospel received a definitive form at a certain point in time. One might say that the Darwinian theory was only applied to a certain period in the history of the Gospel texts and did not encompass their beginnings or their continuing development. Streeter may not have been absolutely right, but this does not mean that Darwin’s work is irrelevant for the ways in which we may think about the New Testament. Instead, an analogy may apply between the deeper insights that the development of genetics has given into Darwin’s work and the use of phylogenetic tools to map the way in which Greek New Testament manuscripts are related. Changes in texts may be described in the same way as changes in sequences of genetic code: they can add, they can lose, their order can change. Thus, the problems that have troubled philologists also trouble geneticists. A  change in a DNA sequence can occur more than once; this is seen in manuscripts as the same error being made independently by two copyists in different times and places (the phenomenon already described as multiple emergence). A sequence in DNA that has changed may change back to a previous sequence; this is analogous to a correction of a copy that brings the text back into line with the wording that preceded a change. The use of phylogenetic programs in developing models of manuscript relationships produces graphics that (while again needing to be taken as theoretical representations and not as historical observations) provide useful information. Figure 1 is a section from a graphic from a program called MrBayes, showing a possible grouping of witnesses to the Gospel of John.11 The witnesses are identified by Gregory–Aland numbers (e.g. 033, 865), the numbers above the line and the colours indicate the degree of certainty, and the length of line marks the degree of textual difference (more for a longer line). Witnesses sharing a node are more closely connected (e.g. 249 and 333). It is encouraging that sets of witnesses that had already been identified as closely related using traditional tools stand close together in these graphics. An example is Family 1 (first identified in 1902). The composition of the family and its precise relations are better defined, but the insight is corroborated. In another presentation (Figure 2), a Median Joining Network, the relationship between witnesses is presented as the simplest routes connecting them. In this presentation, the distance between witnesses is presented by the nodes and the numbers on the lines connecting them.

18

100+–0

100+–0

033 100+–0

100+–0 100+–0

100+–0 100+–0 100+–0 100+–0 100+–0

51+–5

2786

249

100+–0

80+–4

333

100+–0 86+–7

100+–0

100+–0

213

799

869 317 100+–0

100+–0

Figure 1  Representation of manuscript relationships using MrBayes

430 397

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53+–6

865



The Life of the Text

19

1230 2106

80

153

1

2

1

1 1

2

144 168

1 0

1

5

66

5

35

1 1 1

18

0

16

19

377

807

Figure 2  Representation of manuscript relationships as Median Joining Network

Thus, 35 and 18 are very similar; 168 and 2,106 are not. In fact, the total number on the lines between 18 and 168 (152) is much less than that between 168 and 2,106 (298), even though more stages are required to connect them. So far, this contribution may seem to have been discussing matters rather distant from the theme of this volume. The reader may be relieved to find that there are several observations to be made on the basis of this example which may be more relevant to it. They concern the character of the printed text which is used and the nature of the text of scripture. To begin with the first: for several centuries, the vernacular texts commonly used have been derived from critical Greek texts determined according to a set of philological principles. The text of the Editio Critica Maior also follows these principles, using digital methodologies to achieve better results. It is easy to think of the resultant explanation of the oldest attainable form and subsequent development of the text as a historical account. But this is too simple a view. It has been argued above that in some respects it is the simplest possible explanation of the evidence, on the basis of the methodology. There is no reason why the unknowable ‘real life’ history of the text should conform to this. We might consider what a small proportion of

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the copies ever to have existed are available to us. Our visualizations make them look something like lights on a Christmas tree. It might be more realistic to think of them as stars separated by the immensities of space. Thus, what appear to be comparatively similar copies may be separated by many steps containing fluctuations now lost to view. For the theologian and ethicist using the text, it is important to bear in mind the degree to which the text is provisional, based on a theory and not on historical certainty. It may be more helpful, considering the ways in which manuscript copies behave in the same way as DNA, to regard the text as subject to the same influences as human behaviour. It seems probable that the things we create will be like us, and so it seems prudent to treat the manuscript copies as containing the same complexities as human beings. By the same token, the alternative wordings that emerged when the text changed are also a part of the text’s DNA. Those that are knowingly made contain the imprint of interpreters seeking to clarify its meaning (as may some that are not conscious but accidentally betray an interpretation of the text). Such a reading as the addition of εἰκῆ (‘without cause’) at Matt. 5:22, significantly changing the saying about anger, leads one straight into an ethical debate.12 That a corrector supplied the added word in the margin of Codex Sinaiticus means that the user of this manuscript is faced with the two possibilities at every reading. The concept of the text as DNA, including the variations in wording as part of its composition, may be considered as an alternative to the approach which seeks a single reconstructed authoritative form. Such an alternative will require modification of the use of Scripture in theological debate. The opportunities now available both practically and theoretically in studying and editing the text are in their infancy. It seems probable that we are only at the beginning of thinking about new ways of treating Scripture as a resource and an authority.

Notes 1 Conversations with the Birmingham scholar Michael Goulder made clear to both Iain and this writer how seriously weaknesses in Streeter’s arguments had to be taken. 2 B. H. Streeter, The Four Gospels: A Study of Origins, Treating of the Manuscript Tradition, Sources, Authorship, & Dates (London: Macmillan, 1924). 3 C. J. Smith, ‘Old Wine, New Wineskins: Digital Tools for Editing the New Testament’, Dublin conference, forthcoming. J. W. Ellison’s work was a doctoral thesis at Harvard.



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4 See E. J. Epp, ‘The Multivalence of the Term “Original Text” in New Testament Textual Criticism’, Harvard Theological Review 92 (1999): 245–281; and M. W. Holmes, ‘From “Original Text” to “Initial Text”: The Traditional Goal of New Testament Textual Criticism in Contemporary Discussion’, The Text of the New Testament in Contemporary Research. Essays on the Status Quaestionis (Festschrift for B. M. Metzger), ed. B. D. Ehrman and M. W. Holmes, revised edition (Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill, 1995). 5 See http://www.uni-muenster.de/INTF/ECM.html. Volumes to have appeared so far are the catholic letters and Acts. 6 See https://collatex.net/. 7 The example is the witnesses 02 and 044. These are the Gregory–Aland numbers, used to designate Greek New Testament manuscripts. 8 See Tommy Wasserman and Peter Gurry, A New Approach to Textual Criticism: An Introduction to the Coherence-Based Genealogical Method, Resources for Biblical Study 80 (Atlanta, GA: SBL, 2017). 9 There are virtually no close relationships between the oldest manuscripts, on which so much of our understanding depends. This is why they contain so many readings found in no other witness. 10 Yii-Jan Lin, The Erotic life of Manuscripts: New Testament Textual Criticism and the Biological Sciences (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 77–86. 11 My thanks to Andrew Edmondson of ITSEE for giving me permission to use this data. 12 See D. C. Parker, An Introduction to the New Testament Manuscripts and Their Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 336–337; and Codex Sinaiticus. The Story of the World’s Oldest Bible (London: British Library; and Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2010), 103–104.

3

Creation: A Catalyst Shaping Early Christian Life and Thought Frances Young

My initial thinking about creatio ex nihilo was outlined in a paper published in the Scottish Journal of Theology some twenty-five years ago.1 It is a great pleasure to honour Iain Torrance with these further developments in my thinking on the subject and to thank him for many years of academic colleagueship. I owe him a debt of gratitude not only for accepting that paper as editor of the journal but also for his ongoing encouragement with other projects, notably the publication of my Bampton lectures2 in a series which he edits. My argument has long been that ‘creation out of nothing’ was the first Christian ‘doctrine’ to be established through debate; here I suggest that it subsequently had a determinative effect on the shape of later doctrinal conclusions. We observe first, however, that the idea of creation was, from the beginning, at the heart of what was distinctive of Christianity in the Graeco–Roman world. Sometime in the late first century, a letter was sent from Rome to Corinth offering advice to a Christian community in which some upstarts had apparently caused discord and splits. We know it as 1 Clement.3 For present purposes, the significant points lie in, first, the way in which God is characterized, secondly, the manner in which creation punctuates the argument and, thirdly, the impact that the appeal is meant to have. Let us consider a few passages: (1) In the first section to claim attention (XIX–XXI), readers are urged to hasten on to the goal of peace and, to encourage this, the text goes on: ‘Let us fix our gaze on the Father and Founder of the entire cosmos, and let us keep attached to his magnificent and excellent gifts of peace, and his blessings.’ Then begins a survey of the cosmos: ‘The heavens riding at his direction are subjected to him in peace. Day and night accept the

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course set by him without hindering each other. Sun and moon, the chorus of stars, roll out their trajectories according to his direction in harmony without swerves.’ From there the passage goes on to speak of the earth teeming with abundance for humans, animals and all living things, all without dispute; then of the ocean and the seasons following the Master’s orders, along with the winds and springs, the emphasis again being their adherence to their allotted places in harmony and peace; and so to the climax: ‘The great Creator (Δημιουργός) and Master (Δεσπότης) of everything ordained things to be in peace and harmony, blessing everything but, above all, us who have taken refuge in his mercy through our Lord Jesus Christ, to whom be glory and majesty to the ages of ages, Amen.’ Now this doxology is immediately followed by a passage emphasising how closely this Creator and Master of everything knows everything to do with us. It alludes to Proverbs 20.27, saying, ‘the spirit of the Lord is a lamp searching the contents of one’s innards’, and continues: ‘Let us observe how close he is and that nothing from our thoughts or our reckonings escapes him.’ The interiority of Jesus’s teaching4 is reinforced by the picture of an omniscient and omnipresent Creator who is a ‘searcher of thoughts and desires’. Thus, the order and harmony of creation becomes itself a motivation for seeking peace. (2) The second passage (XXXIII) justifies hurrying to do every good deed with energy and enthusiasm. ‘For the Creator and Master of all delights in all his works. For he established the heavens by his most immense power and ordered them with his incomprehensible understanding and he divided the earth from its surrounding waters and fixed it on the sure foundation of his own will and ordered the living creatures which roam on it to exist; and readying the sea and the living creatures in it, he enclosed them in his own power.’ The climax of this is the formation of humankind, ‘of the creatures the most distinguished and greatest in intellect’, made ‘by holy and unstained hands’ as the ‘impress of his own image’, Genesis being quoted to back this up. The righteous are adorned with good works, and even the Lord himself rejoices in adorning himself in good works – and that is the motive for working works of righteousness. (3) In a later section (XXXVIII) ethical injunctions – to care for the weak, help the poor, be humble-minded – are similarly grounded in creatureliness: ‘Let us consider, then, brethren, from what matter we were formed, who and of what kind we came into the world, from what tomb and darkness the one who shaped and created us brought us to his world,

Creation

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preparing his blessings, before we were born. Having all these blessings from him, we ought in everything to give him thanks, to whom be glory to the ages of ages. Amen.’ (4) Towards the end of the Epistle (LIX–LXI) the author slips into prayer: God is addressed as the God of all flesh, the one who sees everything and helps those in danger, the Creator and Overseer of everyone, and the prayer seeks not only the good of Christians, but that ‘all nations may know you, that you are the only God’. ‘For you have revealed the continuous conservation of the world by your activities – you founded the earth, you, Lord, faithful in all generations, righteous in judgements, wondrous in power and majesty, wise in creation, understanding in establishing what’s come to be.’ Surveying these passages, it seems that the creative activity of the one God, taken for granted in the writings of the New Testament, has become a truth that is at one level still axiomatic, yet at another has to be rubbed home, as the warrant for ethical advice, as a key characterization of the God to whom prayer is offered. This is reinforced by repeated reference5 to ‘the one who made us’, to the Παντοκράτωρ (Pantokrator  – the Almighty), the Δεσπότης (Master of the universe), the Δημιουργός – the Demiurge or Artisan, the Father, the King, the all-seeing God. The all-embracing, all-encompassing power and greatness of the one source of all existence lies at the heart of Christian belief and practice according to 1 Clement. As Paul put it in 1 Thessalonians, conversion meant turning from idols to serve the living and true God (1 Thess. 1:9). This God is the episcopos, the one with oversight over everything and to whom all will be accountable in the end. True, Jesus Christ appears as the agent of this God, bringing salvation and initiating resurrection, but the title ‘Lord’ is ambiguous and the dominant focus is on the Master and Lord of all, the one Creator God. This, the earliest Christian text we have which was not eventually included in the biblical canon, seems to be aware of some New Testament writings but fundamentally appeals to the Jewish Scriptures as authoritative. The common LXX address to God, Δεσπότα Κύριε (Master Lord), has obviously influenced its language. All this might seem to reinforce the easy assumption that early Christianity simply inherited the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo from its Jewish matrix. However, I am not the only one to have argued against this view.6 The matter is disputed, but the Jewish evidence suggests little interest in the issue before the Middle Ages, and what verbal precedents there are may be interpreted otherwise.

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Some of the ambiguities are apparent if we look back to the third of our selected passages from 1 Clement. Note first the words ἐκ ποίας ὕλης ἐγενήθημεν, ‘from what matter/material stuff we were brought into being’. It was out of unformed and chaotic matter that the Demiurge or Craftsman of Plato’s Τimaeus made things that did not before exist by imposing shape or form on it. In the mid-second century, Justin Martyr understood Genesis in that way. To create, or bring things into existence that had not existed before, did not mean conjuring them up out of nothing, but rather, like a sculptor carving something out of wood or stone, forming things from pre-existent matter. Matter was conceived as infinite – as having no boundaries, therefore shapeless and chaotic. It was a small step to interpret the chaos waters in Genesis 1 in those terms. The following phrase in 1 Clement is, likewise, ambiguous: ‘from what kind of tomb and darkness the Creator brought us into the world’. The deadness and darkness of non-existence do not explicitly suggest that there was nothing there at all. Whether creation was out of nothing or not is irrelevant to our early author – it was simply not a question that arose. Yet, creation of everything by the one God, Maker of all, is clearly of profound importance to him, a conception undergirding prayer, ethics and his entire outlook on life, the universe and everything. So, from the start, creation mattered deeply to Christian identity, and not only because it guaranteed the one God’s governance of the universe, but also because it provided assurance of the resurrection. Already 1 Clement finds precedents for resurrection within the created order: in day and night, in sowing and reaping, in the fabulous Phoenix. Tatian would go further, but his argument is definitely reinforced by the notion of ‘creation out of nothing’. Something changed in the course of the second century. It is perhaps the difference between Justin and his pupil, Tatian, which most clearly suggests that explicit affirmation of creation out of nothing emerged in the second century and was effectively the first Christian doctrine to be clearly defined. In the context of the time, it was far from an easy doctrine to press. ‘Nothing comes from nothing’ was a Greek commonplace implying that anything coming from nothing is a sham. We can take what Plutarch wrote as typical: For creation does not take place out of what does not exist at all but rather out of what is in an improper or unfulfilled state, as in the case of a house or a garment or a statue. For the state that things were in before the creation of the ordered may be characterised as ‘lack of order’ (akosmia); and this lack of order was not something incorporeal or immobile or soulless, but rather it possessed a corporeal nature which was formless and inconstant, and a power of motion

Creation

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which was frantic and irrational. (On the Creation of the Soul in the Timaeus 1014B)

Christians at first adopted current views on pre-existent matter:  along with Justin, we can place Athenagoras, Hermogenes and Clement of Alexandria, all probably anticipated by the Jewish philosopher Philo, though his position is a matter of debate. Those who rejected pre-existent matter include Tatian and Theophilus, then later Irenaeus and Tertullian. It was surely in confrontation with Platonic philosophy that the issue really arose. All along, creation mattered, displaying as it did the overarching power of the one true God, but that was demonstrated even more effectively if, like Theophilus, you criticized Plato for regarding matter as uncreated and therefore equal to God, then pointed out that, as any human artisan creates out of pre-existent matter, there is nothing remarkable in God doing likewise – God’s power is evident in making whatever God wants out of the non-existent (Ad Autolycum II.4).7 Thus, God’s unique sovereignty came to be understood in terms of God being the sole first principle, monarchia ambiguously meaning both. Tertullian would assess available alternatives thus: God did not create out of God’s self, nor out of eternal coexisting matter; so if it was neither out of God’s self nor out of something, it must have been out of nothing. These alternatives were set up by Hermogenes, a second-century Christian Platonist, against whom Tertullian wrote a treatise.8 Where Hermogenes took the pre-existent matter option, Tertullian dared to go for ‘nothing’, despite its associated ambivalences and weaknesses – he certainly did not wish to imply that everything is a sham. Confronted with those options, Christians following in the line of tradition from 1 Clement would surely be bound to opt for God as the sole first principle with the power and sovereignty to create real, rather than illusory, things out of nothing. Tertullian’s three options clarify the underlying logic, doubtless reflecting also the challenge of Gnosticism. The spiritualizing thrust of the so-called Gnostics posed questions also about the resurrection. Tertullian is very clear in his treatise on the resurrection of the flesh9 that the two issues are connected.10 From both heathen and heretic alike, he asserts (De Resurrectione 4), comes invective against the flesh; he offers a different view – of the glory of the flesh created out of nothing, redeemed in Christ and to be resurrected. The connection between creation and resurrection had already been argued by Tatian. In his Oration to the Greeks,11 he is clear that God was definitely alone. Matter is not, like God, without beginning. It was brought into existence by the Creator, who brought our world into being having

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first created the necessary matter. He goes on to say that it is ‘on this account’ that ‘we believe that there will be a resurrection of bodies’ (Ad Graecos 5, 6). Later (Ad Graecos 13) it becomes evident that Tatian totally rejects the idea of the soul’s immortality as incompatible with this doctrine of creation: the creative activity of God is at the root not only of this life but of any afterlife. The exact dating of what are probably the earliest treatises on the resurrection is contested, but both are plausibly placed towards the end of the second century, and the contrast between them certainly captures the issues in contention at that time. The Epistle to Rheginos or Treatise on the Resurrection found in the Nag Hammadi Library12 generally treats ‘death’ and ‘resurrection’ as having metaphorical connotations only. The answer to the question, ‘What is the resurrection?’, is ‘It is always the disclosure of those who have arisen’. The resurrection is the ‘revelation of what is, and the transformation of things, and a transition into newness’. Salvation means ‘restoration to the Pleroma’; ‘this is the spiritual resurrection which swallows up the psychic in the same way as the fleshly’. Altogether, this treatise seems to spell out the views of those criticized in 2 Tim. 2:18 for asserting that ‘the resurrection has already taken place’. In the genre of epistle, in its language and its allusions, it could pass as Christian, but the point to notice is that creation is never mentioned – the connection has been lost. By contrast, Athenagoras, if indeed he be the author of the work known as De Resurrectione,13 states that disbelievers in the resurrection must either deny to the creation of human beings any cause or, if they do ascribe creation to God, they must examine what that implies (De Resurrectione 2). The original creation of our bodies is enough to show that God’s power suffices for their resurrection; if God first gave them form when they did not exist before, he can just as easily raise them up after their dissolution (De Resurrectione 3). Like Tatian, the author affirms that the two parts, soul and body, belong together; so resurrection of the body alone can guarantee survival as a human being – without the composition of soul and body, you would not have a human being (De Resurrectione 15). Once established, the doctrine of creation became a catalyst, shaping further doctrinal definition, including Christology. Let’s first leap to the fourth century, to the Arian controversy. Arius claimed that the pre-existent Logos, though the first and greatest of the creatures, was nevertheless created out of nothing and not, like the one God, agenētos – that is, without beginning or never having come into being. This would be rejected in the end, but the issues took decades to be clarified and then settled. I submit that it was the issue of creation which was the prime factor in shifting the majority view. Implicitly, if not explicitly, sorting out the difference was a replay with respect to the Logos/Son of the options

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with which Tertullian had conjured in respect of creation: Was it/he out of God, or out of something, or out of nothing? Given the solution ‘out of nothing’ for creation, what did that mean for the Word/Son of God? The answer must be not ‘out of nothing’ but ‘out of God’. To get this answer required differentiation between two senses of γεν(ν)ητός  – between simply ‘coming into being’ and ‘being begotten’; in Scripture, the Word/Son of God is described as begotten of God, but this begottenness, so far from implying his coming into being like everything else, must somehow be conceived as eternal. It was through the debate set off by the Arian controversy that the radical distinction between the Creator and everything brought into being from nothing was clarified and both Son and Spirit eventually differentiated from creatures and identified with the transcendent divine Being. That creation was at the heart of the arguments is evident in the significant role of contrasting exegeses of Prov. 8:22 in those controversies,14 and the acceptance of ‘creation out of nothing’ was a crucial factor in framing the debate. But this has become a fairly standard point, so let me now scroll back to the third century and endeavour to show how the doctrine of creation was already acting as a catalyst in Christological debate. The clue lies in the term monarchia, and the fact that it implies not just ‘monarchy’ but also ‘sole first principle’. This reinforced the fundamentally monotheistic position of Christianity and drew critical comments from the second-century philosopher Celsus: ‘If these people worshipped no other God but one, perhaps they would have a valid argument against the others. But in fact they worship to an extravagant degree this man who appeared recently, and yet think it is not inconsistent with monotheism if they also worship his servant’ (Contra Celsum 8.12).15 Christian writings of the first couple of centuries explore a kaleidoscope of different ways of characterizing Jesus Christ, many suggesting a figure, in some sense, as God’s agent, a pre-existent helpmate in creation to be exalted again to God’s right hand after coming in flesh. Though apparently permitting highly paradoxical discourse – for example, the invisible is seen, the impassable suffers, the immortal dies (Melito, Fragment 13)16 – this does not seem to have directly challenged belief in the one true God. Elsewhere17 I have shown how the hierarchical systems of this period, philosophical, synchronistic, Gnostic, Jewish and Christian, all have a family likeness. In Judaism, the one God is served by archangels and angels, but alone is to receive worship; while worship is offered to gods many and lords many in paganism, these were widely regarded, especially among philosophers, as manifestations of one divine being. Treating Jesus as God’s right-hand man and angels as servants populating the one imperial court,

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as it were, did not apparently spark internally the serious challenge that Celsus posed from outside – at least not earlier than general commitment to the notion of the Creator God being the sole first principle. The third-century Monarchian controversies brought the issue to the fore. The exact history of these controversies is difficult to piece together. That Rome was the principal locus of the disputes, and that the Roman bishops Callistus and Zephyrinus were implicated, is evident. The most important sources, the Refutation of all Heresies and the Contra Noetum, are attributed to a supposed anti-pope who may or may not be named Hippolytus; this nicely complicates the story, as does Tertullian’s choice of nickname for the Monarchian against whom he directs his treatise Adversus Praxeam.18 Enough said – let’s focus on the arguments. It is clear that the actual arguments were mostly about scripture. There seem to have been three key texts in play: ●●

●●

●●

Exodus 20:3: ‘You shall have no other gods but me.’ Isaiah 44:6: ‘I am the first and the last, and besides me there is no other.’ Baruch 3:35–37: ‘This is our God. No other will be compared to him. He found out the whole way of knowledge and gave it to Jacob his son and to Israel who is his beloved. Afterwards he was seen on earth and conversed with men.’

On the basis of this last text, Noetus deduced that the God who is one alone was subsequently seen and talked with human beings and so, it is said, felt bound to submit to suffering the single God that exists. An exegetical argument was going on. Yet, the underlying issue was surely God’s monarchia:  those defending the distinction between God and the Logos had to respond to the charge that they were worshipping two gods. Oddly enough, the church historian Eusebius tells us nothing of these disputes but rather of several other heretics who, through an overlapping period in Rome, claimed the Saviour was merely human, a view he regarded as revived in his own day by Paul of Samosata. So modern reconstructions speak of two different Monarchianisms:  one separated the Saviour from the divine, the other incorporated the Saviour in the Father. Paul of Samosata may have tried both moves: Jesus was a man inspired by the wisdom or Logos of God, and the Logos of God was none other than the one God, the solitary Monad. In detail, then, the course and nature of the debates is confused, but my submission would be that the need, by one means or the other, to protect the Monad – the sole first principle – issued directly from the doctrine that the one God created from nothing.

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Creation, then, was the catalyst, provoking the Christological question to which a conceptual response was required. It was also a catalyst shaping response to Christian practice. Irenaeus’s description of the Eucharist is, at first sight, astonishing if one considers only what we find in the New Testament. Jesus is said to have given directions to his disciples to offer to God the first fruits of God’s own created things – only then does he slip into the Last Supper narrative, emphasizing that he took that created thing, bread, and describing the cup also as a part of that creation to which we belong (Adversus Haereses IV.17.5).19 Sacrifice is not required but the first fruits of God’s own created things, offered with thanksgiving for God’s creation (Adversus Haereses IV.18.4). Taking up the same set of issues in book V (2.2–3), both the reality of the incarnation and of bodily resurrection are hung together on the fact that bread and wine are part of the creation yet transformed in the Eucharist. In Irenaeus, the fundamental coherence of these saving and transformative gifts with the initial gift of existence at creation is made clear. I could explore other matters treated in previous papers.20 Indeed, to trace how the doctrine of creation shaped Augustine’s theology would take us back to where we began – the sense found in 1 Clement that God oversees everything, even one’s innermost thoughts. But space allows but this bare cross reference. Here I have tried to draw together insights that have been developed over time in a number of diverse studies so as to bring out the key conclusion: Creation out of nothing was both countercultural and controversial, yet it was working out the implications of that doctrine, both theologically and sacramentally, which in the end made Christianity what it characteristically became. The extent to which it was all already there from the beginning is an interesting issue. 1 Clement shows that it was there, at any rate, in principle. But I would submit that only debate and challenge produced its articulation and showed up its consequences. Hence my title: ‘Creation – a catalyst shaping early Christian life and thought.’

Notes The initial form of this paper was delivered in 2016 as the Ptarmigan lecture in the University of Oxford. Its future publication in a Festschrift for Iain Torrance was already in mind. 1 Frances Young, ‘Creatio ex nihilo: a context for the emergence of the Christian doctrine of creation’, SJT 44 (1991): 139–151. Republished in Frances Young, Exegesis and Theology in Early Christianity (Farnham: Ashgate/Variorum, 2012).

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2 Frances Young, God’s Presence: A Contemporary Recapitulation of Early Christianity, Current Issues in Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 3 1 Clement: Greek text, The Apostolic Fathers, ed. and trans. Kirsopp Lake, Loeb Classical Library; English translation (ET): Maxwell Staniforth and Andrew Louth, Early Christian Writings (London: Penguin, 1987). 4 By which I mean his insistence in the Sermon on the Mount that lust is as bad as actually committing adultery, anger as bad as murder and his suggestion (Mk 7:15) that it is not what goes into someone that defiles but what comes out. 5 E.g. 1 Clem VII.3; XX.11; XXVI –XXVIII; XXXII; XXXIII; XXXV; LIX.2; LXI.2; LXII; LXIV. 6 Young, ‘Creatio ex nihilo’. 7 Theophilus, Ad Autolycum; Greek Text & translation, Theophilus of Antioch Ad Autolycum, ed. and trans. Robert M. Grant, Oxford Early Christian Texts. 8 Tertullian, Adversus Hermogenem; Latin text, Corpus Christianorum, series Latina; ET: Ante-Nicene Christian Library (ANCL). 9 Tertullian, De Resurrectione: Latin Text & Translation, Tertullian’s Treatise on the Resurrection, ed. and trans. Ernest Evans (London: SPCK, 1960). 10 Frances Young, ‘Naked or clothed? Eschatology and the Doctrine of Creation’, in The Church, the Afterlife and the Fate of the Soul, ed. Peter Clarke and Tony Claydon (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, 2009, for the Ecclesiastical History Society), 1–19. Republished in Exegesis and Theology, 2012. 11 Tatian, Oration to the Greeks: Greek text and translation, Tatian, Oratio ad Graecos and Fragments, ed. and trans. Molly Whittaker, Oxford Early Christian Texts. 12 Epistle to Rheginos: ET: Malcolm L. Peel in The Nag Hammadi Library in English, ed. James Robinson (Leiden: Brill, 1977), 50–53. 13 De Resurrectione: Greek text and translation, Athenagoras: Legatio and De Resurrectione, ed. and trans. W. R. Schoedel, Oxford Early Christian Texts. Schoedel, in his introduction, takes the treatise to be an anti-Origenist work of the third century, following R. M. Grant, ‘Athenagoras or Pseudo-Athenagoras?’, HTR 47 (1954): 121–129. The case against authenticity has been vigorously contested by L. W. Barnard, Athenagoras. A Study in Second Century Christian Apologetics (Paris: Éditions Beauchesne, 1971) and others. 14 Frances Young, ‘Proverbs 8 in Interpretation (2): Wisdom Personified’, in Reading Texts, Seeking Wisdom, ed. David F. Ford and Graham Stanton (London: SCM Press 2003), 102–115. Republished in Exegesis and Theology, 2012. 15 Contra Celsum: Greek text, Griechische Christliche Schriftsteller (GCS); ET: Henry Chadwick, Contra Celsum (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965). 16 Melito, Fragment 13; ET: Melito of Sardis. On Pascha and Fragments, ed. and trans. Stuart George Hall, Oxford Early Christian Texts, 80.

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17 Frances Young, ‘Christology and Creation: Towards an Hermeneutic of Patristic Christology’, in The Myriad Christ, ed. T. Merrigan and J. Haers (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2000), 191–205. 18 Hippolytus, Refutation of All Heresies: Greek text, GCS; ET: ANCL. Contra Noetum: Greek text and ET, Contra Noetum, ed. and trans. R. Butterworth, Heythrop monographs (London: Heythrop College, 1977); and Tertullian, Adversus Praxeam: Latin text and translation, Tertullian’s Treatise against Praxeas, ed. and trans. Ernest Evans (London: SPCK, 1948). 19 Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses: Latin text, Libros quinque adversus haereses, 2 vols, ed. W. W. Harvey (Cambridge: Typis Academicis, 1857); ET: ANCL. 20 Such as the impact on Christian anthropology in the fourth century, or the way in which the creation narratives of Genesis became a vehicle for serious engagement with cosmology in the fourth century – in Basil’s Hexaemeron and Augustine’s series of engagements with the Genesis text. See Frances Young, ‘Adam, the Soul and Immortality: A Study of the Interaction of “Science” and the Bible in Some Anthropological Treatises of the Fourth Century’, VC 37 (1983): 110–140; republished in Exegesis and Theology, 2012; and Frances Young, ‘Creation and Human Being: The Forging of a Distinct Christian Discourse’, Studia Patristica 44 (2010): 335–348, republished in Exegesis and Theology, 2012.

4

Theodore of Mopsuestia and the Allegorical Method in Liturgical Commentaries Bryan Spinks

Antioch-on-the-Orontes is now counted as ‘a lost ancient city’, but in the fourth century, it was both vibrant and sparkling and one of the foremost cities of the Roman world.1 Libanius, who had been born in Antioch in 314, was its official sophist from 354 to his death in 393. Among many of his distinguished Antiochene pupils, two, who happened to be close friends, stand out from the rest:  John Chrysostom and Theodore of Mopsuestia. Both became monks, both served as presbyters in Antioch and both were to become bishops. Each was a highly regarded theologian in his own day. However, whereas ‘Goldenmouth’ became a revered saint, the Christological disputes and ruptures that followed the death of Theodore in 428 led to suspicions about his orthodoxy. As the teacher of Nestorius, whose Christological teachings were condemned at Ephesus in 431, many of the more zealous Cyriline party viewed him as the ‘father of Nestorianism’. As part of a trade-off in the attempt to reunify some of the divided Eastern Churches, in 553  – long after his death and when use of terminology had evolved and solidified  – Theodore was condemned as a heretic. The facts that the attempt at union failed, and the possible canonical problem that the dead do not have a chance to answer their accusers, have both been overshadowed by the acceptance in Eastern Orthodoxy of the Council as an Ecumenical Council and therefore unable to err. Many contemporary scholars, with less reason to believe that councils never err, have suggested that Theodore’s Christology, at least in its late fourth-century context, was not Nestorian, and that it is patient of an orthodox interpretation. In his homilies on the Creed, he clearly differentiated between a divine nature and a human nature (kyana=physis) that are united in one person (parsopa=prosopon).2 It is also frequently overlooked that the terms ‘one person’ and ‘perfect humanity

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and perfect divinity’ that were incorporated into the Chalcedonian Definition were Theodore’s terminology as mediated through the Formula of Reunion by John of Antioch. As a result of his posthumous condemnation, his works, which he had written in the Greek language, were largely destroyed. A  good many fragments have survived as well as some complete works that were translated into Syriac and Latin. These include many of his biblical commentaries and a series of catechetical homilies (hereafter CH) that explain and interpret the rites of baptism and the Eucharist. It is the CH on the Eucharist and their influence that is the focus of this paper. Before turning to these in more detail though, a little more, by way of introduction, needs to be said about Theodore and the ‘Antiochene School’. Little is known about Theodore’s early life. He was born ca. 350 and almost certainly to a wealthy family of Antioch, and socially was an equal of John Chrysostom. Both had studied with Libanius,3 and both chose the monastic life. Chrysostom’s writings include a letter and a treatise addressed to a Theodore, and both were concerned with persuading the recipient to return to the monastic life. R.  E. Carter argued many years ago that in fact the two works are addressed to different people, and it is the letter that is likely to have been addressed to Theodore of Mopsuestia, around the year 371.4 Since Theodore did continue his monastic calling, we may conclude that Chrysostom was influential in this decision. Chrysostom and Theodore both studied scripture with Diodore of Tarsus. Theodore himself became a prolific commentator on scripture. The only complete work surviving in Greek is his Commentary on the Twelve Minor Hebrew Prophets. His Commentary on the Minor Pauline Epistles has survived in Latin translation. Fragments in Greek, Latin and Syriac provide us with some of his Commentary on the Psalms, excerpts from the major Pauline epistles, the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, and a good portion of his Commentary on St. John. With Diodore, Theodore is regarded as an exponent of the ‘Antiochene School’ of exegesis. This is often described as a preference for a plain historical interpretation of scripture over against the allegorical method of the Alexandrian School typified by Origen. It is certainly true that Theodore disliked unnecessary use of allegory in exegesis. On Gal. 4:24 he commented: There are people who have a great zeal for overturning the meaning of the divine scriptures, and by breaking up everything placed there they fabricate from themselves certain foolish fictions and give their folly the name of allegory. They use this term of the apostle’s so as to take from it the right to dismiss the entire meaning of divine scripture by depending on the apostle’s expression by



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an allegory. But they fail to understand how great the difference is between their view and what the apostle says in this passage.5

In a surviving fragment of his work Treatise against the Allegorists, Theodore complained: ‘They introduce [interpretations] that do not agree at all – not even in a single instance – with what is written. And they rashly use the words of the divine Scriptures to deceive and lead the multitudes astray, in order that they might appear virtuous guardians of the priestly narrative – which they call an “allegorical interpretation” ’.6 Theodore named Origen as the culprit and accused him of being influenced by Philo rather than by scripture itself. However, the idea that Origen never used history, and that Theodore never used allegory, is simply not true. As Frances Young has shown, the difference is more subtle and complex, and has to do with how texts were interpreted in the schools of grammar, rhetoric and philosophy in the Graeco–Roman world, where texts were the basis of education.7 Exegesis was usually divided into methodikon and historikon. The Antiochenes put more emphasis on historikon, though that should not be confused with the modern use of history. Young argues that the real difference lies in an older struggle between the rhetorical and philosophical schools, with rhetoricians stressing grammar and moral lessons that are found in texts, and the philosophical schools using allegory to uncover deeper truths they found underlying the text. This, however, related to texts. Sixteen CH given by Theodore have survived in Syriac translation. Eleven of the homilies are concerned with texts – the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer. The others are not primarily concerned with texts – not even liturgical texts. Rather, they are concerned with how to understand the experience of the liturgical celebrations. In these homilies, using a generally accepted Platonist backdrop, Theodore happily indulged in allegory. For example, when the deacons brought forth the communion elements, he explained: We must think, therefore, that the deacons who now carry the Eucharistic bread and bring it out for the sacrifice represent the image of the invisible hosts of ministry, with this difference, that, through their ministry and in these remembrances, they do not send Christ our Lord to His salvation-giving Passion. When they bring out (the Eucharistic bread) they place it on the holy altar, for the complete representation of the Passion, so that we may think of Him on the altar, as if He were placed in the sepulchre, after having received His Passion. This is the reason why those deacons who spread linens on the altar represent the figure of the linen clothes of the burial (of our Lord).8

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Theodore later suggests that the deacons represent the angels who sat upon the stone near the sepulchre and announced the resurrection.9 The use of allegory, or a symbolic correlation, in liturgical commentary was not entirely unique to Theodore. Though the authorship and dating are disputed, the Mystagogical Catecheses attributed to St Cyril of Jerusalem, together with the De Sacramentis and the De Mysteriis of St Ambrose, show a similar general approach to the interpretation of the liturgical rituals. Sebastian Brock has edited a commentary on the liturgy that was wrongly attributed to St John Chrysostom but was later expanded by both the Syrian Orthodox and the Church of the East, indicating a fourth- or early-fifth-century origin of a common shared Syriac text. Some of it has much in common with Theodore, but there are also differences. Brock concluded that the commentary and Theodore’s CH both belong to similar catechetical milieu and that they are approximately contemporary.10 It would appear, then, if Theodore chose to play down allegory in biblical exegesis, when it came to explaining the liturgical ritual, he used a conventional method of explanation of the Church’s ritual by means of an allegorical methodology. What was the nature and purpose of this methodology? Clemens Leonhard has drawn attention to certain words that the Syriac translator has used to render Greek terms.11 The priest fulfils celestial things by figures and signs. The Eucharistic sacrifice is a manifestation (buddaqa) of celestial things, and the priest makes an image (yuqna) of heavenly things. Leonhard, noting that Theodore quotes Heb. 8:4ff. to explain the difference between the celestial and earthly sacrifice, writes: Thus, Christ performs a kind of high-priestly service in heaven by offering himself as a sacrifice (122v22-24). Human beings will see (hadyrinan 124r10) these celestial things face to face (appin luqbal appin) after their ascent to heaven. For now, they can only see them in a mirror (mahzita), in parables (pell’ata), figures (tupse), signs (atwata), etc., by means of their faith. The figures and signs of the liturgy allow them to approach these heavenly things in advance but only in a preliminary way.12

The liturgical ritual is an image or likeness (dumya) of heavenly things that allows one to recall, paint into one’s mind and meditate on the divine dispensation.13 Leonhard draws on the work of Mary Carruthers on meditation and rhetoric in the ancient world, in which images or likenesses were used as cognitive representations.14 The Latin rhetorician Quintilian explained: We name visions what the Greeks call phantasiai and it is through these that images of absent things are represented to the mind in such a way that we seem



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to see them with our eyes and to be in their presence. Whoever has mastery of them will have a powerful effect on the emotions. Some people say that this type of man who can imagine in himself things, words and deeds as well and in accordance with truth is euphantasiotos.15

This use of images as part of rhetoric lies behind the observation of Nathaniel G.  Costa that Theodore frequently uses phrases such as ‘we should imagine’, ‘when faith enables our faith’ and ‘we ought to believe’. With the images and representations couched in hortatory and conditional language, Theodore encourages the catechumens to transcend or suspend belief in the present reality and imagine a heavenly order; faith and this understanding allow this visual representation to remain in healthy and instructive balance with the present reality.16 The purpose of such commentaries, according to Daniel Schwartz, was to create a Christianized culture, and thus was a Christian form of paideia. He writes: Just as classical paideia served to differentiate elites from the rest of society, so the distinctly Christian culture promoted through catechesis sought to create a group set apart from the rest of society and embedded within a community that shared unique beliefs and rituals [. . .] paideia sought to shape the minds, characters, and bodies of the young men who would soon enter into positions of social and political prominence. This type of training under the rhetor Libanius constituted the early part of Theodore’s education and would have an impact on his intellectual activity throughout his life.17

Schwarz argues that Theodore drew on his rhetorical education and produced elaborately detailed sermons on the liturgy which strongly bear the marks of the rhetorical genre of ekphrasis, or descriptive speech, the aim of which was to engage the audience with a particularly striking account of an event, location or piece of art. Vividness was a hallmark of this technique, and hence the use of the terms fear, awe-inspiring and mystery.18 Schwarz draws particular attention to Theodore’s symbolic functions attributed to the officiating clergy as well as to the bread and wine in the Eucharist by which he sought to show complete correspondence between the physical manifestation of the liturgical act and the spiritual reality to which it corresponded.19 Ultimately, what Theodore does is what a well-trained student of Libanius was expected to do:  to use all the rhetorical skills to cultivate paideia. What do Theodore’s CH tell us about the Eucharist? It has been suggested that in fact we have two different liturgical uses in the homilies. Each homily is preceded by what might be termed a short synopsis, entitled in Syriac sūrat

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ktāb. A. Mingana, in his edition, called these a synopsis.20 The French edition of Tonneau and Devreesse translated it as ‘texte du livre’ and understood it to be an ‘Ordo’, or service summary, of which the homily was an expansion – the very opposite of a synopsis of the homilies.21 This latter view was accepted by Enrico Mazza, who has argued that the ‘Ordo’ preserves an outline of the liturgy of the early part of the fourth century which Theodore has had to expand in the homilies, since the liturgy of his day or area was more fully developed.22 More recently, Clemens Leonhard has convincingly shown this to be erroneous. Theodore wrote in Greek. The sūrat ktāb quotes the Peshitta and is an eighthcentury summary or synopsis by the Church of the East redactor of each of the homilies. The summaries might tell us something of the Church of the East liturgy, but they most certainly do not represent an ‘Ordo’ that was earlier than Theodore’s homilies.23 But what ‘Ordo’ is presupposed by the homilies? J-M. Vosté placed them during Theodore’s episcopate and therefore they would represent the use of Mopsuestia.24 Abramowski argued that the discussion of the Holy Spirit best fits the period when Theodore was still a presbyter in Antioch.25 Bernard Botte argued for Tarsus.26 As is the case with this genre, the details that would allow us to identify a particular liturgical text that would help to identify location are too vague to allow clear identification. Given the prestige of Antioch, it is likely that, even if the CH date from Theodore’s episcopate, his teaching was no different from his understanding of the Eucharist when he was in Antioch. Sources for the liturgy of Antioch at that time do not give us much further help. Apostolic Constitutions is usually dated ca. 380, but reflects a semiArian, or Eunomian interest. The Greek anaphora named St John Chrysostom may well represent Antiochene use, particularly since it seems to have developed from a similar Ur-text as the later Syriac anaphora of the Twelve Apostles.27 In CH, Theodore mentions the following details: Deacons, who wear stoles, bring the bread and wine to the altar, representing the bringing of the dead body of Christ to the tomb. The deacons wave fans. A deacon announces a time of prayer. The bishop begins a prayer over the offerings. The Bishop gives the Peace. Lavabo Diptychs. Commemoration of the Living and the Dead A deacon calls attention to the offering. The Bishop prays the anaphora; it begins with the Grace, Lift up your hearts, and Let us give thanks to the Lord. The Bishop speaks appropriate words of praise, mentioning the persons of the Trinity, and leading into the Sanctus.



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Then he proclaims the transcendent mercy that God bestowed on us when he revealed his plan for us in Christ. For Christ, ‘though he was in the form of God’, determined to ‘take the form of a servant’; he assumed a perfect and complete man for the salvation of the human race, thus cancelling the ancient and cruel burdens of the law, and death’s long-established hold over us, and conferring upon us favours beyond our description or comprehension. For Christ our Lord accepted the passion in order to exterminate death utterly by his resurrection; and he has promised that we too can share with him in the enjoyment of this future.28 The epiclesis – for the Spirit to come and grace descend on the bread and wine and upon the assembly. Commemoration of the living and the dead Breaking the bread with signing of the bread and wine, and adding a piece of bread to the wine. Prayer for acceptance of the offering. Preparation for communion and the Sancta sanctis Communion – with calls for repentance and worthy reception.

There are many parallels here with the later Byzantine rite of St John Chrysostom, including the anaphora. However, in his description of the anaphora, Theodore discusses Phil. 2:6–7 as though it was in the text of the prayer (and he adds his own Christological terms, which almost certainly were not in any liturgical text at that time).29 Also, commenting on the epiclesis, he speaks of coming rather than being sent. Neither of these are characteristic of the anaphora of St John Chrysostom, but they are both features of the anaphora of St Basil. It could be that he has in mind a quite independent Mopsuestian or a Tarsus anaphora, or it may simply be that the homiletic method was suited to broad theological interpretations rather than close textual quotation. What of Theodore’s influence? Already in the wake of Ephesus, some proCyriline adherents were suspicious of Theodore’s writings, and in the decades leading up to 553 and certainly afterwards, it was in the Church of the East that Theodore was regarded as an esteemed teacher of the Antiochene School, and it secured translations of his works. Naturally, it is in the Church of the East that his influence is obvious. However, since his method and teaching were not peculiar to himself, it is no accident that there are parallels and possibly influence elsewhere. According to Paul Meyendorff, the important Byzantine commentary by St Germanus represents an interesting fusion or amalgamation of the approach of Theodore of Mopsuestia and Pseudo-Dionysius, or as he simplifies it, the

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Antiochene and Alexandrian approaches. This assertion has been challenged by Bishop Auxentios and Father James Thornton who deny that Theodore of Mopsuestia correctly and validly represents the orthodox Antiochene School.30 Though excusing the use of Pseudo-Dionysius, which is almost certainly authored by a non-Chalcedonian, on the grounds that figures such as Germanus believed the work to be by the disciple of St Paul, their main objection to Meyendorff seems to be on the grounds that since an Ecumenical Council condemned Theodore, he cannot represent the orthodox Antiochene tradition, and no good Orthodox theologian would have been influenced by him. It would seem, however, that Meyendorff has in mind a general approach and teaching that is also used used by Germanus, rather than the idea that Germanus had before him Theodore’s actual text. The early Syriac Commentary wrongly attributed to St John Chrysostom, and edited by Brock, notes that the altar is the place of Christ’s sepulchre, the bread and wine on it are symbols of the body of Christ and the deacon is the likeness of the angels who appeared at the head and foot of Jesus Christ our Saviour.31 These are all parallel to Theodore, but, as noted above, this commentary seems to be an independent witness to a similar Antiochene method of liturgical commentary. Meyendorff argues that the method of Pseudo-Dionysius interprets the entire liturgy as an ascent from the material to the spiritual, from the multiplicity of lower existence to the unity of the divine, with a focus on the eschatological. Maximus the Confessor draws heavily on Pseudo-Dionysius and so establishes what Meyendorff calls the Byzantine tradition of commentary. However, of Germanus he writes: Germanus kept much of [the] earlier Byzantine tradition, modifying it somewhat, and adds a more Antiochene perspective, far more historicizing and focusing on the human ministry of Christ. This is apparent from the very beginning of his commentary: ‘The church is an earthly heaven in which the supercelestial God dwells and walks about. It represents the crucifixion, burial, and resurrection of Christ’ (ch. 1). Immediately we are presented with this dual approach. As his readers would have been more familiar with the more traditional, eschatological approach, Germanus spends more time on the newer, less familiar, interpretations. Thus ‘the apse corresponds to the cave in Bethlehem where Christ was born, as well as the cave in which He was buried’ (ch. 3), the ‘holy table corresponds to the spot in the tomb where Christ was placed’ and the table at which Christ sat with the disciples at the Last Supper (ch. 4). The ambo represents the stone at the Holy Sepulchre from which the angel proclaimed Christ’s resurrection (ch. 10) and from which the deacon, who represents the angel (ch. 16), proclaims the Gospel. Thus the building,



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the vestments, the celebrants, the rites all symbolize and reveal Christ’s earthly ministry.32

It is possible to see the same type of combination in the Syrian Orthodox expansion of the commentary edited by Brock. The earlier version sees the altar as the sepulcher of Christ, but the Syrian Orthodox expansion adds that the altar is also Emmanuel, presumably drawing on Pseudo-Dionysius IV.12.33 In his commentary, George of the Arabs says the altar is Emmanuel, but Moses Bar Kepha, who assumed that the earlier commentary is indeed by Chrysostom, gives three possible meanings, including that of sepulchre.34 It would appear then, that in so far as Theodore shared an Antiochene approach to liturgy, those ideas continued to be mediated not just in the East Syrian commentaries but also in Chalcedonian and non-Chalcedonian liturgical commentaries too.35

Notes 1 The term is from Peter Brown, ‘Charmed Lives’, New York Review of Books 48 (12 April 2001). 2 A. Mingana, Woodbrooke Studies Volume 5 (Cambridge: Heffer and Sons, 1932), 63–64. 3 Raffaella Cribiore, The School of Libanius in Late Antique Antioch (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). 4 R. E. Carter, ‘Chrysostom’s Ad Theodorum Lapsum and the Early Chronology of Theodore of Mopsuestia’, Vigilliae Christianae 16 (1962): 87–101. 5 Theodore of Mopsuestia, Commentary on the Minor Pauline Epistles, translated with an Introduction and Notes by Rowan A. Greer (Atlanta, GA: SBL, 2010), 113. 6 Theodore of Mopsuestia, Treatise Against the Allegorists, in Theodore of Mopsuestia, trans. Frederick G. McLeod (London: Routledge, 2009), 75. 7 Francis Young, ‘Alexandrian and Antiochene Exegesis’, in Alan J. Hauser and Duane F. Watson, A History of Biblical Interpretation, Volume 1 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003), 334–354, 339. 8 Mingana, Woodbrooke Studies, 86. 9 Ibid., 87. 10 Sebastian Brock, ‘An Early Syriac Commentary on the Liturgy’, Journal of Theological Studies 37 (1986): 387–403, 399. 11 Clemens Leonhard, ‘Why Does Theodore of Mopsuestia Interpret the Liturgies in an Allegorical Way?’, in Steven Hawkes-Teeples, Bert Groen and Stefanos Alexopoulos, Studies on the Liturgies of the Christian East (Louvain: Peeters, 2013), 141–155.

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12 Ibid., 143. The references are to the Tonneau and Devreesse edition of CH. 13 Ibid., 143–145. 14 Mary Carruthers, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 15 Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria 6, Vol. 2, 29–30. 16 Nathaniel G. Costa, ‘“Allegorical Typologies” of the Eucharist: An Analysis of Some Eastern Liturgical Commentaries’, Graduate School Paper College of Saint Benedict/St. John’s University 2007, Paper 12, digitalcommons.csbsju.edu/sot_ papers, 1–24, 6–7. 17 Daniel L. Schwartz, Paideia and Cult: Christian Initiation in Theodore of Mopsuestia, Center for Hellenic Studies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 3, 30. 18 Ibid., 119. 19 Ibid., 121. 20 A. Mingana, Commentary of Theodore of Mopsuestia on the Lord’s Prayer and on the Sacraments of Baptism and the Eucharist, Woodbrooke Studies Volume 6 (Cambridge: Heffers, 1933). 21 R. Tonneau and Robert Devreesse, Les Homélies Catéchétiques de Théodore de Mopsueste (Rome: Vatican City, 1949). 22 Enrico Mazza, The Origins of the Eucharistic Prayer (Collegeville, PA: Liturgical Press, 1995), 287–331. 23 Clemens Leonhard, ‘Did Theodore of Mopsuestia Quote an Ancient “Ordo”?’, Studia Liturgica 34 (2004): 191–204. 24 J.-M. Vosté, ‘La chronologie de l’activité litteraire de Théodore de Mopsueste’, in Revue Biblique 34 (1925): 54–81. 25 Luise Abramowski, ‘Was hat das Nicaeno-Constantinopolitanum (C) mit dem Konzil von Konstantinopel 381 zu tun?’, in Theologie und Philosophie 67 (1992): 481–513. 26 Bernard Botte, ‘L’onction postbaptismale dans l’ancien patriarcat d’Antioche’, in Miscellanea liturgica in onore di sua eminenza il Cardinale Giacomo Lercaro, arcivescovo di Bologna (Rome: Descalée de Brouwer, 1966–1967), 795–808. 27 Robert F. Taft, ‘The Authenticity of the Chrysostom Anaphora Revisited: Determining the Authorship of Liturgical Texts by Computer’, Orientalia Christiana Periodica 56 (1990): 5–51. Cf. G. J. Cuming, ‘Pseudonymity and Authenticity, With Special Reference to the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom’, Studia Patristica 15 (1984): 532–538. 28 Cf. Mingana VI, 102–103. 29 Ibid. 30 Chrysostomos of Etna, Four Essays on Orthodox Liturgical Issues (Etna: Center for Traditionalist Orthodox Studies, 1996), ch. 2, titled ‘Three Byzantine



31 32 33 34 35

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Commentaries on the Divine Liturgy: A Comparative Treatment’, 35–57, 36. These writers are ultra-Orthodox dissidents. Brock, ‘An Early Syriac Commentary’. Paul Meyendorff, ed., St. Germanus of Constantinople: On the Divine Liturgy (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Press, 1984), 42–43. Brock, ‘An Early Syriac Commentary’, 391, 393. R. H. Connolly and H. W. Codrington, Two Commentaries on the Jacobite Liturgy (London: Williams and Norgate, 1913, Gregg International Reprint, 1969), 17, 34. So Dionysius Bar Salibi repeats Moses Bar Kepha. Dionysius Bar Salibi, Commentary on the Eucharist; ET: Baby Varghese (Kottayam: SEERI, 1998), 31.

5

Study as Spiritual Formation Ellen T. Charry

On education It is the case that some like to study and some do not. For many it is a joy, while others would rather be on the court or at the mall. Those who love reading books and thinking and talking about them with others cannot bear to leave school, and so it is often those who become permanent students. I became an academic because I never learned how to do anything but go to school. I have no idea how much of the population is constituted this way, but I suppose it is rather small. Our culture now thinks of study as instrumental to money, power and prestige. Indeed, our educational system is so taskoriented that it no longer teaches students how to study or what they should be trying to do when learning. I  am dismayed, for example, that students study, even write papers, in coffee shops. How is a well-defined sense of ‘study’ possible in a place designed for socializing? Perhaps an aspect of the gap in understanding here is due to the fact that our students inhabit a culture that has exterminated silence that is indeed essential for focusing the mind – solitude that permits the object of study to emerge before us. Silence has become frightening. Nevertheless, here I want to challenge the dominant instrumental view of education and suggest that study is a pre-eminent form of spiritual formation. There was a time when it was common to believe that the world is God’s. That idea is mostly gone now, and even Christians who may profess it may not know what to do with it. To believe that the world is God’s is not only a religious judgement, it is also a moral commitment. It carries with it the implication that whatever we study will lead us deeper into the knowledge of God. So, be it geology, psychology or mathematics, the beauty and goodness of God are within

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reach. On this view, studying is an act of glorifying and praising God by enjoying his handiwork. Although the direct object of study may be plants or disease or the movement of the oceans, from a religious perspective, the object is God’s wisdom. That is what Christians, Jews and Muslims are really seeking. So, whatever blessing praying the psalms, offering spontaneous thanksgivings for specific blessings or reciting scripture has bestowed upon us – be it food, waking up, moving freely or the fortune of community – as the usual way we think of devotion, studying with our minds set on spiritual gain (as Paul puts it in Rom. 8) offers fragrant sacrifice to God. It is another way of ‘making melody to the Lord in our hearts, giving thanks to God the Father at all times and for everything’.1

On classical Christian theological education It is important here to turn to the special form of study undertaken in Christian theological schools that audaciously want to study God. By way of introduction, there is a specific misunderstanding of study within the culture, a point which may at first appear to contradict the prior comments regarding the need for silence and solitariness. That second misunderstanding is that one can learn alone. As Plato’s Meno argues, each person has within all that they need to know well. While there is some merit to this view, it has been warped into an utterly unusable shape, and even Plato did not embrace this idea wholeheartedly. After all, for Plato, no one learned anything without Socrates. That we cannot learn alone is affirmed in the importance of study groups, or even coffee shops. Despite several fields of study that rely on or, in some way, incorporate the apprenticeship model (like medicine), a common assumption is that one does not need a teacher in order to learn. One of my favorite American painters, Henry Ossawa Tanner, captured a student–teacher relation in several works: ‘The Banjo Lesson’, ‘The Sabot Maker’ and ‘The Bagpipe Lesson’. In all these cases, the pupil is bathed in light while the teacher is shadowed. The future is with the student but the teacher is essential. As a teacher, these paintings have been a personal guide. Christian theology has always maintained that God is the true teacher but also insisted that people are rarely prepared to be taught of God and so need to be trained by earthly teachers who have been taught of God by their teachers. The point is that good learning takes place in the context of trusting



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relationships. One cannot learn from those that are suspected to lead astray or deceive. Now when I speak of teachers, I am not speaking of a faculty but of the master theologians whose work students must read. Teachers cannot pretend to know how to be taught of God or how to teach students accordingly. All one can hope to accomplish is to point students towards teachers who can by placing themselves in the tradition of those who do. Any given faculty member may not be able to be the student’s teacher, but the hope is to point to those who can be. In a personal anecdote, from time to time a student will stumble into my office saying that she simply does not fit in because she asks questions that others cannot understand or dismiss as useless and irrelevant. The student feels isolated. I  usually suggest some books that speak directly to that concern in order to assure her that she is not alone. There is a great cloud of witnesses. Even if a student cannot talk to their classmates, they ought to be able to talk with a teacher, or preferably, be listened to. In 389, St Augustine wrote a treatise called ‘The Teacher’ in which he constructed a conversation about learning between himself and his son. Teaching often employs words. But, he says, the words must not just sit there. They must provide more than information. One must press beyond the words to the reality they point towards. The teacher’s task is to set before the student the things that the student really wants to know. Learning is getting to know the things that the words point to: ‘Our real Teacher is he who is so listened to, who is said to dwell in the inner self, namely Christ that is [. . .] the wisdom of God [. . .] However, to each is given only so much as he is able to receive, according to his own good or evil will. Confessedly we must pay heed to the light that it may let us discern visible things so far as we are able.’2 When one sees with light that illumines the soul, the truth is genuinely enjoyed. Therefore, Augustine says, ‘It is not I who would teach him. He is taught not by my words but by the things themselves which inwardly God has made manifest to him.’3 At the end of the conversation, Augustine’s son concludes, ‘I have learned that in order to know the truth of what is spoken, I must be taught by him who dwells within and gives me counsel about words spoken externally in the ear. By his favor I shall love him the more ardently the more I advance in learning.’4 That is, students need teachers who can help them live into the knowledge of God. Augustine knows that that is an awesome responsibility because each student is different. The teacher does not know the direction every student needs to go. And perhaps students do not know what direction they need to go. In the 1970s, when universities did away with required courses, sequenced courses and grades, it tried to allow the student to lead, but it was a failure.

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This is not to suggest that one never knows what they need; instead, one must consider under what circumstances humans have that knowledge. Knowing what we need to learn requires spiritual maturity. But it is precisely spiritual maturity that one seeks in order to study well. How can anyone ever get spiritual maturity if spiritual maturity is needed for good study? One tradition says that we are not able to learn the wisdom of God until we are forty years old, and that was from an era when forty was an advanced age. This comforts me – although I have passed the deadline. It means that partaking in the wisdom of God does not come easily. We must be prepared for it. Spiritual maturity is hard to come by. One thing that gives rise to spiritual maturity is, or at least can be, suffering. Everyone eventually encounters it. Perhaps forty was picked as the age for wisdom because by then it is likely that one has encountered some impediment, some stumbling, some failure, some illness, some loss or crisis that slows them down enough to grasp attention and realize their need for more than they have. Suffering and tragedy create a different perspective. They cast our desires, habits and foibles in a broader, even cosmic, framework that reveals our pettiness, narrow-mindedness or silliness. Such experiences can help us long for God, crave God, in order to realize that we are part of a bigger reality than our own salvation. It is at such a point in one’s life that one realizes that they cannot go it alone, that they need a teacher in order to learn how to be, especially in light of who they may have become because of what has happened to them. Humility is essential for being able to study well. In the ancient world, education was spiritual formation (the separation is a modern invention). Study was individuated with a high teacher-student ratio. Gregory Thaumaturgus became a student of the great Origen of Alexandria, one of the greatest teachers in the church’s history and Christianity’s first biblical scholar. Gregory had been a Roman orator and magician until he found himself, by God’s grace, along with his brother, at Origen’s feet. He was overawed by the grace, dignity and power of Origen’s teaching, and tried to keep from falling over himself praising his teacher.5 Origen cultivated the longing in Gregory’s heart and mind to know God and lured him away from his former life that depended on his own eloquence and skill. What Origen taught Gregory may be summed up as ‘piety’. This means he helped Gregory live an upright life that longs for truly good things. He taught him not to be distracted from the study of that which uplifts the soul. And he did this through friendship. Origen cut out and thoroughly removed the weeds of stubbornness, impulsiveness and obtuseness from his students, sometimes by refutation or censure, sometimes by confronting them. They reacted like so



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many unbroken steeds until Origen reduced them to quietness. He disciplined them, much to their chagrin and edification. Gregory enumerates all the blocks that he put up to moral and spiritual learning, and how Origen patiently broke through them to nurture Gregory in the practice of virtue. Origen spiritually formed his charges for a noble, righteous life, counselling them to devote themselves to God alone, and the study of philosophy, by giving them all the space they needed to explore ‘the whole circle of knowledge’, far beyond scripture and religious books, to investigate everything and to satisfy themselves with all kinds of beliefs and doctrines. The experience of genuine learning turned Gregory’s life around, and he was forever grateful. He wrote, ‘Here, truly, is the paradise of comfort; here are true gladness and pleasure, as we have enjoyed them during this period which is now at its end.’6 Like every well-taught student, he was afraid to leave his teacher, fearful that he has not yet learned sufficiently well or enough to sustain his life without his teacher by his side.

On Christian theological education today Like Origen and Iain Torrance, I have spent my life as a teacher, indeed a teacher of Christian theological students, many of whom are preparing for professional Christian ministry. I often ask them why they undertake theological study. Some incoming students have not asked this question of themselves. That is, perhaps a few have not had a proper conversation with God about why they undertake theological study and what they expect to accomplish in their time studying. Perhaps some will have identified their own gifts for ministry and come to get a credential that will let them preach in communions that guard their gates. Some students are so sure of their gifts that theological study appears to offer little more than a list of boxes to be ticked off, required courses to be gotten through. Some students come for a credential that they hope will land them a fine position. Some have been warned by their mentors to beware of what goes on in our classrooms because we teachers are out to undermine their faith with tainted learning against which they should close their faithful ears. Perhaps some of these thoughts blur together so that the goal is simply to get through and get out with as little disturbance to themselves as possible. Students who think this way have not yet engaged with God sufficiently to merit matriculation, although pointed questions are not asked on the application

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form. Such reasons are instrumental and fatuous. Perhaps these students see theological education as simply an impediment to their career goals as if there were another place where Christian ministry happens. These are not only false but also self-defeating reasons to spend time in theological study as Origen taught us. I am persuaded that these are not really the reasons students come to theological study, often at great sacrifice to themselves and their families. Not one student really thinks that they arrive at school having everything they need to preach presciently, teach wisely, tend the sick compassionately, ‘give rest to the weary, bless the dying, soothe the suffering, pity the afflicted, shield the joyous’7 and enable their waiting community to thrive. They are not that vain or that self-deceived. I think the real reason that all who are here – perhaps, pre-eminently, those brazen enough also to ‘profess’ here  – are here for this reason:  We all seek to know, love and enjoy God and the things of God better in order that the communities to which we contribute may flourish. That is, the real reason we are all here is to become beautiful. Although the road we lay before students is rugged, they, not we, are in control of their education and formation. Ministry does not begin with a first position after graduation. It happens in every interaction with every person, every day. Ministry happens in every email, every meal in the refectory, every conversation, every gesture, every smile offered, every glance given, every tweet and Facebook posting one propels into the world. While many theological schools are located in universities, theological faculties could be a bit more candid in articulating what they do. Universities often claim that their goal is to advance knowledge for its own sake. Theological schools, on the other hand, openly acknowledge that they are also interested in forming the people within their portals for a flourishing life, because education not only conveys and discovers information but also forms people. Dwelling in the ancient world, Origen understood that. While theological schools are by no means uninterested in the cultivation of knowledge, they frankly admit that knowledge forms people. Secular university faculty may balk at their responsibility for forming persons, but the subject matter that they impart and the strategies for imparting it do precisely that. Each member of an educational community contributes to the flourishing or the languishing of each and every person in that community. A Christian way of putting this is quite scandalous in most university contexts, but Christians unashamedly admit that they are to become and to help their students become beautiful in God.



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The Psalter opens by painting a word picture of the beautiful people that the collection of Psalms wants to enable. Those who heed the poet’s advice pick their way carefully among alluring voices that would derail them from the beautiful way of God’s path. They eschew cynicism and temptation to an ugly way of life. They discern God’s way, considering carefully how to apply God’s teaching to their life. They are like trees planted by streams of water, which yield their fruit in its season, and their leaves do not wither. In all that they do, they prosper.8 Becoming as beautiful as a flourishing tree is more difficult than memorizing dates and terms for tests and writing polished papers. For the ability students really want is to enhance their ability to love well. There is much glib talk about Christian love. Some of it is self-deceived and hypocritical; some is simply empty. Yet, the challenge to learn to love well will not be stilled. Paul etched the desire to become beautiful into Christian consciousness even before the word ‘Christian’ was coined: ‘If I speak in the languages of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.’9 That is, if I preach love but am not willing to pay its price, I belittle the Christian calling to beauty. ‘And if I have prophetic powers and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I  have enough faith to remove mountains, but am without love, I  am nothing.’10 Currently, the church has far too many people running around calling themselves prophets, boasting of their deep faith, sure that their interpretation of Christianity is the right, the best, the only defensible one. They are Paul’s clanging cymbals. He does not simply condemn, however, but tells how love behaves: Love is ‘patient [. . .] kind [. . .] not envious or boastful, arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in what is right.’11 This is the beauty that we crave. Now the last word of verse six in 1 Cor. 13, ἀληθείᾳ, is usually translated as ‘truth’. The NRSV reads, ‘[Love] does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing [adikia], but rejoices in the truth’.12 The juxtaposition of adikia with aletheia made sense in Paul’s day but it does not make sense now because we are working with a different understanding of ‘truth’ than that which prevailed in his world. Paul and Origen understood that truth is related to goodness, not as information. Modernity gave us an evidence-based information-driven notion of truth whose opposite is not ugly wrongdoing but quantitative inaccuracy. But for Paul, that which is wrongly done is false because it is ugly, not because it is contrary to fact or unquantifiable. In Paul’s world, what is bad is false/ugly; what is good is true/beautiful. There was no valuefree notion of truth as we today hope to approach which has enabled modern

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sciences, for example. Yes, scientific exactness may be elegant, but moral beauty is another design altogether. Reading Paul’s sentence as if aletheia meant factually correct information without reference to moral beauty has led theology into a trap regarding the very task of theology and away from Paul’s commendation of agape (love). His admonition in this sentence is to avoid Schadenfreude, rejoicing at another person’s dip into ugliness. If we mistakenly substitute the modern notion of truth for the ancient one, we miss Paul’s point entirely. In that case, one’s hope is to persuade others of the better information we have (or that we at least believe we have) and that they lack. We delude ourselves into thinking that this correction is a form of loving them while what we really want is for them to recognize our superior experience, knowledge or clarity of mind, or yet further to become like us, or admit that they are wrong and we are right, so that we experience control and feel powerful. But Paul teaches that love does not insist on its own way, that is, on being right in the information-driven sense or to gain psychological power over others, but love rejoices seeing others being in the truth, that is, seeing them flourish morally. Love is not controlling but beautiful and, in that way, transforming. Now, who among us loves as Paul would have us love? He presses the point: ‘Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, and endures all things. Love never ends.’13 Here, Paul teaches that growth in love is inexhaustible and, therefore, imperfectible. Becoming the perfect lover always outdistances us. ‘If only my irritation had not gotten the better of me in that moment. If only I had held my tongue or listened more carefully.’ Our ability to become beautiful lovers stretches out before us, beckoning us to dwell with Christ in the fullness of God the Father that our joy may be complete. Paul contrasts love, whose possibilities are never exhausted, with experiences that will peak and conclude. Ironically, the first item on Paul’s list is prophecy. It is an admonition for our moment when we pretend that we might be the first generation to bemoan our inability to let justice roll down like a mighty stream. Shame be on such arrogance. Thanks be to God that Amos got there first. Paul knows that our knowledge of love is fragmentary. ‘Now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only partially; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.’14 Here is the antidote to the certainty about our ability to love adeptly in this life that should sober but not discourage us. We have, after all, to heed Deut. 6:5: ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength.’ Or, as the children’s dance ‘the hokey pokey’ puts it: ‘put your whole self in’. Jesus set



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this verse together with Lev. 19:18, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord’, to give us paired love commandments in order to engage all of the self all of the time for becoming beautiful and enabling others to do so as well. Jesus’s linking of these two biblical commands was not lost on Paul (even if he did not have the text), who gave us faith, hope and love, underscoring the last ‘What is love?’. We reach out for it with wide-stretching fingers like trying to catch smoke. We crave knowing that we matter to someone . . . somehow, even for no reason. Then, love strikes us from behind, catching us up in itself. And what of loving God that Deuteronomy commands and Jesus echoes? Is love of God the model for loving one another, or does earthly, even earthy, love fashion our grasping attempts at compliance? We are to love God in response to first being loved, as evidenced by the cumulative case for God’s love for us: creation itself, escape from the great flood, liberation from Egypt, rescue at sea’s edge, deliverance into the land of promise and, eventually, the gift of Christ Jesus. Still, let us press ahead, for love is thicker than gratitude.

‘But what do I love when I love my God?’ No material beauty or beauty of temporal order; not the brilliance of earthly light so welcome to our eyes; not the sweet harmony of melody and song; not the fragrance of flowers, perfumes, and spices; not manna or honey; not limbs such as the body delights to embrace. And yet, when my soul is bathed in light that is not bound by space; when it listens to sound that never dies away; when it breathes fragrance that is not borne away on the wind; when it tastes food that is never consumed by the eating; when it clings to an embrace from which it is not severed by fulfilment of desire. This is what I love when I love my God.15

Augustine knew well the power of earthly and earthy loves whose satiety fades and we reach for them over and again. He regretted but did not despise them for this shortcoming, knowing that they beautify us for that love whose satiety never ceases. Loving God, he teaches, involves more than experiencing gratitude when recalling past gifts. It engages the spiritual senses, each of which is stimulated by and for moral beauty. He calls us to enjoy light that does not fade, sonority that never ceases, fragrance that never evaporates, taste that does not become stale and arousal that is never quenched. Loving God adroitly ushers us into a lighted, sonorous, scented, tasty, palpable reality vibrating with life that beautifies us to love one another into flourishing. Augustinian delight (read heaven) is not calm and static but pulses with energy. Loving God is not a mental exercise done

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in secret. It does not happen apart from but through our senses as we grow more adept at loving well, seeing others more clearly, listening to them more attentively, feeding them more nourishingly and touching them more gently. Thus, we become beautiful in God. Contrary to dour construals of Christian ethics that identify Christian love as self-sacrificial, the Augustinian vision affirms that our creatureliness carries us to God in spite of ourselves. Loving others beautifully beautifies us as God’s lover. Classical Christian ethics has worked on the zero-sum principle that wellbeing is a scarce commodity to be parcelled out in modest increments, with the bravest among us giving up their share for the sake of others. The Christian life is said to be about giving and giving, and when you have no more left to give, you give some more as if self-depletion were meritorious. Yet, in truth, we enhance ourselves when we enhance others. Loving well is not a zero-sum game but a win-win proposition, demanding as it may be at times. The better we become at loving, the more lovable we become. And the more adeptly we enhance others, the happier we become because we are becoming the beautiful person God calls us to be.

Notes 1 Eph. 5:19–20. 2 Augustine, ‘The Teacher’, in Augustine: Earlier Writings, ed. and trans. John H. S. Burleigh, Ichthus Edition, Library of Christian Classics (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press, 1958), 69–101, 95. 3 Ibid., 96–97. 4 Ibid., 101. 5 Gregory Thaumaturgus, ‘Oration and Panegyric Addressed to Origen’, in AnteNicene Fathers of the Third Century, Vol. 6, ed. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1886), 21–39. Gregory studied under Origen for perhaps five years in Palestinian Caesarea and wrote this panegyric upon his departure to become bishop of Neocaesarea in Pontus, where he spread Christianity, importantly to the future leaders of the church in Cappadocia, two of whom were his namesakes. 6 Ibid., 37. 7 Book of Common Prayer (New York: Church Hymnal Corp; Seabury Press, 1979), 71. 8 A paraphrase of Ps. 1:3. 9 1 Cor. 13:1. 10 1 Cor. 13:2.

11 12 13 14 15

Study as Spiritual Formation 1 Cor. 13:4–6. 1 Cor. 13:5–6 (NRSV). 1 Cor. 13:7–8. 1 Cor. 13:12. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford, NY: Oxford University Press, 1991), 10.

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The Logic of Incarnation and the Problem of the Extra Calvinisticum Ian A. McFarland

It does not take much acquaintance with Iain Torrance to be struck (and thereafter endlessly surprised) with the breadth of his knowledge of the Christian tradition, which stretches from the apostolic era through the Reformation right up to the present day. While it is impossible to do adequate service to the range of his interests in the compass of a single essay, the extra Calvinisticum at least touches on some significant points, for it emerged in the Lutheran–Reformed debates of the sixteenth century, draws on conceptual distinctions hammered out in the patristic period and reaches forward to modern concerns about God’s relationship to history. And although one more contribution is hardly likely to settle so controverted a question, I hope that it will at least serve as something of a tribute to Iain’s enthusiasm for vigorous ecumenical engagement. The extra Calvinisticum refers to the Christological question of whether the Second Person of the Trinity exists ‘apart from’ or ‘outside’ (extra) the flesh after the incarnation. Reformed theologians answer in the affirmative (hence the description of the doctrine as the ‘Calvinistic’ extra), on the grounds that to do otherwise is to reduce the Word’s divinity to finite, human dimensions.1 Lutherans disagree, arguing that the Reformed position fatally compromises the biblical principle that in Christ ‘the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily’ (Col. 2:9). Barth summarized the terms of the debate as follows: ‘Depending on whether one shies away more from the extreme of Christ absent from the world or from Christ present as the world, and bearing in mind that there is no clear third option out there, one will have to decide today either for the Lutheran or the Reformed view, conscious of the problems present in both.’2 Although Barth’s summary is admirably balanced, all too often caricatures based in a long history of inter-confessional polemics have impeded honest

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assessment of the two positions. For example, the standard Lutheran account of the debate from the sixteenth century right up to the present day argues that the Reformed insistence that the eternal Word continues to exist outside of Christ’s flesh is born of captivity to the metaphysical principle that finite humanity is not able to contain the infinite divine nature (finitum non capax infiniti). One contemporary Lutheran theologian, for example, avers that the classical Reformed position ‘implied a very loose linkage between the Logos and the man Jesus of Nazareth and led to a theology of glory, opening the doors to exalted language about the Logos apart from its enfleshment’.3 So stated, the opposition between the two sides could not be clearer; yet the tendentiousness of this characterization of the Reformed position is clear from the account of the extra Calvinisticum found in Heinrich Heppe’s classic compendium Reformed Dogmatics: Christ so assumed the human nature into the unity of his person, that since his incarnation, although as the Father’s eternal Son he also exists in an infinite way outside the assumed humanity, his will personally is as Redeemer of the world never to be thought of, believed in or called upon apart from his humanity at all. Indeed even before his appearance in the flesh it was only possible to believe in him as one who intended to come in the flesh.

And if this weren’t enough, Heppe goes on to say that not only is it the case that we human beings are unable to think of the Son of God apart from his flesh, but ‘the Father Himself never knows the Son otherwise than as the Son who came in the flesh’.4 In light of such assertions, it should be clear that the Reformed are no less keen than the Lutherans to reject any weakening of the link between the eternal Word and the flesh of Jesus. What then is the substance of the disagreement? The point of the extra Calvinisticum is to guard against understanding the union of divinity and humanity in Jesus as a matter of the local or spatial coincidence of the two natures.5 The Reformed therefore draw a distinction between the separation of the two natures (which they deny) and the non-inclusion of the divine in the human (which they affirm).6 According to this perspective, the Word at no point abandons Jesus’s humanity (which would mean separation), but the human cannot be at every point coincident with the Word. Otherwise, it would be necessary to ascribe divine properties like omnipresence to Christ’s human nature in a way that would vitiate the fundamental ontological distinction between creature and Creator and (in line with Barth’s description above) effectively identify God with the world.



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In response to the Reformed teaching on the Word’s presence ‘outside the flesh’ (extra carnem), Lutherans insist that the Word is ‘entirely in the flesh and never outside it’ (totus intra carnem et numquam extra carnem).7 Faced with the problem of explaining how the finite human nature could be coextensive with the infinite divine nature, they appealed to the classical doctrine of the communication of attributes (communicatio idiomatum), arguing that the union of the divine and human natures in Christ legitimized not only the ascription of the properties of both natures to the one person of Christ (the genus idiomatum, which the Reformed also accepted) but also the communication of the properties of divinity – including omnipresence – to the human nature (the genus maiestaticum).8 In other words, for Lutherans if it is the case (as the Reformed agree) that Jesus is, without qualification, the Son of God (so that the personal designations Jesus Christ, Son of God, Word, etc. are fully convertible with one another) and (as the Reformed also agree) that Jesus is the human son of Mary, then it is impossible to affirm that the Word subsists apart from the human nature after the incarnation, since a Word who is not at every point human is simply not Jesus – and thus not the Christian Lord and Saviour. As compelling as this position may appear, however, the conceptual difficulties that attend it are considerable. For all Lutherans inveighing against Reformed captivity to metaphysics, their arguments could also take a decidedly metaphysical cast. For example, an emphasis on the union of natures could lead at least some Lutherans to suggest that Jesus’s humanity was effectively divinized from the moment of conception in a way that gave substance to the Reformed charge that the Lutheran position amounted to monophysitism or worse.9 After all, if Jesus’s humanity was omnipresent from conception, then it followed that on the day of his birth, his human nature was no more present in Bethlehem than in Rome or on the moon.10 In this way, the effort to affirm God ‘deep in the flesh’ has brought at least some Lutherans very close to collapsing the distinction between the created and the uncreated in the incarnate Word.11 In light of the deep differences between the two positions, I think the best way to get some purchase in the debate is to call into question a point on which they agree: that the Word did exist outside the flesh before the incarnation. Lutherans and Reformed are one in their belief that the life of the Word could be conceived in terms of two sequential states:  first, and from all eternity, a Logos asarkos (‘Word without flesh’) and then, from the time of Jesus’s conception, the Logos ensarkos (‘enfleshed Word’). While the point at issue in the extra Calvinisticum debate has to do with the propriety of continuing to invoke this distinction between asarkos and ensarkos after the Word took flesh (and, still more

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specifically, in the transition from the state of humiliation to that of exaltation following Christ’s resurrection and ascension), the problems attending both sides are arguably rooted in their shared understanding of what might be called the Word’s prehistory. Thus, although as a Lutheran I will argue that the extra Calvinisticum should be rejected, I  will do so by way of a characteristically Reformed emphasis on divine transcendence. To speak of God as transcendent is (among other things) to insist that God, precisely as Creator and Lord of all, is not to be regarded as one entity alongside others.12 Because all creatures are absolutely dependent on God, while God is not dependent on or relative to any non-divine reality, God and creatures do not exist on the same ontological plane. It follows that the relationship between God and creatures is non-competitive:  whereas no two creatures can occupy just the same position or produce just the same effect (since the presence or activity of one will necessarily displace the other’s), God’s presence and action do not crowd out creatures’ capacities in this way. On the contrary, because God is Creator, the presence and activities of creatures are at every point dependent on God’s. For while my existence entails that I occupy a location and sphere of activity apart from other creatures, just the opposite is true where God is concerned, since without the Creator’s continually upholding and enabling my being, I cannot exist or act at all. Crucially, it is just these qualities of divine transcendence that make the incarnation possible. Were God not transcendent, then the presence of divinity in Christ could only come at the expense of his humanity, resulting in a hybrid being who was neither truly divine nor truly human. But a transcendent God does not have to displace the human in order to be fully present in the human being Jesus of Nazareth.13 Indeed, it is a corollary of divine transcendence that in one respect God is no more present in Jesus than in any other creature, since as Creator God is fully present in every creature as the one who holds it in being. What is distinct about Jesus is that in this one case God claims this creature’s being as God’s own, so that God is not merely the cause of Jesus’s walking, talking, eating and so forth (as is the case for any human being); rather, Jesus’s walking, talking and eating are God’s own actions. That is, what it means to say that in Jesus of Nazareth, God (or, more specifically, the Second Person of the Trinity) assumes a human nature: that Jesus’s humanity is not just sustained in its being and activity by God, but that it is God’s very own. In the language of the Council of Chalcedon, Jesus is one person (i.e. a single someone, the Word of God) in two natures: at once divine, as the Word is from all eternity, and human, from the moment of his conception in Mary’s womb.



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Something of the character of this relationship between the divine and human may be suggested by drawing an analogy between God’s taking flesh in Jesus (incarnation) and a novelist who makes herself as a character in her novel (call this ‘inscription’). In a manner parallel to God’s relationship to the incarnate Jesus, the human author’s relationship to the ‘inscribed’ version of herself is, in many respects, exactly the same as her relationship to all the other characters in the ‘world’ of the novel:  for herself, no less than for every other character, she determines directly and completely every aspect of existence, including both every external circumstance that impinges on her and every inner disposition that shapes her response to those circumstances. The sole difference is that this character is identified by the author as herself, such that her actions are also the author’s actions.14 Now, on this analogy it makes no sense to think of God’s taking flesh and becoming a human being as an event or development in the life of the Word. To think of the incarnation in this way – as though it were, for example, like a king deciding to take up the life of a beggar – fails to pay due regard to divine transcendence. By suggesting that the incarnation entails a movement of God from heaven to earth, such language implies that God and the world exist on the same ontological plane. But this is a mistake:  God’s transcendence of the world means that nothing ‘happens’ to God in becoming a human being, any more than anything happens to an author who chooses to become a character in her novel. At first glance, this claim may seem inconsistent with the biblical descriptions of a Word who has ‘come down’ (John 6:38), who is ‘from heaven’ (John 3:13, 31; 1 Cor. 15:47), who ‘emptied himself ’ (Phil. 2:7) and ‘became flesh’ (John 1:14). But if, following the lines of Chalcedonian Christology, it is accepted that the hypostasis, who is the subject of all these actions, is divine (and therefore transcendent), then it follows that what is being described in these verses is neither a transformation nor a relocation. In assuming a human life, the Word neither ceases to be God (since the Word could not do so without also ceasing to be the Word), nor moves from one place to another (since one who is omnipresent cannot move), any more, again, than an author who becomes a character ceases thereby to be the author or ‘moves’ into the novel from some other space. At this point, the problem with the idea that the Word existed extra carnem before the incarnation should be clear. To put the matter sharply, while it is certainly true that during the age of the dinosaurs (or at any other time before Jesus’s birth) the Word was not enfleshed; it would be wrong to conclude that

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the Word then subsisted in an unenfleshed state.15 To do so – to speak of a Logos asarkos existing prior to the Logos ensarkos – is to have failed to grasp Christianity’s central claim: that the incarnation just is the full and unqualified revelation of the eternal Word. If the incarnation were truly a becoming or modification of the Word, then it would not be such a full revelation, since it would, of necessity, not include that which came ‘before’ the Word’s enfleshment.16 But because the Logos ensarkos just is the Word revealed in time, it makes no sense to speak of the state of the Word ‘before’ the incarnation, since the very language of ‘before’ plots divine eternity and created time along a single temporal sequence. Prior to Jesus’s birth, the Word is not apart from the flesh (asarkos), not even as the one who is to become enfleshed (incarnandus); rather, to confess the incarnation at all is to recognize there is no Christianly coherent way of referring to the Word except just as the one who is Jesus, the Word made flesh (incarnatus). Importantly, this conclusion does not mean that the phrase Logos asarkos is to be rejected altogether. On the contrary, it has two legitimate functions. First, it serves as a means of affirming the free and gracious character of the incarnation, since it is only by positing a Logos asarkos as the incarnation’s presupposition that it is possible to avoid the conclusion that the Word is inherently and by nature enfleshed.17 Second, insofar as Chalcedon holds that the divine and human natures are united in Christ ‘without confusion or change’,18 it is necessary to affirm that the Word remains asarkos according to the divine nature even after the incarnation, in the same way that after the incarnation the Word remains invisible and immortal according to the divine nature. In both these legitimate functions, however, the force of the asarkos is purely regulative: that is, it secures particular theological principles (viz. the graciousness of the incarnation and the integrity of the divine nature) and is not descriptive of an ontological state (i.e. a mode of subsistence of the Word apart from the flesh). In this respect, the affirmation of a (dogmatically regulative) Logos asarkos is properly distinguished from the confession of an (ontologically substantive) extra Calvinisticum, such that the Reformed are right to hold to the former and Lutherans to deny the latter. For once the idea of the Logos asarkos is reframed in strictly regulative terms, the idea of the Word extra carnem either before or after the incarnation appears as inconsistent with the conviction that Jesus simply is the Word (versus a mere form or manifestation of the Word), even if (following Chalcedon) his divine nature remains unchangeably immaterial and incorporeal. It follows that it is licit to speak of the Word as unenfleshed according to the divine nature (i.e. of incorporeality as an eternal property of divinity), but not to speak of the Word subsisting apart from the flesh (i.e. the



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extra Calvinisticum). To revert to Barth’s language, the incarnation means that the Word is neither present as the world nor absent from the world.19 As Maximus the Confessor noted long before the Reformation, Jesus is not simply from or in two natures (as though the hypostasis of the Word were a tertium quid alongside the divinity and humanity); rather, he just is the natures – they are the substance of his being and, as such, no less inseparable from each other than from the hypostasis of the Word.20 To imagine one to be present without the other would be to confess a Son of God who is not to be identified with the son of Mary – and this is just what the incarnation rules out. How this can be eludes our conceptual resources, even as we lack the conceptual resources to speak coherently about the state of the (eternal) Word prior to his (temporal) enfleshment. But it remains the case that once the Word is confessed to have taken flesh in Jesus, he is ‘never to be thought of, believed in or called upon apart from his humanity’ – which, of course, means that he is not to be thought of as existing ‘in an infinite way outside’ his humanity, either.

Notes 1 See, e.g., the Heidelberg Catechism, qu. 48: ‘For since divinity is incomprehensible and everywhere present, it must follow that the divinity is indeed beyond the bounds of the humanity which it has assumed, and is nonetheless ever in that humanity as well, and personally united to it.’ Book of Confessions: Study Edition (Louisville, KY: Geneva, 1996). 2 Karl Barth, The Theology of the Reformed Confessions (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2002), 184. Cf. Barth’s later assessment of the contrasting weaknesses in the two positions in Church Dogmatics [hereafter CD], 13 vols., ed. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1956–1975), I/2, 170. For a more positive assessment of the different foci of the two confessions, see I. A. Dorner, A System of Christian Doctrine, Vol. 3, trans. Alfred Cave and J. S. Baker (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1882), 223–224. 3 Carl E. Braaten, ‘The Person of Jesus Christ’, in Christian Dogmatics, Vol. 1, ed. Carl E. Braaten and Robert W. Jenson (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress, 1984), 509. 4 Heinrich Heppe, Reformed Dogmatics Set Out and Illustrated from the Sources (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1950), 427. This point is conceded in Heinrich Schmid, The Doctrinal Theology of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, 3rd edn (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg, 1961), 331. 5 Francis Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, 3 vols, Vol. 2 (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed Published Company, 1994), 329 [XIII.viii.27]; cf. Heppe, Reformed Dogmatics, 447.

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6 See Turretin, Vol. 2, p. 329 [XIII.viii.28]: ‘It is one thing for the Logos to be without the flesh by non-inclusion and in this sense it is conceded because it is not included in it, being infinite. It is another thing to be out of it by separation (which is denied) because although it is not included still it is nowhere separated from the flesh.’ Cf. Johannes Wollebius, Christianae Theologiae Compendium: ‘the totus Christus is everywhere, but not the totum Christi, i.e. both the natures.’ Cited in Heppe, Reformed Dogmatics, 443. 7 Schmid, Doctrinal Theology, 310: ‘the logos is to be regarded as always in the flesh and never without it.’ In short, the claim that ‘the Word became flesh’ implies that at every point after the incarnation Christ ‘is not halfway present, nor is just half of him present. The entire person of Christ is present, to whom belong both natures, the divine and the human.’ The Formula of Concord, Solid Declaration [hereafter FC, SD] 8.78, in The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, ed. Robert Kolb and Timothy J. Wengert (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2000). 8 See Schmid, Doctrinal Theology, 314: ‘for, by the personal union, not only the person, but, since person and nature cannot be separated, the divine nature also has entered into communion with the human nature.’ The most influential dogmatic elaboration of the Lutheran doctrine of the communication of attributes was Martin Chemnitz’s The Two Natures of Christ, trans. J. A. O. Preus (St. Louis, MO: Concordia, [1578] 1971). 9 See Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, Vol. 2, 325 [XIII.viii.13]. The charge that the Lutheran position amounts to a blending or identification of the two natures is addressed in the FC, SD 8:60–63 and rejected in 8:89–92. 10 The FC was deliberately ambiguous regarding the question of whether Christ’s presence to creation according to the human nature was absolute (i.e. generalized) or only ‘wherever he wishes’ (see FC, SD 8.92; cf. 8.64, 78). Although the idea of a generalized presence was rejected by the decisio Saxonica of 1624, it continued to have its defenders (including Johann Gerhard). 11 The phrase ‘deep in the flesh’ comes from Eric W. Gritsch and Robert W. Jenson, Lutheranism: The Theological Movement and Its Confessional Writings (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress, 1976), 100. 12 The logical connection between the confession of God as Creator and as Lord may be summarized as follows: God can coherently be confessed as Lord only if there is no factor other than God that might claim a creature’s ultimate allegiance, and this condition is met only if God is the only condition of a creature’s existence – which is just what it means to confess God as Creator (at least on the traditional Christian understanding of the doctrine as specifically creation from nothing). 13 See Kathryn Tanner, Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity: A Brief Systematic Theology (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000), 11.



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14 One might think here of the character of Dante in the Divine Comedy. At the same time, it is important to recognize that not all first-person narratives imply this sort of identification. One need only think of the deliberate ambiguity of the relationship between narrator and author in Le Recherche du temps perdu, let alone the situation with David Copperfield or Tristram Shandy. 15 ‘Moses could certainly have said, “It is true now that the Son of God exists”, but he could not have said truly, “The Son of God exists now”. That proposition, which attributes temporal existence (“now”) to the Son of God, is the one that became true when Jesus was conceived in the womb of Mary.’ Herbert McCabe OP, God Matters (New York: Continuum, [1987] 2010), 50. 16 Cf. Dorner, System of Christian Doctrine, vol. 3, 243: ‘The justice of selfpreservation of God [which the Reformed sought to safeguard] must also preserve His communicability, otherwise, since Go is also love, the self-preservation of God would not be complete.’ 17 It is in this context, as a metaphorical means of affirming the free and contingent character of the incarnation, that those biblical passages that speak of the Son or Word coming down from heaven are best understood. 18 Compendium of Creeds, Definitions, and Declarations on Matters of Faith and Morals, 43rd ed., ed. Heinrich Denzinger, Peter Hünermann et al. (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 2012), §301. 19 The transcendence of the divine precludes describing the relation of the Word and Christ’s human nature using spatial terms like ‘outside’ or ‘included’. To revert to the analogy of the novelist, the ‘presence’ whereby the author sustains the entirety of the novelistic world isn’t a matter of filling any volume but just the recognition that the author is not one ‘placeable’ item among others in that world. By becoming a character, she does come to occupy a particular space, but not in such a way that she either ceases or continues to be somewhere else; for as the transcendent cause of the world, she never was anywhere in (or outside) it. This line of argument (mooted in FC, SD 8.92) arguably constitutes a better defense of the Lutheran position than the speculative gambit of the genus maiestaticum, which, as Heppe perceptively noted (Reformed Dogmatics, 418–419), reflects in its own way a captivity to metaphysics – and of a distinctly Nestorian type! 20 See Maximus the Confessor, Opuscula Theologica et Polemica 1 (PG 91: 36C), 6 (PG 91: 68A) and 19 (PG 91: 224A); Ambigua 5 (PG 91: 1052D) and 27 (PG 981: 1269C); and Epistles 12 (PG 91: 488C) and 15 (PG 91: 573A).

7

The King James Bible in Scotland David Fergusson

Iain Torrance has long maintained a commitment to the King James Bible (KJB) and the works of Shakespeare, carrying these in electronic form on his extensive travels. With its arresting images and cadences, the KJB has shaped his leading of worship and facilitated that precise and economical use of words for which he is distinguished. Both he and I were involved in the quatercentenary celebrations of 2011, and in what follows I offer some reflections on the particular influence of the KJB in Scotland. Despite its possible provenance in the General Assembly at Burntisland attended by James VI in 1601, the KJB was distributed, read and accepted in Scotland only gradually, after its initial 1611 launch in London. But, notwithstanding this inauspicious start, the KJB put down deep roots in homes, schools and churches in Scotland so that it became an important element of an indigenous tradition. Here, I chart the story of not only of how the King James Bible came slowly to replace the well-known Geneva Bible in the pulpit and the church but also its influence upon Scotland’s education system, literature and language. Today, its demise generates some challenges for Christian education.

The English Bible at the Scottish Reformation The Reformation came relatively late to Scotland in 1560, by which time the Bible had been translated into several European languages. The reform movement comprised a commitment to the renewal of church and society according to the Word of God. To this end, the Bible was to be placed in the hands of the people. This required its translation into the vernacular and the raising of literacy levels around the country. Tyndale’s New Testament probably appeared in Scottish

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ports shortly after its publication in Europe in 1527. One of the principal charges against Patrick Hamilton, who was burned the following year in St Andrews, was that he taught that ‘it was lawful for any man to read the Word of God, especially the New Testament’.1 An act of 1536 banned the English Bible. Thomas Forret, vicar at Dollar, was condemned by George Crichton, the bishop of Dunkeld, for teaching his parishioners the English Bible and preaching every Sunday. He was subsequently executed. Crichton apparently declared, ‘I thanke God, that I never knew quhat the Old and New Testament was.’2 Bible translation was an ongoing activity. Governed by a commitment to scrutiny of the best available versions of the Hebrew and Greek texts, the aim was to provide the most accurate rendition into the languages of sixteenthcentury Europe. Yet, there was never a principled commitment to any one translation. Provided the words of the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures could be rendered accurately and intelligibly, this was sufficient for the Reformers. John Knox could quote Scripture frequently and at length, but his rendition was often imprecise and not traceable to any one standard version. In part, this may have been on account of his free translation of sections of the Latin Bible with which he was familiar. He may also have been working from memory or have had other translations to hand, such as the French. Knox, indeed, was a relative latecomer to Hebrew and Greek language and was less proficient than many of his scholarly contemporaries. But a new English translation of the Bible conveniently appeared in 1557. Produced by William Whittingham and other Protestant exiles in Geneva, it was widely distributed in England and Scotland. The Geneva Bible is often associated with Protestantism. This is not so much because of its translation of the Hebrew and Greek but more on account of the marginal notes that gradually appeared with the intention of guiding a particular interpretation. Whether this stands in tension with the Protestant account of the perspicuity and sufficiency of Scripture is another matter. These textual annotations reflected not only the doctrinal tenets of the Reformers but also the more critical political theology that was espoused, especially by Knox and his supporters. While the papacy was discerned in the book of Revelation, the lamb of the Passover in Exod. 12:11 was understood as a signification rather than the thing itself  – a clear reference to Reformed sacramentology. More controversial were its occasional remarks on political authority which pointed towards a theology of armed resistance to tyrants. The marginal note to 2 Chron. 15:16 comments on Asa’s deposition of his mother. ‘Herein he shewed that he lacked zeale; for she oght to haue dyed.’ Such passages provoked the displeasure of James VI and contributed to his general dislike



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of the Geneva Bible. No doubt, he associated it with the disputatious Scottish clergy whom he was glad to leave behind when he departed for London in 1603 to unite the crowns. The Geneva Bible was printed in Scotland in 1579. The so-called Bassendyne edition, this was the first complete Bible to be printed in Scotland. Its title page included a dedication to ‘Iames the Sext’. Each parish was required by the General Assembly to set down £4.13s.4d for a copy ‘weel and sufficiently bund in paste or trimer’. That same year, the Scots parliament ordered every householder of substance to have a copy of the Bible and Psalter in his home. Failure to comply would incur a fine. So the Geneva Bible became standardized soon after the Reformation and continued to be printed in Scotland until 1610, when an edition was produced by Andrew Hart in Edinburgh. The First Book of Discipline declared it ‘a thing most expedient and necessary that every Church have the Bible in English and that the people be commanded to convene and hear the plain reading or interpretation of the Scriptures’.3 In 1604, Aberdeen Session ordained that ‘all men and wemen in this burgh quha can reid and ar of famous report and habilitie sall hawe Bybles and psalm buikes of thair awin and sall bring the same with thame to thair paroche kirkis, thairon to reid and prais God.’4 There are several notable features of this Bible. The first is its sheer bulk, largely owing to the extensive annotations. This made printing and distribution more expensive, thus ensuring some market opportunities for a later edition or newer translation that would prove more compact and cheaper to purchase. Second, despite its resonance among Protestants, the Geneva Bible was never regarded as beyond improvement in its translation of the Hebrew and Greek. Third, it was an English Bible. The Scots never showed any real desire to produce a distinctive translation in the vernacular of lowland Scots. Here again there was a pragmatism in the acceptance of the English translation that lay to hand. This would become an important factor in the decline of Scots as a literary language.5 In 1601, the General Assembly at Burntisland recognized that there were many errors and imperfections in the rendition of the Hebrew and Greek by the Geneva Bible. The record of the Assembly’s proceedings indicates that the King played an active part both comic and dramatic.6 At the opening of the first Session, the Moderator proposed to read a long letter of reproach and exhortation from James Melville whom sickness had prevented from attending. King James, however, prevented the reading of the letter by taking it from the hand of the Moderator and stuffing it into his pocket. The general mood of the Assembly was gloomy. The country and its Kirk were in poor shape. All estates

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of the country had defected from the purity, the zeal and the practice of true religion. If not arrested, these trends would lead to ‘papistry or atheism’, or so it was alleged. Much of the blame was laid at the door of the church’s ministry – their lack of training and application, failure to engage in continual and constant reading of the Scriptures, and negligence in suitably grave patterns of life and conversation. But blame was also attributed to patterns of education, particularly ‘the education of their majesties’ children in the company of obstinate and professed papists, such as the Lady Livingston’. As a remedy, two Sabbath days in June were set aside for fasting and prayer, to be followed by a series of practical measures to improve the religious condition of Scotland. At the fifth session of the General Assembly on 16 May 1601, a proposal was made that the sundry errors in the vulgar translation of the Bible and the metrical Psalms should be corrected. A project was thus proposed, though it was never executed. Did James continue to harbour the idea of a new translation after Burntisland in 1601, later to spring this upon his English bishops in 1604 at Hampton Court? We cannot be sure, but his historic initiative certainly had this interesting prequel three years earlier. A well-trained and capable classical scholar who later produced his own translation of the Psalms, James was unlikely to have forgotten the discussion that had taken place in 1601. Although the KJB was launched in London in 1611, its production in Scotland was delayed until 1628 when the New Testament was published by the heirs of Andrew Hart in Edinburgh. Very few copies of this survive. The entire Bible, together with the Apocrypha, eventually appeared in 1633 published by Robert Young, the King’s Printer. This coincided with the Scottish coronation of Charles I at Scone. Twelve further editions would appear before the end of the century, some without the Apocrypha. This was the first Bible of manageable size (octavo format) to appear in Scotland. The Geneva Bible may have continued to be imported and read after 1611, but by 1670 it had effectively been replaced by the KJB. This was the result of a gradual process rather than a revolution – the path of least resistance, rather than a sudden policy decision to abandon one translation for another.7 The new translation gradually and slowly made its way in Scotland.8 In itself, this is testimony to its quality and durability. Despite tensions with the monarch and resistance to Erastian trends during the covenanting period, there was no formal ecclesiastical or theological opposition to the KJB in Scotland. A recent study of the Scottish book trade in the early modern period notes that not a single church court required the use of the KJB; nevertheless, ministers simply used what they had, at a time when bibles were in relatively short supply. It



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seems that the KJB was broadly respected almost in spite of its origins; at any rate, it was not the subject of any significant criticism, ecclesiastical censure or organized attack in Scotland.9 One writer has commented: [I]‌f the new Bible had been sent to this side of the Solway armed with a royal proclamation, or enforced by Episcopal canons, it would have been refused, or at all events been regarded with profound suspicion [. . .] At an era when Church and State were alike in deep confusion, when mitre and crown had both passed away, this English translation won for itself a lasting home in Scottish hearts, and at length displaced a Bible endeared by the many associations that clustered around the scene of its origin.10

The Bible in Scottish literature In the case of Robert Burns, Walter Scott and James Hogg, Scottish literature demonstrated a capacity to draw almost instinctively upon the text of the KJB. Part of their everyday discourse, they could employ its images, insights and sayings in myriad ways whether in devotional, satirical, ironic, tragic or comic writing.11 Burns’s familiarity with the Bible is evident from his published letters which contain around 130 biblical quotations and allusions, drawn from thirty-four books of the Old and New Testaments.12 The Bible is deployed less as a set of proof texts but more to illustrate his arguments and points, and, on occasion, to use the text playfully. His strategy of interpretation is New Licht rather than Auld Licht. In a letter in 1789 to Mrs Dunlop, he writes: ‘Still I am a very sincere believer in the Bible; but I am drawn by the conviction of a Man, not the halter of an Ass.’13 ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’ is doubtless a somewhat idealized staging of the use of the Bible in eighteenth-century rural family life, but its intention is authentic and it signifies not only the respect in which the KJB is held but its regular and domestic use. In this respect, it fulfils the vision of Tyndale to produce a vernacular Bible that will be read and understood by the ploughboy. The rapid description of the narrative of Scripture suggests an easy acquaintance with a wide range of Old and New Testament stories. Even better known is Burns’s masterpiece of religious satire, ‘Holy Willie’s Prayer’. Ian Campbell has pointed out that the genius of Burns lies in his capacity to intersperse the English of the pulpit and the Bible with everyday colloquial Scots. The sudden shift of registers from a pompous and inflated use of the formal English to the bathetic whinging of Holy Willie’s Scots is devastating.

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Replete with Old Testament phrases and allusions from the KJB, these stanzas are also punctuated with a sudden breaking into Scots that accentuates the hypocrisy of its subject. ‘It is just because he tries too hard to use Sunday speech to nudge the Almighty – Thou kens – and because of that killing alliteration of “lawless leg” that Burns reduces him to an object of ridicule.’14 Although coming from a different stratum of Scottish society, Scott is likewise familiar with the Bible and works its allusions into his novels. He frequently quotes it in his correspondence, drawing heavily upon the books of the Old Testament  – Genesis, Kings, Job, the Psalms, Proverbs  – as well as the four gospels. Some texts recur. A favourite was Ps. 37:35: ‘I have seen the wicked in great power, and spreading himself like a green bay tree.’ It appears at least eight times in the published letters.15 The Bible is quoted in different ways and to various effects, Jeanie Deans in The Heart of Midlothian being an oft-cited example. On the matter of strong drink, Jeanie quotes scripture against scripture. The Duke of Argyle cites the Psalmist ‘wine maketh the heart glad’. She retorts with a reference from Jer. 35:6:  ‘My father is Jonadab the son of Rechab, who charged his children that they should drink no wine’. The Duke replies gently, ‘I thought your father would have had more sense [. . .] unless indeed he prefers brandy.’16 James Hogg’s great, if bleak, novel The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) is immersed in the KJB though its reception today



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illustrates the problem for a generation lacking Biblical literacy. Recent awareness of Hogg has been facilitated by Peter Garside’s new critical edition of his novel that charts in its footnotes the frequent Biblical and theological allusion, quotation and misquotation that are central to the work’s literary art. Hogg’s brother once wrote, ‘In all the circle of my acquaintance, either among old of young people, I  never was conversant with any one who had as much of the Bible by heart, especially of the Psalms, or could have told more readily where any passage was recorded than my brother James could have done.’17 In this respect, the English Bible belongs not just to church and schoolroom but also to the home and early childhood, at least from the eighteenth century onwards. Learned, absorbed and loved in a domestic setting, the inheritance of the KJB cannot be construed as an external influence imposed upon native Scots by their educational system or Presbyterian church government. The Bible belongs to an indigenous oral tradition as much as a formal literary one.

The Bible in pulpit and school From about the middle of the seventeenth century, each parish church would have had the KJB in its pulpit. Extensive passages were read each Sunday, often before the commencement of divine worship.18 These readings might have been followed by one or two services in addition to a lecture on Scripture delivered by the minister. He would also have preached at some length on a chapter of Scripture in the main diet of public worship. As an exposition with multiple cross references, the sermon would have drawn extensively upon the language of the KJB. Pulpit discourse was also shaped by the language of the translated Bible throughout the subsequent two centuries. Those attending church, of course, would not require much introduction to the Bible. An acquaintance with its stories and precepts could have been assumed by the preacher whose task was largely one of proclamation and interpretation. To a significant extent, this was the result of an educational system in which the Kirk was deeply involved until the late nineteenth century. One of the primary functions of an education was to ensure that the Bible was read, learned and understood. Given the dominance of the KJB in school, church and society, it is hardly surprising that the language of the sermon would draw heavily upon its phrases, images and cadences. And not only sermons but also other devotional and scholarly literature was produced by ministers who were raised on the KJB. Some random examples must suffice.

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Hugh Blair, popular preacher at St Giles and the first Professor of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres in Edinburgh in the late eighteenth century, published a series of sermons that went through numerous editions. These were also translated into German by Schleiermacher. Blair’s discourses still read well and reveal his immersion in the Bible. A century later, in 1855, John Caird delivered a sermon at Crathie Kirk before Queen Victoria on ‘Religion and Common Life’. Described by Dean Stanley of Westminster, surely with a degree of hyperbole, as ‘the best single sermon in the language’,19 this was published and widely circulated.20 On reading these sermons, one is struck by the way in which their language is woven with verses and images from the KJB. This gives their words a resonance and pathos at telling moments. Consider this passage at the close of Blair’s famous sermon on 1 Cor. 1:12, ‘Now we see through a glass, darkly’. Let us then walk by faith. Let us strengthen this principle of action to the utmost of our power. Let us implore the Divine grace to strengthen it within us more and more [. . .] Till at last, having, under the conduct of Christian faith, happily finished the period of discipline, we enter on that state, where a far nobler scene shall open where eternal objects shall shine in their native splendour; where this twilight of mortal life being past, the Sun of righteousness shall rise; and that which is perfect being come, that which is in part shall be done away.21

The wider influence of the Bible upon Scotland is also deserving of mention. From about the middle of the eighteenth century, the dedication to linguistic precision, scholarly attainment and intellectual understanding was manifested in the production of dictionaries, lexicons and encyclopaedias, the Encyclopaedia Britannica first emerging on Presbyterian soil. The first of its kind, Alexander Cruden’s Concordance (1737) provides an exhaustive set of references to every significant word in the KJB. The qualities exhibited in this output of reference works reflect something of the concern for clarity and exactitude that distinguishes the literary culture of the Reformed tradition. In this context, we should also register the ways in which the devotional and liturgical output of the Scottish churches has been influenced by its Bible. This includes the metrical Psalms and the paraphrases which, from the middle of the seventeenth century, draw extensively upon the language of the 1611 Bible. Nor should we forget the influence of Handel’s Messiah, perhaps as frequently sung and appreciated in Scotland as anywhere throughout the English-speaking world. Drawn from the KJB, the lyrics of Messiah have been made memorable for large audiences by soloists and choirs around the country.



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Conclusion: Stands Scotland where it did? The story is largely one in the past tense. The KJB continues to be used in some centres of worship  – generally traditional  – but for the most part it has been superseded by a plethora of modern English translations, no one of which has yet become standard. Whether any can dominate in the manner of the KJB is surely doubtful. In some ways, this is to be lamented. The literary riches of the Bible are fading from our common consciousness. Contemporary students of English and Scottish literature have to work hard at their Biblical knowledge in order to understand their field. A Biblical literacy acquired in childhood can no longer be assumed in a university education. And, of course, the Bible tends not to be read except within the churches. C. S. Lewis once predicted that eventually the Bible would only be read by Christians. Within the churches themselves, the loss of a common text means that Biblical phrases no longer have the resonance or memorable quality that once they commanded. The decline of the memorizing and recitation of Scripture in Sunday Schools probably coincides with the introduction of modern translations of the text around the 1960s. On the other hand, the early translators of the Bible and the Reformers would have been surprised at the long run enjoyed by the KJB in the English-speaking world. Their project was to provide a translation that was both accurate and accessible, and given shifts in scholarship and language, one might expect there always to be new translations. With the greater affordability of books and the absence of restrictions on the translating and printing of Bibles, the current variety of English Bibles is inevitable. And yet, the KJB still has its place, partly as the best known and most successful of its kind which can still be used at the main Christian festivals. And sales figures remain buoyant, the KJB proving the bestselling book for Oxford University Press in 2011. The KJB sets a standard and benchmark for others deliberately to follow; by virtue of its name, the RSV and NRSV acknowledge their debt. And we should welcome the support of critics such as Melvyn Bragg who argue for the retention of the KJB alongside Shakespeare in the school curriculum. But there is no turning back the clock. While some residual significance may be maintained, the capacity of the KJB to shape public consciousness and provide a shared language with multiple applications has largely been lost. If we can no longer assume a social and educational process that will guarantee nearuniversal Scriptural literacy, the burden will increasingly fall upon church and home to instil a knowledge of the Bible. This will require greater attention to

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adult Christian education than is evident today. A determination to stick with one single translation of Scripture for a generation or two would help, though it is hard to see how this can be achieved given the plethora of versions and the commercial incentives to maintain such multiplicity. A commitment to Scriptural fluency cannot be left to one or other wing of the church; the task is for the whole people of God. In this context, a strategy of ‘less is more’ might be worth adopting. Encouraging the practice of reading short extracts from Scripture accompanied by brief prayers can provide a spiritual discipline for the busy and over-committed. Inviting a congregation to read in preparation the passage on which the preacher will speak the following Sunday is not an overly demanding task. Paying more attention to the public reading of Scripture during a church service is worthwhile and easily achieved – my late colleague Richard Ellis, former Fulton Lecturer in Speech and Communication at New College, has argued that those reading the lesson on a Sunday morning should spend at least an hour in preparation. At the same time, maintaining services composed only of readings and praise during the main Christian festivals – lessons and carols remain among the most durable liturgical events – can have a decisive impact that we underestimate in our constant search for innovation. All is not lost if we retain our confidence in the capacity of the Bible to speak anew. And, as a faith community that should recall and develop its earlier traditions, we should not ignore a translation that is unlikely to be surpassed for centuries to come.

Notes 1 David F. Wright, ‘“The Common Buke of the Kirke”: The Bible in the Scottish Reformation’, in The Bible in Scottish Life and Literature, ed. David F. Wright (Edinburgh: St Andrew Press, 1988), 162. 2 Ibid. 3 ‘First Book of Discipline’, in Works of John Knox, ed. David Laing (Edinburgh: James Thin, 1895), 183–260, §9. 4 G. D. Henderson, Religious Life in Seventeenth-Century Scotland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1937), 4. 5 An early Scots version of the New Testament in 1520 was produced by Murdoch Nisbet, a Lollard from Ayrshire. Based upon Wyclif ’s English translation, this translation remained unpublished until 1901 when it was reproduced by the Scottish Text Society. Other parts of the Bible were translated into Scots from the



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mid-nineteenth century though the finest rendition of the New Testament was William Lorimer’s work published in 1983. 6 See Duncan Shaw, ed., Acts and Proceedings of the General Assemblies 1587–1618 (Edinburgh: Scottish Record Society, 2004), 1259–1281. I am grateful to Jane Dawson for directing me towards this material. 7 See Alastair J. Mann, The Scottish Book Trade 1500–1720: Print Commerce and Print Control in Early Modern Scotland (East Linton: Tuckwell, 2000), 39, 160. 8 See John Eadie, The English Bible, Vol. 2 (London: Macmillan, 1876), 314. 9 Mann, The Scottish Book Trade, 50. 10 Eadie, The English Bible, 314–315. 11 Ross Roy, ‘The Bible in Burns and Scott’, in The Bible in Scottish Life and Literature, ed. Wright, 91. 12 James A. Mackay, ‘Introduction’, The Complete Letters of Robert Burns, Vol. 1 (Ayr: Alloway Publishing, 1987), 16. 13 The Complete Letters of Robert Burns, Vol. 1, 349. 14 Ian Campbell, ‘From Burns to Gideon Mack’, in Life & Work (January 2011): 14. 15 Ross Roy, ‘From Burns to Scott’, 90. 16 Sir Walter Scott, The Heart of Midlothian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), ch. XL, 388. 17 Quoted by Ian Campbell, ‘The Bible, the Kirk and Scottish Literature’, in The Bible in Scottish Life and Literature, ed.Wright, 95. For further discussion of Hogg’s use of the Bible, see Alison M. Jack, Scottish Fiction as Gospel Exegesis: Four Case Studies (Sheffield: Phoenix Press, 2010), 35–63. 18 See Henderson, Religious Life in Seventeenth-Century Scotland, 1–30. 19 See Edward Caird, ‘Memoir’, in John Caird, The Fundamental Ideas of Christianity, Vol. 1 (Glasgow: MacLehose, 1899), xxxii. 20 John Caird, Religion and Common Life (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1885). 21 See Alexander Broadie, The Scottish Enlightenment: An Anthology (Edinburgh: Canongate, 1997), 343.

8

Jonathan Edwards: Panentheist or Pantheist? Oliver D. Crisp

Panentheism is all the rage. For many writing in the science and religion literature today, it has great promise as a conception of the God–world relationship that sits midway between two extremes:  classical theism and pantheism, respectively. Additionally, it promises an account of the God–world relation that, so it is said, sits better with our contemporary understanding of the natural sciences in relation to religion than do the two alternatives of theism and pantheism. However, defining panentheism is notoriously difficult. As a neologism coined by Karl Krauss in the nineteenth century, its initial meaning is clear enough:  all-in-god-ism (allingottslehre). But as soon as we begin to ask for a more precise understanding of this term, things begin to get rather murky. Part of the problem is that the term is often claimed for a multitude of different views. Thinkers as diverse as Benedict Spinoza and Jürgen Moltmann are said to be panentheists. And in the midst of this plethora, there is a subgroup of religious thinkers whose position might be called ‘orthodox panentheism’, since their views are, in other respects, within the bounds of historic Christianity. One of those often placed within the motley crew of orthodox panentheists is the subject of this paper, the New England pastor-theologian Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758). To begin with, let us spend a short time elaborating the meaning of panentheism (a term that post-dates Edwards, even if his views imply it) alongside theism and pantheism. Then, we shall outline Edwards’s position. Finally, we shall analyse the costs and benefits of Edwards’s position. We shall end by showing that, on one plausible interpretation of his view, Edwards thought of himself as what today we would call a panentheist, though, in fact, there is reason to think that central structures in his thought press him in the direction of pantheism.

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Problems defining panentheism In an essay in the Oxford Handbook to Science and Religion, Owen C. Thomas writes: There are some serious problems in the understanding and interpretation of panentheism in what has become a fairly widespread movement that has gathered under this banner. These problems arise from the fact that panentheism is not one particular view of the relationship of the divine to the world (universe), but rather a large and diverse family of views involving quite different interpretations of the key metaphorical assertion that the world is in God. This is indicated by the common locution among panentheists that the world is ‘in some sense’ in God, and by the fact that few panentheists go on to specify clearly and in detail exactly what sense is intended.1

The problem seems to be with the locution ‘in’ and the rather different ways in which the world is said to be ‘in’ God by different panentheist thinkers. Suppose we place panentheism as a middle way between the poles of classical theism on the one end and pantheism at the other end.2 The classical theist maintains that God and the world are distinct; that God creates the world; and that God is independent of the world, that is, he exists a se. For many theists, it is also true to say that God is intimately involved in the sustenance of the world, without which the creation would simply cease to exist. Classical theism offers a metaphysically richer picture of God’s relation to the world than mere theism per se, including claims about God’s perfection, his relation to time and so on. But for present purposes, this characterization of what we might call ‘bare’ theism will do to distinguish it from alternatives. At the other pole, so to speak, is pantheism. As I understand it, pantheism (all-is-god) is the view according to which the world, that is, the created order, composes the parts that make up God without remainder. Sometimes it is said that pantheism is the view that God and the creation are identical. However, that does not seem to be a very helpful way of putting the point, since I suppose there are pantheists who think that God is not identical to the world, strictly speaking. For just as the marble composes the statue though it is distinct from it, so it may be that God is composed by the world, though he is distinct from it. According to Michael Brierley, pantheism could include the notion that ‘God is totally dependent on, or coterminous with, the cosmos’.3 But to my way of thinking, being totally dependent on the creation is not a sufficient condition for pantheism. Suppose the sum of all the proper parts of the cosmos composes



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God. Under these conditions, what would it mean to say that God is totally dependent on the cosmos? Perhaps it means no more than that God has the same dependency relation to the cosmos that, say, a table has to the parts that make it up: if one of its legs is suddenly annihilated, the table is no longer whole, and (so one might think) the continued existence of the table depends on the continued existence of this leg. Mutatis mutandis, God’s continued existence depends on the parts of the cosmos not being annihilated. What about the notion of the cosmos and God being ‘co-terminous’? Well, that gets closer to my claim about the composition of the cosmos and God, but two things can be coincident without being identical. The statue is spatially coincident with the block of marble, but it is not identical with the marble. It has different persistence conditions for one thing: I can deface the statue without thereby destroying the block of marble. Perhaps the relation between God and the cosmos is like that according to some versions of pantheism. Then, God and the world are not identical, though they are coincident. Panentheism falls somewhere between theism and pantheism, so it is said. The world is not identical to God, in this way of thinking. Nor is it the case that the world (i.e. the cosmos) comprises the parts that make up God without remainder. The world is not coincident with God either. Here, the panentheist agrees with the theist that the world is distinct from God. Yet, unlike the theist, the panentheist claims that the world exists ‘in’ God  – which is the problem with which we began. How does the world exist ‘in’ God, exactly? At this juncture, different analogues or metaphors are cited such as the soul– body relation. According to some panentheists, God is to the world as the soul is to the body. Yet, this does not offer much by way of explanation of the God–world relation, which is what we are after (similar things could be said about other analogues used by panentheists to this end). However, one promising way to construe panentheism is as a mereological claim, namely, that the created order is a part of God. That is, God has a part that comprises the creation and a part that does not. This would give some explanation of the phrase ‘the world is in God’ used by panentheists. For, on this construal of the term, the world is ‘in’ God in the sense that it exists as a part of God, though not the only part of God. This is a very strange notion, not least because it requires a very different conception of the divine from that held by the vast majority of historic orthodox Christian thinkers, for whom God is a being without any parts. We shall return to this concern presently. For now, it is sufficient that we have a rough-and-ready way of distinguishing theism, pantheism and panentheism.

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Edwards on the God–world relation4 We come to Edwards’s views on this subject. Edwards does not endorse pantheism. He would deny that God and the world are identical, or that God is composed by the parts of the world without remainder (a claim to which we shall return when considering objections to Edwards’s position). Instead, he thinks that the world is a divine communication. In fact, he thinks that God, the only true substance, communicates the created order as a series of world stages that are projected, as it were, from God. The world does not persist through time whole and complete at each moment of its existence. Instead, it persists by means of numerically distinct but qualitatively identical, or near-identical, stages that are created out of nothing moment-by-moment and connected together seriatim by divine fiat. We, as creatures, are ephemeral things, the products of constant creation, and not even truly independent substances distinct from God. Instead, according to Edwards, we are something like divine ideas sustained in being by the divine mind. Not only that, the creation is itself an ideal entity. There is no material world on Edwards’s way of thinking because matter is a fiction. Instead, the world is composed of minds and their ideas. Or, more precisely, the world is a collection of ideas and attenuated creaturely minds that are the immediate communications of the divine mind. From an early infatuation with the Cambridge Platonism of Henry More, according to whom God is to be identified with space, so that he is infinitely extended, Edwards came to think that space itself was merely a divine idea. In his notebook, ‘The Mind’, he writes: Space, as has already been observed [in his earlier notebook, ‘Of Being’], is a necessary being (if it may be called a being); and yet we have also shewn [sic] that all existence is mental, that the existence of all exterior things is ideal. Therefore it is a necessary being only as it is a necessary idea – so far as it is a simple idea that is necessarily connected with other simple exterior ideas, and is, as it were, their common substance or subject. It is in the same manner a necessary being, as anything external is a being.5

In commenting on this early period of Edwards’s intellectual formation, Robert Jenson points out that ‘Edwards reaches a position that will remain through his entire development: that God contains, envelops, all other reality [. . .] as a consciousness contains that of which it is conscious’.6 This certainly appears to be commensurate with panentheism. For it implies that the created order is something like a set of divine ideas contained within God, so that God has the



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following proper parts: the part comprising these stable ideas and the part that does not comprise these ideas. If we were to summarize Edwards’s position, it would look like this: first, God is the only true substance. All creatures are the products of the divine mind, either divine ideas or – in some attenuated sense – creaturely minds. This means, secondly, that there is no matter. The world is ideal. All that exists is the divine mind and its ideas or, perhaps, the divine mind, (attenuated) creaturely minds and the ideas of these minds. However, as Jordan Wessling has recently pointed out, if we take this latter approach to understanding Edwards, we should bear in mind that creatures are only the proximate bearers of properties. God alone is the ultimate bearer of properties.7 Thirdly, God has proper parts. He has a part that comprises his ideas concerning the creation as well as a part that does not comprise these ideas. Fourthly, Edwards denies that created things persist through time wholly and completely at each moment of their existence. Instead, he thinks that God creates a series of world stages and segues them together seriatim, according to his own good pleasure and will. So, Edwards holds to a version of four-dimensionalism with respect to the created order. He also espouses occasionalism, which is the notion that God causes all that occurs in creation; we are not truly causes of things that take place but merely the occasions of God’s bringing about certain things at certain times and places. This is a fifth distinct aspect of his position. Taken together, his doctrine of continuous creation plus occasionalism present a formidable view of divine sovereignty! Sixthly and finally, Edwards believes that the world is the necessary output of God’s essential creativity. This has several components. To begin with, Edwards thinks that God is essentially creative. In which case, he must create some world. This is consistent with divine freedom, says Edwards, because it is consistent with God acting according to his nature and acting according to his desires. But, in addition to this, Edwards thinks God must create the best possible world. If that is right, then it looks like God not only must create a world, he must create this particular world. Needless to say, this is a strong doctrine of God’s motivation in creation.

Weighing up Edwardsian panentheism So much for exposition. What are the theological prospects for this Edwardsian account? In his recent account of Edwards’s panentheism, Jordan Wessling sets out three things that he thinks count in favour of Edwards’s view.

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The first of these is that Edwards’s idealism is ontologically economical in that it only posits minds and their ideas, thereby cutting away the complex and convoluted attempts to explain the existence of minds and material bodies, as well as the interaction between these two sorts of things. If ontological austerity is truth-indicative (as some people think), then, says Wessling, this counts in favour of Edwards’s position. However, by the same token, reductive versions of physicalism are ontologically parsimonious because they deny that there are non-physical entities. But I  do not think that by itself warrants belief in physicalism, because I don’t think physicalism is true. Ontological parsimony may be a condition of truthfulness in a particular metaphysics, but it is not the only consideration – as Wessling concedes. A second positive element according to Wessling is that Edwards’s position preserves the distinctness of God and creatures. There is no blurring of the two on his way of thinking. Moreover, Edwards makes God omnipresent in a very strong sense, and in a way that may be preferable to traditional accounts, because he is immediately present with all created things which are radically dependent on God. This may have more to be said for it, especially on the question of omnipresence. However, for many, the cost of embracing idealism may be too much to bear for the dividends promised. Third, Wessling argues that Edwards’s view allows for a ‘direct account of God’s conservation of creation’. God simply thinks of creation ‘in the manner necessary for the relevant collection of ideas to count as creation’, such that the created order ‘exists if and only if God thinks about creation in the relevant way.’8 This is partially true. As we have seen, Edwards thinks that God is the sole cause of all that obtains (via occasionalism), and God arranges the order of creation according to his own purposes by sequencing the world stages according to his good pleasure and will. As Edwards puts it at one point, ‘it appears, that a divine constitution is the thing which makes truth, in affairs of this nature’.9 This amounts to a denial of conservation, strictly speaking, or at least a significant revision to how it is conventionally understood in the tradition. Taken together with Edwardsian occasionalism, I  suggest this pushes his views beyond the bounds of what most theologians are willing to countenance. But what about the shortcomings of Edwards’s position? Chief among these is not his commitment to idealism, I  think, but the implication of Edwards’s position (given our earlier characterization of panentheism) that creatures such as you and I are parts of God. This presents at least two significant problems. The first is that it means that God has parts, and that appears to jeopardize



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any traditional-looking account of divine simplicity. Given that in a number of different places in his corpus, including his published words like Religious Affections and the Discourse on the Trinity, Edwards endorses divine simplicity, this presents a prima facie problem of coherence for Edward’s doctrine of God. The second problem for the implication that Edwards’s views have regarding parts in God is that creatures like you and me appear to be very ephemeral entities indeed. There are a number of Christian philosophers and theologians today for whom some doctrine of four-dimensionalism, when applied to human persistence through time, holds no terror. There are a few Christian philosophers that hold to versions of idealism like Berkeley and Edwards as well. There is even discussion of occasionalism and several Christian philosophers who either endorse some version of occasionalism (thus, Jonathan Kvanvig and the late Hugh McCann)10 or at least have flirted with it (most recently, Alvin Plantinga).11 What is unusual in Edwards is the concatenation of these different metaphysical claims in one theological package. Now, it is hardly a knock-downdrag-out objection to a view to say that it is metaphysically exotic. Nevertheless, other things being equal, it would be preferable to have an account of the God– world relationship that was not as exotic as the one Edwards proposed if that is feasible. A third worry concerning Edwards’s view was raised as long ago as the nineteenth century. In his Systematic Theology, Charles Hodge writes this about Edwards’s position: It necessarily follows that if God is the only substance He is the only agent in the universe. All things out of God being every moment called into being out of nothing, are resolved into modes of God’s efficiency. If He creates the soul every successive instant, He creates all its states, thoughts, feelings, and volitions. The soul is only a series of divine acts. And therefore there can be no free agency, no sin, no responsibility, no individual existence. The universe is only the selfmanifestation of God. This doctrine, therefore, in its consequences, is essentially pantheistic.12

So, on Hodge’s reading, Edwards is a pantheist despite himself. That is, Edwards’s views press in the direction of pantheism because he affirms the following claims that jointly imply pantheism: that God is the only true substance, that only substances are agents, that the creation is contained within God as a set of divine ideas that are a divine ‘self-manifestation’ and that God causes all that takes place in creation, according to a four-dimensionalist account of persistence.

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However, this is not equivalent to pantheism. To make Hodge’s criticism stick, one would have to add in the doctrine of divine simplicity, according to which all God’s attributes imply each other and the divine essence. If all God’s attributes imply each other and the divine essence, then there is no real distinction between divine attributes and essence, or between one attribute and another – hence simplicity. Edwards implicitly endorses the first of these claims when he says, ‘We must take heed that we han’t to[o]‌Gross a notion of God’s Immensity and Omnipresence we must not Conceive of it as part of God’. He goes on, ‘For God is not made [. . .] up of Parts for he is a simple pure act’. What is more, when ‘we say that God is in this house’, this must not be understood to mean ‘that Part of God is [. . .] in this house but God is here. ‘tis not part of God that is in us but God is in us’.13 He endorses the second claim when he says in the Religious Affections that ‘all the attributes of God do as it were imply each other’.14 But then, there are no distinct ideas in God, no parts, and the creation is not distinct from the divine essence but is identical to it. Taken together with Hodge’s objection, this does imply pantheism. There may be ways to repair this problem in Edwards’s ontology. However, any such remedy will come at the considerable cost of revising central components of his doctrine of God.15

Notes 1 Owen C. Thomas, ‘Problems in Panentheism’, in The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Science, ed. Philip Clayton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 654. Cf. John W. Cooper in his survey, Panentheism: The Other God of the Philosophers (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2006), ch. 1, who seems to think that the conceptual content of the term panentheism is clear enough for a working definition. 2 This is exactly what Michael W. Brierley does in his contribution to The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Science, entitled ‘The Potential of Panentheism for Dialogue Between Science and Religion’, 637–638. 3 Ibid., 638. 4 I have set forth Edwards’s idealism in detail in Oliver D. Crisp, Jonathan Edwards on God and Creation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), especially ch. 1. Readers are directed to the exposition there for more references to the primary sources where Edwards’s views can be found. 5 Jonathan Edwards, Scientific and Philosophical Writings, The Works of Jonathan Edwards Vol 6, ed. Wallace E. Anderson (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980), 341. This ‘correction’ of his earlier, immature endorsement of More in the



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direction of immaterialism has been discussed by Jasper Reid in, ‘Jonathan Edwards on Space and God’, Journal of the History of Philosophy 41 (2003): 385–403. Robert Jenson, America’s Theologian: A Recommendation of Jonathan Edwards (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 21. Jordan Wessling, ‘Idealistic Panentheism: Reflections on Jonathan Edwards’s Account of the God-World Relation’, in Idealism and Christian Theology: Idealism and Christianity, Vol. 1, ed. Joshua R. Farris, S. M. Hamilton and James S. Spiegel (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 57. Ibid., 60. Jonathan Edwards, Original Sin, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Vol. 3, ed. Clyde A. Holbrook (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970), 404. Hugh J. McCann and Jonathan L. Kvanvig, ‘The Occasionalist Proselytizer: A Modified Catechism’, in. Philosophical Perspectives, Vol 5: Philosophy of Religion, ed. James Tomberlin (Aterscadero, CA: Ridgeview Publishing, 1991), 587–615. See Alvin Plantinga, ‘Law, Cause, and Occasionalism’, in Reason and Faith: Themes from Richard Swinburne, ed. Michael Bergmann and Jeffrey E. Brower (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 126–144. Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology Vol 2 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1940), 220. For a recent discussion of other pantheistic objections to Edwardsian metaphysics, see Steven M. Studebaker and Robert W. Caldwell III, The Trinitarian Theology of Jonathan Edwards: Text, Context and Application (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012), ch. 9. The Works of Jonathan Edwards Online Vol 42, §44, Sermon skeleton on Ps. 139: 7–10, located at http://edwards.yale.edu/ (last accessed 18 April 2016). Jonathan Edwards, Religious Affections, The Works of Jonathan Edwards Vol. 2, ed. John E. Smith (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959), 256–7. I argue this in more detail in Oliver D. Crisp, Jonathan Edwards Among The Theologians (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2015), ch. 9.

9

Scotland and Princeton Gordon Graham

Princeton, New Jersey, was first settled in 1683. A  contiguous township and borough grew up over time, but they were not finally combined into a single municipality until 2013. Three-hundred-and-thirty-years had passed, and yet the total population still fell short of 30,000, a surprisingly small number given the growth and development of America since the colonial period. Princeton, accordingly, is a very small town by modern standards, and yet its name is well known across the world. That is because ‘Princeton’ is synonymous with the internationally acclaimed university that occupies the town centre. Although Scotland’s most important connection with Princeton’s history is through its university, there are, in fact, four internationally acclaimed academic institutions in this little municipality. Two others  – Princeton Theological Seminary and Westminster Choir College – also have Scottish roots. It is only the famous Institute for Advanced Study, where Einstein was among the first of a long list of exceptional scientists and scholars, that has had no special connection with Scotland, though even it has indirectly given rise to one. The exclusion of theological subjects from the research activities of the Institute led, in 1978, to the creation of a Center of Theological Inquiry that would make good this deficiency. The initiative came from the president of the seminary, but a major intellectual contributor to its shape and program was the Scottish theologian Thomas F.  Torrance, and in 2004, another Scottish theologian, William F. Storrar, was appointed director of the CTI, whose building – Luce Hall – stands next to the seminary library. The connection between Scotland and Princeton’s educational institutions has persisted over a remarkably long period of time. The College of New Jersey was founded in 1746 and located to Princeton ten years later. Its origins lay with the Scottish Presbyterian diaspora, and from then until the appointment of Iain R. Torrance as sixth president of the theological seminary in 2004, there have

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been few extended periods of time when Scottish-educated teachers, scholars and administrators have not made a significant contribution to the institutional life of Princeton and, by this means, to the culture and education of the United States more widely. Some of this history is the outcome of immigrant populations that included energetic and influential individuals. Many of these people were expressly seeking a new world with fresh opportunities, and they brought with them a mentality, and a set of theological concerns and philosophical ideas, that shaped their response to the needs and opportunities of the new context in which they found themselves. Second and third generations inherited the mentality and ideas, but the task of adapting them to the changing context had an important impact on the way they came to be interpreted and realized. For the purposes of this short overview of Scotland’s relationship to Princeton, it will prove helpful to distinguish some core conceptions, theological debates, educational ideals and philosophical ideas that germinated in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Scotland, there is something a little misleading about these abstractions since they chiefly found expression in the writings, projects and actions of highly influential personalities. Nevertheless, the Scottish intellectual background from which many of these personalities arose  – both directly and indirectly  – is essential to understanding the development of Princeton’s educational institutions. In time, that development proved to be of much greater consequence than the early settlers of 1683 could reasonably have expected. As its current international renown suggests, the debates and ideas that Princeton inherited from Scotland played a considerable part in shaping the emerging republic, most especially in the decades after the War of Independence.

The Presbyterian mentality For the most part, Scotland’s influence on Princeton was mediated rather than direct. It came chiefly through the Scotch-Irish, or Ulster Scots who emigrated to the American colonies in far larger numbers and much earlier than did those who came directly from Scotland.1 This had an important consequence. The Ulster Scots were ‘dissidents’. Whereas in Scotland the national church was Presbyterian, in Ireland it was Anglican. Protestant dissidents, no less than Catholics, were excluded from the established Church of Ireland and thereby from its schools and its principal seat of learning, Trinity College Dublin. In response, the Ulster Scots created ‘academies’ in which to give their children



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an education that took them close to, and sometimes even up to, college level. Many, however, completed their education by returning to Scotland and

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what was essentially the same theological debate. In the eighteenth century, ‘New Side’ Presbyterians competed with ‘Old Side’ Presbyterians; in the nineteenth century, the ‘New School’ confronted the ‘Old School’; and in the twentieth century, Modernists found themselves challenged by Fundamentalists. These conflicts led to schisms, but the root of them all lay in a repeated encounter between the Scottish theological inheritance and the ‘Great Awakening’ of religion which arose in Congregational New England. The creation of academies took its cue from the ‘Old Side’ Presbyterian emphasis on theological orthodoxy and adherence to doctrinal formulation. To those on the ‘New Side’ who were ‘awakened’, however, this conception of the faith lacked life. Intellectual assent, which is all that theological instruction and learning on their own could secure, fell lamentably short of spirit-filled discipleship. True faith, consequently, must begin in an experience of conversion. This view, of course, placed the subjective state of the believer above the scholarly mastery of the minister, and from the point of view of orthodoxy, it thereby ran the great risk of ‘enthusiasm’, which is to say, religious fanaticism. Biblical scholarship and theological study were essential to guard against the errors into which the human spirit, left to its own devices, may so easily fall. Some New Siders were willing to abandon the scholarly tradition they had inherited, but not many and not for long. Still, they were no less reluctant to discount the power and importance of transforming conversion, and, accordingly, they sought to harness intellect and emotion in some way. This prompted a sometimes bitter division between schools and educators. So, for instance, while the Presbytery of New Brunswick took steps to reaffirm the Old Side, William Tennent’s ‘log college’ in Buck’s County became a training ground for New Side ministers. After a time, it was Tennent’s log college that provided the model for the College of New Jersey. A little less than a century later, by which time the College of New Jersey had spawned a semi-independent seminary, New England’s latest theological innovations caused a second wave of disagreement to sweep through Princeton. At the heart of the dispute lay competing understandings of the individual’s relationship to God. The ‘New School’ allowed scope to the free will of the believer that the ‘Old School’ regarded as too great an affront to the Sovereignty of God and, hence, contrary to fundamental Calvinist principles. Led by the hugely influential figure of Charles Hodge, Princeton Seminary came out as ‘Old School’, and in succeeding decades, ‘Princeton theology’ became the standard bearer of orthodox Calvinism. This played a significant part in a gradual separation of the ways between college and seminary, a separation finally made evident when



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Scottish Enlightenment. The list of Scottish educated philosophers who taught at Princeton, both at what became the university and the seminary, is remarkably long. Beginning with John Witherspoon in 1768, it stretches to John A. Mackay, who served as president of the seminary from 1937 to 1959.6 Witherspoon was a graduate of Edinburgh and familiar with philosophical debates in Glasgow. Mackay, born in Scotland in 1889, studied philosophy and logic at the University of Aberdeen, won an award for further study in America and subsequently spent a year in Spain with the philosopher Miguel de Unamuno. The list of philosophers in between includes Norman Kemp Smith and A.  A. Bowman, who held Princeton University professorships. They both returned to Scotland to fill chairs at Edinburgh and Glasgow, respectively. George Stuart Hendry, who took his MA at the University of Aberdeen, was appointed Charles Hodge Professor of Systematic Theology at the seminary, a post he held from 1949 until 1973. It is evidence of this enduring relationship between Princeton and Scottish philosophy that in 1896, when the College of New Jersey finally became Princeton University, the celebratory events included two guest lectures by Andrew Seth, Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at the University of Edinburgh. The university’s president at this time was Patton, who, when he returned to the seminary, was simultaneously installed as first president and professor of philosophy of religion. The towering philosophical figure, however, was James McCosh, president of the college from 1868 to 1888, and one of the directors of the seminary. McCosh had studied philosophy in both Glasgow and Edinburgh and been ordained as a minister in the Church of Scotland. He played an active part in the Disruption that split the Church in 1843 and came out on the Free Church side. Though he devoted his principal energies to the new denomination, he was also a gifted philosopher in his own right and published a book that led to his appointment as the first professor of logic and metaphysics at Queen’s University Belfast. It was from his position in Belfast that he moved to Princeton. McCosh was not simply versed in ‘the Scottish philosophy’; it was he who brought the tradition to self-consciousness. Though the expression became firmly established, it was virtually unknown until his publication of a book with that title (in 1875).7 McCosh’s book traces ‘the Scottish philosophy’ back to Francis Hutcheson (1694–1747) and follows its development through a large number of major and minor figures up to Sir William Hamilton (1788–1856), the doyen of the Scottish universities in the first half of the nineteenth century. Its purpose is to detect the essential elements at work in the tradition, and McCosh’s account importantly construes it more broadly than the widespread perception that its

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heart was the ‘Scottish School of Common Sense’. ‘Common Sense’ was especially identified with Thomas Reid’s Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense (1764), and the ‘philosophy’ of ‘Common Sense’, allegedly, gave an appearance of respectability to Princeton moralists and theologians who wanted to resist the intellectual challenges that science and philosophy were increasingly presenting.8 This is something of a distortion, however. Though it may be true that ‘Common Sense’ was invoked (as it still is) in a spirit of anti-intellectualism, Reid formulates his ‘principles’ of common sense as a way of putting properly scientific inquiry on a better intellectual foundation. In any case, ‘the Scottish philosophy’ cannot be identified even with Reid’s sophisticated ‘common sense’. To begin with, Witherspoon’s lectures on moral philosophy to the students at Princeton drew not on Reid, whose works he never mentions, but on Hutcheson, who knew nothing of Reid’s Inquiry. It was not Witherspoon but his successor Stanhope Smith who first directed his students to Reid. Furthermore, several texts by other Scottish philosophers contributed importantly to the curriculum, notably George Campbell’s Philosophy of Rhetoric (1776) and Hugh Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783). The influence of Scottish philosophy on education and academic inquiry in Princeton (and the United States more widely) derives chiefly from three leading aspects. First, its emphasis was on the importance of ‘moral philosophy’, which is why Witherspoon as president gave the final year ‘capstone’ moral philosophy lectures, a practice in which many other college presidents followed him. That is to say, the value of philosophical reflection lies ultimately in its ability to illuminate, and shape, the conduct of life. Secondly, its method was, in a very general sense, empirical rather than rationalistic. This favoured observation and experiment in the approach to traditional questions about mind, morality and metaphysics. Thirdly, moral philosophy aimed to sustain a ‘new’ rhetoric (in contrast to the classical rhetoric of the Sophists), in which the division between the logical task of ‘proving’ and the practical task of ‘persuading’ could be combined.9 This concern, obviously, has direct connections with the education of preachers and plainly resonates with the New Side’s acknowledgement that Christian education must integrate personal religious conviction with theological truth. By 1875, McCosh saw reason to lament the declining influence of the Scottish philosophy, and though his own allegiance to its spirit and method never diminished, he subsequently turned his attention to what a properly ‘American’ philosophy ought to look like. By this time, the speculative philosophy of St Louis was on the rise, and Princeton’s lingering loyalties, and theological



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conservatism, began to look academically stale and dated. But the problem, it may be argued, was more deep seated  – an internal instability within the Scottish philosophy itself. In the end, it could not hold together the ideals of individual moral formation, professional engagement with public affairs and the advancement of scientific inquiry. This, of course, was not a problem for Princeton only, but for the relation of church, politics and academy in the United States at large. McCosh saw that the future for Princeton lay with outgrowing the ‘regional’ college it had hitherto been and becoming a national university with international standing. In his time, and despite his prompting, the Board of Trustees would not take the final step in this process. McCosh died two years or so before the change of name occurred. It was formally enacted under Patton’s presidency, but it had little to do with him. The accomplishment was McCosh’s, and since he knew this, he was content to let the change of name take time. The course of higher education in Princeton over the next century was not significantly different to its course elsewhere in the United States. Marked by an ever-increasing degree of specialization on the part of an ever-increasing number of largely autonomous disciplines, it may be regarded in some respects as an enriching differentiation as in others an impoverishing fragmentation. Either way, it signals a radically different educational world from the one to which the Presbyterian academies and ‘log colleges’ aspired. Rather more recently, bringing still greater change between their world and ours is the decline of the church, the weakening of denominational loyalties and the increasing subsumption of biblical criticism within the study of ancient texts. All three have accelerated the marginalization of theology within the academy. The point can be made as easily about Scotland and its universities as about Princeton. The phenomenon of ‘globalization’ has so mixed and mingled currents of thought, it is implausible to think that we might find detectible residues of Scotland’s influence on Princeton now. This does nothing, of course, to diminish the influence it once had.

Notes 1 The number of Ulster Scot immigrants during the eighteenth century has been estimated at 200,000, compared to 25,000 from Scotland. Douglas Sloan, The Scottish Enlightenment and the American College Ideal (New York: Teachers College of America, 1971), 36. 2 St Andrews seems not to have figured very much.

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3 Sixteen out of the twenty-six men admitted as ministers to the Presbytery of Philadelphia before 1717 were Scottish graduates. Sloan, The Scottish Enlightenment, 41. 4 Patton’s first appointment to the seminary in 1882 was as a ‘philosopher’ whose classes would enable ministers to respond to the challenge of Darwinism. 5 Mark A. Noll, Princeton and the Republic 1768–1822 (Vancouver: Regent College, 1989), 274. 6 Iain R. Torrance, though primarily a theologian, also graduated with a degree in philosophy from Edinburgh. 7 James McCosh, The Scottish Philosophy (London: Macmillan, 1875). 8 See Sydney E. Ahlstrom, ‘The Scottish Philosophy and American Theology’, Church History 24 (1955): 257–272. 9 See further Gordon Graham, ‘Beauty, Taste, Rhetoric and Language’, in Scottish Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Aaron Garrett and James A Harris (Oxford University Press, 2015), Sections VII and VIII.

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Two years after the appearance of this book, George Lindbeck’s famous treatise The Nature of Doctrine made Schleiermacher exhibit A where the ‘experiential expressive’ model of religion5  – and a self-referential account of doctrine commensurate with that model – are concerned.6 To be sure, the work of a good many specialists in Schleiermacher’s theology has done much to undermine that picture, but the Lindbeckian casting of Schleiermacher remains widespread in the English-speaking world. In support of finding a subjectivizing of Christian doctrines in Schleiermacher’s thinking, appeal has frequently been made to his initial definition of doctrines. ‘Christian doctrines are accounts of the Christian religious affections set forth in speech.’7 But, then, such a definition would remain valid even where it was acknowledged that the Christian affections are themselves the effects of a realistically conceived divine causality – so the definition as a stand-alone item cannot be decisive. Furthermore, the fact that doctrines are (in their origins) descriptions of certain conditions of human life does not at all mean that they tell us nothing about God. They tell us, in fact, everything that humans can know – which is rather a lot. Critics might conceivably say in response that talk of divine causality and its effects is all very well and good. But the definition which Schleiermacher himself gave to divine ‘attributes’ surely places the entire matter beyond contention. ‘All attributes which we ascribe to God are to be taken as denoting not something special in God, but only something special in the manner in which the feeling of absolute dependence is to be related to Him’.8 Here, the critic might say that there is talk only of how something in human consciousness is to be related to God; there is no mention of how God is related to human consciousness. But here again, we must not proceed too quickly. This definition, set forth at the very beginning of the first of three movements in Schleiermacher’s treatment of the doctrine of God, is offered at the point of the greatest abstraction from anything proper to specifically Christian experience. What we find as we read further in The Christian Faith is that Schleiermacher is led – as he knew all along he would be, of course! – to revise (amplify, fill out and even ‘correct’) the content of all ‘attributes’ previously treated once he has firmly in place the attributes of God made known in and through the Christian’s experience of redemptive grace. In doing so, he also gave to his general definition a clarity and concreteness it would otherwise have lacked. My thesis in what follows is twofold. First, I will argue that Schleiermacher’s treatment of the attributes of love and wisdom demonstrates clearly that his doctrine of God is meant to be responsible to what God is ‘in and for Himself ’. In truth, no distinction between an ‘in Himself ’ and a ‘for us’ can be sustained,

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the end that His love is. ‘The divine wisdom is not capable of producing any other disposition of things, or any other ordering of their course, than that in which the divine love is perfectly realized; and just as little is the divine love capable of leading to self-impartations other than those in which it itself finds perfect satisfaction.’14 And so, Schleiermacher says that the attributes of love and wisdom ‘are never separate in any way; they are so entirely one that each may be regarded as being intrinsically contained in the other’.15 Love and wisdom alone, therefore, may be truly predicated of the Divine Essence. Now, in light of the fact that Schleiermacher also insists that no distinction exists in God between essence and attributes,16 we might easily conclude that none of the so-called ‘attributes’ treated in the first two movements are rightly called ‘attributes’ at all. Only love and wisdom may truly be called ‘attributes’ since they alone give expression to the Divine Essence. But such a conclusion would be too hastily drawn. What takes place in the penultimate section of The Christian Faith is not a rejection of the earlier ‘attributes’ but an ordering of them into a proper understanding of the essence and attributes of God which is made available only in the experience of redemption. Of course, an ordering of the attributes treated in the first two movements into a proper understanding of God as love and wisdom does not leave those earlier attributes unchanged. In fact, Schleiermacher now offers a critique of his earlier treatment of divine attributes and provides what he sees as a necessary ‘course correction’. First, in relation to the ‘attributes’ treated in the First Part (eternity and omnipresence, omnipotence and omniscience) he holds that if we treat the action of God in isolation from the ‘motive’ (Motiv) which gave rise to that action, we remain bound to the finite sphere and do not reach God at all with our talk of ‘attributes’. And so, he now says that when, earlier, he had claimed that omnipotence is ‘the attribute in virtue of which all finite things are through God as they are’, he was treating the activity of God in isolation from the motive which animated it – which is to say, as an action ‘wholly indeterminate in character’.17 But, of course, the Divine Activity is never indeterminate. If, then, ‘omnipotence’ is to be ascribed to God in a way more responsible to what God is; it will have to be a description of the loving action of God (i.e. the essential directedness of God to unite with the human creature). What is happening here is that the ‘attributes’ treated earlier are now being taken up into the attribute of love so that the earlier attributes are now seen to be qualifiers of the divine love (i.e. divine love is seen as an ‘omnipotent’ and ‘eternal’ love which is ordered teleologically to human redemption and the fellowship with God which redemption creates). Where this correction is not made, the statement that God



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is ‘omnipotent’ will really convey nothing ‘but what the finite is through God, as willed and posited by Him’ and we will ‘remain uncertain as to the nature of the will of God which is implied in omnipotence’.18 The belief that God is omnipotent in the absence of the knowledge of the motive which governs the exercise of divine Power is ‘nothing more than that shadow of faith which even devils may have’!19 Second, the same kind of correction is made with respect to the second group of ‘attributes’ treated, viz. those of holiness and justice. ‘Nor are the two attributes (holiness and justice) discussed in our Second Part, under its first aspect, such as originally could stand as expressions of the Divine Essence’.20 Where it is seen that what was formerly considered as the work of divine holiness and justice is properly (by way of preparation) part of the work of redemption, it will also be seen that ‘it is only when we [. . .] resolve [the earlier attributes of holiness and justice] into those attributes we are now discussing as the result of the second half of our exposition that they are recognizable as divine attributes at all [. . .] Thus, both of these attributes, like the others [viz. those treated in Part I], merge for us in the divine love’.21 Once these earlier attributes have been ordered to and qualified by the attributes of love and wisdom, they do indeed give expression to the Divine Essence (if only in a derivative, secondary fashion). They, too, are thereby made suitable as divine ‘attributes’ (and, therefore, as descriptions of the Divine Essence). We can see what a tremendous step forward Schleiermacher has taken here in his third consideration of divine attributes. How to reconcile this consideration of the attributes with what was said earlier – viz. that ‘all attributes which we ascribe to God are to be taken as denoting not something special in God, but only something special in the manner in which the feeling of absolute dependence is to be related to Him’22 – has not been obvious to all readers. That it entails an affirmation of a version of divine ‘simplicity’ is clear enough. But is it saying something more? Many there are who have taken the latter half of the statement to mean that all talk about God is simply talk about our act of relating to God and, therefore, talk that is altogether self-referential. Karl Barth thought this (in some moods), and a fair number of theologians who are attracted to apophaticism and metaphorical understandings of religious language would certainly be in agreement (though they would value this more positively than Barth did).23 The problem is that Schleiermacher’s identification of love and wisdom with the Divine Essence provides us with an explanation of his initial definition of ‘attributes’ that most are not expecting. My own conviction is that it is here, finally, in §167, that we find out what Schleiermacher really thinks about

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Christian talk of God and its value where mediating real knowledge of God is concerned. Surprising though it may be to some, in the English-speaking world at least, Schleiermacher does indeed think that the language generated by the Christian experience of redemption reaches all the way to the Divine Essence and is not to be limited to a Divine Activity abstracted from the being of God.24 Now earlier, Schleiermacher considered and rejected several speculative ways of classifying the divine attributes:  metaphysical and moral, inactive and active, absolute and relative, original and derived. All such divisions, he argued, have arisen from a separation of what God is in and for Himself (the Divine Essence) from what He is in relation to the world  – a practice which Schleiermacher regards as illegitimate.25 Though it was not altogether clear at the time, Schleiermacher was not completely setting aside the distinction between ‘essence’ and ‘activity’; in fact, he retains that distinction. What he was setting aside was the human attempt to isolate the Divine Essence from the Divine Activity, so as to make the Divine Essence an object of human knowledge in its own right.26 Such a ‘separation’ he regards as speculative and illegitimate within the realm of dogmatics. Now we are in a better position to understand how it is that Schleiermacher can retain the ‘essence/action’ distinction even while rejecting the ‘in Himself/for us’ distinction. God is never, for Schleiermacher, ‘in and for Himself alone’. God is never inactive or active only inwardly; God is eternally active ad extra, moving out from Himself and beyond Himself. Hence, the Divine Essence has no reality apart from the Divine Activity to which it immediately gives rise. It is for this reason, too, that Schleiermacher is now able to say that no distinction exists in God between essence and attributes (or, as we might more accurately say) between Divine Essence and the attributes of love and wisdom.27 One way of describing what Schleiermacher has achieved up to this point is that he has rejected classical metaphysical accounts of the essence and attributes of God in favour of an account grounded wholly in the divine economy. But he still retains a different kind of essence/action distinction; if he did not, he could not superordinate the attributes of love and wisdom to those of omnipotence, eternity and so on. The division of essence and action (and of the attributes proper to each) which is set forth by Schleiermacher is one that is based upon a distinction between disposition (Gesinnung) and the form (Art und Weise) by means of which the disposition is given effect. Now this is a distinction which, as Schleiermacher rightly notes, is taken from observation of human causality.28 The danger here of anthropomorphism is great and Schleiermacher is keenly aware of it. But he believes that he has overcome it by eliminating the separation



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more a common life depends on an individual life, the less it is an existence in common [. . .] The more all depend on one, each receiving his impetus from him, the more are all merely his tools or members and the whole is just an enlargement of this one personality’.43 If, then, we think of the fellowship of the disciples as animated by a ‘common spirit’,44 we must acknowledge that this common spirit was still ‘incomplete’ so long as Christ remained with them.45 I will say more about this ‘common spirit’ in a moment. For now, it is only important to see that the fellowship of the disciples had yet to become the Church prior to Christ’s departure from them. The communication of the Spirit is a description in Schleiermacher’s theology of the transition from the living receptivity of the disciples to the power of Christ’s self-proclamation during his lifetime to a spontaneous activity which arises in them after Christ’s ‘ascension’. Viewed from one angle, the power of the Holy Spirit simply is the ongoing and continuous effect of the power of Christ’s self-proclamation as it spreads organically through persons.46 The Holy Spirit, we might say, is the presence of the risen Christ.47 But it is important to notice that the transition from the receptivity characteristic of the disciples in the presence of the Christ who had yet to be crucified to the spontaneous activity in which the disciples individually and the Church communally are empowered spontaneously to ‘imitate’ Christ,48 to reproduce in themselves Christ’s way of being in the world is also and at the same time, the ground of a distinction of ‘persons’ in the Trinity. The union of divine causality with Christ and the union of divine causality with the Church are not the same, even if the power by which the latter occurs is unleashed through the former. They are not the same because receptivity and spontaneous activity are distinguishable elements in human life. One last point on Schleiermacher’s pneumatology: though Schleiermacher’s talk of a ‘common spirit’ in the Church might seem, at first glance, to rise no higher than a reference to a collective human spirit  – and many students of theology upon first reading Schleiermacher take it is exactly this way  – this would be a mistake. What is true is that Schleiermacher does not understand the Holy Spirit in the sense of the traditional doctrine of the Trinity, as a ‘divine person’ who pre-exists the world’s creation. But, then, he is convinced that the New Testament never speaks of the Holy Spirit otherwise than as ‘in believers’. Nevertheless, we would be ignoring the uniting of divine causality with Christ Himself (and its distinction from His human consciousness) if we thought that the ongoing efficacy of His self-proclamation were reducible to human striving for unity. For Schleiermacher, it is clear. There is a divine power at work in the



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4 William J. Hill, OP, The Three-Personed God: The Trinity as a Mystery of Salvation (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1982), 90. 5 George Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press, 1984), 16. 6 See on this point, Bruce D. Marshall, whose ascription to Schleiermacher of an ‘interiorist thesis’ makes ‘truth’ to be something to which the believer has ‘immediate access’ in her Gemützustände, thus setting aside any distinction between emotional states and the ‘feeling of absolute dependence’ joined with them. Bruce D. Marshall, Trinity and Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 53. 7 Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, Leitsatz (Philadelphia: Fortress Press,1976), §15, 76. 8 Ibid., §50, Leitsatz, 194. 9 Schleiermacher, Gl. §167.2, 731–732: ‘Love and wisdom alone, then, can claim to be not mere attributes but also expressions of the very essence of God’. 10 Schleiermacher, Gl. §167.1, 730. 11 Schleiermacher, Gl. §165.1, 726. The word is translated in the English edition as ‘impulse’. But that misses the teleology resident in Schleiermacher’s chosen word. 12 Ibid., 727. 13 Fiorenza says that ‘wisdom is the perfection of love’. Fiorenza, ‘Schleiermacher’s Understanding of God as Triune’, 179. If I choose the participle ‘perfecting’ here, I do so because Schleiermacher understands the Divine Activity to be ongoing. 14 Schleiermacher, Gl. §165.2, 727. 15 Ibid. 16 Schleiermacher, Gl. §167.1, 730. 17 Schleiermacher, Gl. §167.2, 731. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid. Gerhard Ebeling rightly observes that the so-called ‘metaphysical attributes’ are treated by Schleiermacher as ‘merely an empty framework which receives its content only through the divine attributes in the second part of the Glaubenslehre’. Gerhard Ebeling, ‘Schleiermacher’s Doctrine of the Divine Attributes’, in Schleiermacher as Contemporary, ed. Robert W. Funk (New York: Herder and Herder, 1970), 155–156. Ebeling is also right to see in this move an effort to overcome the fatal confusion of speculation with dogmatics. Schleiermacher himself confirms this explicitly with regard to his equation of the Divine Essence with love. ‘Only, it is understood that here also we wish to have nothing to do with any conception of God reached by way of speculation.’ Schleiermacher, Gl. §167.1, 730. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid. (emphasis mine). This calls to mind Barth’s claim, going back to his pre-war ‘liberal’ sermons that God’s justice is the servant of the divine mercy.

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22 Schleiermacher, Gl. §50, introductory proposition, 194. 23 See, e.g., Sallie McFague, Models of God (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1987). 24 As Fiorenza rightly says of Schleiermacher, ‘he is not maintaining that love and wisdom are merely the revealed manifestations of a hidden unknown monad. Instead, Schleiermacher is making a claim about the very essence of God’. Fiorenza, ‘Schleiermacher’s Understanding of God as Triune’, 179. 25 Schleiermacher, Gl. §51.4, p.200. 26 Cf. Ebeling, ‘Schleiermacher’s Doctrine of the Divine Attributes’, 142. 27 Schleiermacher, Gl. §167.1, 730: ‘Already it has been stated repeatedly that in God there can be no distinction between essence and attributes, and that just for that reason the conception “attribute” is not particularly well fitted to set forth the Divine Essence. Still, this also implies that, in so far as anything is true of God by means of what we posit as a divine attribute, what is thus truly predicated must also express the Divine Essence itself.’ 28 Schleiermacher, Gl. §165.1, 726. 29 We might well suspect that Schleiermacher is engaged in a bit of ‘natural theology’; that he is beginning with an account of what love is on the human plane, and then stripping that definition of its human limitations (by means of the argument that in God, love as disposition and wisdom as plan do not “fall apart” because thinking, willing and acting are all one in God) and ending by ‘projecting’ this now modified concept of love on to God. In truth, however, Schleiermacher’s procedure is a good deal more complex. He doesn’t start with the human definition of love. He starts with the union of the Divine Essence with Jesus (and what that tells us about the goal of the divine government (viz. the planting and extension of the Church) and then says of such a uniting activity that this is the kind of thing we humans know as ‘love’. ‘If, then, the pivot of the divine government is redemption and the foundation of the Kingdom of God, involving the union of the Divine Essence with human nature, this means that the underlying disposition cannot be conceived otherwise than as love.’ See Schleiermacher, Gl. §165.1, 726–727. So the first thing is the Divine Activity in all of its concrete reality and then a human attempt to describe the nature of that activity in terms of its underlying ‘disposition’. 30 Schleiermacher, Gl. §170.1, 739 (emphases mine). 31 Schleiermacher did hold that ‘Sabellius as well as Athanasius should be a resource for future doctrinal progress’. But, in doing so, he was ‘not making Sabellius the end-point but [. . .] suggesting that one should develop an understanding that goes beyond the contrast between Athanasius and Sabellius’. Fiorenza, ‘Schleiermacher’s Understanding of God as Triune’, 174. The decisive difference lies in the fact that Sabellius distinguished a hidden divine One from the revealed three, whereas Schleiermacher equated the ‘Father’ with the unity of the Divine Essence ‘as such’.



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See, on this point, B. A. Gerrish, Christian Faith: Dogmatics in Outline (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2015), 300. 32 Schleiermacher, Gl. §170.2, 739. 33 Schleiermacher, Gl. §170.3, 740. 34 Schleiermacher, Gl. §170.2, 740. 35 Schleiermacher, Gl. §119.1, 547. 36 It is because the ‘disposition’ for union is never unformed but is ordered to union with Jesus of Nazareth that Gerhard Ebeling is right to say, ‘theologically [. . .] profound is the [. . .] interpretation of eternity as divine causality. The two misinterpretations of eternity – as boundless time, and as a timelessness that has no relation to time – are surmounted by understanding eternity as once again a modulation of divine causality – namely, as the constitutive condition not only of all temporal things but of time itself ’. Ebeling, ‘Schleiermacher’s Doctrine of the Divine Attributes’, 144. 37 Schleiermacher, Gl. §94.2, 387. 38 Schleiermacher, Gl. §96.3, 397. 39 See, on this point, Kevin Hector, ‘Actualism and Incarnation: The High Christology of Friedrich Schleiermacher’, IJST 8 (2006): 307–322; Bruce L. McCormack, ‘Über Barth hinaus. . . mit Schleiermacher’? in Karl Barth und Friedrich Schleiermacher: Zur Neubestimmung ihres Verhältnisses, ed. Matthias Gockel and Martin Leiner (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2015), 45–88; McCormack, ‘Barths Kritik an Schleiermacher: Eine Meta-Kritik’ in Karl Barth und Friedrich Schleiermacher, 303–315. For an opposing point of view, see George Hunsinger, ‘Salvator Mundi: Three Types of Christology’, in Christology: Ancient and Modern, ed. Oliver D. Crisp and Fred Sanders (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2013), 42–59. It may be noted that Hunsinger ‘pronounces’ (there really is no other word for it) Hector’s reading of Schleiermacher’s Christology as ‘high’ to be ‘implausible’ – without addressing a single argument Hector advances in support of this conclusion. Hunsinger’s conclusion is based solely on his own way of distinguishing ‘low’, ‘middle’ and ‘high’ – terms which, precisely in their highly formal character, are unlikely to command universal agreement – which are then imposed upon Schleiermacher’s ‘empirical’, ‘magical’ and ‘mystical’. 40 Schleiermacher, Gl. §122.1, 566. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid. 43 Schleiermacher, Gl. §122.2, 566–67. 44 See, among the many places, Schleiermacher, Gl. §121, Leitsatz, 560. 45 Schleiermacher, Gl. §122.2, 566. 46 Schleiermacher, Gl. §121.2, 564. 47 Schleiermacher, Gl. §122.3, 568.

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48 Ibid. ‘The common spirit expressed in this spontaneous activity is only the Holy Spirit in so far as the activity it induces is a prolongation of Christ’s own activity’. 49 Schleiermacher, Gl. §122.2, 562. 50 Schleiermacher, Gl. §123. 51 David Friedrich Strauss, The Christ of Faith and the Jesus of History: A Critique of Schleiermacher’s ‘Life of Jesus’, trans. Leander E. Keck (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1977), 5: ‘The illusion, which is supported primarily by Schleiermacher’s explanations, that Jesus could have been a man in the full sense and still as a single person stand above the whole of humanity, is the chain which still blocks the harbor of Christian theology against the open sea of rational science. To break this chain is the purpose of the present work, as it has always been of all my theological writings.’ 52 See, on this point, McCormack, ‘Über Barth hinaus [. . .] mit Schleiermacher?’.

11

The Place of Prayer in Theological Method: A Conversation with Sarah Coakley James F. Kay

Before initiating a conversation with Sarah Coakley, I wish to offer a personal tribute to Iain Torrance. He arrived as president of Princeton Theological Seminary (2004–2012), on the cusp of increasingly severe testing for American higher education in general and theological education in particular. Throughout this difficult period of rapid cultural change and economic crisis, Iain remained a scholar-educator of the first rank and also a perceptive and prescient Christian ethicist. In his inaugural address, he boldly called into question the American practice of ‘extraordinary rendition’, a euphemism for government kidnapping in order to transport suspected terrorists to places where, unrestrained by US law or public knowledge, they could be tortured without restraint.1 From this example, one should not infer that Iain majored in hortative imperatives. Such discourse is tempting for the Reformed tradition with its emphasis on the ethics of divine command, including the ‘Third Use of the Law’ and in its covenantal theologies whenever they veer toward contractual or symmetrical understandings of human and divine reciprocity.2 In this regard, at a time when the Church of Scotland and the Presbyterian Church (USA) would neither ordain nor marry ‘avowed practicing homosexuals’, one of the first public acts of Iain’s presidency was to end the era of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ at Princeton Theological Seminary. He accomplished this transition to an ethos of communal honesty not by issuing some direct dictum but by pastorally presiding at a communion service at the invitation of the then ‘Bisexual, Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Supporters’ (BGLASS) campus organization. For Iain, the eternal covenant of God, calling all to the will and way of Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit, opposes every effort by the institutional church to say of anyone, let alone its baptized members, ‘I have no need of you’ (1 Cor. 12:21).



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Jesus Christ. To take one example that could be regarded as paradigmatic of the lex orandi, Wiles cites the Aramaic phrase, Maranatha, ‘Lord, come’ (1 Cor. 16:21), transliterated into Greek by the Apostle Paul, and ‘most naturally understood as an invocation in prayer to Jesus as Lord’. The Aramaic ‘strongly suggests that such practice goes back to a very early stage in the life of the Church, to a time before the development of the Gentile Greekspeaking churches’. This clearly shows ‘a conservative function’ of the lex orandi principle in transmitting tradition from generation to generation. More significantly for the development of Christian doctrine, we learn from this invocation that ‘Jesus was clearly invoked in worship from the very start of the Church’s life’, and that he was invoked as Lord (Greek = Kyrios), which is the ‘regular translation of the divine name in the Old Testament’. Thus concludes Wiles, ‘The continuing practice of invoking the name of Jesus in worship helped to ensure that when the time came for more precise doctrinal definition of his person it would be in terms which did not fall short of the manner of his address in worship’.9 Can something similar be seen at work in securing the ‘more precise doctrinal definition’ of the person of the Holy Spirit? For Wiles, the strongest evidence for the role of liturgical practice in this development ‘was the fact that baptism was regularly administered in the threefold name of Father, Son and Holy Spirit’. In the relatively dormant years of theological reflection on the Spirit, principally in the second century until the revival of interest in the early third century (e.g. Origen), until cresting in the fourth, ‘it was the continuing fact of baptismal practice which did most to keep alive the idea of the Holy Spirit as a third alongside the Father and the Son’. A soteriological appeal to baptismal rites (which liturgically extended from exorcism to chrismatic signation and to which a catechetical process was either prefixed or suffixed) is one that animates the basic arguments of both Athanasius and Basil of Caesarea for the consubstantiality of the Spirit.10 While noting Wiles’s ‘laudable attempt to take some account of the lex orandi (the “law of prayer”)’,11 Coakley contends that his cited appeals to the baptismal rites of the ancient church still beg two historical questions, ‘But why three?’, and why was Mt. 28:19–20 taken up into the baptismal rite and formula of the church? Moreover, Wiles does not press the theological question, ‘Why indeed “hypostasize” the Spirit at all?’12 In a brilliant move, Coakley then appeals to the prayer practice of the earliest church by pressing back into the New Testament itself to establish the ‘proto-trinitarian’ status of the Holy Spirit, even as Wiles had correlated prayer in the New Testament to the deity of Jesus Christ. As



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for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes [for us] with sighs too deep for words. And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to [the will of] Go’. Coakley can describe such prayer as ‘the only valid experientially based pressure towards hypostasizing the Spirit’. Nevertheless, she quickly adds that ‘the whole point’ is ‘a delicate ceding to something precisely not done by oneself. It is the sense (admittedly obscure) of an irreducibly dy-polar divine activity – a call and response of divine desire – into which the pray-er is drawn and incorporated’.17 Sarah Coakley’s creative redeployment of the lex orandi differs from that of Wiles in accounting for the development of the doctrine of the Trinity. Coakley’s exposition of Romans 8 on ‘Spirit-led prayer’ extends or centrally transposes appeals to the ‘law of prayer’ for establishing Christian doctrine from the confines of officially sanctioned liturgical prayer to those of personally practiced contemplative prayer. She claims ‘that prayer (and especially prayer of a nondiscursive sort, whether contemplative or charismatic) is the chief context in which the irreducible threeness of God becomes humanly apparent to the Christian’.18 It is contemplative prayer (with some concession to charismatic prayer) that largely defines what Coakley means by ‘the practice of prayer’. If you will, it is this ‘law of prayer’ that she argues historically prompted Nicene trinitarianism and thereby holds renewed promise today for trinitarian piety, theology and ethics. This is not to say that Coakley completely dismisses the lex orandi in the liturgical sense of common prayer, since the role of the epiclesis in the ancient Eucharistic anaphoras may send an ‘implicit signal’ of ‘some sort of incorporative trinitarianism’ for which she argues otherwise on explicitly contemplative grounds.19 Nevertheless, the authorized liturgical prayers of the church proved largely impotent in adjudicating competing doctrinal claims in the ancient church. Indeed, both the ‘Nicene’ and ‘Arian’ parties could appeal for their positions to the baptismal rites, the Eucharistic anaphoras and the doxologies employed in the worship of the church.20 Moreover, today’s ‘skepticism about the intrinsic authority of any creedal formulae’, which Coakley sees undercutting traditional appeals substantiating the doctrine of the Trinity, would arguably extend as well to any formal citing of official liturgical texts.21 In other words, the historical priority of Paul’s account and practice of Spiritled proto-trinitarian prayer must now be given theological and methodological priority in establishing Christian teaching today, at least with respect to the doctrine of God.



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this may explain why it is charismatic communities, rather than contemplative ones, to which Coakley gravitates in attempting inquiries of a social scientific sort regarding their practice and understanding of prayer.24 Any prospective transposition or extension of what has been traditionally denominated as the lex orandi in establishing credible Christian teaching today needs to take account of a number of criteria that are assumed or entailed by its deployment. In reviewing the capitula Coelestini containing Prosper of Aquitaine’s formative and explicit use of the lex orandi in doctrinal debate, Geoffrey Wainwright draws out the multiple criteria Prosper identifies as intrinsic to the practice of prayer in worship: The practice is universal, in toto mundo, the same everywhere, uniformiter, and followed in ominia ecclesia catholica; it is the practice of the gathered people of God, who are holy, sancta plebs, and are led in this ‘by the Spirit of God’; the practice expresses the mind of the whole Church, sensus ecclesiae; the practice is demonstrably agreeable to God, who in this case shows his pleasure by converting the people prayed for.25

Similarly, Gordon Lathrop summarizes Prosper’s views by noting that the lex supplicandi referred to ‘not just any practice, not whatever one might encounter being done in a supposedly Christian assembly’ but to ‘a practice which had biblical grounding, universal acceptance, actual local congregational exercise, and some accompanying sense that it had God’s approval’.26 Wainwright and Lathrop’s commentaries on Prosper’s formulation of the lex orandi together suggest that the strongest arguments for Christian doctrine drawing upon the prayers of the faithful are simultaneously appeals to scripture or apostolic practice, both of which are often virtually synonymous as criteria. Such appeals are strengthened further if they can also refer to universal and uniform practices undertaken in gathered congregations. Especially noteworthy for Coakley’s own project, but which goes unremarked with respect to the lex orandi of Prosper, is that appeals to the prayers of the church simultaneously entail appeals to the sanctifying leadership of the Holy Spirit in the community, along with ‘signs and wonders’ (Rom. 15:19, 2 Cor. 12:12, Heb. 2:4). Specifically, for Prosper, ‘conversions’ reflect divine approval. In Coakley’s discussion of Paul, we do find appeals to scripture, to apostolic practice and to the Holy Spirit. Nevertheless, these appeals remain unthematized in conscious relation to the lex orandi. We can also say that there is certainly testimony of ‘divine approval’, again unthematized by Coakley, when Paul refers to ‘Abba prayers’ as indicative of ‘that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit

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that we are children of God’ (Rom. 8:16). Nevertheless, without comparative and relatively plentiful historical evidence for practices of contemplation in the apostolic and post-apostolic periods of the church, and this evidence is perhaps even scarcer than that for liturgical prayer, Prosper’s criteria of universality and uniformity are difficult to establish or to correlate with the particular genre of contemplative prayer. Moreover, restricting or transposing the lex orandi largely to contemplative prayer may so remove its scope from Prosper’s contextual criterion of a congregational practice as to undercut Coakley’s claim that this genre of prayer could be unquestionably granted ‘absolute centrality’ over others in theological method. Contemporary appeals to the lex orandi, including Coakley’s contemplative version, raise questions about the weight they can be accorded given today’s dogmatically divided churches coupled with the erosion of their once customary internal liturgical standards. This characterization of our ecclesial situation may be truer for the heirs of the Reformation, whether they descend from magisterial Protestantism or prayer-book Anglicanism, than for contemporary Roman Catholics. That is to say, the lex orandi functions more credibly where it can appeal to diachronically fixed liturgical forms and practices within a church whose uniformity in liturgical texts and ceremonial enables appeals to prayer and praise to cinch the binding status of doctrines whether formulated by charismatic leaders, pastors, bishops, councils or popes. Apart from a strong degree of ecclesial unity and liturgical uniformity, appeals to the lex orandi from across confessional or denominational lines ultimately beg the question as to which and whose prayers, pray tell, really count and for whom. This contemporary conundrum of institutional Christian disunity explains why Coakley cannot easily claim, and perhaps for this reason does not discuss, Prosper’s criteria of liturgical universality and uniformity in which his lex orandi is contextually embedded. It may further explain the late Archbishop Robert Runcie’s perceived disquiet about the Charismatic Renewal Movement in the Church of England.27 Unless one can make a case for the prayer practices of this movement with reference to the rites and ceremonies of the Book of Common Prayer, such appeals are not likely to prove persuasive to Anglican bishops in drawing them and their flocks into patterns of reflexive prayer ‘in the Spirit’. Charismatic Anglicans are, therefore, likely to be receptive to Mark Earey’s proposed elevation of praying in the Spirit over against any imposed criterion of liturgical uniformity in building their case for freeing Anglican worship from its current canonical constraints in the Church of England.



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As Earey declares, ‘If the worship which we have been given is no longer connecting with our culture, or if other ways of praying in Spirit and truth emerge, which are true to Scripture and to the historic Creeds [. . .] then they should allow us to question the beliefs, understandings and practice which have been handed down’.28 Thus, Earey recasts pneumatically the lex orandi principle as ‘the ways that the Holy Spirit leads us to worship can and should influence how we understand God’.29 If the traditional lex orandi, which Coakley takes up from Wiles to improve upon him, is to continue to be deployed, whether by way of historical reconstruction or in contemporary doctrinal debate, then its ensemble of multiple formal criteria for theological case making must be regarded with greater attentiveness. Thematizing on the presence or absence of any of these criteria, as well as conscious reflection on their relative weighting and coherent patterning, would appear to be necessary in sustaining or strengthening the contestable claim that contemplative prayer should hold ‘absolute centrality’ in theological method.

Notes 1 Iain R. Torrance, ‘Beyond Solipsism’, Princeton Seminary Bulletin (2005): 59–66, esp. 65, where the author also remarks that ‘the vision which subsequently became the American experiment – trembles if it ever becomes a persecuting force’. 2 See Iain Torrance, ‘Fear of Being Left Out and Confidence in Being Included’, in To Glorify God: Essays on Modern Reformed Liturgy, ed. Bryan D. Spinks and Iain R. Torrance (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1999), 159–172, where the author suggests that the baptismal rites of the Presbyterian Church (USA) in its Book of Common Worship (1991) arguably tend to minimize the free grace of God by virtue of their contractual language. 3 Sarah Coakley, God, Sexuality, and the Self: An Essay ‘On the Trinity’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 18–19. On contemplative prayer as a practice of ‘un-mastery’, see 44–46. 4 Ibid., 43. 5 Ibid., xiii. 6 Ibid., 16. 7 Geoffrey Wainwright, Doxology: The Praise of God in Worship, Doctrine and Life (London: Epworth Press, 1980), 224–227. See further, Paul De Clerck, ‘ “Lex Orandi, lex credenda”: The Original Sense and Historical Avatars of an Equivocal Adage’, Studia Liturgica 24 (1994): 178–200.

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8 Maurice Wiles, The Making of Christian Doctrine: A Study in the Principles of Early Doctrinal Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 62–93. For Coakley’s critical discussion of Wiles, see God, Sexuality, and the Self, 106–110, 116, 137 and 142–143. 9 Wiles, The Making of Christian Doctrine, 64–65. This key christological discussion by Wiles goes unremarked by Coakley. As the NRSV margin notes at 1 Cor. 16:22, Marana tha can also be read Maran atha, meaning, ‘Our Lord has come’. Wiles follows the invocatory reading. 10 Ibid., 79–81, citing Athanasius, Epistola(e) ad Serapionem, and Basil, De Spiritu Sancto. See also, 87. 11 Coakley, God, Sexuality, and the Self, 116. 12 Ibid., 110 and 118. 13 Ibid., 107. In this way, Coakley claims to offer ‘the vital textual evidences about the Spirit in the earliest church which I believe have been ignored in his [Wiles’] – and indeed many others’ – analyses’. 14 Ibid., 112. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid., 113–114. Coakley is aware that, historically speaking, Paul’s views do not necessarily lead to ‘orthodox’ trinitarianism; nevertheless, they arguably provide some of its seminal insights. 17 Ibid., 112–113. 18 Ibid., 55. 19 Ibid., 133. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid., 104. 22 I will not explore Coakley’s conviction that we can prayerfully experience the dynamics of the Trinity qua Trinity beyond cautioning that the distinctive apophatic curtains drawn by such diverse figures as Gregory of Palamas and F. D. E. Schleiermacher are worth reconsidering. 23 Coakley, God, Sexuality, and the Self, 25. 24 Ibid., 163–186. 25 Wainwright, Doxology, 266–227. Wainwright further notes in this context that Prosper understands appeals to prayer not simply on the basis of their ‘wordcontent’ or ‘verbal components’ but as a ‘complex ritual act’ or as a ‘total ritual event’. 26 Gordon Lathrop, ‘Knowing Something a Little: On the Role of the Lex Orandi in the Search for Christian Unity’, in So We Believe, So We Pray: Towards Koinonia in Worship, Faith and Order Paper No. 171, ed. Thomas F. Best and Dagmar Heller (Geneva: WCC Publications, 1995), 39. 27 Coakley, God, Sexuality, and the Self, 164–165.



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28 Mark Earey, Beyond Common Worship: Anglican Identity and Liturgical Diversity (London: SCM Press, 2013), 103. The conjunction ‘or’ linking the conditional clauses in Earey’s definition, will no doubt give some theologians genuine pause for concern. 29 Ibid. For Earey’s fuller discussion, see 100–107.

12

Christian Self-Formation and the Meaning of Baptism Kathryn Tanner

In a great many of his lectures late in life at the Collège de France and elsewhere, Michel Foucault traced the permutations of Christian anxieties about postbaptismal sin from their beginnings in the early church down to their influence on modern juridical forms of self-understanding.1 He was specifically interested in such Christian antecedents because of the importance of what they eventually helped shape:  the entrepreneurial self of modern accounting systems and its funding of neo-liberal economies under state direction.2 After briefly rehearsing Foucault’s arguments, I’ll suggest how a competing understanding of baptism, resurgent at the time of the Reformation, can, to the contrary, quell anxieties about sin after baptism and thereby serve to interrupt such a modern sense of self and the institutional forms it undergirds. While aware of these counter-strands of Christianity, Foucault neglected them, interested as he was in the precursors of modernity and disinclined to believe in any continuing efficacy of Christianity for good in the present. If, unlike him, one has faith in Christianity’s power to resist rather than merely feed inimical sociocultural trends, there is reason to reconsider what it might mean for the baptized to be inclined no longer to make a fear-filled accounting of their sins, a way of relating to themselves that might well prime them, if Foucault is right, to be meek servants of a broader neo-liberal agenda. Foucault thinks a juridical self-understanding is bound up with modern state-enforced ways of ‘conducting the conduct of others’  – what he terms ‘governmentality’. One must render an account of oneself to oneself and to others, and in that very process, one falls under the control of those others. One observes one’s impulses and inclinations, both good and bad, through a procedure of rigorous self-examination. One makes an accounting of how far one

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has strayed and what one has done, positively, to make up for those lapses; one draws up a kind of ledger. In and through that very procedure of self-inquisition, one becomes subject to forces directing one to behave; such a way of relating to oneself is the underpinning for and means of enforcing the conducting of one’s conduct by others. One acts oneself as others think one should. To employ a very mundane example of such state direction of self-directing subjects, the state might like its citizens to stop smoking. Making public the statistical correlation between smoking and cancer deaths, prohibiting tobacco companies from advertising, and the taxing of cigarettes all become means of coaxing a self-directing citizenry to conform to such state directives: every smoker begins to count up the cigarettes they smoke each day and is led to economize on tobacco purchases, they might decide to buy nicotine patches in an attempt to quit and so on. In this way, people become self-directing by way of a constant effort at self-observation, so as to take responsibility themselves for their own health outcomes. By being self-legislating, citizens come to conform, as they should, to externally imposed directives and state interests. Foucault argues that this sort of juridical self-understanding has Christian roots and is mediated to the present through historical trajectories that importantly include practices of spiritual direction at the time of the CounterReformation (but that also, one might assume, include the moralizing typical of post-Reformation Protestantism, although Foucault himself does not expound on this).3 Christians are prone to a worried weighing up of their moral achievements and faults because such achievements either attest to one’s salvation or effect it, helping to bring it about. While the former effort at certification is associated with Protestant worries about election – the character of my deeds will inform me whether or not I am among those predestined to salvation – the latter tends to hinge on a particular understanding of the grace of baptism. On such an understanding of baptism, sins prior to it are both forgiven and wiped away by what Christ has done without one and in one’s stead. But given the now blank slate and new powers of Christ’s Spirit to lead a holy life granted at baptism, no excuse remains for backsliding. Further sin counts against one and stands in the way of one’s ultimate salvation. One therefore tries to minimize such sin in a kind of accounting relationship to oneself, a form, indeed, of double bookkeeping in which one weighs faults over and against merits since baptism. The atoning efficacy of Christ extends, then, only to one’s past life of sin, simply forgiving and wiping clean the profligate life one led before baptism. Now renewed in Christ and put on the path of righteousness through the gift of Christ’s Spirit at baptism, one has the responsibility oneself, aided by the effects



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of that Spirit on one’s own spirit, to maintain the purity of one’s baptism and keep it undefiled. Should one fall into sin after baptism, the relationship of divine favour one gained through Christ and appropriated at baptism is threatened. Those faults need to be made up for – by compensatory good actions or, short of that, acts of contrition and confession that warrant renewed acts of divine mercy. One’s final salvation becomes conditional on them. The efficacy of Christ having been lodged in the past according to this understanding of baptism, one has the responsibility oneself to ensure one’s future salvation; one is to move towards that final salvation by way of the achievement of a holy life. To be finally saved, one must make good use of what one has been freely given by God’s grace in Christ and appropriated at baptism. Far from being forgiven by Christ over the whole of one’s life, sins after baptism are even more grievous now that one has the power through Christ, by virtue of baptism, to resist them. Post-baptismal sins have to be made up for, by good works equaling, indeed it is hoped exceeding, demerits since baptism, thereby bringing one, incrementally, towards a final salvation justly earned, the grace of baptism rewarded by the final, excessive grace of eternal life and beatitude in heaven, in keeping with one’s performance, on balance, of good works in this life. Making clear the accounting-like, economically inflected register of such an understanding of post-baptismal sin, one can say, ‘If a man is good and does good works, he will go to heaven, and [. . .] if his final account with God shows a debit balance, an excess of sins over good deeds, he will go to hell.’4 Assuming ‘a sort of book-keeping transaction or legal fiction on the part of God’, ‘the baptized Christian has to continue to live the Christian life by keeping his baptism intact, or, if he fall into sin [. . .] by making amends to God and redressing the balance [. . .] He must earn merit and pay for his demerits until the account is closed at the final Judgement [. . .] His initial justification, though given to him by free grace while he is a sinner, turns out to be a justification advanced on credit. He still has to settle the bill later on’.5 Thus, by virtue of one’s baptism, according to Ambrose, ‘[t]‌hou has money; redeem thy sins. God is not to be bought, but thou canst be bought; thou art sold under sin – buy thyself back with works, buy thyself with money.’6 Committed Christians will accordingly scrutinize the course of their thoughts and desires to make sure they are directed towards God as much as humanly possible, putting them through the mill, so to speak. In this connection – so as to support the actual later economic implications of this religious self-understanding – Foucault, citing the First Conference of Cassian, develops the analogies of both miller and money changer: ‘Thoughts are like

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grains and consciousness is the mill store. It is our role as the miller to sort out amongst the grains those which are bad and those which can be admitted to the mill store to give the good flour and good bread of our salvation.’ Again, ‘conscience is the money changer of the self. It must examine coins, their effigy, their metal, where they came from. It must weigh them to see if they have been ill used. As there is the image of the emperor on money, so must the image of God be on our thoughts. We must verify the quality of the thought: This effigy of God, is it real? What is its degree of purity? Is it mixed with desire or concupiscence?’7 Such scrutiny of post-baptismal life by the religiously inclined is only heightened over the course of Christian history, reaching a kind of pinnacle in the Catholic Counter-Reformation, whereby the whole fleeting contents of consciousness become a matter for constant self-evaluation and scrupulous confession, before mutating into state-sponsored forms of conduct-shaping surveillance and the governmental techniques that bend one’s own efforts at self-direction towards approved lines of conduct in everyday life. Rather than being a religious practice that could simply be opposed to coercion or political power, ‘in the political functioning of both Catholic and Protestant societies at the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century, we had very subtle, thought out, and organized combinations of the development of an administrative political power and a whole series of institutions of spiritual direction [. . .] So forms of [spiritual] direction and forms of political functioning may well be heterogeneous, but their coexistence, linkages, and reciprocal supports are no less evident.’8 Fearful of damnation, trying to still that anxiety and prove themselves among the elect by manifesting the good works of which only the saved are capable, Protestants (of a Calvinist stripe) are prone to make confessional diaries, daily logs, to chart their success in driving out their faults. They thereby become practiced, for religious reasons, in the double bookkeeping that will serve them well as capitalist entrepreneurs; such skills readily transfer from the religious domain to a strictly economic one (and back again). But where conducting the conduct of others (and not just oneself) is concerned  – the concern, for example, of the modern state with respect to the behaviour of its population  – Catholic spiritual direction surpasses in significance such Protestant moral scrupulousness. The entirety of one’s life, not just acts but impulses and even seemingly random thoughts, need to be hashed over, verbally confessed, not just to oneself but to a spiritual director to whom one absolutely submits oneself. Among other permutations, this sort



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of extensive self-examination under the direction of others, in conformity to a kind of externally imposed law meting out consequences exactly proportional to ascribed faults, eventually comes to extend (in modified forms), not just to religious adepts in a monastic setting, but to the whole of everyday life throughout the entirety of a nation state’s population. One has to tell one’s secrets so as to become the subject of administrative direction and supervision by others, in line with institutional mandates (in, for example, state-run prisons and schools). Foucault hopes to solicit resistance to such contemporary ways of conducting the conduct of others by recounting the twists and turns of such a complex history; the contingencies of this history, for one, make clear its vulnerability to dismantling in the present. What results from it, moreover, is never simply domination but resistance-plagued efforts to enforce approved forms of conduct; Foucault indeed recounts a history that includes recurring forms of counterconduct, counter-conduct that at least in a religious domain encompasses the Protestant Reformation.9 Even if they are prone to forms of self-examination, Protestants, for example, tend to be wary of simple conformity to external authorities and institutionally enforced legal mandates; that is not the point of their self-examination – to prove obedience by way of some thoroughgoing confession of fault to others. Indeed, one might argue the Protestant Reformation is opposed to the very understanding of sin and grace that fuels worries about post-baptismal sin to begin with, along with its Christian-driven accounting practices. For many Protestants, the grace of Christ brings forgiveness of sin both before and after baptism. While sin continues to be forgiven, it is not simply erased in Christian lives after baptism; one is justified through Christ’s grace while a sinner still. Although one has in Christ all that is necessary to lead a holy life now, one never fully does, short of the eschaton. And one needn’t worry about that:  already saved by Christ and destined for eternal life by virtue of what Christ has achieved without one, lapses since baptism do not have the power to threaten either that salvation or that destiny. One puts one’s faith in Christ, who is one’s security, past failing. Self-scrutiny is, of course, in order after baptism, but it now has a different point. One is certainly concerned that salvation ‘take’ or show itself in the changed character of the life one leads; one is indeed obligated as a Christian to lead a different kind of life, in keeping with the grace of Christ made one’s own in baptism and enabled through the gift of Christ’s Spirit. A different sort of life – a life that is life-giving rather than death-dealing – is in fact what the grace of Christ is all about, what Christ has come to give to his followers.

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Doing good works is an expression and testing of what remains the case – that one is making one’s way on the path of new life by virtue of one’s baptism. No reason then not to weight up the results of that effort to lead a good life. But the point of doing so is to turn one’s attention all the more to the giver, Christ, rather than to measure the extent of one’s own progress in self-improvement, since the end, if effected by Christ, is sure and comes in a significant sense despite oneself qua a sinner still, as much after baptism as before it. One therefore confesses one’s sins, not out of fear that they might outweigh one’s merits, but as a form of recognition of what one always is apart from Christ – a sinner – and with a boldness born of the ineradicable joy that nothing can interfere with Christ’s love for such sinners. One confesses, one could say, one’s now ineradicable status – as a forgiven sinner – rather than one’s degree of relative achievement on the path towards eternal life. One confesses sin to repudiate it, it’s true, to move beyond it in a course of holy living, but with a confidence based not on the extent of one’s achievements so far but on the love of God for sinners made clear in Christ. One confesses sin out of a warranted distrust in one’s own sanctity, short of the eschaton, and one needn’t fear to make such a confession, since one knows one is accepted by Christ nonetheless, however far one currently strays in the effort to live a different sort of life. But the point of such confession is now different – not so much for the sake of self-improvement (about which one remains skeptical in this life) but for the sake of giving the glory to God. However much one has improved, not just when one fails but when one succeeds in the effort to lead a holy life, all the glory is indeed to be given to God. Because whatever the degree of success or failure in that effort, the impetus to, the need for, an exact accounting of the balance sheet of one’s deeds is undercut; it loses its rationale. This Protestant understanding of sin and grace has indeed a long history, arguably predating (or at least contemporaneous with) the view of baptism that prompts worry about sins subsequent to it.10 It is arguably indeed ‘the heart and essence of the Pauline gospel [. . .] [and] central in the Johannine teaching [. . .] It is in Christ that the sinner is justified. He is placed in a right relationship [. . .] given the status of son because he is in Christ, standing within the scope of the reconciliation that Christ effected [. . .] The imputation of righteousness rests upon a real and effective change in the status of the sinner. Christ has taken him into union with Himself [. . .] “In Christ” he is vindicated and accepted although he is a sinner [. . .] It is “in Christ”, too, that he is sanctified. The sinner is holy as being in Christ, not as he is in himself [. . .] [and this is so] throughout his Christian life in the present order [. . .] If he clings by faith to the state of being



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in Christ, then the Holy Spirit, the principle of the new life to God [. . .] operates in and through him conforming him to Christ’ and there is therefore no need for worry.11 Arguably according to the New Testament, ‘by the Cross the believer has been put in the right with God once and for all – Christ is his righteousness. He is already in Christ what he will be – to that no striving will add one iota [. . .] And so what fills the forward view is not some ideal yet to be attained, but the Christian’s position already attained in Christ and about to be revealed’.12 Rather than a lost past of baptismal purity making one anxious about the future that has now become one’s own responsibility, here one is thrown forward by an always present fact of the matter – a changed status in Christ – which cannot be lost, as the motor for a changed way of life that will one day wholly manifest that fact, through the same power – of Christ’s Spirit – that initiated it in baptism. What difference might such a different view of the grace of baptism make to the present situation? Foucault suggests that the present neo-liberal economic order is interested not just in one’s labour power but in one’s person, and (unlike a liberal view of a properly non-interventionist state) enlists the powers of the state for that very purpose – to gain traction over one’s person in conformity to economic mandates.13 It is not enough for people to work hard while on the job; they need to think of not just their labour power but also their very persons in economic terms, as the entrepreneurs of their own lives, the holders of capital in their own persons which they bear the responsibility for putting to good use by maximizing their potentials, by efficient utilization of their own resources in aptitudes and talents. As such an economic resource, persons come to have an accounting relationship to themselves, running themselves like little businesses, weighing profits against losses, not just in overtly economic domains  – for example, on the job – but everywhere (at home, at school, at church and so on). By breaking religious reasons for maintaining such an accounting relation to oneself, Christianity – particularly its Protestant forms – has the potential, I’ve been suggesting, of breaking the hold of such a spell. One’s religious manner of relating to oneself  – through an indelible and overriding relationship with Christ  – might free one from what has now become the economic common sense of the present day.

Notes 1 See, most notably, his 1979–1980 Collège de France lectures, On the Government of the Living, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); and his

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1981 Catholic University of Louvain lectures, Wrong-Doing and Truth-Telling: The Function of Avowal in Justice, trans. Stephen W. Sawyer (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2014). 2 For this influential treatment of neo-liberalism, see Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2008). 3 See, e.g., C. Fitzsimons Allison, The Rise of Moralism: The Proclamation of the Gospel from Hooker to Baxter (New York: Seabury, 1966). 4 G. W. H. Lampe, Reconciliation in Christ (London: Longmans, Green, 1956), 97. 5 Ibid., 28, 100. 6 Ibid., 102, citing Ambrose, De Elia et Jejunio [On Elijah and Fasting], 20. 7 Michel Foucault, Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault [1982] (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 46–47. 8 Foucault, Government of the Living, 232. 9 See Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 196, 228–230. 10 See Thomas F. Torrance, The Doctrine of Grace in the Apostolic Fathers (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, [1948] 1996) for an account of deviations from such a view as early as the second century CE. Foucault concurs with the same historical judgement. I fail to be convinced by Torrance’s judgement that those lapses result from Judaic and Hellenistic influences; what is happening here, instead, in my judgement is an ongoing internal argument among Christians on disputed matters of biblical interpretation. 11 Lampe, Reconciliation in Christ, 63–65. 12 Torrance, Doctrine of Grace, 35. 13 Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics.

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Real Insights along False Paths: With Karl Barth and Against the Stream in Theological Ethics Paul T. Nimmo

In theological ethics today, the work of Karl Barth continues to provide a highly distinctive, if rather contested, voice. In his determination to ground theological ethics formally and materially in the Word of God and in his quest to present the principal task of ethical action to be one of witness to Jesus Christ, Barth ventures a teaching with which many have engaged but to which few have subscribed.1 As so often in his theological labours, the work of Barth in this domain consciously proceeds ‘against the stream’.2 Such contrarian movement was for Barth never a matter of caprice or ignorance, however: at each point, the constructive trajectory which he pursues is purposively set out in opposition to alternatives which are carefully considered and evaluated. In Church Dogmatics generally, and in his theological ethics in particular, this feature of Barth’s thought gives rise to several passages in which he first explores possible routes of theological advance and then adjudges them in turn inadequate; only then does he move to advocate in detail his own position.3 However, material from the passages that explore and adjudge such ‘false paths’ is rather vulnerable to being passed over quickly, in the haste of the reader to reach Barth’s own view. In actual fact, these passages can often serve as moments of illumination through which to gain real insights into Barth’s position. This essay correspondingly seeks to demonstrate the kind of benefit that can accrue from following Barth with some care in his consideration of alternative trajectories of thought, proceeding by way of one particular case study. The material chosen for this study is a rather short and rather neglected section near the start of the general ethics in volume II/2 of Church Dogmatics. Entitled ‘The Basis of the Divine Claim’,4 the passage offers an important point of departure for

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human being in this relationship’.20 The insufficiency this time, however, lies not in the conception of God here but in the conception of the human being. Far from human beings in themselves being able ‘in some sense and to some extent to will and to do that which is good’, Barth posits, ‘what is characteristic of them from the start is rather the desire (the “yearning”) to be like God’.21 The result is that not only do human beings not participate in the essentially good of God, but that they actively obstruct it.22 In the small-print section that follows here, Barth explores which classical Greek thinkers better understand the character of the divine-human relationship. For Plato, on the one hand, there exists between God and humanity a reciprocal methexis (participation), in which ‘the originally existing Good reflects and recognises itself just as tranquilly in the finite, as does the finite in the infinite’.23 Yet, in the midst of such harmony, Barth avers, it is not possible to find a basis for divine claim or human obedience. For the tragedians, on the other hand, human beings are seen as ‘powerlessly desiring similarity to the gods’ while the gods are seen as ‘coldly directing these human beings [back] to their boundaries’.24 In the human desire to oppose the superiority of the eternally good and in the divine wrath against this hubristic enterprise, Barth implies, lies a clearer basis for theological ethics. Reflecting further upon this second false path, various features again stand out. First, in the denial of a Platonic conception of the God–human relationship, Barth decisively rejects any conception of theological ethics in which the concept of participation in the good is the defining factor or in which the capability of human beings to pursue virtue is present. The result is that, for Barth, virtue ethics and theological ethics are simply incommensurable.25 Second, as a corollary, in the endorsement of the more agonistic sensibility of the God– human relationship in the Greek tragedians, Barth builds a recognition of the intensity and extensity of human sin into the very centre of his theological ethics and ineluctably posits the (fallen) human being as one who is ineradicably in opposition to God.26 Thus, any attempts to read Barth as working with a natural law ethic or a Platonic virtue doctrine would seem to misread in significant ways the basic trajectory of Barth’s ethics. A further feature of this second false path is common also to the first false path. In the small-print sections in both cases, a wide range of witnesses is cited.27 On the one hand, Barth explicitly cites the views of Schleiermacher and Plato on these false paths, rejecting both en route. On the other hand, an array of references and citations is cited positively, and these are sourced from a surprisingly broad array of figures: explicitly and approvingly cited are Prometheus, the Stoa, Horace



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Instead, its focus has been upon demonstrating by way of this case study the kind of real insights that are to be gained from traversing with Barth along his false paths of inquiry and thinking beyond them to the implications and relations they attest. Far from representing peripheral material included for the sake of completeness, these investigations of Barth not only shed light upon some of his most profound commitments in their individuality and radicality but also indicate and effect the deeply systematic nature of Barth’s work. Accruing the full range of such real insights along false paths such as these can at times require slow and deliberate labour; but for the reader of Barth who has patience, the effort is more than adequately rewarded. Enhanced by such practice is the sense of Barth as a thinker who is not only profound but also radical and thus liable to isolation. Nevertheless, as Barth wrote late in his life, ‘it seems to be intrinsic to worthwhile movements that they be unsuccessful, but that they must nevertheless be ventured [. . .] one can only really live – really live “concretely” – when one is swimming hopelessly against the stream’.44 Solitude in theological ethics, as in all his work, was for Barth a price that simply had to be paid.

Notes 1 For further orientation to and engagement with the theological ethics of Karl Barth, see Paul T. Nimmo, Being in Action: The Theological Shape of Barth’s Ethical Vision (London: Continuum/T&T Clark, 2007); Gerald McKenny, The Analogy of Grace: Karl Barth’s Moral Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); and William Werpehowski, Karl Barth and Christian Ethics: Living in Truth (London and New York: Routledge, 2016). 2 The trope of going ‘against the stream’ can be found in Barth’s work from his early sermons to his final years. In a sermon in November 1913, Barth stated, ‘The Kingdom of God is coming – quite assuredly and certainly, [and] the Lord Jesus is coming [. . .] This gives us Christians the courage and the joyfulness to persevere, to resist, to swim against the stream, to be faithful in matters both great and small’, in Predigten 1913 (GA I.8), ed. Nelly Barth and Gerhard Sauter (Zürich: TVZ, 1913), 615–616, translated by the author. In his late outline of Protestant theology, he stated, ‘If the theologian engages with theology, and if it is not trivialities which should come from it, then he must not allow himself to regret swimming against the stream’, in Karl Barth (ET: Evangelical Theology: An Introduction, trans. Grover Foley [Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1963], 118). In the case of Barth’s theological ethics in particular, Gerald McKenny rightly offers attestation of the extent to

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Schools of Faith which Barth swims against the stream in concluding of Barth’s ethics: ‘[h]‌ere, at last, is a viable alternative to the Augustinian tradition’, The Analogy of Grace: Karl Barth’s Moral Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 292. Examples of this procedure from Church Dogmatics at large include the exploration of natural theology and the investigation of the grounds for the incarnation. See Karl Barth, Die Kirchliche Dogmatik [hereafter KD followed by volume number, part-volume number and page number], 4 volumes in 13 parts (Munich: Chr. Kaiser, 1932; and Zürich: EVZ, 1938–1965), II/1, 93–141, and IV/1, 201–203, respectively. Translations of KD are the author’s own. References are also provided for the published English translation (ET), Church Dogmatics, 4 volumes in 13 parts, ed. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance, trans. various (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1956–1975) – here at II/1, 85–128 and IV/1, 184–186. Within the theological ethics, this procedure can be found in Barth’s treatment of the relationship between (general) ethics and theological ethics in KD II/2, 577–594 (520–535). KD §37.1 – ‘Der Grund des göttlichen Anspruchs’, found in KD II/2, 612–628 (552–565). KD II/2, 612 (552). The reference to the Psalm is not made explicit by Barth. In their respective translations, the KJV has ‘to draw near to God’, while the NRSV prefers ‘to be near God’. The ET runs with ‘For me the good is to cleave to God’. KD II/2, 612–613 (552). KD II/2, 613 (552). KD II/2, 613 (552–553). KD II/2, 613–614 (553). The unacknowledged quotation comes from the song ‘Feiger Gedanken’, which appears in Act 2 of Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s musical production Lila. KD II/2, 614 (553). KD I/2, 304–397 (280–361). KD II/2, 614 (553). Given Barth’s regular denouncement of Schleiermacher’s alleged anthropocentrism in previous works, it is – as Barth notes – ‘remarkable’ (merkwürdig) that here he accuses Schleiermacher of having an ‘inhuman’ conception of the relationship between God and humanity, KD II/2, 614 (553). The question of whether Barth has Schleiermacher right in this accusation cannot be broached here. KD II/2, 614–615 (553–554). Horace is not acknowledged explicitly at this point, but an extract from his Odes (III.iii.7) is given. The quotation from Goethe is said by Barth to have been particularly loved by Harnack. This can be found in Barth’s doctrine of God, KD II/1, 587–685 (522–607). KD II/1, 589 (524). As Barth writes in his doctrine of God, then, the omnipotence of God is materially specified in the revelation of Jesus Christ, the Crucified, KD II/1, 682–683 (605).



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16 KD II/1, 674–675 (598). As the theological ethics will proceed to explain, the consequence of this revelation for humanity is that the command comes not simply obligating obedience, but also – and primarily and uniquely – permitting a true and particular freedom, KD II/2, 650 (585). 17 KD II/1, 682 (605). 18 KD II/2, 615 (554). 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid. 23 KD II/2, 616 (555). 24 Ibid. 25 For Barth, such ‘virtue ethics’ – Barth refers to Tugendlehre at KD II/2, 592 (533) – is inadmissible because its analogical (participationary) understanding of the God– human relation cannot entertain the question of the being or non-being of the human being, KD II/2, 592 (533), and because its derivation from Plato renders it is materially vacuous and thus susceptible of infilling in diverse religious ways, KD II/2, 605 (545). 26 Barth refers wonderfully to the ‘daily drowning of the old Adam [. . .] which is such a questionable thing because unfortunately he can swim’, KD III/2, 768 (631). Or again, in his doctrine of justification, Barth writes that human beings ‘in so far as they live in time and are considered in their own person [. . .] are simul peccator et iustus (simultaneously a sinner and justified)’, KD IV/1, 664 (596). 27 Among the small number of negative witnesses cited appear Schleiermacher (in the first small-print section) and (in the second small-print section) Plato – and the Platonists. Given that – as Barth would know – Schleiermacher was a significant translator of the works of Plato into German, the tempting possibility lies close to hand that the collocation – though not materially significant – may conceivably be no coincidence. 28 KD II/2, 600 (540). Against this possibility is Barth’s insistence that such ethics be ‘reinforced, determined, and guided by a preceding knowledge of the Word of God, whether this be more or less unexpressed’, KD II/2, 601 (541). Yet, in its favour stands Barth’s comment that ‘it is [. . .] entirely possible that Christian perceptions and inferences are also actually present where their Christian presuppositions are invisible or where one would – on closer investigation – even encounter all sorts of paltry Christian presuppositions’, KD II/2, 602 (542), and his call to correct ‘Christian ethics’ when it goes astray, at which point he makes explicit reference to Paul’s correcting of the errors of the Gentiles (not of the Christians!) in Acts 17:28, KD II/2, 602–603 (542).

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29 KD IV/3, 122–188 (110–165). Against speaking of such references as representing ‘little lights of creation’ is Barth’s stipulation that such lights ‘have nothing in themselves to do with the opposition of Creator and creature’, KD IV/3, 164 (145). Against speaking of such references as being ‘words in the world’, meanwhile, Barth’s concern may be that such words work ‘to lead the congregation deeper into the biblical Word [. . .] as the authentic testimony of the Word of Jesus Christ himself ’, KD IV/3, 151 (134). Yet, in the small-print section that follows this quote, Zwingli’s quoting of Hercules, Theseus, Socrates, Cicero and others is mentioned, while Barth indicates that he has, by contrast, deliberately refrained from citing examples, KD IV/3, 152 (135). The suspicion lies to hand that Barth is here in theological ethics drawing on some ‘little lights of creation’. 30 KD II/2, 575 (518). 31 KD II/2, 616 (555). The unacknowledged quotation is from the opening lines of the hymn ‘Allgenugsam Wesen’ (All-sufficient being) by the German Reformed writer Gerhard Tersteegen (1697–1769). A further quotation of the hymn follows almost immediately: ‘You alone delight – completely, profoundly, purely – soul, heart, and mind’. 32 The quotation of this is unacknowledged by Barth, but is – of course – Augustine, Confessions, I.1. 33 KD II/2, 616 (555). 34 KD II/2, 617 (555). 35 KD II/2, 617 (556). 36 KD III/4, 6–17 (7–17). Barth writes, ‘[Such an ethic] makes it just too comfortable for [human beings] to submit to – and, in fact, to judge themselves by – a decision which is not that of the divine command’, KD III/4, 14 (14). 37 KD II/2, 617 (556). It is not the case, of course, that the foundation of ethics is thus located in human belief: Barth is explicit that the command is present and effective before faith is awakened. KD II/2, 618 (556–557). 38 KD II/2, 618 (557). 39 KD II/2, 619 (557). 40 KD II/2, 618 (557). 41 KD II/2, 621 (560). 42 KD II/2, 628 (565). 43 Ibid. 44 Karl Barth, ‘Letter to Hans Stern, Editor of konkret, Hamburg, 1961’, in Briefe 1961–1968 (GA V.6), ed. Jürgen Fangmeier and Hinrich Stoevesandt (Zürich: TVZ, 1979), 16 (ET: Letters 1961–1968, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley [Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1981], 14). The reference to ‘concretely’ (konkret) directly references the title of Stern’s publication, a prominent and influential left-wing periodical of the day.

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since the Reformation. He thought it packed enough explosive charge to blow up the walls dividing Protestants from Catholics. In 1965, Lindbeck proposed that the eschatology that emerges through ‘Schema 17’ into ‘Schema 13’, that is, in the early drafts of Gaudium et Spes, was a tectonic shift that erased the chasm between Protestants and Catholics. Despite setbacks to the ecumenical movement and the receding of the goal of full, sacramental reunion, Lindbeck never abandoned this insight. Having spent many Roman evenings with the French priests and Monsignors, Lindbeck grasped that the conflict between the old Scholastics and the New Theologians was rooted in opposed political allegiances.3 The Old Thomists were anti-liberals, like the nineteenth-century popes:  they wanted the church to speak for the common good and the common man. They undercut their humanistic political theory with a practical determination to ward off theological utopianism at all costs. The aim of the New Theologians was to uproot neoscholastic anti-utopianism and plant Catholic social anthropology in a natural desire for the supernatural God. In Gaudium et Spes, everyone wins: the Thomists get their common good and a rejection of European-style ‘liberalism’ and the New Theologians get to found this social anthropology in a Christ-haunted utopianism, which is driven by the desire for God to build a new Jerusalem. In this paper, I will present Lindbeck’s interpretations of Schema 17 and 13, as they unfolded into Gaudium et Spes. Lindbeck’s exegesis was on the ball. And into the bargain, ‘eschatology’ gave Lindbeck the ‘new look’ on Pauline Christianity which narrative theology requires.

Lindbeck’s initial reaction to Gaudium et Spes Lindbeck’s earliest reaction to Gaudium et Spes appeared in French and has never been translated. In 1965, when the Pastoral Constitution was still ‘Schema 13’, Lindbeck mentions several ways in which the document changes ProtestantCatholic relations. Here are a couple: ‘When we employ eschatological categories’, as the Schema does, particularly as combined with the personalist and existential vision of the historicity of human life, the ancient theological conflicts about Sola fide and sola gratia, about free will and predestination, sin and concupiscence, purely and [. . .] disappear. For Catholics as well as Protestants, retrieve the Biblical vision of salvation as a passage from the old age to the new age, a passage from



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slavery to demonic powers to the freedom of the sons of God, deliverance from that fixation on the past which leads to attempts at self-justification to open the future to God. There is no way one could debate the old problems in the terms of that individualism which we have inherited from Augustine [. . .] and which, by itself, gave a meaning to those disputes like the one about infused grace and extrinsic imputation. The surmounting of the individualism of the Western tradition draws our attention to a second domain, that of ecclesial reunion. Not only the Bible, but also history and sociology, have rendered us more conscious of the social nature of man than one could have been with Aristotle and his time [. . .] Whoever concerns himself about an authentically personal life becomes a being who is profoundly preoccupied with the social context [. . .] it is only by means of that which can be transmitted in and through the Christian community, that a person can become consciously and actively a member of the body of Christ. The Church, not in the sense of an authoritarian institution, but as a communion, a community, is the mother to all of us – our mother country – and this is why her living continuity, her catholicity, and, in consequence, her unity are of an utmost importance.4

Lindbeck announces that the ‘eschatological communio’ theology of Schema 13 renders the Protestant-Catholic schism obsolete. He finds here the rather startling implication that the central features of the Lutheran Reformation, faith alone, grace alone, predestination, cease to matter. Lindbeck seems to regard the Pastoral Constitution’s focus on historicaleschatology as re-setting the picture of the human person so that the old questions which flow from examination of a person’s interiority or conscience disappear. A new, eschatological anthropology emerges, in which human beings belong in active history and oriented toward the future eschaton, are understood not as individuals who are busy tending their own little souls but rather as ‘collective humanity’, preoccupied with the social construction of the earthly city.

Lindbeck’s eschatological reading of Gaudium et Spes Gaudium et Spes describes the natural law which governs the morality of social and political endeavour in terms of the human ‘vocation’5 or calling.6 The document states that it belongs to the human vocation to connect the ‘city of man’ to the city of God. The Pastoral Constitution teaches that ‘while earthly progress must be carefully distinguished from the growth of Christ’s kingdom, to the extent that the former [earthly progress] can contribute to the

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better ordering of society, it is of vital concern to the city of God’.7 The Pastoral Constitution schools us in presenting human effort to create a better world in eschatological terms: ‘The Church has a saving and eschatological purpose which can be fully attained only in the future world. But she is already present in this world, and is composed of men, that is, of members of the earthly city, who have a call to form the family of God’s children’. Gaudium et Spes speaks of a proleptic intermingling of the future synthesis of the earthly and the heavenly cities. It instructs us that the presence of the new Jerusalem within the city of man is visible only to the eyes of faith: ‘That the earthly and the heavenly city penetrate each other is a fact accessible to faith alone; it remains a mystery of human history’.8 The Constitution would not have us conceive of our Christian vocation as extrinsic to the requirements of worldly citizenships: This council exhorts Christians, as citizens of two cities, to strive to discharge their earthly duties conscientiously and in response to the Gospel spirit. They are mistaken who, knowing that we have here no abiding city but seek one which is to come, think that they may therefore shirk their earthly responsibilities. For they are forgetting that by the faith itself they are more obliged than ever to measure up to these duties, each according to his proper vocation.9

Catholic theologians present at the Council saw that Gaudium et Spes ‘eschatologizes’ the traditional Catholic thinking about nature and grace, turning human nature into an active, constructive future orientation and grace as the historically future fulfillment of that orientation.10 Lindbeck’s reading of Gaudium et Spes is woven from this eschatological thread. Writing when the document was still Schema 13, Lindbeck was impressed by the document’s cosmic Christology, which ‘seems to suggest that [. . .] the “building up of the earthly city” is a participation in the cosmic redemptive activity of Christ’. The document’s teaching that ‘the redeemed must communicate [. . .] their hope’ of final, eschatological deliverance ‘by earthly agencies and conditions’11 rocked Lindbeck’s chimes. Lindbeck perceives that the Schema reframes the picture of grace perfecting nature within a historicalfuturistic conception of ‘fulfillment’. As Lindbeck reads the Schema, it exhorts ‘the Christian [. . .] to throw himself wholeheartedly into the building up of the earthly city’ just because the faithful citizen ‘thereby prepares the conditions for the final coming of the kingdom’.12 Lindbeck is enthused by the non-chiliastic millennialism of the Conciliar imagination, its plundering and rebaptizing of the old Joachimite image of the first fruits of the new Jerusalem sprouting in a renewed earth, here below, its recovery of Irenaeus’s this-worldly and optimistic



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eschatology. Lindbeck would have found the material for his reading in texts such as ‘human advancement, even in scientific, technical and artistic domains [. . .] is not irrelevant to the Christian’s hope, but is in some sense a direct preparation for the final fulfillment, for the ultimate manifestation of the kingdom of God’.13 Even between 1965 and 1967, Lindbeck had stated that ‘progress’ delivers both cures for hitherto incurable diseases and the atomic bomb: he knew that progress is not linear and often circles back on itself. He knew, too, that we do not necessarily know what counts as progress, or what, in our earthly ascent, is actually contributing to laying the foundations of the new Jerusalem, and what is a wrecking ball, knocking the building back down. But Lindbeck does not think our lack of knowledge of what counts as ‘progress’ matters, any more than the fact that the Greeks and the Romans did not advertently recognize their cultural achievements as ‘preparatio evangeliae’ matters. Lindbeck claims that ‘[t]‌he world is not getting better in any unambiguous way any more than in the thousands of years before Christ. And yet, perhaps even our ambiguous secular achievements are being used by God to prepare the way for the consummation, just as he used the Greeks and the Romans to prepare for the coming of the kingdom in the person of Jesus’.14 Lindbeck acknowledges, likewise, that what he sees as the Schema’s focus on eschatology and the future good of humanity as a whole can ‘distract attention from the one thing necessary’:  how it stands right now between the believer and the Lord of history. Lindbeck assigns such a concern for the relation between the individual and Christ to the Reformation and to a negative aspect of the Reformation:  Lindbeck the Conciliar observer already has the ‘social’ anthropology of his later, famous work on doctrine. He thus concedes the ‘individual’ and his immortal soul to the Catholic humanitarianism, inventing a rhetorical question of his own:  ‘Catholics can justifiably ask us whether we have not so individualized, personalized, and existentialized the forgiveness of sins that we have forgotten its objective, ontological and cosmic dimensions. They can ask us whether we have not so much emphasized faith that we have neglected hope’.15 Lindbeck has three levels of explanation of why Protestants and Catholics should give enthusiastic assent to the ‘eschatologism’ of Gaudium et Spes. The Conciliar ‘Joy and Hope’ is a threefold good. In the first place, the Constitution on the Church in the Modern World has assimilated the historicization of modern human consciousness. Modern people, as Lindbeck claims, seek transcendence in and through history: they envisage that which transcends them as being ‘ahead’ of them, not ‘above’ them. An authentically ‘Biblical eschatology’ resonates with

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how modern people experience their being in the world. The eschatologism of the Pastoral Constitution vibes with modernity. Lindbeck writes that ‘biblical eschatology [. . .] has not won the field, because theologies believe themselves faithful to the witness of Scripture. Its success must be attributed to the fact that New Testament eschatology takes on, in the modern perspective, a meaning which it did not have in the classical perspective’. And, thus, it can return anew to the center, in the way that hope, the fore-taste and the opening to the future salvation that God prepares for the whole world can become once more a dimension and an essential source of Christian faith and love. It is in this renewal of biblical eschatology, bound to the modern sense of the historical character of existence which, I  suggest, furnishes the new framework, the common framework, which will matter to both Catholic and Protestant theology in the times to come.16

Secondly, an eschatological perspective is susceptible of eschatological empirical verification.17 Lindbeck notes that the only language which makes sense for the modern pragmatist is a language open to empirical verification. Eschatological language is proleptically verifiable, so Lindbeck imagines. Thirdly, Lindbeck proposed in 1970 that the ‘eschatological’ orientation of the social teaching of Gaudium et Spes means that it presents the ‘good’ to be achieved by humanity not propositionally but in terms of a story. Conciliar eschatology makes the social teaching of the Constitution take a story form. It enables the document to conceive of ‘the world not in terms of endless sameness’, not on a Greek or Cartesian or ‘two-storey’, propositional model, ‘but as the story of God’s creative and redemptive action and man’s ever new responses’.18 Lindbeck proposes that the eschatological outlook of Gaudium et Spes historically relativizes the antique disputes between Protestants and Catholics, making those disuptes ‘of their time’ and not of our time. The historical perspective espoused by Gaudium et Spes shows us that the disagreements of Catholics and Protestants are ‘more complimentary than contradictory’.19 Hence, Lindbeck’s first reaction to Schema 13 was to propose that it kills Catholic-Protestant conflict stone dead in the past. Lindbeck offered as his ‘personal conclusion [. . .] that, it in the contemporary eschatological-historical framework of thought, it becomes more and more difficult to develop a complete and solid theological justification of Protestantism and of Catholicism as they now are’ – meaning, as two opposed versions of Christianity. Lindbeck felt that, ‘even at the heart of history, and without speaking of the reconciliation for which we hope at the end of time, we are constrained to aspire to one Church, to pray for one Church which would be



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simultaneously Catholic and reformed’.20 We can, as it were, live proleptically now in the reunited church which has yet to materialize but which Christian hope lets us perceive as the ground of our enterprise: the future reunion of Christendom is at the root of our ecumenical project. It is fascinating to observe the extent to which the father of narrative theology is prepared to immolate all the traditional Protestant and Lutheran concerns on the altar of eschatology. Lindbeck got colder feet as the years drew on, and by 1970 he was able to observe that the so-called ‘classical’ or vertical perspective is there in Gaudium et Spes, alongside the historical-eschatological.21 But Lindbeck never retreated from the impression of a new landscape which he received at his first gaze into Catholic eschatology. There is, nonetheless, something missing from Lindbeck’s reading. He does not quite grasp that the document resolves the natural/supernatural controversies in the person of Jesus Christ. In keeping with his own Lutheran narrative theology, an ‘eschatological’ story is taken to function like a futuristic version of ‘predestination’, and to determine the uptick of human fortunes without the merely individualistic intervention of any particular persons, even and including the Second Person of the Trinity. Lindbeck neglects to observe that the heart of Gaudium et Spes, out of which its eschatological conjunction of nature and supernature flows, is Jesus Christ. His mind is on questions like, Is salvation being conceived merely individualistically or communally? Lindbeck is blinkered by theories so that he fails to see personalities, even that of Jesus Christ. Along with many other Protestant observers,22 Lindbeck felt that Gaudium et Spes was ‘too optimistic’ in what it expected from this-worldly history. The 1960s was an upbeat decade, and many pessimists have wondered about the prudence of anchoring magisterial developments in such a tuneful season as the 1960s. Lindbeck was an ‘inopportunist’ with respect to Gaudium et Spes assumptions about social progress:  he remarked to Weigel in 1994 that ‘I had reservations about the document’s opportuneness. I was already pessimistic about the state of the world [. . .] you could see 1968 coming in 1965’. It was a fine thing to observe Roman Catholics magisterially affirming modernity, but this firm endorsement of modernity unsettled the young Lutheran professor. What Lindbeck fails to see here is that Gaudium et Spes uses modernity and ‘modern man’ as tropes with which to illustrate the human condition itself; its affirmation of ‘modernity’ sets the scene for an analysis of the human person who strides upon this stage in history. To affirm modernity is to affirm the backdrop and scene within which modern people live. But the point of this is to ask human beings what they are here for. It asks what’s up with modern times

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in order to ask modern people what is up with them. It discusses the ups and downs of modernity in order to consider the ups and downs of historical human beings. Gaudium et Spes describes ‘the modern world’ as ‘at once powerful and weak’: the absence of blanket affirming optimism leads into the inference that ‘the imbalances under which the modern world labors are linked with that core basic imbalance which is rooted in the heart of man’. In keeping with its inspiration in the Augustinian theme of the heart restless until it rests in God, and its constant Pascalian evocation of the grandeur and lowliness of man, the document notes that the internal conflicts which each individual experiences are externalized in the division between those complacent moderns who ‘are convinced that the future rule of man over the earth will satisfy every desire of his heart’ and the nihilistic moderns ‘who despair of any meaning to life and [. . .] think existence is devoid of [. . .] significance and strive to confer a total meaning on it by their own ingenuity alone’.23 The Constitution teaches that the human being who sidesteps self-interrogation about his own ‘end and beginning’, his purpose in life, either projects the desires of the restless heart outward and makes a sacrament of technology, or fixates on technological progress to make up for the intrinsic meaninglessness of it all. Trying to solve the human problem from ‘outside in’ rather than from inside out leads us to turn our social reality into a projection of the human problem writ large. Modernity with all its engineering masterworks is a projection of the human problem across the face of the earth in ambivalent technical achievements. The problem is that we have lost the key to the question, ‘What is man?’ We do not grasp that as a result of a broken bond to the Creator, and, therefore, with all our fellow human beings, ‘man is split within himself ’. ‘As a result’ of this ‘split’, the document teaches, ‘all of human life, whether individual or collective, shows itself to be a dramatic struggle between good and evil [. . .] Indeed, man finds that by himself he is incapable of battling the assaults of evil successfully, so that everyone feels as though he is bound by chains. But the Lord Himself came to free and strengthen man, renewing him inwardly and casting out that “prince of this world” [. . .] who held him in the bondage of sin. For sin has diminished man, blocking his path to fulfillment’.24 Lindbeck does not reflect upon this introspective side of Gaudium et Spes. Its eschatology is actually intended as a response to the real, historical situation of the human person, who is stuck in the mud and whose efforts to release himself enmire him still further. Gaudium et Spes was written by simple Catholic men who had been taught in their catechisms about the four last things. Across the spectrum of theologians



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who worked on the numerous Schemas for the Constitution from Karol Wojtyla and Henri de Lubac to Msgr. Piolanti and Sebastian Tromp, eschatology is about death, judgement, heaven and hell. Thus, paragraph 18 is about ‘the riddle of human existence grow[ing] most acute’. In the face of ‘death’, Man ‘rebels against death because he bears in himself an eternal seed which cannot be reduced to sheer matter’.25 So the document leads back through the labyrinth of introspection, down into the ‘acute’ questions raised by death, and through that door in the human soul to God: The Church holds that the recognition of God is in no way hostile to man’s dignity, since this dignity is rooted and perfected in God. For man was made an intelligent and free member of society by God Who created him, but even more important, he is called as a son to commune with God and share in His happiness. She further teaches that a hope related to the end of time does not diminish the importance of intervening duties but rather undergirds the acquittal of them with fresh incentives [. . .] when [. . .] the hope of life eternal [is] wanting, man’s dignity is most grievously lacerated, as current events often attest; riddles of life and death, of guilt and of grief go unsolved with the frequent result that men succumb to despair.26

The document contrasts the despairing attitude to modern technological society of secular agnosticism with the positive hopeful attitude to human progress which can be seriously entertained only by those who hope in eternity and eternal life. The document itself contrasts Godless despair over the future and Christological hope in eternal life giving us some hope for life on earth. So as John Paul II appreciated, the storm center of the eschatology of Gaudium et Spes, is at paragraph 22: ‘[O]‌nly in the mystery of the incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light. [. . .] Christ, by the revelation of the mystery of the Father [. . .] fully reveals man to man himself and makes his supreme calling clear’.27 Christ is the eschatological momentum of history. When we speak of the indwelling of the heavenly city in our earthly human achievements, we mean that Christ, the Lord of history, is present in every stage of the communal biography of mankind. One of the main contributions of the Protestant observers to the social documents of Vatican II, like Gaudium et Spes and Dignitatae Humanae, was the notion of the Church as a ‘servant’ presence in society. Originally proposed by the Reformed theologian Lukas Vischer, the idea of the ‘servant church’ was an important inroad in the discussion of how the Church could be present in public without dominating that public space.28 How could one steer between the out-of-date integralism of the traditionalists and the liberal reduction of faith to passive private option? The Protestant observers suggested that the Church



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about doctrines would not overturn the entrenched divisions of the Churches. Lindbeck told George Weigel in 1994, The circumstances that would make reunion possible had to do with much more than the discovery that these doctrines could be understood, without betraying one’s own heritage, in ways that were not church-dividing. We learned a lot as time went on. And while we were never naive enough to think that that agreement was all that was needed, we did think that a meeting of minds on the sixteenth-century conflicts [. . .] would make more difference ecumenically than in fact it has. We thought [. . .] that specifically historical doctrinal issues were more decisive than they proved to be.31

Nonetheless, Lindbeck left the Council thinking the Reformation was over and did not retreat from that insight. He explained to Weigel that ‘the agreements we reached are [. . .] one of the conditions for reunion. And so, while I have no idea when this progress will contribute in substantial ways to the reunion of the churches, I find myself feeling a great sense of satisfaction that that job is in large part done’.32 Writing in 2003, at the time of the Lutheran–Roman Catholic statement on Justification, Lindbeck asked this rhetorical question: ‘What [. . .] if the influence of the Enlightenment on modern and postmodern religious developments is itself coming to an end? What if it is the currently regnant theologies with their indifference to unitive ecumenism that are the anomaly? Perhaps, in our post-Constantinian yet increasingly globalist age, the visible unity of the Christian Churches, no doubt in post-Constantinian forms, will come to seem more and more important’.33

Notes 1 Lindbeck, cited in George Weigel, ‘Re-Viewing Vatican II: An Interview with George A. Lindbeck’, First Things 48 (December 1994): 44–50. 2 George Lindbeck, ‘A Protestant Point of View’, in Vatican II: An Interfaith Appraisal, ed. John Miller (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1966), 219–228. 3 Ibid. 4 George A. Lindbeck, ‘Le Cadre du Désaccord Catholique-Protestant’, in Théologie d’aujourd’hui et de demain, ed. P. Burke, H. de Lubac et al. (Paris: Cerf, 1967), 191– 206 (202–203). 5 Vatican II, Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World: Gaudium Et Spes (1965) # 35. 6 Ibid., # 35. 7 Ibid., # 36.

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Ibid., #40 Ibid., # 43. Ibid., 638. George A. Lindbeck, Dialogue on the Way: Protestant Report from Rome on the Vatican Council (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg, 1965), 240. 12 Ibid., 242. 13 Ibid., 244. 14 Ibid., 250. 15 Ibid., 251 16 Lindbeck, ‘Le Cadre du Désaccord Catholique-Protestant’, 197. 17 Ibid., 199. 18 George A. Lindbeck, The Future of Roman Catholic Theology: Vatican II – Catalytst for Change (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1970), 13. 19 Lindbeck, ‘Le Cadre du Désaccord Catholique-Protestant’, 205. 20 Ibid., 206. 21 Lindbeck, The Future of Roman Catholic Theology, 23. 22 Henry Bruston, ‘L’Église et la Vocation Humaine’, J. Bosc, M. Ferrier Welti, A. Roux et al., eds, Points de Vue de Théologiens Protestants: Études sur ls décrets du Concile Vatican II (Paris: Cerf, 1967). 23 Gaudium et Spes, # 10. 24 Gaudium et Spes, # 12. 25 Ibid., # 18. 26 Ibid., # 21. 27 Ibid., # 22. 28 Herbert Vorgrimler, ed., Commentary on the Documents of Vatican II: Volume V. Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, trans. W. J. O’Hara (London: Burns & Oates, 1969), 20–25. 29 Lindbeck, Future, 49–50 30 Ibid., 35. 31 Lindbeck, cited in George Weigel, ‘Re-Viewing Vatican II: An Interview with George A. Lindbeck’. 32 Ibid. 33 George Lindbeck, ‘The University and Ecumenism’, in Justification and the Future of the Ecumenical Movement: The Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, ed. William G. Rusch (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2003), 10.

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natural world, for it is believed that divine integrity prohibits the violation of the very laws of nature that God has created. On the other hand, at the heart of Christian history and theology is a primal commitment to the ongoing active presence of God in creation, responding to the needs and actions of created beings in a truly relational manner. A  theistic understanding of the God–world relationship assumes an interactive relationship between God and nature (including, but not limited to, humans) and does not allow a retreat into deistic claims that God has created a law-governed universe that is now devoid of God’s ongoing activity. It is because of this dual commitment to scientific methodology and to a theistic understanding of divine activity that contemporary theologians have sought ways to ‘fit’ divine activity into specific underdetermined areas of the natural world. Quantum mechanics, chaos theory, and emergence have all been posited (and contested) as specific underdetermined areas of the natural world in which God might appropriately act  – that is, without ‘breaking’ any laws of nature.1 And yet, these seemingly non-interventionist theories of divine action have been challenged as both theologically insufficient and scientifically implausible.2 What, then, is a Christian theologian to do? How can one take seriously not only scientific knowledge and practice but also the theological claim that God is truly relational and responsive to creation? One underutilized and extremely rich theological resource, I suggest, is to be found in Eastern Orthodox theology. What one finds upon close examination of Orthodox concepts is that this Christian tradition challenges the (perhaps unnecessary) binaries within which Western divine action theology has often been developed. In particular, an Eastern Orthodox model of divine action challenges the often-assumed conception of nature wherein the natural world is defined by its ontological distinction from the supranatural  – that is, God and other spiritual realities. Instead, Eastern Orthodox theologians insist that nature is only truly natural to the extent that it is involved with, or participates in, God. Using concepts such as the Logos/logoi, these theologians describe divine action as a fundamental feature of full reality and work with a God–world model in which the Western tendency to discuss the natural world as a reality independent of divine presence and activity is, essentially, theologically insufficient. In what follows then, I  will suggest that Eastern Orthodox theology offers a helpful corrective to contemporary divine action theology. In particular, Orthodoxy essentially posits a theistic version of naturalism that serves to reframe the usual conceptions of interventionism and non-interventionism, the laws of nature and the ‘default’ relationship between God and the natural

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might ‘appropriately’ act without intervening in law-governed processes. This causal joint model is intended to take seriously both scientifically identifiable regularities in nature, as well as theological commitments to God’s activity in creation. One assumption within contemporary divine action theology (including the DAP) has been that divine action is to be divided into three categories: general divine action, special divine action and miracles. General divine action is taken to be the creation and sustaining of the natural world and is often simply equated with the laws of nature in divine action discussions. Miracles, on the other hand, have been largely ignored as an unfruitful area of inquiry within such projects as the DAP, at least insofar as miracles are defined in the Humean sense as violations of the laws of nature.3 Instead, the DAP (and the many scholars influenced by its sizable research output) focused largely on special divine action  – God’s mode of acting in and through natural processes in such a way that the laws of nature are not violated but also allowing God to be temporally responsive to personal needs, prayers and so on. Robert John Russell (perhaps the most prominent and influential participant in the DAP) writes that ‘we can now understand special providence as the objective acts of God in nature and history, to which we respond, and we can understand these acts in a noninterventionist manner consistent with science’.4 As will become clear, this three-fold typology may be arbitrary or even theologically suspect. Indeed, while the categorization of different types of divine action may understandably seem helpful, it is also true that this categorization has the effect of shaping – rather than simply describing – how one approaches the divine action question. As we will see, challenging the distinctions between general divine action, special divine action and miracles is a key component of Orthodox responses to contemporary divine action theology. While the scientific problems with causal joint approaches have been well rehearsed elsewhere, it is helpful here to highlight the theological problems arising from the implicit assumptions undergirding the causal joint model assumed by the DAP and a great many other divine action theorists.5 Specifically, the causal joint model exhibits commitments to non-interventionism and a prescriptive view of the laws of nature. Understanding these unexamined metaphysical assumptions is an important component not only to identifying the theological problems with the standard causal joint approach to divine action but also to seeing how Eastern Orthodoxy might provide a more theologically sound corrective – even in a scientific age.

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Eastern Orthodox theology of nature is as a form of theistic naturalism. This theistic naturalism affirms that an understanding of nature that excludes God’s immanent activity is ‘in fact no more than subnaturalism [. . .] Only in the context of what has been revealed to us by God can the universe in which we live be fully understood’.12 That is, not only does God make a difference to how we see and explain the natural world, but the natural world itself is fundamentally involved with God. Divine action is intrinsic to nature itself, rather than an intrusion into an otherwise ‘pure’ nature. Writing of Orthodox theologian Vladimir Lossky, Knight explains how Orthodoxy ‘knows nothing of “pure nature” to which grace is added as a supernatural gift. For it, there is no natural or “normal” state, since grace is implied by the act of creation itself ’.13 And again, in contrast to the metaphysical constructs of Western divine action theorists, Knight writes that ‘for Orthodox theology there is no separation of grace and nature of the kind that medieval Western theologians (with the exception of Duns Scotus) saw as almost axiomatic’.14 An Eastern Orthodox conception of nature, then, would only allow for an account of divine action that begins from an affirmation of God’s active, immanent presence from the start – any causal joint account attempting to ‘insert’ God into underdetermined areas of nature would be deemed theologically incoherent, and the Eastern theologian would reject ‘the notion – common in Western philosophical theism – that the world is intrinsically separated from God’.15 It will be evident that the theology of nature described above is basically panentheistic, and while many in science and theology have been happy to adopt this God–world model, others will be concerned about panentheism’s potential for minimizing the distinction between God and nature to such an extent that the two are conflated  – that is, rendering pantheism. While a full discussion of panentheism is beyond the scope of this paper, it is perhaps helpful to examine the specific theological concepts informing an Orthodox God–world model in the first place. Namely, an Orthodox theology of creation includes an account of Logos cosmology. Knight, for example, engages deeply with Maximos the Confessor, explaining that ‘Maximos perceives the Logos of God not only in the person of Jesus, but in the words – logoi – of all prophetic utterance, and in the logoi – in the sense of underlying principles – of all created things from the beginning’.16 Maximos is thus working with an understanding of the Word that has truly cosmic significance, having to do not only with Jesus Christ but also with the basic structuring principles – the logoi – of nature itself.17 Thus, Knight can write affirm that ‘in some sense, the Word that “came into” the world in the person of Jesus had not previously been absent from it’.18 In the words

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could ‘break in’ to the created order without intervening in the laws of nature. But if God’s activity is inherent to the structure of nature itself, then not only is special divine action rendered an incoherent concept, but the commitment to non-interventionism becomes unnecessary as well. It is technically impossible for God to intervene in the first place, for God is already in nature to begin with – non-intervention would imply the theoretical possibility of intervention, but that in turn implies an understanding of nature in which God is, by default, inactive. Interestingly, Knight argues that divine action can ‘be seen as an anticipation of our restoration to a “natural” state from our present “subnatural” one’.23 There is, thus, an eschatological dimension to Orthodox divine action, a sense in which divine activity is not an intervention, and not a ‘special’ act of non-interventionist activity, but a reflection of God’s salvific, eschatological intention for all creation to be made fully natural in the truest sense of the word. Thus, Knight argues that ‘when the universe “changes” so as to bring about events of special providence, it is a sign and foretaste of what is to be when all the purposes of God have been fulfilled [. . .] Created things are, in the deepest sense, simply becoming themselves as they are in the intention of God [. . .] so that nature becomes “natural” once more’.24 One could perhaps thus say that all divine action is by definition ‘non-interventionist’ – not because it fits the standard causal joint model, but because the idea of intervention implies an erroneous relationship between God and nature. But what about the laws of nature? How, exactly, should we understand the regularities that we observe and which are so reliably predictive of scientifically verifiable outcomes? While there is not a single, comprehensive Orthodox response to this, Knight offers one helpful perspective. Specifically, Knight suggests that we contextualize physical regularities within what he calls ‘higher laws’ – Knight suggests that ‘there may be laws of nature about which we know nothing scientifically but that nevertheless occasionally have significant effects’.25 In other words, if we affirm that all nature exists in a fundamental, dynamic relationship to an active and immanent God, then the ‘laws’ of nature currently explicable in scientific terms must necessarily be understood against the backdrop of the full spectrum of causal influences – created and uncreated. In other words, observable regularities exist, but they form only one part of the overall causal picture. They exist in fundamental relationship to God’s immanent presence and activity; ‘the laws of nature that can be investigated through the scientific method represent only a “low-level” aspect of the way in which God’s presence in the world allows God’s will to be accomplished’.26 Within this framework, the



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laws of nature as currently understood reflect only our human approximations of reality as it truly is, taking into account only the physical mechanisms of which we are currently capable of identifying. The fact that divine action seems absolutely unacceptable from a scientific perspective is not, Knight would suggest, because of some inherent incompatibility between current scientific laws and the ‘higher laws’ of divine agency. Rather, this incomprehensibility ‘is because [divine action’s] manifestation depends on something that cannot be replicated under laboratory condition: the faithful response to God of those who recognize him as their creator and redeemer’.27 I have here explored the challenges facing non-interventionist causal joint approaches to divine action and possible correctives from within Eastern Orthodoxy. The contemporary divine action discussion has been overwhelmingly framed by a non-interventionist commitment to a God–world model in which nature is understood as essentially devoid of divine presence and activity. Within such a model, the potential for any theologically robust, scientifically plausible account of divine action is grim indeed. Eastern Orthodoxy, on the other hand, with its theology of nature that stresses the fundamental, dynamic relationship between God and nature, offers an approach to divine action that essentially upends the standard causal joint model. In its place, Orthodoxy suggests a rich, textured understanding of nature, ‘laws’ and divine-creature interaction. While much remains to be done in fleshing out Western engagement with an Orthodox account of divine action, Orthodoxy may well offer those in theology and science a real ‘light from the East’.28

Notes 1 See Wesley Wildman, ‘The Divine Action Project, 1988–2003’, Theology and Science 2, no. 1 (2004): 31–75. 2 See Nicholas Saunders, Divine Action and Modern Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 3 Wildman, ‘The Divine Action Project’, 38. 4 Robert J. Russell, ‘Does the “God Who Acts” Really Act? New Approaches to Divine Action in Light of Science’, Theology Today 54, no. 1 (1997): 45. 5 See Saunders, Divine Action and Modern Science. 6 Wildman, ‘The Divine Action Project’, 38. 7 Ibid., 38. 8 Taede Smedes, ‘Beyond Barbour or Back to Basics? The Future of Science-andReligion and the Quest for Unity’, Zygon 43, no. 1 (2008): 243.

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9 Niels Henrik Gregersen, ‘Special Divine Action and the Quilt of Laws’, in Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action: Twenty Years of Challenge and Progress, ed. Robert John Russell, Nancey Murphy and William R. Stoeger, S. J. (Vatican City State: Vatican Observatory Publications, 2008), 191. 10 Saunders, Divine Action and Modern Science, 49. 11 William R. Stoeger, ‘Conceiving Divine Action in a Dynamic Universe’, in Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action: Twenty Years of Challenge and Progress, ed. Robert John Russell, Nancey Murphy and William R. Stoeger, S. J. (Vatican City State: Vatican Observatory Publications, 2008), 237. 12 Christopher C. Knight, The God of Nature: Incarnation and Contemporary Science (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2007), 95. 13 Christopher C. Knight, ‘An Eastern Orthodox Critique’, Journal of Religion and Science 51, no. 3 (2016): 573–591, 584. Knight is here referencing Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (Cambridge: James Clarke, 1991), 101. 14 Knight, ‘An Eastern Orthodox Critique’, 584. 15 Knight, The God of Nature, 31. 16 Christopher C. Knight, ‘Theistic Naturalism and the Word Made Flesh’, in In Whom We Live and Move and Have Our Being: Panentheistic Reflection on God’s Presence in a Scientific World, ed. Philip Clayton and Arthur Peacocke (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2004), 57. 17 See also Keith Ward, Christ and the Cosmos: A Reformulation of Trinitarian Doctrine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), Ch. 8. 18 Knight, The God of Nature, 32. 19 Particularly found in Maximus the Confessor, Ambiguum 7, translated in St Maximus the Confessor, On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ, trans. Paul Blowers and Robert Louis Wilson (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003). 20 Andrew Louth, Introducing Eastern Orthodoxy (London: SPCK, 2013), 42. 21 Knight, ‘An Eastern Orthodox Critique’, 585. 22 Knight, ‘Theistic Naturalism and the Word Made Flesh’, 59. 23 Knight, ‘An Eastern Orthodox Critique’, 586. 24 Knight, The God of Nature, 94. 25 Ibid., 39. 26 Ibid., xi. 27 Knight, The God of Nature, 39. 28 Alexei Nesteruk, Light from the East: Theology, Science, and the Eastern Orthodox Tradition (Cambridge: International Society for Science and Religion, 2007).

16

Christianity and China: Looking Forward George Newlands

‘Here I  stand’  – Luther’s famous challenge epitomizes that occasional but existential dilemma to which the best answers are often far from simple. Challenges to basic Christian values always invite an absolute clarity of response, yet this affirmation sometimes carries a probability that the result may do harm to unknown numbers of people not directly involved without solving the problem. What then? I would like to offer a contribution to this conversation by looking at one instance in recent history. Iain Torrance has himself reflected deeply on issues of church and state, and ethics and civil society, and his grandparents instantiated a remarkable path to coping effectively with this challenge over forty years of pastoral work in China. My example comes from China. I begin by thinking of China as an area which Europe’s theology, though not its politics and economics, has often largely forgotten. The establishment of a communist government in 1949 made it extremely difficult, especially for the churches, to maintain direct links with China, and the huge momentum of the previous half century was lost. During my own theological studies, and in my teaching career, China was hardly mentioned:  I suspect this was not a unique experience. There was, of course, a very substantial academic discipline in Chinese studies, but that was another world. More recently, Western theology has become more engaged with Islam, but with China, home to a sixth of the world’s population, there remains comparatively less involvement. Today, however, there exists flourishing Chinese Christian theology, Sino-Christian theology and a wide range of religious studies reflecting the numerous varieties of community in China where Christianity is practised and where it is studied. In this chapter, I  want to highlight this area as a place where greater interaction may mutually benefit all who share a common faith and all who share concern for our common humanity. I start from

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apparently unpromising territory, with relationships between church and state, the subject of myriad monographs in political studies. I look at the issues from theological and religious aspects, very much aware that British contributions are often, and not surprisingly, still viewed with profound scepticism in China, and that Chinese observations may often be much more significant than any outside comment. China, like Europe, has many faces and historically has always been concerned to maintain its unity and stability. Instability brings many unanticipated challenges, as we see in Europe today. The priority of stability can impinge on any community which evokes a fundamental loyalty from its members. We see tension between church and state played out in all areas where Christian faith has been established, from ancient Rome to medieval Europe and to contemporary America. The earliest Chinese Christians found themselves in China in part because they had been driven eastward by an insecure and ideologically driven Roman Empire. We see continuing problems: How do we distinguish rule of law from rule by law? Tension between obedience and conscience, between God and Caesar, was there from New Testament times, with mixed results for the future of the parties involved. Are there absolute criteria of value – is there scope for constructive conversation or only for uncompromising affirmation? All have been tried, and all have been the best solution at different times. It is easy to advocate the toughest options from a comfortable seat outside the action. But difficult decisions sometimes have to be made. Appeals to a transcendent source of ultimate significance will always be an issue where states regard their own polity as the embodiment of ultimate value and when their actions are perceived by some of their citizens to be in clear contradiction to what are considered to be the most basic values of that transcendent source. It has not been difficult for Western Christians to criticize the relation of the established churches in China to the state. The state is the ultimate source of authority, above church and law. Yet, many European churches are, and have been for centuries, established or semi-established churches, and there are strong arguments both for and against these relationships. Colonialism is an easy target, though, of course, concern about religious bodies has existed at least since medieval times. In China, Britain – along with Russia and Japan – is still remembered as a prime source of the humiliations of the nineteenth century, and Christianity itself can be seen as a source of intrinsic instability. The catastrophe of the Taipeng Rebellion (1850–1864), which saw the deaths of tens of millions, has not been entirely forgotten. In the United States, Christians have in the past



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rendered great service to China, not least through the provision of education and health care when very little else existed. Yale, Harvard and the flagship seminaries in Princeton and Union in New  York all played major roles from the earliest period of American missionary involvement. Chinese and American Christians in America continue to contribute materially to theology and church in China. This service is complicated by the growth of tensions between the world’s superpowers – Christianity too easily becomes entangled in politics. Issues fundamental to Christian discipleship, like human rights and human dignity, easily become political footballs. This all contributes to continuing anxiety about foreign influence in China. But there is much that is positive. Countries with less-contested histories of political involvement, like Norway and Canada, have become places where constructive engagement with China takes place, even on a comparatively small scale. Equally significant is the careful scholarship of modern Sino-Christian writers who have evaluated the much-criticized missionary legacy in more positive terms. Is there anything that the European theologian can offer in these conversations? Clearly none of these issues exist in a cultural and historical vacuum. Quite apart from Chinese construal of their ‘wounded history’ between 1840 and 1949, past wounds and tensions generated between different Christian groups in China complicate matters further. Sino-Christian theology as practised in the mainland and elsewhere in South East Asia takes the initiative in constructing conversation with Western theologies from a Chinese perspective, selecting movements and materials which may illuminate the Chinese social and cultural environment. When Western theology studies Asian theology, it may also find fresh perspectives. This is where the advantage of listening as much as talking becomes obvious, and may be one way of overcoming serious obstacles to mutual relationship. Here is a prime example of the problems facing dialogue. Central to Christian faith is the notion of incarnation. It is sometimes said that part of the reason for a serious and weakening division between evangelical and liberal Christians in China is that while evangelicals have historically stressed justification by faith and personal salvation, liberals have emphasized the centrality of love, more precisely, the symbol of the cosmic Christ within the whole created order. Both have, in recent years, been active in promoting human rights, but this concept has sometimes been hijacked by outside sources in the pursuit of global political goals. Liberals have been tempted to agree to place loyalty to state initiatives above loyalty to their evangelical fellow Christians. On the other hand, some evangelicals have worked courageously as human rights lawyers for religious

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freedom, inevitably raising tensions with the state, while other evangelicals encourage the state to maintain laws originally imposed on China by the British. For Christian faith, salvation is not just a verbal promise. It is embedded, concretized and instantiated in the material world of which we are ourselves a part. The Word became flesh. The Word became human. All humanity is valuable in the sight of God because God has embraced humanity in all its forms. God has embraced life in all its experiences, death in its worst horrors, and out of this experience has brought salvation. Incarnation is central to the tradition of the gospel which the church relives in every generation in its own way. Faithful discipleship is not served by mindless repetition. If the old language has got to the stage of obscuring rather than illuminating the true meaning of incarnation, perhaps even immunizing us against the risk-laden reality of incarnational discipleship, might it not indeed be time to jettison notions such as incarnation in the name of wider understandings of solidarity, an option explored by some British scholars half a century ago? There was fresh appreciation by such scholars of many aspects of Christology. But in time there was a realization that much that is vital to Christian life and action would be lost. Nevertheless, here was a useful reminder that even key concepts cannot simply be taken for granted, precisely if they are to have the dynamic effects today that they had for their original creators. Most importantly, God is where people are, at the point of greatest need. Incarnation is central. Yet, it is possible to think and act in profoundly incarnational ways without using the word incarnation, and possible to think and act with notions of incarnation in ways which actually mask the entire basic thrust of incarnation, just as the commitment to human dignity may be undermined by nations which talk the talk without walking the walk. For Christians, Jesus is at once the bearer of the presence of God and the medium of its hiddenness. Through life, death and resurrection, there takes place a costly reconciliation, in which the relationship between God and humanity is renewed, to await the perfection of the eschatological peace of God. All of this was to be disputed fiercely in the early centuries of the Christian era, as the desire for doctrinal uniformity led to a suppression of minorities whose views were perceived to be inadequate. Emperors could hijack the theological slogans. Every age thinks that its own preferred interpretation most faithfully reflects the original interpretation – and that is of course a legitimate aspiration. In the twenty-first century, emancipatory theologies and human rights-orientated Christologies have come to complement and challenge traditional perspectives. None of this stress on solidarity and equality is wholly owned by Western or



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Eastern theology, just as no country has a monopoly on respect for human rights. Here is one kind of unity in diversity. However we come to think of incarnation, the decisive issue is how we seek to implement this understanding through engagement in the complex globalized world in which we live. This might be a Christomorphic response to the challenge of the form of Christ in the world. Theology attempts to ground love in a kenotic framework which prioritizes the most vulnerable. This is not a recipe for inertia, but a reminder that it may often be better for initiatives towards building confidence and concerted action to come from the otherness of the other. This is not exclusively a matter of Chinese Christianity or indeed of Chinese values or the Chinese dream. It is more a question of the human dream of mutual respect which is the basis of trust. So far, I have considered primarily theology. Students of Chinese language, literature, culture and politics offer in-depth assessments of engagement in these fields. The future of evangelical Christianity and of what approximates more to a ‘cultural Christianity’ is steeped in the developing directions of Chinese culture. In responding to coming cultural challenges, we find Chinese Christians and their allies analysing the trials and achievements of European scholars who have wrestled with the interaction of theology, church and culture, from Troeltsch and Weber to Habermas and Badiou, from Barth to Wuthnow, often from angles unfamiliar to their Western counterparts. Echoes in concern for a just society and for authentic human dignity may be read in the light of very similar concerns in Mencius and other Chinese classics. It is fascinating, too, to hear Chinese students reacting to films on the European Holocaust and recalling grandparents’ memories of catastrophe nearer home. Equally telling is the silence concerning ‘sensitive’ events that cannot be legally mentioned, in some ways echoing the near silence that for twenty years followed the Holocaust and which, in some instances, can still apply. Totgeschwiegen, totgeschlagen. Silebatur, it was passed over in silence, a menace that Cicero elegantly highlighted two thousand years before. But, in time, the unspeakable always become speakable, and the utterance may contribute to the healing. Historically, there have long been tensions between Christian communities and state authorities. The gospel involves perspectives which are central to faith – love for God as the source of our common humanity and love for all people, especially for the vulnerable. These imperatives remain constant. States which ignore them are inevitably on a collision course with faith. Equally, Christian discipleship is inclusive. The love of God is to be shown to all people including state authorities, in engagement which makes constructive contributions to society, through listening and working together. Reconciliation is for the whole

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created order. Different branches of Christian community will stress different approaches to these issues in different circumstances. That is why working towards unity in diversity, both in the Christian community and in the wider society is key. Christianity is not simply a protest movement but a responsible player in society. Policies of divide and rule, whether by the state or the churches themselves, are always a menace. When policies are driven by myopic ideologies, dialogue may become impossible. Yet, often one important result of open dialogue is simply better information, from the lowest to the highest levels of society. Religious communities may often misunderstand the complexities of government policy and related legislation. Governments may critically misunderstand the nature of religious beliefs. In China, there is still a belief in some quarters that Christianity is essentially Western, and therefore suspect. Yet, Jesus lived in the Middle East, where the Biblical writings were created. Christians who settled in China were involved in the life of the early church, and a significant amount of modern theology comes from the liberation theologies that spring from African, Asian and South American thinkers. On the other hand, many Christians appear to believe that political structures which fail to mirror the structures with which they are most familiar are simply bound to be oppressive, without reflecting on the presence of these negatives within their own societies. Better information may not solve problems where there is a positive determination to misinterpret, but it can often help. How can we build up shared values between churches, between states and between church and state? I  take some encouragement from developments in Sino-Christian theology in the work of Professor Yang Huilin of Renmin University and his Chinese colleagues. These scholars have developed programmes in dialogue with modern European philosophy and contemporary theology, notably in Leuven. This has the advantage of encompassing Catholic theology as well as Protestant  – it is easy to forget the long saga of Catholic conversation in China before the modern era. In lectures at the Renmin University of Beijing Summer Institute in 2015, I was able raise some of these issues from a Western perspective, and in his own paper, Professor Yang Huilin, head of the host department and a senior Party member, made some highly pertinent observations. In short, it is true that ‘constructive global coexistence’ should be based on the shared values, however, if we cannot realize that none of us is ‘the only tent in town’, ‘value’ is not ‘value’ per se any more but has been replaced by our



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‘identity’, ‘position’ or ‘context’. If we foolishly assume that we can represent the shared values of all human beings, we have been even far away from the genuine meaning of ‘value’. The effectiveness of ‘value’ does not depend on the nouns that can be interpreted or endowed with meaning randomly and arbitrarily, but on a verbal process that generates the value. In other words, this process is not just sharing the values as nouns but mutually participating into the sharing and making them ‘sharable’. The fundamental logic in this process is probably a kind of ‘impossible possibility’: because ‘value’ itself is defined as an absolute ideal, we have been ‘relativized’ by this definition and thus become the ‘impossible’; on the other hand, because ‘value’ cannot be replaced or internalized by ‘us’, our ‘impossibility’ brings out the ‘possibility’ of ‘value’, which enables ‘value’ to surpass any kind of ‘centralized discourse’ or ‘politics of identity’ and become the foundation of values supporting the ‘global co-existence’.

Developing the impossibly possible with the aid of Jullien’s écart, Gerhard Ebeling’s polarity and James Legge’s reflections on translation to provide tools for a better understanding of the intercultural communication, Professor Yang sketches the notion of a new reality appearing ‘in between’ the opposition of two extremes. He cites Barth in Romans on the contradiction between life and death. ‘The dilemma of this double-sided negation is resolved only by the apparent impossibility that “minus times minus equals plus.” ’1 He adds Bonhoeffer in his Letters: ‘The God who makes us live in this world without using God as a working hypothesis is the God before whom we are standing. Before God and with God we live without God.’2 The ‘in-between’ in Chinese thought generates reciprocity which encompasses empathy and mutuality, illustrated in comparing the two versions of the Golden Rule, in the Bible and in Mencius. Yang concludes that even in a technically incommunicative dialogue, there is value in a ‘ “devoted and self-abandoned” effort that has evoked and promoted the “virtual encountering of two worlds of ideas” ’. This might be more important than simply sharing the similar but suspicious ‘values’ on the surface level or staying at a moral appeal of ‘global co-existence’. What is at stake here is the value of a conversation without frontiers which may create new possibilities through exploring the in-depth significance of apparently unintelligible concepts in very different cultures. It seems to me that though such notions have been adumbrated by one or two Western writers, for example, Voegelin and Theunissen, Yang’s narrative underlined the imperative in the case of Christian theology of making a concerted attempt at in-depth knowledge of Chinese culture and tradition, in the manner of Yang’s

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own erudite analysis of the Western traditions. His position as a former vice president of Renmin University, a survivor of the ‘sent out’ generation of the Cultural Revolution and a scholar deeply sympathetic to, but not observant of, Christian faith and practice is itself a testimony to one important variant of the ‘in between’. Returning to the discussions between different Christian groups in China, one of the main differences between the state church and the more evangelical churches has been on the question of justification by faith. Stress on confessing the faith is a strength of Chinese Reformed communities, growing in recent years through intellectual attraction for professionals. Justification can be seen as a vital element of faith which is notably deficient in the official churches, with their focus on love and on incarnation. Justification reminds us, too, of the need to make a clear witness to the priorities of the gospel, if necessary, over and against the state, rather than leaving the state to its own appropriate sphere of jurisdiction. Love has concrete, specific substance; it is not a general affirmation of benevolent harmony. Compromise on issues affecting the substance of belief is never easy, yet communities can learn to agree to disagree. Recent work on justification in Europe and in the United States has clarified issues and helped to separate authentic tradition from pure traditionalism. At the same time, the work of Yang and other scholars reveals ways of negotiating the relationship between legal principle and the creation of empathetic exception in Chinese legal codes, past and present. The ‘in between’ can still lead to unacceptable compromise, but it may also create interruption which enriches tradition and moves conversation forwards. In the best outcome, the ‘in between’ may enable different perspectives to retain their authenticity while working together in a constructive relationship. Such an outcome is, of course, entirely dependent on trust and on the absence of overriding ideological imperatives judged to endanger human dignity. Interestingly for this essay, Yang cites approvingly Iain Torrance’s father T. F. Torrance’s maxim about being unable to picture how a picture pictures a picture, as an argument against the definition of absolutes through language – a seminal insight, expressed in different ways by Goedel, Wittgenstein, Max Born and others. It does not inhibit scholars from assuming that their own particular theological and ideological approximation is superior to any other approximation, but it serves as a check against complete dogmatic scholasticism. The Torrance quote might suggest parallel mental strategies for the unlocking of conversational logjams, not through linguistics but through



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mathematical physics. John Polkinghorne said that Christology has not yet found its Dirac. Without this discovery, it might still be possible to see in the work of Dirac and colleagues further hints of the possibility of conversation between incommensurable values which produce unexpected and apparently serendipitous solutions to the insoluble, results through courage to change minds and precision calculation. Numbers are the prerogative neither of East nor West. I return to Luther’s challenge. There are values which Christians as Christians can neither dilute nor finesse and which they share with at least some human beings in every culture. On basic issues of human dignity, there are points to be taken from critics such as Samuel Moyn and from Jullien’s criticism of the assumed universality of values in the Western tradition. However, responsible global critical scholarship has long been well aware of the incompleteness of its perspectives, past and present. Faith understands the imperative to unconditional love, not as the acme of a superior Western tradition of transcendent values, but as the centre of the divine creation of the human. This love may of course be better understood through the lens of comparison with cultures other than our own. The local remains important but does not shut out the global. World Christianity is a reality. And unconditional love may also be appreciated without faith in God. At times, it may become impossible to communicate in the face of ideological blindness and political oppression on all sides. With due consideration for the inadequacy and element of cultural relativism in all ideologies, torture remains torture and killing remains killing. The field of the ‘in between’ can be a promising area where conversation may produce different but constructive outcomes, from ‘agreeing to disagree’ to reaching a more comprehensively common mind. Yet, the realities can often subvert the theoretical. To reach ‘agree to disagree’ in the ‘in between’, not to say reach a common mind, can sometimes be extremely difficult. A gradualist approach may not resolve the issues. Sometimes there are no magic wands, even ‘in between’. The current tightening of state control over social and personal life in China is a particularly unfortunate development. It may take considerable time before conditions for a truly fruitful engagement are present. But there is a human imperative and, beyond any doubt, a Christian imperative to continue to reflect and to act with intelligent, focused and consistent commitment and good will. Even in the most unpromising of circumstances, the value of such commitment, within the residual ‘in between’ of a dream of common humanity, even the humanity of God, should not be underestimated.

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Notes 1 Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, trans. Edwyn C. Hoskyns (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), 141. 2 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Vol. 8, ed. John W. de Gruchy, trans. Christian Gremmels, Eberhard Bethge and Renate Bethge (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2010), 479.

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they must not ‘make an idol of me, or a Jerusalem of Geneva’. He was buried in an unmarked grave. Calvin wanted people to imitate Christ, not him. Calvin’s concern was to point people to Christ in Scripture, ‘Christ clothed in his Gospel’, as he so beautifully called Jesus in his Institutes of the Christian Religion. But it is precisely for this reason that we should look to Calvin for inspiration, because his focus was so clearly on Christ. And who is this Christ we find in Calvin? He is none other than the bodily ascended Jesus, who, after his virgin birth, sinless human life and public ministry, crucifixion and bodily resurrection, ascended through the heavens and now sits at the Father’s right hand in power and glory. In his ascended humanity and eternal divinity, Jesus the Son of God intercedes for us as our great high priest, reigns over us as the rightful king of heaven and earth and makes himself known to us in his Word and Sacraments as our true prophet, pointing us to his Cross as the only way to know him, and pouring out his Spirit and heavenly gifts on us as Head of his Body, the Church, until he comes again in glory to judge the living and the dead. But how does the ascension change the relationship between heaven and earth? The ascension does something new, says Calvin: ‘Christ by rising again began to show his glory and power more fully. Yet he truly inaugurated his Kingdom only at his ascension into heaven’.1 And what is his Kingdom? It is none other than the power conferred upon the ascended Christ by the Father to rule heaven and earth. By faith in this ascended Christ, reigning in heaven, we receive three benefits on earth, says Calvin in his Institutes. First, we have access to heaven through Christ’s humanity. Second, we have access to God the Father through Christ’s heavenly intercession.2 And third, we have access on earth to Christ’s power in heaven. Calvin writes: [Christ] therefore sits on high, transfusing us with his power, that he may quicken us to spiritual life, sanctify us by his Spirit, adorn his church with divers gifts of grace, keep it safe from all harm by his protection, restrain the raging enemies of his cross and of our salvation by the strength of his hand, and finally hold all power in heaven and earth. All this he does until he shall lay low all his enemies and complete the building of his church.3

With Christ’s ascension and inauguration of his Kingdom, the relationship between heaven and earth has changed, says Calvin. An earthly community has been transfused with the power of heaven to fulfill heaven’s purposes on earth. This is no triumphant Church on earth: ‘Christ gives to his own people clear testimonies of his very present power’, writes Calvin, ‘yet his Kingdom



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lies hidden in the earth, so to speak, under the lowness of the flesh’.4 While the Church waits for the visible return of its Lord on the Last Day, it lives its life now on earth by faith, looking to its hidden life in heaven. As the Apostle Paul writes in his Letter to the Church at Philippi, ‘our citizenship is in heaven, and it is from there that we are expecting a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ’ (Phil. 3:20). However, for Calvin, the hidden, heavenly life of the Church as citizens of heaven has profound implications for its life on earth. As the Dutch Reformed theologian Cornelis van der Kooi has described this relationship between heaven and earth in Calvin: Essential for Calvin’s theology is the distinction between heaven and earth, the fundamental otherness of the world and the coming world. Calvin’s sharp distinction between the two gave his theology a deeply eschatological orientation. The eschatological identity of the believer is fundamentally different by his adoption as a child of God into a heavenly citizenship. It is, however, important to recognize that for Calvin, this heavenly citizenship has a bearing on one’s life in this world.5

In other words, our heavenly citizenship has social significance for our life on earth, according to Calvin. This key insight into Calvin’s understanding of the new relationship between heaven and earth in the ascension is echoed by another Reformed theologian, the Scottish Calvin scholar Ronald Wallace. In his book on Calvin, Geneva and the Reformation, Wallace describes Calvin’s understanding of the relationship between the Church and society in the light of Christ’s redemption of our humanity: Calvin believed that what happens when humanity is redeemed in Christ gives us a true picture of what was meant to happen originally in society in its natural form. For grace always tends to reveal and restore the original form of nature. Therefore he found the ideal human order described for him in Paul’s account of the Church in the New Testament – an organism, or a body, in which each member derives its life and health and nourishment from the whole body, and has a quite unique and irreplaceable function.6

For Calvin, the heavenly life of the Church as the Body of Christ shows the earthly life of the civic community what it means to be truly human and to live together in society as God intended. The dynamic relationship between heaven and earth in the Body of Christ is to inform its relationship with society. As Head of his Body, the ascended Christ in heaven has poured out his life-giving Spirit on his Church and adorned it with his diverse gifts to enable it to live as God intends for humanity, so that it might be salt and light in the world around it.

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What we see in Geneva is Calvin working out this understanding of the Church’s life as a pattern for the life of the civil society around it, as Wallace notes: In Geneva [Calvin] wanted even civil society to reflect as far as it could the pattern of mutual dependence, cooperation, close intercommunion between the whole body and its members which he expected to find first especially in the Church. Earthly citizenship was to be patterned on heavenly citizenship. His first concern in Geneva was therefore to create at the heart of the city a community of the faithful in Christ whose ways of mutual forbearance, love and forgiveness would provide a pattern for the rest of civil society. By nurturing its own members within its fellowship to a life of true Christian sanctification, the Church would at the same time produce a pattern for good earthly citizenship not attainable through any kind of purely secular education.7

This is our distinctive perspective on public life in modern society as Reformed Christians: our earthly citizenship is to be patterned on our heavenly citizenship. It is as we live our life together as citizens of heaven in the Church that we have something distinctive to offer to the earthly community. As we show mutual love and forgiveness to one another in the Church, for example, we offer a pattern of mutual dependence and care to our fragmented modern society of isolated and competing individuals. The Swiss Reformed theologian Karl Barth described this relationship between heaven and earth in terms of reflected light. On the eve of Europe’s darkest hour in 1938, he wrote: ‘The light which falls from the heavenly polis upon the earthly ecclesia is reflected in the light which illuminates the earthly polis from the earthly ecclesia through their mutual reflection’.8 In other words, the light which heaven shines on the Church should be reflected into the life of the society around it. As citizens of heaven, we shed the light of Christ’s reign in heaven on the civic life of society through the prism of Christ’s light in the life of the Church. It is our ascended Lord in heaven who calls us to reflect his light into the life of modern society, as he called Calvin to do in Geneva, and as he has called generations of Reformed Christians to do in their societies over the last five centuries. But that was at the time of the Reformation in Europe. What about Reformed churches today, in very different parts of the world? Can the heavenly citizenship of the Church be a pattern for the earthly citizenship of modern societies that are not part of the Western world of Europe with its Reformation history? I believe it can. We have one outstanding modern example of how a Reformed Church outside the Western world turned to its heavenly citizenship to challenge and change the earthly life of both church and society. In the early 1980s, at the

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a specific situation. We are aware that such an act of confession is not lightly undertaken, but only if the heart of the Gospel is so threatened as to be at stake. In our judgement, the present [. . .] situation in our country [. . .] calls for such a decision. Accordingly, we make this confession [. . .] for the sake of the gospel in view of the times in which we stand.11

As Mary-Anne Plaatjies Van Huffel, an expert on church polity in that Dutch Reformed Mission Church, has written: After many deliberations the Dutch Reformed Mission Church Synod of 1982 declared that, because the secular gospel of apartheid fundamentally threatened the reconciliation in Jesus Christ and the very essence of the unity of the Church of Jesus Christ, it constituted a status confessionis for the Church of Jesus Christ.12

In response to what this Reformed Church Synod saw as a threat to the Gospel, it assigned a group of its theologians to draft a Confession during its severalday meeting, to be adopted before it concluded. Under this time pressure, and with so much at stake for the Gospel, one member of this group of Reformed theologians was assigned the task of writing the draft Confession in little more than 24 hours. He went to his home and to the old car garage which he used as his study. In these most humble of circumstances, like the homeless baby born in a stable, the Belhar Confession was born to bear witness to the light of Jesus Christ, shining from heaven on his Body, the Church, and from there into the darkest corners of human sinfulness on earth. What, then, is the Belhar Confession’s response to a church and society bitterly divided on racial grounds? Does it attack the government who imposed these policies? Does it make a statement in support of the secular political movements which oppose apartheid? No. It does none of these things. It does not even mention the word apartheid. As Plaatjies Van Huffel notes, ‘although most Reformed confessions have been responses to specific historical circumstances, these documents typically do not mention the particular historical causes at all, precisely because their truth claims are claims about the gospel and, therefore, claims with [universal] appeal’.13 Therefore, to address its particular historical circumstances under apartheid, the Belhar Confession declares that dividing the Church of Jesus Christ on racial grounds undermines the unity of the Church, denies the reality of reconciliation in Christ and is an affront to the justice of God.14 At the heart of the Belhar Confession is the calling of the Church to bear witness to the new relationship between heaven and earth in Jesus Christ. The Confession declares:



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We believe that God has entrusted the church with the message of reconciliation in and through Jesus Christ; that the church is called to be the salt of the earth and the light of the world, that the church is called blessed because it is a peacemaker, that the church is witness both by word and by deed to the new heaven and the new earth in which righteousness dwells. We believe that God’s lifegiving Word and Spirit has conquered the powers of sin and death, and therefore also of irreconciliation and hatred, bitterness and enmity, that God’s lifegiving Word and Spirit will enable the church to live in a new obedience which can open new possibilities of life for society and the world.15

At the heart of what the Belhar Confession says about reconciliation in Christ, we see the new relationship between heaven and earth which Calvin noted was inaugurated with Christ’s ascension. The Belhar Confession does not explicitly mention Christ’s ascension as such, but it is clearly the doctrinal basis of all the Confession says about the nature of the Church’s calling in society. The church is called to live in anticipation of the new heaven and the new earth, when all creation will be in right relationship with God. The Church is called to live in such a way that it shows society and the world a better way to live. How is all this possible? Only because the bodily ascended Lord in heaven, Jesus the Son of God, has, in the words of Calvin, inaugurated his Kingdom and transfused the Church with his power through his life-giving Word and Spirit. Without Christ’s ascension, there is no new heaven and earth. There is no peace, no light, no reconciliation on earth. But with Christ’s ascension and reign in heaven, all these things are experienced powerfully in the life of his Church and potentially in the life of the world God loves. We have, therefore, seen a consistent approach to public life in the Reformed tradition, first with Calvin, then with Barth and now with Belhar: the heavenly presence and power of the ascended Christ in the spiritual life of the Church can also be the pattern, the prism and the power of new possibilities for the civic life of society. Calvin showed the citizens of Geneva how to care for the poor and the refugee in their midst on the pattern of the heavenly community which was also in their midst, where everyone was valued and loved as members of the Body of Christ. Barth showed the Church in Germany how to expose the darkening evil of the Nazi regime by acting as the prism, refracting the light of its confession that Jesus is Lord into a wider society under tyranny. Belhar shows Reformed churches around the world today the power of the Church’s witness to the new heaven and earth for opening new possibilities of life in modern society, as it did for a non-racial South Africa.



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Where then does our hope lie? According to our Reformed tradition, our hope lies in heaven, not as an escape from these realities of life on earth, as cynics say. No, we look to heaven as the place where earth’s cries for help are heard with human sympathy and divine mercy, as the Letter to the Hebrews assures us: Since, then, we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold fast to our confession. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who in every respect has been tested as we are, yet without sin. Let us therefore approach the throne of grace with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need. (4:14–16)

Once again, it is the ascension which transforms the relationship between heaven and earth. It is the fully human Jesus and fully divine Son of God, one person in two natures, as Chalcedon says, who connects the Church’s hidden life in heaven before the throne of grace with its public life on earth before the rulers of the Gentiles. The Letter to the Hebrews was written for Christians who were a persecuted minority in the ancient Roman world. They were under constant threat of imprisonment, torture and death for their faith in Christ. They could find no encouragement in their public life. Their hope lay hidden in their heavenly life with the ascended Christ. The Kirk may not be persecuted like these first Christians or like so many of our sisters and brothers in Christ in wartorn regions and hostile regimes around the world today. But we do find little or no encouragement in modern Scottish society for church growth or our public witness to the Gospel. In all these circumstances, whether of active persecution for our faith or social indifference to our message, the Letter to the Hebrews teaches us how to live as a minority church in public life. It tells us to love one another so that we are ready to welcome two visitors from heaven: one who is expected, the Saviour, and the other who is unexpected, the stranger. A Reformed theology of the ascension leads us to see the significance of the spiritual life of the Church for the public life of society. In the life of the Church, we are called to recognize the presence of the ascended Christ in the guise of the poor and needy on earth. We are called to show hospitality to angels from heaven in the guise of the stranger knocking at our door. It is as we recognize these expected and unexpected visitors from heaven that we can offer a pattern of life for the wider society of which we are part. The life of holiness in the Church should give society some sense of what true wholeness might look like, as God intends for humanity. In the words of the Reformed Confession of Belhar, God’s

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life-giving Word and Spirit enable the Church to live in a new obedience which can open new possibilities of life for society and the world. As we have seen from Ronald Wallace’s account, this was Calvin’s approach to public life in Reformation Geneva: by nurturing its own members in a life of true Christian sanctification as citizens of heaven, the Church at the same time produces a pattern for good earthly citizenship. Who will offer this pattern for good earthly citizenship in Scottish society today? Who will show the better way of mutual care and concern for one another in our modern society, where social life will increasingly be driven by the algorithms of the internet and the artificial intelligence of robots? The Reformed answer is that it is the heavenly community of the Church that is called to offer society a better way in this interim time of God’s patience and mercy between Christ’s ascension to heaven for our salvation and his return to earth for our judgement. Even a minority church can influence public life by nurturing a life of Christ-like holiness and love among its members, a life which the Gospels and Pastoral Letters of the New Testament all identify with caring for the poor and welcoming the stranger.

The body in question: On being a church of the ascension The dominant narrative about the Church of Scotland since the mid-twentieth century is that it is a declining institution. Falling membership would seem to indicate that it is indeed a body in freefall. Mission is construed as arresting and reversing decline. I have argued to the contrary in this chapter. When seen from the perspective of a Scottish Reformed tradition of theological thought about the ascension from John Knox to William Milligan and Thomas Torrance, the Kirk is not an institution in declension but a creature of the ascension.16 This casts a very different light on our past, present and future. The body in question is not in freefall but ascended on high. Therein lies both our soteriology and our sociology as a Reformed branch of the Church Catholic. Our salvation is hidden with Christ in God. We are now citizens of heaven. Our situation is evident to all in Scotland. We are now a minority church in ‘a free market in religion which offers the spiritual seeker a vast cafeteria of options’. As the sociologist Steve Bruce has concluded, ‘it is possible to extract from what may seem a bewildering array of information, a single theme to Scotland’s religious history and that theme is not “decline” [. . .] It is choice’.17 In light of this analysis, the priority for the Church of Scotland must



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be investment in the all-age Christian education of its members, not yet more national schemes with the false hope of arresting decline. Seen through the bifocal lens of the ascension, we are both citizens of heaven, where the bodily ascended Christ reigns, and members of the suffering Body of Christ on earth, which the ascended Christ has transfused with his contrarian power of servanthood. We are called to lift up our hearts in praise to God in heaven and to live out our lives in prayer for God’s reign on earth, as it is in heaven. Seen through this bifocal lens, the Church of Scotland is an inclining institution, bending towards heaven as a church of the ascension, and seeing its life on earth in light of its ascended Lord, whom it knows only in his Cross. This public theology of heaven and earth offers the Church of Scotland a model of its public identity in Scottish society not as a national church but as a mainstream minority.18

Notes A revised version of an invited lecture to the Association of Reformed and Presbyterian Churches of Japan in Yokohama Union Church on the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. 1 John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Bk. 2:14, Vol. 1, ed. John T. McNeill (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1960), 522. 2 Ibid., Bk 2:16, 524. 3 Ibid., 525. 4 Ibid., Bk 2:17, 525. 5 Cornelis van der Kooi, ‘Striking Similarities: The Eschatological Orientation of Calvin, Barth and Van de Beek’, in Strangers and Pilgrims on Earth: Essays in Honor of Abraham van de Beek, ed. Eduardus van der Borght and Paul van Geest (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 372. 6 Ronald Wallace, Calvin, Geneva and the Reformation (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1988), 117. 7 Ibid. 8 Karl Barth, Church and State (London: Student Christian Movement, 1939), 61, quoted in Bram van de Beek, ‘Reformed Theology and Politics’, in Living Theology: Essays Presented to Dirk J. Smit on His 60th Birthday, ed. Len Hanson et al. (Wellington: Bible Media, 2011), 221. 9 Mary-Anne Plaatjies Van Huffel, ‘Dirk Smit – An Apologist for Confessions’, in Living Theology, ed. Len Hanson et al., 251. 10 Ibid., 252.

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Ibid., 253–254. Ibid., 253. Ibid., 254. Ibid., 253. English translation of the original text of the Belhar Confession in the Afrikaans language, prepared by the Office of Theology and Worship, Presbyterian Church (USA): https://www.presbyterianmission.org/resource/belhar-confession/. 16 See G. D. Henderson and James Bulloch, eds, The Scots Confession 1560 (Edinburgh: The Saint Andrew Press, 1960), 65–66: ‘We do not doubt but that the selfsame body which was born of a virgin, was crucified, dead, and buried, and which did rise again, did ascend into the heavens for the accomplishment of all things, where in our name and for our comfort He has received all power in heaven and earth, where He sits at the right hand of the Father, having received His kingdom, the only advocate and mediator for us’; T. F. Torrance, Scottish Theology from John Knox to John McLeod Campbell (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996), 21: ‘Knox laid unusually strong emphasis on the ascension of Jesus Christ in the self-same body which was born of the Virgin Mary, and was crucified, dead and buried and which rose again [. . .] It is one of the most neglected doctrines of the Faith’; William Milligan, The Ascension and Heavenly Priesthood of our Lord (London: Macmillan, 1892), 335: ‘Among those aspects of truth, too much neglected, but full of power, the Ascension and Heavenly Priesthood of our Lord may certainly be included’; and T. F. Torrance, Space, Time and Resurrection (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1976), chs. 5 and 6. David Fergusson, ‘The Ascension of Christ: Its Significance in the Theology of T F Torrance’, in Participatio, Vol. 2 (2012), gives a sympathetic account of Torrance’s views but notes (106): ‘More troubling is the relative absence of the ethical and political significance of the ascension, not least given its greater prominence in Barth’. My contribution to this Festchrift for his son Iain Torrance offers my own practical application of this neglected doctrine to the public life of the Church of Scotland, which my esteemed Aberdeen colleague has served with such distinction. 17 Steve Bruce, ‘Religion: Have Scots Become a Godless People?’, in David McCrone, The New Sociology of Scotland (London: Sage, 2017), both quotations from 367. 18 Ibid., 369, ‘Claims of the Church of Scotland to be the “national” church have become fatally damaged by the large number of dissenting alternatives, and by religious indifference’.



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I am increasingly sceptical: that the congregational type of church is the only one which is growing across the world and that the societal type is dead or doomed. This is what I call the myth of evangelical growth. The myth finds various expressions. Dean Kelley’s influential but rarely read little book Why Conservative Churches Are Growing singled out strictness as one salient factor in growth; that theme was taken up by the large body of work in American sociology of religion known as Rational Choice Theory.2 A more recent variant singles out not just strictness but also ‘hot’ charismatic enthusiasm as what counts, an idea perpetuated by the veritable industry of Pentecostal studies, and popularized by journalists like John Mickelthwait and Adrian Woolridge of the Economist. They present the kinds of religion which are doing well around the world as the ‘hot’ ones – entrepreneurial, enthusiastic and demanding.3 This myth of evangelical growth is fuelled by a mix of fact (Pentecostalism has been successful in some countries, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Latin America), selective vision (in many Western cities, there is at least one evangelical church that is growing at any one time) and ideology. The latter celebrates the fact that the world has become a religious free market and advocates for a constitutionally enshrined US-style ‘religious freedom’ which ensures it stays that way, free of any state ‘interference’. This is said to be good for religion, good for individuals, good for civil society and good for economic growth. From this point of view, societal churches with their cultural monopolies and entanglements between state and church are an undesirable relic of the past and the old mainline religions have had their day. This narrative is so powerful that even secular people buy into it. But it is weakened by a bad dose of confirmation bias. It typically focuses on examples of evangelical growth which support it but fails to investigate examples of evangelical decline which do not, and it is uncritical about the assumption that societal churches are all declining. When looked at over decades and centuries, congregational churches seem to follow a pattern of rapid growth followed by plateauing and decline (which is why periodic ‘revivals’ are an essential part of their story). I can’t resist citing an example I read recently in a history the Scottish island of Arran where, in 1812, an outbreak of ‘outcrying’ saw people ‘uttering strange cries, trembling and falling into convulsions’. By 1813, the enthusiasm was already waning. The revivalist preacher of the time commented ruefully that ‘like the stonyground hearers, the religious impressions of many were slight and transitory [. . .] coldness, deadness and formality in religion are now too prevalent among

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group. The effect can stretch back through generations: questioning people who self-identified as ‘Christian’ on the Census for England and Wales, Abby Day found that some did so not just because they were baptized but also because their parents or grandparents were.10 So the more entry points a church has in society, and the more familiar its representatives (lay not just clerical), the more we can expect that to build a foundation for trust. The role of churches as service providers is another factor in building or losing trust. For societal churches, such services include a range of historic, social and cultural provisions – from Sunday schools to hospitals to funerals. Literature on institutional trust tells us that it has to do with fulfilled expectations of competence and good intention.11 Insofar as people encounter the church as responsive to their needs and capable in meeting them, trust is likely to increase. As the role of churches in providing health, welfare and what we now call statutory services diminishes in modern societies, so the quality of their provision of life-rites comes to count for more. A good experience of church at these turning points in life builds trust; a bad one can break it forever. In Britain, for example, there is evidence that refusing parents baptism for a child (because the parents are unmarried or not Christian enough), refusing couples a wedding (because divorced or gay) and excluding children from church schools (because their parents don’t attend church) are all reasons why people lost faith in the church.12 Trust in societal institutions is undermined most decisively when they are perceived to flout basic standards of ‘common decency’ (which, of course, change over time, usually rather slowly). What keeps societal churches going is not hot enthusiasm for countercultural values but the identification of Christian values with everyday decencies and traditions. This is why it is so corrosive of societal churches when ‘Christian values’ are perceived to be at odds with standards of common decency in liberal democracies. A church like the Church of Denmark is more or less obliged to reflect such standards, both because it is governed by the state and because it cannot afford to alienate the large proportion of the population who pay an annual church tax. But other societal churches are not so constrained, and trust in them has been undermined by a growing ‘values gap’ between them and the wider culture. Whereas congregational churches can afford to reject society’s standards of equality on the basis of religion, gender and sexuality (for example), societal churches are negatively impacted by sexism and homophobia, not least because it affects the willingness of parents to present the churches in a positive way to their children. Gradually, Christianity becomes ‘something that other people do’ rather than part of ‘what makes us who we are’.13



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rationalization and urbanization. Of course, many social changes transcend individuals, but that doesn’t mean individuals are not involved. I have singled out trust as a human factor which needs to be taken more seriously in understanding church growth and decline. For congregational churches, the issue of trust arises in very different ways than for societal ones: they demand not just high commitment of time and money but also the opening of conscience and inner life to scrutiny and direction. Societal churches depend on a cooler, less demanding, more widely dispersed form of trust, and in this they are not unique: it would be interesting to compare how effectively other cultural institutions – like museums and universities  – have managed to retain trust in modern societies. But wherever it happens, loss of trust has serious consequences. Trust is made and broken in millions of small human encounters, and the fate of entire institutions depends on it.

Notes 1 Ernst Troeltsch, The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches, 2 vols (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1931) (originally 1911). 2 Dean Kelley, Why Conservative Churches are Growing. 2nd edn (San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row), 1977. 3 As they put it, ‘the most remarkable success story of the past century has been the most emotional religion of all [Pentecostalism] [. . .] The hotter bits of Islam have also gained ground [. . .] There are all sorts of long-term reasons why hotter, more combative religions will gain.’ John Mickelthwait and Adrian Woolridge, God Is Back: How the Global Rise of Faith Is Changing the World (London: Penguin, 2009), 15. 4 Thorbjørn Campbell, Arran: A History (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2007), 124. 5 Linda Woodhead and Hans Raun Iversen, eds, The Persistence of Societal Religion: The Old National Churches of Northern Europe. Forthcoming. 6 Ibid. See also Phil Zuckerman, Society without God (New York: New York University Press, 2010), 24–25. 7 I.e. voluntary self-identification with the church in question, ranging from paying church tax in Denmark to being a registered member in Norway to self-identifying as Church of England in England. 8 This means that membership and life-rite participation are more important indicators for societal churches than regular Sunday church attendance and doctrinal conformity which are more important for congregational ones; using the wrong measures is one reason societal religion has been underestimated.

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9 See, e.g., Gordon Hodson and Miles Hewstone, eds, Advances in Intergroup Contact (New York: Psychology Press, 2013). 10 Abby Day, Believing in Belonging: Belief and Social Identity in the Modern World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 11 Katherine Hawley, Trust: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 12 Leslie Francis and Philip Richter, Gone for Good? Church-Leaving and Returning in the Twenty-First Century (Peterborough: Epworth, 2007). 13 Andrew Brown and Linda Woodhead, That Was the Church That Was: How the Church of England Lost the English People (London: Bloomsbury, 2016); and David Thurfjell, Det Gudlösa Folket (Stockholm: Molin & Sorgenfrei, 2015). 14 In early 2018, the Church of England revealed that it was dealing with more than 3,300 complaints over sex abuse in a single year (2016). Revealed by the Bishop of Bath and Wells in response to a Synod question, and reported in the press, e.g. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/10/church-of-england-faced-3300sexual-abuse-claims-figures-reveal (accessed 12 February 2018). 15 See, e.g., Larry Sidentop, Inventing the Individual. The Origins of Western Liberalism (London: Penguin, 2015). 16 The collapse of the old ‘free churches’ has exacerbated this, transferring divisions which once ran between them and the established churches into the latter; the growing influence of fundamentalism has also played a role. 17 So long as doing so does not compromise those who decline to take part for reasons of conscience. Iain Torrance, General Assembly 2017, Speech for the Theological Forum. Available at http://www.churchofscotland.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_ file/0009/40311/Theological_Forum_Speech_Thursday.pdf Accessed 12-2-18. See also An Approach to the Theology of Same-Sex Marriage (2017). Available at http:// www.churchofscotland.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0009/39573/Theological_ Forum.pdf (accessed 12 February 2018).

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Just cause for war: The rescue of the innocent from natural injustice In War and Self-Defense, the philosopher David Rodin has mounted a logically careful, analytically searching and argumentatively circumspect critique of what he takes to be ‘just war’ thinking. Mistaking Michael Walzer’s 1977 version with the whole of ‘just war’ thinking,1 David Rodin tells us that national defence, which is ‘central to modern international law’,2 is ‘one of the lynchpins’ of international law’s intellectual progenitor, the just war theory.3 The second half of this assertion, at least, is not true. Christian just war thinking – which now finds public expression in the doctrine of ‘Responsibility to Protect’ – has always taken as the paradigm of just military action the defence of the innocent neighbour against injustice. ‘Innocence’, ‘injustice’ – these are moral terms. The Christian understanding of justified national defence is moral and subjects its justification to moral conditions. Pace a Hobbesian interpretation of positive law, it refuses to regard state sovereignty as a morality-free zone. Taking its bearings primarily from moral law, natural and revealed, Christian thinking sanctions the state’s self-defence only against unjust aggression. But surely – some will say – in a ‘globalized’ world, where the full plurality of moral understandings is laid out in plain view, belief in a single, universal morality that transcends individuals and states and cultures, and which is somehow given in the nature of things, is untenable? And while morality that is alleged to be divinely revealed may hold religious believers in the blinding glare of its authoritarian headlights, surely it has no claim on the attention of others? To the first rhetorical question, I  respond by saying that belief in a single, universal moral reality is entirely compatible with the acknowledgement of moral plurality. It is perfectly consistent to affirm universal moral principles, while acknowledging that there is a variety of ways in which these may be specified, that various circumstances require various instantiations, and that interpretations of them vary according to the wisdom and virtue of the interpreter. Unity at a high, generic level is quite consistent with plurality at lower, specific and concrete levels.4 Further, the concept of natural moral law should not be identified with the particular version expressed in the Roman Catholic Church’s magisterial prohibition of contraception and homosexual practice. There is a variety of concepts of natural law, not all of which concur with the church’s official doctrine. And belief in natural moral law is not, and has not been, confined to

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holds that justified war is always a response to a grave injustice that aims to rectify it. This response may take defensive or aggressive forms. It may move seamlessly from defence to aggression or it may begin with aggression. Justified aggression is what so-called ‘humanitarian intervention’ is about. The doctrine of the Responsibility to Protect is, in effect, a reassertion of the classic Christian paradigm of justified war. This paradigm involves a claim about justified war that is very controversial and arouses quite some alarm: namely, the claim that the basic form of justified war is punitive  – even, I  would say, retributive. This view is characteristic of Christian thinking at least up to Grotius in the seventeenth century, and since then in the cases of Jean Bethke Elshtain and Oliver O’Donovan. Therefore, it is also a major reason why many believe that just war thinking should cut itself loose from its Christian moorings. Why is this? Two main reasons are given. First, that to allow just warriors to think of themselves as punishing the enemy is to encourage them to loosen the constraints on how they wage war. And second, that many, perhaps most, fighting on the unjustified side will not be morally culpable and will therefore not be liable for punishment. My response to the first objection is this. If justified defence is only and always defence against an injustice, it necessarily has the form of retribution. Let me make clear that by ‘retribution’ I do not mean ‘retributivism’. I do not mean the ethic that prescribes an eye for an eye, a wasteland of equal suffering. Rather, my meaning derives from the etymology of the Latin verb retribuere, that is, a handing or paying back of what is due. So, by ‘retribution’ I  mean simply a hostile reaction to an injustice. All punishment has this basically retributive form. The question of what purposes one wants to achieve through one’s hostile, retributive reaction remains open and is yet to be determined. It could be one or more of several ends:  defence, deterrence or, ultimately, reform and reconciliation. In Christian eyes, the end or goal of punishment should never be the suffering of the unjust perpetrator for its own sake. Justified war, therefore, is retributive in its basic form but not retributivist in substance. It is a hostile reaction to injustice, but it does not aim simply to make the perpetrator suffer for its own sake. The difficulty that many people have in describing justified war as retributive is an expression of a general cultural tendency to equate punishment and retribution with retributivism, and to see it therefore as a form of vengeance meted out by the self-righteous. In Christian eyes, however, punishment and



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retribution should only ever be meted out by one group of self-conscious sinners upon another, and if it is to be just punishment, it cannot be vengefully retributivist but must aim at defence, deterrence and eventual reconciliation. Accordingly, it must be proportioned to those ends, and it must suffer such constraints as that proportion imposes. What about the issue raised by the second objection, namely, the liability of soldiers fighting in an unjust cause? The first thing to say is that, while an element of tragic fate often characterizes the predicament of a soldier fighting in an unjust cause, that does not relieve him of responsibility or excuse him from culpability. Take this example. At the Deutscher Soldatenfriedhof at Maleme in Crete there is a permanent exhibition. This tells the story of the three von Bluecher brothers, the youngest still in his teens, who were all killed in the same place on the same day in May 1941. How did they all end up there? The two younger ones heroworshipped the oldest – as younger brothers often do – and when he joined the parachute regiment, they followed. In the past, I have used this to illustrate the element of tragedy that attends even the actions of unjust warriors, in the course of arguing that we should regard them with a measure of sympathy. One does not have to agree with what these three young men were doing falling out of the sky onto Crete in 1941, in order to share a sense of sadness at their untimely deaths and a sense of common human fatedness. Nevertheless, a friend of mine who fought with the Royal Ulster Constabulary against the Irish Republican Army during the most violent phase of the ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland, is less inclined to be sentimental and has challenged me not to assume the three brothers’ innocence. It is, after all, quite possible that they were convinced Nazis and that at least the oldest one had participated in atrocities elsewhere in Europe. Certainly, after landing on Crete, the Fallschirmjäger were involved in some brutal reprisals against civilians. My second comment on the issue of the liability of unjust soldiers is to say that, in the absence of the possibility of more precise discrimination, it is reasonable for the just warrior not to give benefit of doubt and to presume guilt. This does make war rough justice – but rough justice is still justice. Third, I’m not convinced that someone has to know subjectively that they’ve done wrong to be liable for punishment. Indeed, many of those who are rightly punished refuse to accept that they are guilty. And fourth, the fact that just warriors understand themselves to be punishing unjust warriors does not mean that just warriors cannot submit themselves to in bello (in war) conventions that bind just and unjust alike for the pragmatic purpose of limiting violence.



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that the Blair government’s attempt to secure a second UN Resolution on Iraq in March 2003 was absolutely right and far better than the Bush government’s barely concealed contempt for the United Nations. So, in the absence (probably fortunate) of a global state, and in order to stave off international anarchy, we should affirm the authority of international law. Notwithstanding that, the question of what actually constitutes international law is a controversial one. Is it simply what is written in treaties or does it also embrace customary law as expressed in state practice? And how should different bodies of law relate to one another? Should the battlefield be governed by the Laws of War or by International Humanitarian Law? When lawyers pronounce, ‘International law says this’ or ‘Under international law that is illegal’, we ought not to be over-impressed. They are behaving as advocates, behaving politically, pushing a particular point of view. If they were more honest and less political – or more academic and less lawyerly – they would claim, ‘International law says this or that, according to my interpretation of it’. There is more than one reasonable view of what international law is and what it says. What is more, a Christian monotheist is bound to acknowledge that positive international law, whatever it is, cannot have the last word. This is because, like any moral realist, he assumes that there is a universal moral order that transcends national legal systems and applies to international relations even in the absence of positive international law. He believes that there are human goods and moral obligations that exist in and with the nature of things, and which exercise a guiding and constraining moral authority long before human beings articulate them in statutes or treaties. He holds that the principles of moral law are given or created before positive laws are made. Legal statutes and social contracts are therefore not crafted in a primordial moral vacuum. They are born accountable to a higher, natural law, and their word is neither first nor last. If that were not so, then Nuremberg was nothing but victors’ vengeance dressed up in a fiction of ‘justice’, and today’s high-blown rhetoric of universal human rights is just so much wind. One thing that this implies is that military action can sometimes be morally justified in the absence of, and even in spite of, positive international law. Therefore, Christian just warriors cannot join those who believe that the ‘legitimacy’ of military intervention to prevent or halt grave injustice is decided simply by the presence or absence of authorization by the United Nations Security Council. Loath though lawyers are to admit the penultimate nature of the authority of positive law, they do, when pressed. Writing of NATO’s 1999 intervention in Kosovo, Martti Koskenniemi has admitted that ‘most

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lawyers – including myself – have taken the ambivalent position that it was both formally illegal and morally necessary’.7 It is possible to break the treaty letter of international law, while making a serious case that one is acting within its spirit, and, insofar as other nations are persuaded, the authority of the law will not be damaged. What is vital is to assure the international community that one remains bound by common norms, even when one’s reading of them is controversial. If the manner of literal transgression is respectful, the law’s authority can be saved and international trust maintained.

The goodness of creation and legitimate national self-interest It is very common to suppose that where national interests motivate military intervention, they vitiate it. Intervention cannot be both humanitarian and motivated by national interests. This view expresses a popular Kantianism, according to which self-interest is necessarily an immoral motive.8 Christian ethics, however, furnishes an alternative and superior view, which finds classic expression in Thomas Aquinas. Combining the book of Genesis’s affirmation of the goodness of creation with Aristotle, Thomist thought does not view all self-interest as selfish and immoral. Indeed, it holds that there is such a thing as morally obligatory self-love. The human individual has a duty to care for himself properly, to seek what is genuinely his own good. As with an individual, so with a national community and the organ of its cohesion and decision, namely, its government: a national government has a moral duty to look after the well-being of its own people  – and in that sense to advance its genuine interests. As the French political scientist Yves Simon once wrote, ‘What should we think, truly, about a government that would leave out of its preoccupations the interests of the nation that it governs?’9 This duty is not unlimited, of course. There cannot be a moral obligation to pursue the interests of one’s own nation by riding roughshod over the rights of others. Still, not every pursuit of national interest does involve the committing of injustice; so the fact that national interests are among the motives for military intervention does not by itself vitiate the latter’s moral justification. This is politically important, because some kind of national interest needs to be involved if military intervention is to attract popular support; and because without such support intervention is hard, eventually impossible, to sustain. One such interest can be moral integrity. Nations usually care about more than

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That Christian military chaplains continue to communicate Christian ‘just war’ thinking to Britain’s armed forces is an important part of the Church’s contemporary witness.

Notes 1 Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations (New York: Basic Books, 1977). 2 David Rodin, War and Self-Defense (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), 1. 3 Ibid., 2. 4 Aquinas himself says this (Summa theologiae, Ia IIae, q. 94, aa.4, 5, pp. 86–95; q. 95, a. 2, pp. 102–107). For a modern discussion, see Morris Ginsberg, ‘On the Diversity of Morals’, in On the Diversity of Morals (London: Mercury, 1962), 97–129. 5 Derek Parfit, On What Matters, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 6 Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons (London: Heinemann, 1960), 38–9. 7 Martti Koskenniemi, ‘ “The Lady Doth Protest Too Much”: Kosovo and the Turn to Ethics in International Law’, Modern Law Review 65, no. 2 (March 2002): 159–175, 162. 8 The ethics of Immanuel Kant are usually held to be simply ‘deontological’, viewing the only truly moral act as one that is done out of a pure sense of duty or reverence for the moral law. So conceived, the truly moral act stands in stark contrast to a merely prudential one, which seeks to promote the agent’s interests. Whether this common, deontological view of Kant fully captures his thought I doubt. I think that a better reading has him argue that truly moral acts are those where the duty of justice as fairness disciplines – rather than excludes – the pursuit of interest. 9 Yves R. Simon, The Ethiopian Campaign and French Political Thought, ed. Anthony O. Simon, trans. Robert Royal (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009), 55. 10 The British casualties were very light: one dead, one seriously injured, and twelve wounded (http://www.eliteukforces.info/special-air-service/sas-operations/ operation-barras/, as at 20 September 2017). 11 Nigel Biggar, In Defence of War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 232; and Gareth Evans, The Responsibility to Protect: Ending Mass Atrocity Crimes Once and for All (Washington, DC: Brookings Institute, 2008), 144. 12 As I demonstrate in ­chapter 5 of In Defence of War.

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problem lies not merely in the sheer number of value systems that coexist in modern society, or how different they are from each other, but rather in how often and how irreconcilably they contradict each other. Rawls observes that many of these diverse doctrines ‘are perfectly reasonable, and this diversity [. . .] political liberalism sees as the inevitable long-run result of the powers of human reason at work within the background of enduring free institutions’.1 In other words, diversity is the product of two very good things:  ‘human reason’ and ‘free institutions’. But such diversity creates problems. The liberal idea of ‘public reason’ serves as a stopgap solution for the irreconcilability and contradictability of pluralistic value systems. The converse of public reason acceptable to all is ‘non-public’ or ‘private’ reason, accessible only to specific groups. According to Rawls, mutual respect in public discourse is possible only on the condition that discourse is limited to arguments based on public reason. ‘Trying to meet this condition is one of the tests that this ideal of democratic politics asks of us. Understanding how to conduct oneself as a democratic citizen includes understanding an ideal of public reason.’2 ‘Private’ reason, in distinction, ought to be excluded from public discourse, no matter how valuable or well-reasoned it might be. However, the limits of public reason entail that no public political argument or action can be adequately justified by appealing to a comprehensive perspective  – be it philosophical or religious, Confucian or Christian. In Rawls’s conception of a liberal democracy, public reason cannot appeal to any of these internally coherent perspectives. With the distinction between private and public reason, Rawls delineates the limits of discourse that are acceptable in public forums: let public be public and let private be private. While acknowledging that ‘religious, philosophical, and moral considerations of many kinds’ do play a role in each citizen’s personal reflection on religious questions, Rawls emphasizes that these same citizens will be held to different standards ‘when they engage in political advocacy in the public forum’.3 Rawls further asserts that public reason must govern ‘how citizens are to vote in elections when constitutional essentials and matters of basic justice are at stake’; if not, he warns, ‘public discourse runs the risks of being hypocritical: citizens talk before one another one way and vote another’.4 But why should citizens put aside their own principles when engaging in fundamental political questions? Rawls answers in accordance with a society’s understanding of its members as free and equal in political discourse and action. Democracy implies ‘an equal share in the coercive political power that citizens exercise over one another by voting and in other ways. As reasonable and rational, and knowing that they affirm a diversity of reasonable religious



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The ideal of public reason would lead to the opposite of what its proponents hope for: a dearth of political debate and almost no restrictive laws. If one were to observe the limits of public reason with true force, one would paradoxically find oneself silent in most, if not all, democratic parliamentary sessions. As Wolterstorff observes: The person who embraces Audi’s view will, in her mind, run through a variety of considerations in support of some proposed law or policy; if she is at all socially observant, she will dismiss each one in succession, on the ground that almost certainly there is some citizen around who is fully rational and adequately informed on the matter but would not accept it. And so, she says nothing.12

If every legislator adhered to the limits of public reason, there would only be very few restrictive laws. This would mean that in a pluralistic democracy, as Philip L. Quinn aptly points out, no comprehensive value system, ‘including all known secular ethical theories’, would be admissible in public debate, ‘on the grounds that every such theory can be reasonably rejected by some citizens of a pluralistic democracy’. As a result, ‘very few restrictive laws or policies can be morally justified, a conclusion that would, I suspect, be welcomed only by anarchists’.13 If ‘public political argument is argument in the public forum in which citizens try to convince one another to pass legislation or to adopt policies’,14 the ultimate goal is agreement. In actual politics, a common political basis is not the precondition for convergence in or agreement on political discussions. There is no reason to assume that political persuasion is impossible if the parties involved do not first begin from the same set of values and principles. There are political persuasions and agreements every day in spite of the fact that they do not base arguments on the ideal of public reason. Wolterstorff observes that people ‘do not for the most part aim at achieving agreement concerning a political basis; rather, (they) aim at agreement concerning the particular policy, law, or constitutional provision under consideration’.15 Wolterstorff, therefore, sees the search for an ideal of ‘public reason’ as irrelevant, as a workable agreement can only be reached in political outcomes, not in the type of reason which forms their basis. Moreover, even if there is a common basis for compromise, it may well change from one day to the next as it is affected by a volatile political climate and the evolving needs of the society. To insist on reaching consensus via a common basis would in reality turn a parliamentary session into a Quaker meeting, that is, a meeting which operates by consensus as Wolterstorff defines it.16

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religious teacher.’ He instead replies: ‘How could Jesus or any Hebrew prophet, or any Hebrew at all, for that matter, be a religious teacher without being a social reformer, or a social reformer without being a religious teacher?’26 The distinction between religion and secular politics did not exist in the Hebraic society for ‘the law which regulates all aspects of its life is religious. Its sanction is that it is the revealed will of God.’27 The ancient Hebrew prophet as such was both a religious teacher and a social reformer.28

Jesus as God incarnate is himself a powerful statement of God’s involvement in public humanity. The disciples are told to pray for the coming of the Kingdom of God which is not to be separated from doing the will of the Father on earth. Jesus’s teaching about Christians being the light and salt of the world is a call to become a saving presence in the world. The Christian church, therefore, has to participate in the public life to fulfil this task: its presence in the world properly reflects its true Christian nature as both personal and communal. If Christian faith is indeed faith in ‘God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible’, and in Jesus Christ ‘through whom all things were made’, there should be no realm that is absolutely outside the overall horizon of theological interest. In other words, if God the Creator is the source of meaning and order who calls into being all things out of nothing, and if Christ the Reconciler is the telos of history who renews and culminates all things in himself, the exploration of freedom and equality, tolerance and peace, dialogue and understanding, and other fundamental issues in politics and social ethics is clearly within rather than without the boundaries of theological concern. Nor can a religious/secular disjunction be characterized as private/ public as if Christian faith could be privatized without a disastrous narrowing of its theological vision. It weakens the priestly self-examining and prophetic self-critical spirit of the Christian church. When reflective exercises are confined entirely within the Christian community, the church will not benefit from a wider circle of scrutiny and criticism and, thus, will be less effective in communicating its truth and relating its faith to the society. Since every aspect of our lives today is deeply influenced by the politics and social ethic of the secular world, keeping religion ‘private’ would only make faith irrelevant to daily life. If in the final analysis, ‘loving God’ and ‘loving one’s neighbour’ truly go hand in hand as the greatest of all commandments, then the proper concern for the quality of social life and the enthusiastic promotion of consensus on social values should belong to our care of and service to our neighbours. Indeed, church history has shown that the growth of the church can even help accelerate the pace of social transformation and renewal.



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What happens when religious concerns are excluded from the public forum? Wolterstorff laments: What has rushed in to fill the void is not noble discussions about principles of justice which have been extracted in Rawlsian fashion from the consensus populi. For nobody cares about principles of justice thus obtained. What has rushed in to fill the void is mainly considerations of economic self-interest, of privatism, and of nationalism. These today dominate our discourse in the public square [. . .] What people in contemporary society care most deeply about is their pocketbooks, their privacy, and their nation. If the reigning ethos says that it is wrong to introduce religion into the public space, then it is these other concerns that people will appeal to. What else?29

Silencing religion gives voice to the me-ism and we-ism of private and group egoism. Perhaps the editor of a secular daily newspaper has already been wary of the looming danger of a post-Christian era: The idea that people have some rights just because they are human, and entirely irrespective of merit, certainly isn’t derived from observation of the world. It arose out of Christianity, no matter how much Christians have in practice resisted it. Although human rights have become embedded in our institutions at the same time as religious observance has been in decline, they could become vulnerable in an entirely post-Christian environment where the collective memory slips from the old moorings inherited from Christian ethics.30

Notes 1 John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 3f. 2 Ibid., 218. 3 Ibid., 215. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid., 217. 6 Robert Audi, ‘Liberal Democracy and the Place of Religion in Politics’, in Religion in the Public Square: The Place of Religious Convictions in Political Debate, ed. Audi Robert and Nicholas Wolterstorff (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997), 16. 7 Rawls, Political Liberalism, 25. 8 Audi, ‘Liberal Democracy’, 25, 28f; cf. 33, 141. 9 Ibid., 31f. 10 Nicholas Wolterstorff, ‘The Role of Religion in Decision and Discussion of Political Issues’, in Religion in the Public Square, 81.

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11 Richard Rorty, ‘Religion as Conversation-Stopper’, Common Knowledge 3, no. 1 (Spring 1994): 4. 12 Wolterstorff, ‘The Role of Religion’, 154. 13 Philip L. Quinn, ‘Political Liberalisms and Their Exclusions of the Religious’, in Religion and Contemporary Liberalism, ed. Paul J. Weithman (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997), 144. 14 Paul J. Weithman, ‘Introduction: Religion and the Liberalism of Reasoned Respect’, in Religion and Contemporary Liberalism, 8. 15 Wolterstorff, ‘The Role of Religion’, 114. 16 Nicholas Wolterstorff, ‘Audi on Religion, Politics, and Liberal Democracy’, in Religion in the Public Square, 152f. ‘A parliamentary session operates by majority vote – though it is essential to recognize that majority is not always to be equated with simple plurality [. . .] By contrast, a quaker meeting, as I shall understand it, operates by consensus [. . .] By consensus here, I mean agreement, not acquiescence’ (152, his italics). 17 Ibid., 153f., his parentheses. 18 Quinn, ‘Political Liberalisms’, 157. 19 Wolterstorff, however, quips over Weithman’s phrase. ‘(Rawls) wants to avoid appealing to any independent notion of respect for rational agency. His argument is that the idea of liberal democracy itself implies restraint on the use of reasons derived from comprehensive religious or philosophical perspectives. The notion of respect, though it no doubt underlies Rawls’s thought, plays no role in the argument itself ’. Wolterstorff, ‘The Role of Religion’, 119, his italics. 20 Sanford Levison, ‘Abstinence and Exclusion: What Does Liberalism Demand of the Religiously Oriented (Would Be) Judge?’, in Religion and Contemporary Liberalism, 79. 21 Robert Adams, ‘Religious Ethics in a Pluralistic Society’, in Prospects for a Common Morality, ed. Gene Outka and John P. Reeder, Jr. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 112. 22 Ibid., 106. 23 Michael Perry, Love and Power: The Role of Religion and Morality in American Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 145. 24 Cf. Kathryn Tanner, ‘Respect for Other Religions: A Christian Antidote to Colonialist Discourse’, Modern Theology 9 (1993): 1–18. Tanner powerfully argues that in spite of a pluralist’s best intentions, her insistence on commonalities as precondition for dialogue brings her into line with colonialist forms of discourse. 25 Wolterstorff, ‘Why We Should Reject What Liberalism Tells Us about Speaking and Acting in Public for Religious Reasons’, in Religion and Contemporary Liberalism, 180f, his italics.



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26 John Macmurray, Search for Reality in Religion (London: Quaker Home Service, 1984), 36. 27 Ibid. 28 See, e.g., Amos 5:21–24, Mic. 6:6–8. 29 Wolterstorff, ‘Why We Should Reject What Liberalism Tells Us’, 177f., his italics. 30 ‘The Guardian View on Disappearing Christianity: Suppose It’s Gone For Ever?’ (Editorial) The Guardian, May 26, 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/ commentisfree/2016/may/27/the-guardian-view-on-disappearing-christianitysuppose-its-gone-for-ever (accessed 31 August 2017).

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God, Discipleship and Meaning in Rainer Maria Rilke and Abu Hamid al-Ghazali Mona Siddiqui

The contemporary decline in letter writing constitutes a huge cultural shift in the way society had communicated for centuries. Today, technology allows us to connect in diverse ways. But at a time when probably most of us no longer write long or personal letters, when some lament that the art of letter writing has been robbed of romance, it is worth remembering that this decline has been quite sudden. During the Middle Ages, writing was a way of ordering one’s thoughts and preserving the past. Letters formed an intrinsic aspect of how knowledge and thought were communicated. In pre-modern Islamic societies as well as in most societies in antiquity, the letter was first and foremost an essential mode of communication, one that often transmitted meaning across countries and even continents.1 Consciously or unconsciously, the letters of most authors are intended for a wider circle than for the individual recipients alone. Richard and Mary Rouse open their introduction to their collection of articles, Bound Fast with Letters, with a quote from Isodore of Seville:  ‘Use of letters was devised to remember things:  things are bound fast with letters lest they escape into oblivion’.2 Letters retained their literary popularity and distinction as they are also witnesses to change, in human thinking, morality, society and politics. They are about communicating ideas as well as personal stories of love and anguish. In addition to providing a comment on social and political history, some letters are epic tales of correspondence between two friends or two people who are romantically inclined. Others, like the example of De Profundis by Oscar Wilde which he wrote from prison, are a dramatic monologue in which he speaks of all that matters to him, his reflections on his life, his downfall, his decadence, his wrongful passions, art and spirituality and religion.

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Letters were never written in one style or form or with one purpose. In the following pages, we can see a glimpse of the educational-philosophical dimension of letter writing as we look at a scholar and a poet whose works continue to inspire for their poetic wisdom. Despite their very different civilizational and cultural backgrounds and the distance of time and space, their letters explore one of the fundamental human struggles which is how to reconcile ourselves to impermanence and yet find meaning in life. The two writers have been chosen not as representatives of East and West or Islam and Christianity but for the literary and theological quality of their respective works. Their letters are very different in their didactic tone but they share that elusive quality of the author’s personal quest for meaning and fulfilment. The Muslim theologian Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (d.1111) is deemed by many to be the greatest ethical thinker in Islamic intellectual history. In fact, his contemporaries were in such admiration of his work that they gave him the honorific title hujjat al-Islam or proof of Islam. Ghazali was not only a polymath and a jurist of the Shafì’i school of law but also a philosopher, a theologian and a Sufi of Sunni Islam. Born around 1058 in Tabaran in the district of Tus in Iran, he studied with the influential Ash’arite theologian al-Juwayni at the Nizamiyya Madrasa in nearby Nishapur. After being appointed to the prestigious Nizamiyya Madrasa in Baghdad where he became closely connected to the court in Baghdad, Ghazali soon came to be regarded as the most influential intellectual of his time. In his autobiographical works, he writes about enjoying the privileged access he had to the great minds and men of state. In 1095, he grew frustrated with scholastic philosophy suffering a kind of spiritual crisis and gave up his teaching and left the city. At the height of his crisis, he writes that ‘he prayed like a man at his wits’ end to whatever god there may be’. Going through a period of doubting his senses and reason itself as means to certain knowledge, he went through a stage of deep scepticism when he confesses to being a Muslim only in name. Under the influence of Sufism, mystical literature and practice, Ghazali saw his life in a different way; the virtuous life demanded higher standards of ethical living which, for him, weren’t compatible with being in the service of sultans, viziers and caliphs. The quest for certainty dominated Ghazali’s struggle with his faith. It led him to what is best described as an epistemological Odyssey in search of the essence of knowledge. This intellectual disorder in his life meant that he could not simply think his way out of this abyss. Using reason, he examined the teachings of ‘the seekers after truth’:  the theologians, philosophers and Sufis. He studied much and complained that the philosophers considered their way of knowing by ‘demonstrative proof ’ was superior to theological knowledge



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drawn from revelation and its rational interpretation. For Ghazali, the primary evidence for God was not per se rational; there was no way to certain knowledge except through Sufism, through prayer and the development of the inner life, a virtuous life. The answer lay in Sufism which meant devoting oneself to rituals of the faith, to prayer and mystical practice. His greatest work, Ihya Ùlum al-Din, The Revival of the Religious Sciences, a work which spans some forty books, has inspired scholarship and popular piety throughout the generations for successfully combining both orthodox Sunni theology with Sufi practice as a guide to almost all areas of life and death. His purpose is to show how the doctrines and practices of Islam can serve as the basis of a profound devotional life, leading to the higher stages of Ṣufism or mysticism. It is from this work that his short treatise ‘Ayyuha al–Walad’ – ‘Oh Boy/Disciple’ – but also translated as Letter to a Disciple is considered to be one of Ghazali’s last works. The letter is a reply to the request of a former student who wants advice as guidance for the rest of his life. The student is also described as advanced, despite the title of the work implying boy, youth or jeunesse.3 The preamble to the work is an addition to the epistle, and unlike the main body of the letter, the preamble has only one question while the main body has several. Ghazali’s Letter to a Disciple  – Ayyuha al–Walad  –is considered to be one of his final works focusing on what one needs to know to perfect the inner life. Tobias Mayer describes it as having the pathos of a ‘spiritual last testament’.4 It is contended by some that the disciple didn’t exist and that Ghazali was in fact writing to himself  – a mirror image of a young man whom Mayer says was a preacher ‘steeped in learning, prone to vanity and possibly on course for spiritual disaster’.5 The very first question, however, is why seek advice from Ghazali when the advice which comes from the Prophet’s messengerhood should be enough. And if a person hasn’t been receiving advice from the Prophet, then what has the young man achieved in these years? Running throughout the letter is a central theme, that the true purpose of life is worship of God. And yet, alongside this truth is the human truth, the human struggle which is how one stays true and faithful to this worship. Ghazali is always aware how humankind gives into vain desires and longings. Much of Ghazali’s attitude to the need for increased worship and prayer is predicated on his ideas of disciplining the soul. These ideas are found predominantly in his other works such as Al-Ghazali on Disciplining the Soul, Kitab Riyaḍat al-nafs, and On Breaking the Two Desires, Kitab kasr al-shahwatayn.6 Ghazali’s concern is that man must discipline his soul for the sake of the righteous life, for a gradual detachment from worldly

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temptations which allows us to become nearer to God. This jihad against the soul is mentioned in multiple ways: The believer is beset with five afflictions: a believer who envies him, a hypocrite who hates him, an unbeliever who makes war on him, a devil who misguides him and a soul which struggles against him. Man has three enemies: the world, the devil and the soul. Be on your guard against the world through renunciation, against the devil by disobeying him, and against the soul by abandoning desire.

There is here a call of desperation as humankind remains suspended between the two worlds, caught in his desires for this world and his hopes of the afterlife. But the purpose of self-discipline, this long inward strife, is to find oneself constantly in the presence of God. Bringing these themes into his Letters, Ghazali’s criticism is not of the ordinary fellow or worshipper but also those who have knowledge and think that knowledge alone without deeds will be enough for salvation. For Ghazali, knowledge was that which led to obedience of the law, of God. But knowledge alone could not save you from yourself; knowledge had to be accompanied by action, and so he writes, ‘The knowledge which does not remove you from sins today and does not convert you to obedience, will not remove you tomorrow from hellfire’.7 Our whole life is a provision for the next life. This includes those philosophers who mistakenly think that their knowledge is their salvation. Even if you had studied for a hundred years and collected a thousand books, you would not be eligible for the mercy of God except through action.8

Ghazali stresses, ‘The mercy of God is near to those who do good’, and asks then what happens when faith itself is tested. That is the biggest struggle we face because faith is always tested. For Ghazali, the important thing was to kill the ego, otherwise the heart will not be illumined by gnosis. His advice to his disciple is ‘work for this world in proportion to your stay in it, work for your afterlife in proportion to your eternity in it, work for God in proportion to your need of him and work for the fire in proportion to what you can bear of it’.9 Knowledge itself should be pursued, but it needs to be grounded in actions which bring you closer to God. The most eloquent expression of this are the questions ‘If mere knowledge were enough for you and you did not need deeds besides it, God’s call is there any suppliant? Is there anyone seeking forgiveness? Is there anyone repentant?’10 This is based on the tradition which says that during the last third of the night, God descends into the lowest heaven and asks these questions of anyone who is awake and praying.



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Ghazali reminds his disciple of God through prayer and death, ‘Live as long as you want, but you must die, love whatever you want but you will become separated from it’. In some ways, death and prayer went hand in hand. Death was the fate awaiting us all after which the truth of our faith would become clear. There was no room for complacency; indeed, faith was strengthened not just by deeds but supererogatory acts of worship such as prayer during the night. For most Muslim thinkers and devotees, prayer was what eased human struggle and suffering, and for many Sufis, being deprived of the joy of praying was their biggest fear. For Ghazali, human struggle is ultimately about how one devotes one’s life to God – this means banishing ones desires for the earthly life and recognizing that we are alone in this world and all we carry in life as in death are our good deeds. Ghazali ends the Letters content that he has given his disciple the necessary advice but also requests that the disciple remember him in his prayers. The master-disciple relationship may have been hierarchical, but there was no hierarchy in the eyes of God; it was always a sign of humility to ask someone to remember you in their prayers. A very different genre of letters was written in the twentieth century by the Bohemian Austrian-born poet and novelist Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926). Rilke was born in Prague and is considered one of the most important poets and writers combining philosophical, literary and poetical genres. He was reading literature from an early age and was writing poetry from the 1890s. His father was a military man and rather ferocious, who despaired of him never having a proper job. After five miserable years at a military academy, he left for Prague University and travelled quite extensively. Rilke lived in Paris, and after a short stint on the front during World War I, he left and sought army release. He left Germany in 1919 with a great ambivalence towards the country he held responsible for the war and its aftermath. Rilke wrote about solitude and the experiences of life in all his works, but he also wrote on God, love, art and theological matters. According to Ulrich Baier’s biographical notes, Rilke left his wife and child to become a poet and had passionate affairs with several women, only to end them when he wanted to return to his writing. He acknowledged late in life that while he had paid for his wife and daughter’s living expenses throughout his life, he had been neither a good husband nor a good father.11 His biography paints the portrait of a man who could not afford the expensive lifestyle he lived and mostly relied on patrons and benefactors. Yet, people lavished praise and money on him and despite his erratic publishing record as Baier writes, his correspondents knew

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that with each letter ‘they were given something that would far outlast anything bought with their money’. Some of his most famous works are the Sonnets of Orpheus, Duino Elegies and Stories of God. From 1922 until his death in 1926 from leukaemia, he lived in relative seclusion in Switzerland. He was only twenty-six when at the time of his famous and most widely quoted work, Letters to a Young Poet, the young poet Franz Xaver Kappus first wrote to him in 1902. They were written over six years but Rilke never met Kappus This young poet Kappus pursued his military studies and served for fifteen years as an officer in the Austro-Hungarian Army. During the course of his life, he worked as a newspaper editor and journalist, writing poems, humorous sketches, short stories, novels and adapted several works (including his own) into screenplays for films in the 1930s. However, Kappus did not achieve lasting fame, and this young poet who died in 1966, while immortalized in Rilke’s Letters, has been largely forgotten by history. Rilke’s ten letters contain various themes whether in his advice to the young poet or his own sentiments on life. At the beginning, his advice is to encourage the poet to think about why he is writing: Examine the reason that bids you to write; check whether it reaches its roots into the deepest region of your heart, admit to yourself whether you would die if it should be denied you to write.12

It is as if only when you know you can’t live without writing, that’s when you write or when you write the very best that is within you. In fact, if your everyday life lacks material, it’s because ‘you are not poet enough to summon up its riches, for there is no lack for him who creates’.13 Throughout the letters, it is clear that Rilke is more interested in Kappus the man rather than Kappus the poet. Kappus may have turned to Rilke seeking advice on the quality of his poems, but Rilke is more interested in giving advice to the man who desires to be the poet and the artist. There are several themes which emerge from his letters to a young poet, but solitude as a gift seems the most poetic. W. H. Auden’s description of Rilke was that he was the Santa Claus of loneliness. Rilke had suffered from loneliness as a child and concluded in his letters that ‘we are lonely’. However, rather than suffer from loneliness, he takes isolation to be a given, something to be embraced, and this is what he urges Kappus to do as well. Solitariness is about going into oneself embracing the struggle, the suffering that life presents, but then turning that into some kind of artistic creation. ‘Love your solitude and bear the pain it causes you with melody wrought with lament.’14 For Rilke, ‘every artist is born abroad, as it were; and his home is nowhere but within himself ’.15



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Living humbly and with patience is part of being an artist – it doesn’t happen in the way we understand time – true artistic creativity may take years to manifest itself and in that time while we wait we should know that art is a way of living. It is here that we come across Rilke’s famous lines in which he advises Kappus, ‘Be patient towards all that is unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves liked locked rooms, like books written in a foreign language. What matters is to live everything. Live the questions now, for gradually without noticing it, live your way into the answer, one distant day into the future.’16 He advises that everything serious is difficult and everything is serious. In all this seriousness, love is the most serious thing we do, ‘love between one person and another; that is perhaps the hardest thing it is laid on us to do, the utmost, the ultimate trial and test, the work for which all other work is just preparation’.17 The love to which Rilke seems to be referring is a kind of abstraction not a youthful abandon. It has little to do with the unfolding, abandon and uniting with another person. It is almost a way of coping with the inevitable disappointment that love will bring. For Rilke, solitude here means turning inwards to reflect and grapple with the disappointment of love which leads to a certain creativity. Questions of love, he writes, cannot be solved publicly; they are questions that touch the quick of what it is to be human. For Rilke, love was the experience that had the potential to lift us out of our self-involved selves. When we are in love, as he describes so beautifully, we are capable of being slightly more alive than how we normally are. This is so despite the fact that life is both beauty and unspeakable suffering. Alongside Rilke’s encouragement of accepting solitude as our individual human condition, Rilke reveals a certain complexity in his religious faith and views on God. The search for God was the search for life’s greater meaning. God is a great conviction in him but as he writes, ‘the whole of creation says this word without deliberation’.18 He critiques Christianity for ignoring the gesture Christ makes on the cross which was to point to a different way of being in their search for God; Christ’s way on the cross was meant to be a signpost, not the destination itself. But Christians have settled there. Christians have made a job out of the Christian purpose a bourgeois activity: Instead of leaving Christ’s way of the cross, where the signpost was erected to reach far into the night of sacrifice, instead of moving on from this via crucis, Christianity has settled there.19

Rilke discovered another mighty forefinger pointing when he read the Qur’an. God also stands in an Orient which cannot be exhausted. Rilke was not an orthodox Christian; in fact, he writes against Christianity at times but he was

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concerned about the artist’s relationship to God. Frederick Vanson writes that ‘if ever a man was obsessed by God with God as the immanent power informing all natural and human life, that man was Rilke’.20 His gospel is the gospel of God immanent. The restlessness, uneasiness and dreaminess of his early poetry gave way to his grappling with God, an obsession with God’s presence in the world and our grappling with him. Both these writers are giving moral wisdom in their own way through their own understanding of the divine. For Ghazali, the Qur’anic verse ‘The mercy of God is near to those who do good’ (Q7:56) guided his writing. God is the beginning and the end  – our life should be a God-centred life for it to have meaning and purpose – this means removing ourselves from that which takes us away from God. For Rilke, there was no salvation or hope outside the experience of this life, as he writes, ‘Why should you want to exclude from your life all unsettling, all pain, all depression of spirit, when you don’t know what work it is these states are performing within you?’21 It is all of life’s experiences which make a worthwhile life. This is the beautiful mystery, our existential reality and the essential human struggle. For both Rilke and Ghazali, their advice to their disciples is to go into oneself, for Rilke to cultivate solitude because that is necessary for the artist, and for Ghazali, this knowledge come about through prayer and reflection but also through our awareness of death, to know that we take nothing into the next life other than our good deeds. The letter form gives their thoughts a more personal touch even though their advice is undoubtedly for a wider audience. Ghazali was a theologian and Rilke was a poet, but their letters were fragments of advice to themselves as well as to their recipients. For all of us search for hope amid death and suffering. Rilke had observed the vanishing of all kinds of master narratives of redemption. Rilke believed in love, even when and maybe because he understood how love can be the deception we need and want in life, to make life liveable. Rilke remains a mystic in an age of disillusionment but does so by making art and solitude his religion. Ghazali saw faith in God as the only way to come to some understanding of life; life could not be understood without faith and God could not be understood without prayer. Both advised the disciple and the poet by recognizing the divine in their own way – Ghazali in prayer and Rilke in solitude.

Notes 1 Adrian Gully, The Culture of Letter Writing in Pre-Modern Islamic Society (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), 2.



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2 Richard H. Rouse and Mary A. Rouse, Bound Fast with Letters (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013), 1. 3 Manuscript np. 4932 at the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris (dated 1090/1679), gives the name of the man/disciple as ‘Abd Allah ibn al-Hajj Khalil’. See Tobias Mayer, Al-Ghazali, Letter to a Disciple (Cambridge: The Islamic Texts Society, 2005), xxiii. 4 Mayer, Al-Ghazali, xxii. 5 Ibid., xxiv. 6 Al-Ghazāli on Disciplining the Soul (Kitāb Riyāḍat al-nafs) and on Breaking the Two Desires (Kitāb kasr al-shahwatayn), Books XXII and XXIII of The Revival of the Religious Sciences, Iḥyā‘ `ulūm al-dīn, trans. T. J. Winter (Cambridge: The Islamic Texts Society, 1995). 7 Mayer, Al-Ghazali, 16–17. 8 Ibid., 8–9. 9 Ibid., 14–15. 10 Ibid., 18–19. 11 For a short but informative and accessible introduction to Rilke’s life, see Ulrich Baier, The Poet’s Guide to Life, The Wisdom of Rilke, ed. and trans. Ulrich Baier (New York: Random House, 2005), vii–lii. 12 Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, trans. Charlotte Louth (London: Penguin Books, 2011), 7. 13 Rilke, Letters, 8. 14 Ibid., 28. 15 Rainer Maria Rilke, Ruth Sieber-Rilke and Carl Sieber, eds, Das Florenzer Tagebuch, 1942 (Frankfurt and Leipzig: Insel, 1994), 38. 16 Rilke, Letters, 23–24. 17 Ibid., 42–43. 18 Ibid., 71. 19 Ibid., 72. 20 Frederic Vanson, ‘Rilke’s “Stories of God” ’, Renascence 14, no. 2 (1962): 90. 21 Rilke, Letters, 58.

22

The Theological and Educational Promise of Scriptural Reasoning David F. Ford

When Iain Torrance was inaugurated as president of Princeton Theological Seminary in 2005, he invited Professor Peter Ochs, Dr Aref Ali Nayed and myself to give lectures on Scriptural Reasoning.1 It was an extraordinary experience, spending time over several days with Iain and with two of the seminal figures in Scriptural Reasoning. Besides the festivities, there were long conversational walks by day, followed by intensive conversations far into the night. The bonding between the four of us that happened through those days has been of long-term importance in the years since, and Iain’s early and sustained appreciation of the significance of Scriptural Reasoning has been a considerable encouragement to many involved in it, not least myself. From early on, Iain judged that Scriptural Reasoning represents something that is not only distinctive and full of promise for the field of interfaith engagement but that it also has wider implications for our complexly multifaith and ‘multisecular’ world. These implicate several intertwined spheres at once: each of the religious traditions involved – in their faith, self-understanding and educational practices and institutions; issues and histories around which there have been deep differences and conflicts, sometimes leading to religionrelated violence; and the quest for civilized ways of shaping societies and an international order in which there can be diversity and disagreement while resisting violent conflict. Iain and I  had been close colleagues in the University of Birmingham for some years, but had not found in that multireligious and multisecular city anything with the depth and promise of Scriptural Reasoning. There were very worthwhile things  – academic projects and programmes, social and practical engagements, mutual hospitality and personal relationships across the various



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that included Basit Koshul, and for much of its first two decades, the practice was mostly Abrahamic.2 What generally happens in Abrahamic Scriptural Reasoning sessions is that small groups (usually a maximum of twelve) study a number of short texts on an agreed theme. The texts, taken from the Tanakh, the Bible and the Qur’an, but sometimes accompanied also by secondary texts, are briefly introduced, read aloud (often in Hebrew, Greek or Arabic, as well as in translation) and then intensively discussed one by one. There can be cross reference and comparison, but always an insistence on returning to the set texts. The main ingredients in a good session include: close reading of the texts; attentive, respectful listening to each other; recognition of differences without necessarily resolving them or arriving at any consensus; not being afraid to argue; nobody claiming to be an expert on the complete or final meaning of any text; and having enough time to consider from various angles these rich texts, allowing those participants who are slower at realizing what they want to say to reach their point of articulation (my own ideal is at least two hours for one set of texts). There are many fuller descriptions of the practice available,3 together with guidelines distilled by participants from many sessions.4 Scriptural Reasoning began in universities but has spread into many other settings, including seminaries, local congregations (synagogues, churches, mosques), schools, prisons, hospitals, a range of civil society contexts, leadership programmes, Catholic and Anglican religious orders and peacebuilding and reconciliation projects. Within universities, it has been part of undergraduate and postgraduate programmes, has generated many research projects and doctoral dissertations and has drawn on other departments and disciplines beyond theology and religious studies, including art, classics, comparative literature, economics, history, international relations, languages and linguistics, law, music, medicine and nursing, philosophy, politics, regional studies and social anthropology. Its geographical reach has also extended beyond its US and UK origins to embrace continental Europe (especially the Netherlands, Germany and Italy), China, Israel, Jordan, Egypt, Oman, Russia, Kenya, Pakistan, India and Australia. Overall, Scriptural Reasoning can be seen as a form of ‘interactive particularity’5 centred on intensive conversation around scriptural texts, developing a practice that has proved to be highly adaptable in a wide variety of settings and among diverse groups of participants, and has now spread around the world and beyond its Abrahamic origins. There is no reason to think that its generativity has reached a limit – indeed the general sense is of it just beginning,



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presidential inauguration included wide-ranging discussions of what is sometimes called ‘occasionalism’ in Jewish, Christian and Muslim thought. At the opposite extreme from deism, in which God creates and then leaves creation to itself, occasionalism sees God as in continual, intensive, engagement with creation, free to spring surprises. Whether it is described using the language of occasionalism or some other theological rationale, Scriptural Reasoning has helped me appreciate the freedom of God to communicate in unexpected and unprecedented ways. Within Christian theology, the main example (alongside creation) of God’s exercise of freedom is the incarnation: God’s freedom of full self-expression and self-giving that is seen in Jesus Christ. To see how Muslims, Jews and a variety of fellow Christians respond to biblical testimonies to Jesus Christ is to be reminded how central to the New Testament are stories of encountering Jesus, with each meeting distinctive, and most of them surprising. Through the years of doing Scriptural Reasoning, I have now experienced a wide variety of responses to Jesus, with no generalization possible. As a Christian, they have helped me appreciate somewhat more fully one particular way in which my faith claims to be universally relevant and true:  through this living person, Jesus Christ, being divinely free to encounter each person. It can happen anonymously (as in Jesus’s parable of the sheep and the goats, when those who have fed the hungry, given drink to the thirsty, welcomed the stranger, clothed the naked, cared for the sick and visited those in prison are surprised to be told they did these things to Jesus  – Mt. 25:31–46), through scripture, sacraments, preaching, other people, the arts, dreams, events, academic fields, religious traditions of many sorts and innumerable other modes. If, as the prologue of the Gospel of John says, Jesus is the Word of God through whom all things were made, then he can relate to people through all things – all those already mentioned and more. If divine truth is primarily identified as a particular person, who is free to relate in an infinity of particular ways with each other person and with whole families, groups, communities and civilizations, then no one has an overview of those interactive particularities, and everyone needs to be alert for ever-fresh encounters, humbly open to what is given next. And there are analogous Jewish and Muslim ways of understanding and encouraging such humility and openness. Scriptural Reasoning is one way of being open to such encounters, helped by the mediation of three scriptures – two of these name Jesus, and the third is the scripture he learned as a boy. This is, of course, a Christian way (and only one of many Christian ways) of understanding, but what else can a Christian offer? One of the most fascinating aspects for me has been how the interplay of the three



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This is of considerable significance for the role of universities in societies that are complexly multireligious and multisecular. Spaces are needed where there can be teaching, research and thoughtful discussion and debate around religion-related issues, and these need to embrace those who are and are not committed within particular religious traditions. That is important for the health of the religious traditions and of the whole public realm. There is a great deal of ignorant religion, dangerous religion, misunderstanding of religion and religious illiteracy, and a crying need is for more intelligent, better-educated faith and more intelligent, better-educated understanding of faith. In a world where it is estimated that over 80 per cent of people are directly involved in a particular religion (and the proportion is growing because religious people tend to have more children) and, at the same time, the numbers attending university are also increasing steeply, there is an urgent need for academically mediated understanding of the religions by people of all religions and none. But it greatly matters how this is done. There are a good many worthwhile approaches. Among them, one of the distinctive marks of Scriptural Reasoning is what I have described above as its capacity to cultivate multiple deepenings. It enables ongoing exploration of the depths through some of the main carriers of deep meaning in each tradition. This creates settings where differences can be faced, conversations between them can happen and a more healthily plural world enabled. Universities are among the relatively few spaces where there are the right conditions for such ongoing engagement.8 Iain Torrance’s deep engagement in the public life of Scotland, notably in its religious and interreligious aspects and in its universities, together with his many theological and academic involvements elsewhere in the world, make him ideally suited to be a prophetic voice at this time of considerable change and uncertainty in his home country. His wisdom has been shaped partly in confessional Christian settings, such as Princeton Theological Seminary, but also through university departments where theology and religious studies come together, such as Oxford, Birmingham, Edinburgh and, now especially, Aberdeen. At present, the University of Aberdeen, in my judgement, not only is one of the leading centres of Christian theology in Europe, but also is developing its capacity to engage with other faiths and beliefs, and with the complexities of a multifaith and multisecular society, in ways that are likely to be prophetic within and beyond Scotland. Iain’s quiet, influential presence is a formative factor in this, and his appreciation and sponsorship of Scriptural Reasoning in both university and community settings is likely to be of no small importance.



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explored.10 But, in conclusion, I  want to open up three rather different developments.

Beyond argument: Lectio divina In 2010, some Benedictine nuns from Turvey Abbey in Bedfordshire, England, attended an open session of Scriptural Reasoning that was part of Cambridge University’s Festival of Ideas. They greatly appreciated the practice but wondered whether it could be combined with their practice of lectio divina. The result was a day in which over twenty Jews, Muslims and Christians came to the Abbey and in two groups, and engaged with the same set of texts from the Tanakh, the Bible and the Qur’an in both modes. The Scriptural Reasoning sessions had discussion around the texts; the lectio sessions had repeated reading of the texts, meditative silence and sharing of some of the meditative thoughts. It was the coming together of one practice, rooted in many centuries of rabbinic argument, with another, rooted in many centuries of monastic meditation. In the plenary at the end of the day, all agreed it had been extraordinarily fruitful. The two forms of intense attentiveness had enriched each other, and I noticed that the group that did Scriptural Reasoning first, followed by lectio, was convinced that that was the best order of engagement, while the other group that did lectio first was convinced that their order was preferable. The experiment has affected how some groups now conduct Scriptural Reasoning:  they begin considering each text by reading it aloud, having a time of silence and then each participant sharing just one word or phrase that specially struck them, before launching into discussion. This interplay of two forms of rich textual engagement could be a model for analogously drawing on other ways in which the various scriptural traditions open up the meaning of their texts. I  have wondered, for example, how the Muslim tradition of recitation could be more fruitful for Scriptural Reasoning – it resonates with some Jewish and Christian practices, such as learning by heart and liturgical chanting. And as Scriptural Reasoning spreads to include other scriptures, such as Buddhist, Confucian, Daoist and Hindu, the forms of interplay could multiply.

Beyond texts alone: Oral traditions; the arts Embraced within such multiple modes are bearers of religious meaning that are not text-based. On a recent visit to the University of Pretoria, I found that

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a signed copy of Bruce McCormack’s magnum opus on Barth and purchased a full set of the Church Dogmatics from the seminary bookstore (I helped carry them back to our lodgings), but he also, over dinner, had an intensive discussion with George Hunsinger, mainly about Barth’s doctrine of election. The two seemed to be in agreement in longing for more Christian and Muslim thinking and activity today to be comparably God-centred, compassionate, politically wise and deeply scriptural. And in many ways, often largely hidden, Iain Torrance has been an exemplar of such thought and action.

Notes 1 See David F. Ford, ‘Reading Scripture with Intensity: Academic, Ecclesial, Interfaith, and Divine’, Princeton Seminary Bulletin 26 (ns), no. 1 (2005): 22–35. 2 Though, in fact, participants have often self-identified as Jewish, Christian or Muslim, there have been many fruitful Scriptural Reasoning sessions in which others who do not so self-identify have played a full part. 3 For one set of Jewish, Christian and Muslim accounts, including my own, see David F. Ford and C. C. Pecknold, eds, The Promise of Scriptural Reasoning (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006). For a vivid account of what goes on in a typical session, see Mike Higton and Rachel Muers, The Text in Play. Experiments in Reading Scripture (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2012), Ch. 9. 4 See www.scripturalreasoning.org. 5 For more on this concept in relation to Scriptural Reasoning, see ‘Developing Scriptural Reasoning Further: Reflections on Scripture, Reason, and the Contemporary Islam-West Encounter’, in David F. Ford, Shaping Theology. Engagements in a Religious and Secular World (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), ch. 5. The present essay might be seen as a sequel to my own thinking in that essay and also in the later essay, ‘Scriptural Reasoning and the Legacy of Vatican II: Their Mutual Engagement and Significance’ in Interreligious Reading After Vatican II: Scriptural Reasoning, Comparative Theology, and Receptive Ecumenism, ed. David F. Ford and Frances Clemson (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2013), 93–119. The essays in the latter volume have extensive bibliography on Scriptural Reasoning, and I refer readers to those references if they wish to follow through topics raised in this essay. 6 I have written elsewhere on aspects of this, especially in Shaping Theology and The Future of Christian Theology (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011). 7 E.g. the University of Virginia, Cambridge University and the Free University of Amsterdam.



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8 I have been especially fascinated by the development of Scriptural Reasoning in China. There has been a tentative opening up of ‘study of religion’ settings to more theological dimensions of the field, and at the same time an opening of some Christian seminary settings to interreligious engagement (involving some scholars who identify with the traditions of the texts being studied and some who do not). Peter Ochs and I are on the Academic Board of the Institute for Comparative Scripture and Interreligious Dialogue in Minzu University, Beijing, which has been one of the pioneers of the Chinese development of Scriptural Reasoning that has involved texts from six traditions: Buddhist, Christian, Confucian, Daoist, Jewish and Muslim. One distinctive mark of this development has been its interaction with the discipline of comparative literature, pioneered by the chair of the Academic Board, Professor Yang Huilin of Renmin University, Beijing. 9 The main ones I am aware of in the United Kingdom have been the ‘Tools for Trialogue’ sponsored by the Three Faiths Forum in a small number of schools for some years and some initiatives of the Cambridge Inter-faith Programme led by Sarah Snyder, Miriam Lorie and Nadiya Takolia. 10 E.g. I have myself been involved recently in three university-related Scriptural Reasoning developments. In the Free University of Amsterdam, Professor Marianne Moyaert conducts research on Scriptural Reasoning and is part of the Scriptural Reasoning in the University network that meets annually in Cambridge, convened by Dr Daniel Weiss, and she both supervises doctoral research on Scriptural Reasoning and teaches an annual course on it to around seventy students. In the University of Tuebingen, one of the centres in which Germany is developing Islamic theology alongside Christian theology, Professor Lejla Demiri and Professor Christoph Schwoebel jointly lead a Muslim-Christian Scriptural Reasoning Seminar. And in Haridwar, India, the pro-vice-chancellor of Dev Sanskriti Vishwavidyalaya, Professor Chinmay Pandiya, has well-advanced plans and funding in place for the opening in 2018 of a leadership institute that will include Scriptural Reasoning between Hindus, Muslims and Christians. 11 Denise Levertov, ‘Making Peace’, The Collected Poems of Denise Levertov, Introduction by Eavan Boland (New York: New Directions, 2013), 757.

23

The Minister: Some Literary Perspectives Alison Jack

‘My experience as a teacher has rubbed into me the enormous difference between knowing a subject and knowing about it.’1 So wrote the Scottish theologian John Oman (1860–1939) in a typescript memorandum from his time as principal at Westminster College, Cambridge, responding to a question about how broad the curriculum for theological colleges should be. It was Oman’s settled conviction that developing depth and authenticity of understanding in the areas of Biblical Studies, Church History and Theology should be the aim of theological education, particularly for those entering ministry. Many of the conversations I  have had the pleasure of sharing with Iain Torrance have revolved around the topics of knowing and living the truths of the faith, and nurturing these attributes in theological education. Iain was kind enough to write up his paper from a conference in Pittsburgh Theological Seminary for publication in the Expository Times when I was the editor, exploring the relationship between his father’s theology of ministry and emerging issues for the Church around ordination.2 Maintaining the Pittsburgh connection, he graciously agreed to contribute to the new doctor of ministry programme set up in collaboration between the University of Edinburgh’s School of Divinity and Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, in which I  was involved as programme co-director. His block of teaching included reflections on such pressing issues as the ordination of gay people, the relationship between consecration and authorization to perform certain functions in the name of Christ (and the pressures which result from this) and the role of sacraments in the life and worship of the Church. Lived, realized theology was at the heart of his contribution, and the minister-students responded positively to the challenges he raised with

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them. Finally, Iain and I have shared many conversations about literature and the way in which theology may be reflected and refracted through fiction. We discovered we share a deep appreciation for the writing of Marilynne Robinson, whose depiction of the inner life of the Rev John Ames in her novel Gilead is surely one of the most compellingly attractive portrayals of ordained ministry in all of literature.3 We have both had the privilege of meeting Marilynne Robinson and of appreciating her commitment to presenting deep theological reflection in the lived experience of her characters. In this essay, Iain’s long commitment to preparing ministers to know deeply the theological nature and significance of their calling will be explored through some of these interests we have shared. Two resources will be drawn upon to promote this exploration. The first is Iain Torrance’s contribution to the Opening Convocation of Princeton Theological Seminary in 2004, published in Theology Today.4 Here, in conversation with Dr Jonathan Sacks’s work, Torrance considers the adequacy of spatial images to explore moral, theological and ethical issues. He concludes: Ultimately [. . .] I used to believe that Christian ethics was fundamentally to do with geography, with map-making and boundaries, and so was related to a spatial imagination. Increasingly now, I believe it has to do with being transformed, and that neither universalism nor prescription is its method.5

To illustrate his argument, Torrance offers an example from fiction, from Walter Scott’s novel The Heart of Midlothian (1818). The novel invokes the true story of a woman who refused to tell a lie under oath, even although this would save her sister’s life, and who then walked to London to beg a pardon for her sister from King George II. For Torrance, the story embodies the relationship between applying hard, inflexible truth and acting in love to persuade an unsympathetic king to show mercy. ‘Essentially’, he suggests, the novel ‘is a narratival account of how grace and truth, which are so often polarized, may properly be brought together’,6 just as they are in the Prologue to John’s Gospel, and in the Hebrew Bible’s frequent reference to ‘grace and truth’. Torrance argues that this transformed way to be is a vision of his hope for the seminary where he is to serve as its sixth president. Such cooperation of grace and truth resists a mode of living which is purely functional and based on the temptations Jonathan Sacks had identified in the early years of the twenty-first century:  greed, relativism, consumption and disregard of the other. It offers a compelling aim for theological education which transcends the particular. And it finds its resonance, its public and imaginative embodiment of possibility, in literature as a way to know rather than know about.



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Emboldened by Torrance’s use of Scott’s The Heart of Midlothian, my second resource is Robinson’s Gilead itself. The novel takes the form of a letter or reflection written by an aged father, the Rev John Ames, to his seven-year-old son, his child with his second wife whom he married late in life. Ames’s ministry in Gilead has been his only charge, in the Congregational Church, and he writes of his lifelong friendship with his fellow (Presbyterian) minister Boughton. The return of Boughton’s prodigal son, Jack, Ames’s godson and namesake, provokes much of the theological struggle in the novel, as Ames moves from being unable to accept Jack’s motives for return, to blessing him as he leaves. The novel repays deep consideration on many levels, but it is its narrative reflection on a theology of ministry which will be the focus here. While Torrance ultimately finds spatial metaphors inadequate, I  hope he would agree with Robinson herself who argues in ‘Onward, Christian Liberals’, that creating a space for understanding, mutuality and defending theological reflection is central to a Reformed view of ministry, and Christian life in general. In contrast to those who assert creedal orthodoxy and demand unwavering acceptance of biblical ‘truths’, Robinson writes: It is worth remembering that [. . .] a common, non-judgmental space is fully consistent with faithful doubt, as it were, which has not only the very humane consequence of allowing us to live together in peace and mutual respect, but also a strong theological and scriptural grounding. It is first of all the responsibility of liberal or mainline Protestants to remember this, because insofar as it is an aspect of their tradition, they should understand it and be able to speak for it. A very great deal depends on its being understood and defended.7

In Gilead, this common, non-judgemental space is explored and defended at various points. The porches of Ames’s and Boughton’s houses offer space for debate and reflection more often and more authentically than their churches, although Ames meets Jack there too. The quiet of an evening on Ames’s porch is the place where Jack and Ames renew their earlier discussion about Karl Barth and predestination which had taken place at Boughton’s. It is the space in which, Ames asserts, ‘in the dark and the quiet I felt I could forget all the tedious particulars and just feel the presence of his [Jack’s] mortal and immortal being’.8 This is possible, in such a quiet space, because ‘[t]‌he idea of grace had been so much on my mind, grace as a sort of ecstatic fire that takes things down to essentials’. The insight comes, in the space created between the characters on the porch, because the theological truth had been given space and time in Ames’s interior life. His being present when his wife and Jack continue to discuss the

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issue, although they think he is asleep, allows him to hear the reassurance that his wife finally feels at home in the space they have created together, and to hear her bless Jack9 from a position of solidarity that he has not shared. The space has drawn Jack in to experience what he has longed for (‘a settled life’), when he had been planning just to ‘look in people’s windows at night and wonder what it was like’.10 In a profound but very understated way, transformative, relational, respectful theological reflection has taken place in the space Ames’s porch represents:  a place with deep roots in its community, earned by his presence with them through adversity and made sacred by his life of prayerful grappling with issues which are not self-evident.11 Robinson’s novel, then, embodies and promotes an understanding of the theological value of space to test and develop prayerful reflection in the company of others. This value in the novel is underscored by the access given to the reader into Ames’s formation and ongoing development as a minister of Word and Sacrament. In his Expository Times article, Torrance reflected on his father’s understanding of the new order which came into the world with Jesus Christ, and towards which ministry is to be orientated through ‘participation in the obedience of Christ’:12 ‘[T]‌his order is something which is creative, joyful, obedient yet not submissive or crushed. It is to do with living at something’s full potential.’13 Robinson has written about personal holiness which reflects something of this longing for divine order: We baffled creatures are immersed in an overwhelming truth. What is plainly before our eyes we know only in glimpses and through disciplined attention [. . .] [T]‌o attempt obedience to God in any circumstance is to find experience opening on meaning, and meaning is holy.14

In Gilead, Ames’s attempt to live obediently to God is presented in the thematic and narrative interplay between his experience and his search for meaning, leading to a personal holiness which informs his ministry. Deeply aware that unbelief has its own possibilities and logic, Ames makes it a rule to say nothing publicly about belief which would sound insincere to a well-loved but sceptical listener such as his brother Edward.15 However, he does not equate the difficulty of defining God with an assumption that God does not exist. The drive to bring understanding and order into his life, and that of his congregation, involves creative, joyful, obedient attention, exercising his full potential intellectually and pastorally. That intellectual potential may be exercised anywhere, even in an unremarkable and out-of-the-way place such as Gilead: Ames responds to his father’s judgement about the restrictions of the place he calls home with the



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exclamation that ‘I had read Owen and James and Huxley and Swedenborg and, for heaven’s sake, Blavatsky’.16 The intellectual is developed alongside the sharing of experiences which ministry opens up, even when pastoral care involves bringing order to the labelling of kitchen taps:  Ames responds to such a call for help from an elderly widow (‘You can never know what troubles or fears such people have’) and is ‘repaid’ by his wife’s companionable laughter when he recounts the story.17 For Ames, experience brings meaning and meaning is holy. As Amy Hungerford comments, ‘Ames’ reflection itself is that kind of holy act, finding a theological meaning that comes as the sum of a whole life of attending to the different thought of other persons – his brother and father, his wife and son, Feuerbach and Calvin.’18 Ames’s ministry is one in which there is deep tolerance of difference and acceptance of the provisionality of language about belief but also a seeking out of meaning in the pursuit of holiness through engagement with the thoughts and lives of others. By presenting the interior life of Ames, Robinson offers the reader a perspective on faith and ministry which is beyond argument but is rooted in experience and relationship. There is holiness in Ames’s struggle to be reconciled to Jack, mediated through the literary and biblical tropes of allusion, analogy and image, all open to further interpretation. This resonates with Torrance’s drawing on his father’s writing on order in terms of the life of the Church: The Church is sent into history to live out its new life in the form of a servant under the law [. . .] not to be legalized in its life, but to use the patterns and forms of the law of this age in the service of its new life in the risen and ascended Lord. Thus all order in the historical Church is essentially ambiguous because it is order in the overlap of two ages [. . .] ambivalent and provisional.19

In Gilead, T.  F. Torrance’s fears about granting ‘finality, self-justification and inflexible institutional forms to ministry at any one period’20 are effectively and resolutely quashed in the presentation of the ministry of John Ames. The result is a ministry which reflects a holding together of grace and truth, a meaningful holiness rooted in the complexity of human relationships and an engagement with theological thought through the ages. Although the novel is not overtly Christological, that Ames’s ministry is firmly grounded in the life of the risen Christ is highlighted in the scene when he movingly reminds his congregation of his belief that ‘Christ is himself the pastor of his people and a faithful presence among them through all generations’.21 As a narrative model from which those offering theological education for ministry might learn, and to which those undergoing such education might aspire, it could scarcely be bettered.

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A final aspect of ministry explored by the novel is that of blessing. In his Expository Times article, Iain Torrance recounts his father’s response to his concerns arising from the early days of his ministry in Shetland:  ‘He [TFT] simply said, “You are ordained to bless the people in the name of God” ’,22 and offered G.W. Sprott’s understanding of the Benediction as ‘God’s answer to our worship, and as its proper close.’ For Sprott, in the Benediction, ‘God’s Ministers put His name upon the people, and He blesses them. [Thus] a blessing is [. . .] imparted from on high, through the channel of an ordained ministry’.23 Iain offers this as an entry point to his father’s understanding of ministry which, as already noted, involves a sharing in the new order brought about by Jesus Christ, and an obedience to his example and nature, rooted in servanthood and orientated towards blessing. For Ames, blessing is certainly closely entwined with ordained ministry. At the pivotal moment of reconciliation at the end of the book, when Ames blesses Jack using the ‘beautiful . . . expressive . . . sufficient’24 words from the benediction from Num. 6:24–26, he comments that ‘I’d have gone through seminary and ordination and all the years intervening for that one moment’.25 Ames presents himself as a channel of God’s blessing, noting ‘the limits of [his own] powers, whatever they are’.26 But there is a reciprocity in the scene which goes beyond Sprott’s ecclesial understanding. Robinson elaborates on this in her interview with Rebecca Painter: The blessing Ames gives Jack is an act of recognition that blesses Ames, too. He is profoundly moved that he has had the occasion to do that, that Jack accepted it, wanted it. I really do believe that all blessing is mutual, and that the moment of blessing is when people rise to the very beautiful seriousness of what they are [. . .] the wonder of the universe, incomparably complex, brilliant, poignant  – and perverse, of course [. . .] But there are good grounds for awe in any human encounter.27

Blessing as the moment of recognition of awe in a human encounter goes beyond the confines of ordained ministry, although, in the novel, this holy moment is indeed mediated by a minister to the reader. The focus, however, is on the ubiquity of the potential for blessing in all lived experience. In an episode from much earlier in the narrative, blessing and sacrament are held together and related to the physical experience of the other.28 Ames describes having preached on Jesus’s words in Mark’s Gospel, ‘Take ye: this is my body’. He has departed from his normal practice of not preaching on the words of Institution, which he had originally adopted because the Sacrament itself ‘is the most beautiful illumination of them there could be’. This Sunday, however, he had



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been thinking ‘a great deal about the body . . . blessed and broken’, and had used the story of Jacob wrestling with an angel from Genesis 32. He explains: ‘I had wanted to talk about the gift of physical particularity and how blessing and sacrament are mediated through it.’ In this sacred moment of interlaced words, sacrament and mystery, Ames gives his son, his flesh and blood, communion from his own hands. The mutuality of the blessing of the experience (and it is so significant, Ames comments to his son that ‘you may remember this’, giving the moment a similar status to that of the scene in the Upper Room), is clearly established. But what might be overlooked is that the encounter is enabled by Ames’s wife. She brings their son to the place where blessing is made visible, the communion table at the end of the service, and offers the insight to Ames that ‘[y]‌ou ought to give him some of that’. The physical and spiritual mystery on which he had preached and reflected is defined in the starkest terms as ‘that’. As effectively as Ames, his wife mediates grace and blessing through encounter with lived experience. As we have already noted, it is she who first blesses Jack as they share their hopes on the porch, a scene which is as profound and mutually revelatory as Ames’s blessing of Jack at the bus stop. The novel presents an understanding of divine blessing experienced in human encounter which is certainly encompassed within ordained ministry. But it is not confined there, and the lived, relational experience of others may enable blessing in sacred spaces of all kinds. In a recent Diary piece in the Guardian Weekend magazine, Howard Jacobson reflects on benediction in the current age through the medium of Jimmy McGovern’s drama serial Broken shown on the BBC.29 Here, he comments, it is as though a ‘long-forgotten language has been revived’, in which the words spoken by the priest in the drama, ‘God bless you’, ‘dispense [. . .] a benignity’ not just on the congregation who hear it, ‘but on the whole devastated community’ in which the story is set. Jacobson goes on, almost liturgically, ‘God bless you, because no-one else will. God bless you, because the very idea of blessedness is once again a necessity. God bless you, because – God knows – we’ve tried saying everything else.’ Experiencing such an act of blessing undermines sceptical judgementalism. Instead, for the non-believer Jacobson, it prompts the insight that ‘[i]‌t’s imagining the way life presses on people, not scorning the choices they make, that’s divine’. Themes shared here with Ames in Gilead include the mutuality of blessing, through imaginative connection, but also an awareness of the worth of the physical and its ability to provoke awe: life ‘presses’ on people, but connecting with them is ‘divine’. It may be an ordained person who speaks the words in the drama, but the effect goes beyond the narrowly religious, and extends to all in need, whether they understand or accept it or not.

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Literature and drama have offered insights into a wider understanding of blessing than is offered in the narrower confines of theological discussion.30 Neither takes away from the intellectual, historical reflection needed by those in theological training about the importance of blessing and the significance of a calling to be channels of God’s blessing in the world, and in the context of worship in particular. But reading lived theology through the arts in this way certainly lifts it out of the world of the functional and into a place where imagination may be engaged and new possibilities explored and tested, as Torrance had invited his hearers in Princeton to attempt. Perhaps the work of Robinson, McGovern and Jacobson need to find their way onto more faculty and seminar reading lists, if religion is indeed to be redeemed for our times. In his article on the theological and educational context of John Oman, Alan Sell comments that ‘we might say that Oman’s whole life was a response to the challenge posed by his loved and revered College Principal, John Cairns: “The best apology for Christianity is a life which makes the supernatural visible to ourselves and others” ’.31 The legacy of theological educators in the Scottish tradition is long and inspiring, full of lives which make visible the supernatural in diverse ways. The best, among whom I include Iain Torrance, have ascribed to a method of teaching which nurtures deep knowledge of theology rather than ‘knowledge about’. The novel Gilead, for which Iain and I  have such respect, presents a minister who has been read by many as making the supernatural visible in his reflections on his life and, thus, offering a powerful apology for Christianity. As Robinson has written: ‘I love loyalty and trust, and courtesy, and kindness, and sensitivity. They are beautiful things in my mind. They require alertness and self-discipline and patience. And they are qualities that sustain my interest in my characters.’32 I have argued that the character of John Ames presents something graceful and true about Christianity, and that engaging with his narrative might move theological education away from the merely functional and into the world of imaginative possibilities. It is a direction which I  trust Iain Torrance would approve of and enjoy.

Notes 1 John Oman, Typescript ‘Memorandum’ at Westminster College, Cambridge, quoted in Alan P. F. Sell, ‘Living in the Half Lights: John Oman in Context’, in The Theological Education of the Ministry: Soundings in the British Reformed and Dissenting Traditions (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2013), 84–153, 108.



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2 Iain R. Torrance, ‘Thomas F. Torrance’s Theology of Ministry and the Pressing Issues of Today’, Expository Times 124, no. 11 (2013): 521–529. 3 Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (London: Virago, 2005). 4 Iain R. Torrance, ‘More than Regent’s Park?’, Theology Today 61 (2005): 447–454. 5 Torrance, ‘More than Regent’s Park?’, 452. 6 Ibid., 453. 7 Marilynne Robinson, ‘Onward, Christian Liberals’, American Scholar 75, no. 2 (Spring 2006): 42–51, 51. 8 Robinson, Gilead, 227. 9 ‘ “Well”, she said, and her voice was very gentle, “well, Jack, bless your heart.” ’ Gilead, 228. 10 Ibid. 11 In the second novel of the Gilead trilogy, Home (London: Virago, 2008), Boughton’s daughter Glory offers a contrasting perspective on faithful space. She shares with Jack a sense of failure about her hopes and dreams of family, and decides to stay in the family house after the death of their father, to maintain a home for Jack’s son. As Rebecca M. Painter comments, hers is the ‘solitary grace of loyalty’, and Glory represents ‘nurturers quietly prodigal in sustaining homes for others’. Divine acceptance and mercy is firmly placed in her human, and female, hands. See Painter, ‘Loyalty Meets Prodigality: The Reality of Grace in Marilynne Robinson’s Fiction’, Christianity and Literature 59, no. 2 (Winter 2010): 321–340, 336. 12 Torrance, ‘Thomas F. Torrance’s Theology of Ministry’, 524. 13 Ibid., 523 14 Robinson, ‘Onward, Christian Liberals’, 43. 15 Robinson, Gilead, 175. 16 Ibid., 269. 17 Ibid., 150. 18 Amy Hungerford, Postmodern Belief: American Religion and Literature since 1960 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 115. 19 T. F. Torrance, Conflict and Agreement in the Church, Vol. 2 (London: Lutterworth Press, 1960), 18, quoted in Iain R. Torrance, ‘Thomas F. Torrance’s Theology of Ministry’, 525–526. 20 Torrance, ‘Thomas F. Torrance’s Theology of Ministry’, 526. 21 Robinson, Gilead, 147. David Fergusson kindly drew my attention to the significance of this quotation. 22 Torrance, ‘Thomas F. Torrance’s Theology of Ministry’, 522. 23 G. W. Sprott, The Worship and Offices of the Church of Scotland (Edinburgh: Blackwood & Sons, 1882), 45, quoted in Torrance, ‘Thomas F. Torrance’s Theology of Ministry’, 522. 24 Robinson, Gilead, 275.

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25 Ibid., 276. 26 Ibid., 275. 27 Rebecca M. Painter, ‘Further Thoughts on A Prodigal Son who Cannot Come Home, on Loneliness and Grace: An Interview with Marilynne Robinson’, Christianity and Literature 58, no. 3 (Spring 2009): 485–492, 490. 28 The episode is from Robinson, Gilead, 79. 29 Howard Jacobson, ‘Has Jimmy McGovern’s Broken Redeemed Religion for Our Times?’, The Guardian Weekend, 15 July 2017, 69. 30 A similar point is made, in metanarrative terms, in Robinson’s novel, when she has Ames read the book The Trail of the Lonesome Pine, which had so moved his wife. The book charts the successful relationship between an older man and a younger woman. Ames comments that ‘[i]‌t strikes me that your mother could not have said a more heartening word to me by any other means than she did by loving that unremarkable book so much I noticed and read it, too. That was providence telling me what she could not have told me’ (Gilead, 151). There is blessing in this interaction between providence, loving, authentic relationships, and literature. 31 Alan P. F. Sell, ‘Living in the Half Lights: John Oman in Context’, 145. The quotation is from Alexander R. MacEwen, Life and Letters of John Cairns, DD, LLD (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1895), 562. 32 Quoted in Painter, ‘Further Thoughts on a Prodigal Son Who Cannot Come Home’, 490.



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life but an inclusive concept related to every area of life. Thus, Kulturwissenschaft is a colligated concept of human life and labour that includes the cultural sciences, social sciences and natural sciences.24 Through this expansion, Kulturwissenschaft provides an expansive variety of concepts for understanding human nature and the world.25 Culture is not limited to a perspective within political science, social science or philosophy, but is all inclusive.26 Therefore, the task of the cultural humanities is to offer knowledge by modelling diverse ways of self-understanding and interrelationships with the world and to historically and systematically interpret both generational association and operational association of semiotic and value patterns in culture in order to offer prescriptions for human life. Studying the diversity of human life in the cultural humanities helps to enlighten us by broadening our understanding from that which has been restricted by the present and narrow perspective, providing a foundation for establishing critical values needed to form each person’s subjecthood and the ground train in practical wisdom.27 In addition, cultural humanities ought not to allow each discipline to give up its specialization but try to expand the humanities into the horizon of culturology with interdisciplinary collaborations.28 Cultural studies scholars maintain that the human being is social, formed in history, and that human nature is something constituted rather than given. In this light, cultural studies, in theory, works with the concepts associated with post-humanism.29 Cultural humanities also suggest that the human cannot understand anything without viewpoints developed within particular cultures. In other words, human understanding is relatively subjective. One must take a detour through cultural studies in order to research human nature. From the perspective of the cultural humanities, historical anthropology searches for the relation between cultural discourse and human nature. Human nature is changeable, then, and coded culturally.30 This is not to say that such cultural relativism denies the absolute revelation of the Bible, but rather points out the limitations of the human ability to understand it.

A reflection on contemporary Korean theological education from the perspective of the new humanities An orientation towards practical theology from the perspective of applied humanities The current crisis in theology is analogous to the crisis of the humanities as they face similar issues. Above all, the utility and practicality of theology is in question

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today. Contemporary Korean theology is under much criticism, because it is not concerned enough with the issues regarding today’s church and society and is overly pedantic and speculative. The fact that Korean theologians have imported foreign theologies without sufficient reflection on our own situation further clouds our awareness of present reality. One of the ways to solve this predicament is through practical theology. It has progressed well since the 1960s. As Professor Heitink of the Free University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands asserts, pastoral theology has evolved quite rapidly, and it now presents itself at the academic level as a separate branch of theology. It is no longer satisfied with the subsidiary role of a theologia applicata, to which it was relegated in the past, but now identifies itself as a theological theory of action, with a methodology that is closely linked to the social sciences.31 We need to distinguish contemporary practical theology from traditional practical theology. Although liturgics, Christian education, missiology and the like used to be called practical theology previously, practical theology recently does not convey the same meaning as it once did. Today’s practical theology rather emphasizes that theology as a whole has to be practical. Thus, current practical theologians suggest that previous practical theology should be distinctively called applied theology. The present-day Korean church is enhancing the area of practical theology in order to improve theological education. The Korean church has explored various ways to make theological education practical and useful for her ministries. On the one hand, in fact, many seminaries in Korea are trying to expand their faculty size in the field of practical theology, which is desirable. However, on the other hand, I think that the practical orientation of theological education cannot be achieved through just an increase of professors in practical theology.

The significance of expressive humanities for doing theology today in the Korean Church The scholars of the expressive humanities regard understanding-centred humanities as a passive work diffused in an era of oppression. They assert that the search for humanities through practical expressions and actions in life leads to expanding human freedom.32 Expressive humanities emphasize several contemporary conditions for human expression and production.33 First, humans have to work to create expression. However, these are not the only means of human expression. Leisure activities are also important. Such

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of various disciplines.35 Here, we gain cultural insights from all disciplines. Therefore, cultural science is a holistic discipline using all disciplines.36 Cultural humanities lead us into interdisciplinary studies. Theologians need to use other disciplines in order to get a more accurate view of human beings and society. It is important to theologically reconstruct the content discussed in all areas, such as human science and natural science. Thus, theological seminaries and divinity schools need to educate students with the basic liberal arts in relation to the humanities and social science. I am sure that such education will give students a wonderful imagination, extensive knowledge and rich insight when they, as ministers, provide sermons, pastoral counselling and congregational service in their future. Moreover, various team-teaching classes which are composed of interdisciplinary dialogues can help students better understand cultural studies and humanity.

Cultural practical theology as a methodological alternative for theological education I have considered three kinds of new humanities and their significance for today. Interdisciplinary dialogues can indeed help evolve today’s humanities. I have reviewed the new possibilities for theology based on reflection on new humanities and especially the applied humanities, expressive humanities and cultural humanities. The outcome is a new theological methodology of ‘cultural practical theology’. The methodology of cultural practical theology emphasizes the applicability of theological education. Cultural practical theology underlines the practical and cultural approach in doing theology. The emphasis on ‘expression’ raised in expressive humanities is included in the word ‘practical’ in cultural practical theology. Expressing what we understand is not separate from practice. We may come to practice not by accepting cultures passively but by expressing actively what we recognize, with the means of communication. Korean theology in the present time is confronted with a turning point, as it seeks a more practical and cultural theological education as an alternative route to overcome the speculative, pedantic and theoretical theology that is alienated from reality. I  hope this alternative method of cultural practical theology will be very effective for improving the gloomy situation of theological education.



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Notes 1 Julie Thompson Klein, Humanities and Culture and Interdisciplinarity: The Changing American Academy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), 14. 2 Korea Academy Research Council, ed., Humanitarianism and the Humanities (Seoul: Acanet, 2007), 85. 3 Robert E. Proctor, Defining the Humanities: How Rediscovering a Tradition Can Improve our Schools (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), xxiii. 4 So states the declaration by Professors of Liberal Arts Colleges in Korea University on 15 Septemeber 2006. 5 Jae-Cheon Choi, ‘Consilience between the Humanities and Social Science’, the 2nd Conference on Humanities and its Performance (Seoul: Hanyang University), 88. 6 Sang-Ho Lee, ‘A Humane Study of Crisis and Humane Studies of Opportunity – Focusing of Critical Introspection’, Korean Language and Culture 34 (2007): 270. 7 Sang-Yup Lee, ‘Cultural Humanities – Cultural Scientific Project of the Humanities’, in The Humanities and Hermeneutics, ed. Korea Society for Hermeneutics (Seoul: Philosophy and Reality, 2001), 117. 8 Dae-Hyun Jeong, et al., Expressive Humanities (Seoul: Tree of Thought, 2005), 17. 9 The crisis of the humanities was discussed in some countries like Germany in the 1960s but not so in Korea until the 1980s. 10 Lee, ‘Cultural Humanities’, 117–120. 11 Jong-Sook Kim, ‘The Crisis of the Korean Humanities – Regarding the New Intellectual Movement’, The Onji Collection of Works 5 (1999): 335. 12 Hae Lim Yang, ‘The Humanities and Hermeneutics: For the Paradigm of the Humanities and the Solution to the Crisis of the Humanities’, Studies for Hermeneutics 8 (2001): 35. 13 Jeong et al., Expressive Humanities, 56–59. 14 Ibid., 72. 15 Applied humanities is also called practical humanities. 16 Nak-Cheong Baek, ‘The Logic of the Global Market and the Ideology of Humanities Education’, in The Way of Study to Revolutionize the System of Korea’s Division, ed. Nak-Cheong Baek (Seoul: Changbi, 1994), 226–253. 17 Sung-Do Kim, ‘Epistemology and Categorization of Applied Humanities – Cases for Hyper Media and Culture Branding’, in Contemporary Theories and New Humanities, ed. Jeong-Ho Jeong (Seoul: Love for Books, 2008), 16. 18 Ibid. 19 Kwang-Cheol Sin, ‘Humanities and Culture Content’, Korean Language & Literature 143 (2006): 216. 20 Ho Yeon Cho, ‘Reexamination of the Crisis of the Humanities – A Suggestion for the Development of the Humanities’, Journal of Human Studies 20 (2006): 35.

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21 Jeong et al., Expressive Humanities, 351–353. 22 Ibid., 390. 23 The term ‘cultural studies’ is used to refer to Kulturwissenshaft in the United Kingdom and the United States. 24 Wolfgang Frühwald et al., Geisteswissenschaften Heute (Frankfurt/M: Insel, 1991), 71. 25 Sang-Yup Lee, ‘Culture, Culturology and Cultural Philosophy’, Philosophy in the Age of Science and Technology, ed. Association of Society and Philosophy (Seoul: Yihaksa, 2004), 58. 26 E.g. the Presbyterian University and Theological Seminary in Korea has run the department of ‘Christianity and Culture’ since the 1980s. 27 Lee, ‘Cultural Humanities’, 150–151. 28 Concerning interdisciplinary collaborations, applied phenomenology in Korea is a good example. Applied phenomenology seeks new possibilities within the practical humanities through the fusion of phenomenology, neuroscience, sociology, psychology and cognitive science. 29 Nae-Hee Kang, ‘10. Cultural Studies, the Pursuit of New Humanities’, in The Contemporary Theories and New Humanities, ed. Jeong-Ho Jeong, 274. 30 Lee, ‘Cultural Humanities’, 142. 31 Gerben Heitink, Practical Theology: History, Theory, Action Domains (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1993), 1. 32 Jeong et al., Expressive Humanities, 279. 33 Ibid., 279–290. 34 Richard E. Miller and Kurt Spellmeyer, The New Humanities Reader, 2nd edn (Dublin: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2005). 35 D. Paul Schafer, Culture: Beacon of the Future (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998), 42. 36 Lee, ‘Culture, Culturology and Cultural Philosophy’, 58.

25

Searching for Gravitas M. Craig Barnes

One of the missions of theological institutions is to train the next generation of leaders for the church. Our curriculums have historically focused on the disciplines of systematic theology, biblical studies, the history of Christianity and practical theology. Most schools also require some type of field education or internships that provide a lab experience for translating the curriculum into a local experience of ministry. This is how we have been training pastors for the last century. It remains an effective means of offering the church a theologically competent pastor. But what congregations want most in their pastor is something that is very difficult for seminaries and divinity schools to provide. They want a pastor with gravitas. People with gravitas are attractive because they have weighty souls, like all things with a gravitational pull. Most people can immediately think about someone in their lives who had this pull. Maybe it was a former teacher, coach, grandparent, boss, the woman down the street who happily interrupted her gardening to speak with you, or . . . a really good pastor. Typically, people with gravitas are older, but it really has little do with age and so much to do with maturity. These people have scars, which are strangely attractive, but not open wounds. They have settled into themselves and those God has given them to love without any futile plans for re-creating others in their own image of what would be good. But they remain curious about the most ordinary things found in the people they care about. People with gravitas long ago discovered that the Holy haunts the landscape of life; so, they gently probe every glimpse they find of it – whether it’s buried in the ordinary, in the fleeting moments of delight or in places of pain as it often is. No one is born with gravitas, and it’s not exactly a spiritual gift. It comes as a result of good responses to hurts, blessings, failures, achievement, boredom and



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has been on this holy terrain before and knows that the life-changing encounter with God can only come after fervently asking the questions that will never be answered. As Keats also claimed, ‘with a great poet the sense of beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all other considerations’.2 Part of the pastor’s gifting from the Holy Spirit is having this same poetic capacity to wait upon a revelation of the beauty of life that is constantly unfolding in the hands of an incomprehensible Creator.3 Again, this revelation of God does not explain the losses of life or the injustices that continue to abound. But it does reveal ways that life is changed by standing before the whirlwind. Some prefer the alternative metaphor of the pastor as a midwife who skillfully sits beside the woman in painful labour. They claim the best care is given by the reassurance ‘I realize this hurts so very much. But I’ve been here before. And I know new life is coming. In the meantime, I’m not going anywhere. I’ll stay with you until we both behold it’. This is an appealing metaphor by virtue of its clear insistence that the pastor cannot take away the pain of finding the new life. However, I still prefer the image of a pastor as Keat’s committed poet, who, with compassion, takes the trauma of the parishioner’s struggle into her or his own soul. It’s part of the cost of ordination. And it is part of what we mean by gravitas. Pastors spend a great deal of time praying, even when they don’t realize they are praying, between sessions of listening to parishioners. Sometimes this prayer takes on the form of pondering, brooding, arguing. Often this occurs while driving to another appointment, or in a mental retreat during a boring committee meeting, or while staring at a bowl of soup at the end of another long day. As Henry David Thoreau claimed, the call is to ‘know your own bone: gnaw at it bury it, unearth it, and gnaw at it still’.4 Through it all, the pastor is entering the parishioner’s struggle with God. Ministers of the Gospel don’t actually feel their parishioner’s feelings, which is quite impossible. They cannot feel the new widow’s loneliness any more than they can feel the sickness of those in the hospital. But they can come alongside the theological angst of those they have vowed to serve with compassion, which is what the word literally means – to be with those whose passion is great. This is what the Gospel does in claiming God is with us. And so, the pastor gnaws at the problem until the parishioner’s ‘why’ questions turn into a deeper discovery of who God is. The gnawing isn’t done until the parishioner has this holy encounter. But this requires negative capability.



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New pastors soon discover that while their work is constantly being evaluated, there are no more ways to get an A on an exam, and the whole notion of objective measurements and progress have been undermined by the calling to be committed to a people who are wandering around in their usually subtle journey with God. Most days are just another day in the desert searching for the manna. If the new pastor does not come to this realization, she or he will be constantly searching for signs of professional success, such as moving from a smaller congregation to serving a larger one. And no expectation is more distracting to authentic focus on the community to which God has called the pastor. After more than thirty years of serving as a parish pastor, I would say that my most common experience was déjà vu. Even though those years were spent serving three different congregations, I just kept bumping into the same people, with different names and the same reoccurring questions. ‘If we take a special offering will it detract from the special offering?’ ‘Should we let the youth group have their pizza party in the parlor the Women’s Association decorated?’ ‘Why doesn’t anyone ever put gas in the church van?’ Significantly, none of these are pressing issues like, ‘Why is the Kingdom of God so slow in coming?’ But they are the questions that press to the front of the line for the pastor’s attention. Similarly, I  have learned how much of pastoral counselling is not very dramatic, and how much of the clergy’s time needs to be spent in small talk in the church halls. I have constantly left a worship service where I’ve knocked myself out to proclaim the Word of God to go to the fellowship hall where someone wants to tell me their opinion about something like the best place to buy a new set of snow tyres. But the parishioner does not think this is just small talk. For them, it is no smaller than the wafer they receive in the Eucharist as the Body of Christ. The congregation wants to believe, needs to believe, that somehow God is with them in most ordinary concerns of their journey. It’s a mark of gravitas for the pastor to find ways of saying, ‘God loves all of you’. That has to include the parts that do not sound so religious. As a leader of the congregation, the pastor is, of course, also helping them find holy visions for their mission, but the congregation’s ability to believe in the dreams of tomorrow is directly related to their belief in the faithfulness of God in the day they have. That was the point of the daily regimen of gathering manna every day for the Hebrews as they journeyed through the desert wilderness. If the pastor cannot wander with the congregation through the ordinary and can only spin extraordinary dreams about tomorrow, the people will know they are only loved for their potential, which is not love at all.

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this conversation would seem ironic because the pastor is surrounded by more people than any member of the church. By virtue of their calling, pastors do not have mutual relationships, or normal friendships, with their parishioners. When they were ordained, they took vows to serve Christ and the church. A  very costly part of this service is to be set apart in order to serve the congregation. It is as if the laying on of hands at the ordination ceremony includes a subtle means of pushing the new pastor away from the laity just a bit. This is not to create an ontological distinction between ministers and congregations but only a distinction in callings. Pastors bear the unique call to serving the callings of everyone else in the church. Young pastors often resist this distinction and want to insist they are just like everyone else. That is certainly true in terms of their humanity but not true in terms of their particular calling. While the pastor may be confused about this, the congregation is typically quite clear about it. When a deacon of the church goes to the hospital to pray with an infirmed parishioner, it does not matter if that deacon can pray the paint off of the walls of the room, when the visit is done the person in the hospital bed will always ask, ‘When is the pastor coming?’ The members of the congregation keep distance between themselves and their pastor not to alienate their minster. To the contrary, it is because they believe their pastor has been ordained to be the safe place where their most intimate concerns are carried to God. They want their pastor to constantly maintain a sacred conversation between them and their ‘only comfort in life and death’.7 In every hospital visit, sermon and even committee meeting, the pastor is called to sustain this holy discourse between God and the people of the congregation. The distinction between the pastor and the laity is not hierarchical, as if the clergy were in any way above the congregation. To the contrary, the pastor is distanced by being the ordained servant who accepts some level of marginalization in order to struggle for a holy word for the parishioners she or he has vowed to serve. This unique calling of being set apart to serve is often what pastors are referring to when they talk about feeling lonely. The reality of this dynamic is unavoidable. The only choice is if the pastor can transform the loneliness into a discipline of holy solitude. It is precisely because the clergy have been set apart by the church that they are free to enter into the Holy of Holies in search of visions from God. And this most important quest is what protects them from being reactionary, programmatic, petty or sentimental in their ministry. A pastor with gravitas is centred on the great ideas that were discovered by prayerfully bringing the concerns of the congregation before God. And great ideas are what is so often missing in the leadership of parishes. They don’t

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left the apostle discoloured. But there he stood before us on the flannel graph proclaiming more of a holy mystery than our teacher realized: God is not easy on the people in the biblical drama who are used a lot. The striking thing is that when you read Paul’s prison epistles, what he writes about most is his surpassing joy. The same could be said about most of the characters of the Bible who ended life stained and taped together. But their delight was in staying in place as part of the biblical drama to which they had surrendered their lives. And that is gravitas.

Notes 1 John Keats, Selective Letters, ed. Robert Gittings (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 41. 2 Ibid., 41. 3 Phil. 1:6. 4 Henry David Thoreau, ‘Letter to Blake, March 27’, in The Correspondence of Henry David Thoreau (New York: New York University Press), 216. Quoted in Annie Dillard, The Writing Life (New York: Harper Perennial, 1990), 68. 5 Jn 20:16–17. 6 Lk. 15:1–32. 7 The Heidelberg Catechism, in German, Latin and English: With an Historical Introduction (New York: Scribner, 1863), Q. 1. See M. Craig Barnes, Body and Soul: Reclaiming the Heidelberg Catechism (Grand Rapids, MI: Faith Alive, 2012), 13. 8 Jn 21:18.

26

Wisdom in a Wikipedia World: Education, Ecumenism and Leadership in an Age of Globalization Neal D. Presa

The lines of demarcation between my reality and your perception become blurred in a Wikipedia world because what we interpret from each other’s language games becomes a starting point for further interpretation, contributions for conversation, reflection and additional comments. This is not so much a defense of modern technology nor an advocacy of social media, as it is seeing in Wikipedia a representative medium that characterizes our contemporary approach to human relationships and meaning-making; these twin concerns are the very thrusts of theology engaged in public discourse: how we relate to one another as human beings and how other human beings are either included or excluded in making meaning about ultimate concerns (God, the purpose of life) and penultimate concerns (how to govern ourselves, policy decisions). Christian cultural theologian Leonard Sweet observes in his book Viral: We know time is constant, but in recent years it seems time started moving much more quickly. Here is a simple example from just a decade ago. Back then, when travelers were waiting for a flight, they would occupy themselves with people watching, talking, reading a book or magazine, staring into space, or relaxing. Now think about the last time you were waiting for a flight. What were other travelers doing to fill the time? They were watching Hulu, sending pictures to friends, perfecting PowerPoints, creating photoshopped photos, texting, tweeting, on Facebook, and checking e-mail.1

Cultural historians, theologians and sociologists are paying close attention to the Google generation as demonstrative of how human beings in the early twenty-first century receive, relate to and use information. Digital technology

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is a phenomenon that has significantly shaped how we view relationships, the level and the degree to which we will engage one another, one’s view of authority and decision-making and one’s own role in the ecological nexus of being global citizens and children of God. In 2008, a major study was commissioned by the British Library and the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) in the United Kingdom on the relationship of the Google generation, proliferation of information technologies and the nature of libraries. The study noted that The ‘Google generation’ is a popular phrase that refers to a generation of young people, born after 1993, that is growing up in a world dominated by the internet. Most students entering our colleges and universities today are younger than the microcomputer, are more comfortable working on a keyboard than writing in a spiral notebook, and are happier reading from a computer screen than from paper in hand. Constant connectivity – being in touch with friends and family at any time and from any place – is of utmost importance.2

On both sides of the Atlantic, the democratization of information is readily apparent, where the lines between public and privileged sources are diminished, and where everyone has the ability, capacity and desire to participate in meaningmaking and in making meaningful changes in the world around them. For us in the Church, the lines between what is exclusively within the clerical domain and what is for the laity are being diminished, and necessarily so. Jonathan Culler, in his On Deconstruction, summarized Derrida’s thought with the aphorism, ‘meaning is context-bound, but context is boundless’.3 Culler cautioned deconstructionist critics who were concerned that there was a world of meaninglessness. Instead, Culler clarified that Derrida’s thought, with the latter’s conception of différrance, was to critique attempts for univocal meanings; rather, one should seek multivocal, multichrome, multivalent meaning in multiple contexts for contexts provide the meaning and intention of stated ‘truths’. Theological education, pastoral and congregational ministry and the Gospel witness in the public sphere in today’s milieu require postures and approaches that, to use the theme of the former chief rabbi of London Lord Jonathan Sacks, affirms ‘the dignity of difference’.4 The early twenty-first century presents a cultural environment like no other in world history:  post-9/11 geopolitics, globalization marked by interdependent trade and communications, migration, religious pluralism, economic apartheid and, in the midst of that, the flourishing of Christianities in the global South. Sacks urged religious communities to become aware of the distinctive gifts we offer to the world’s conversations:



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Canadian theologian Douglas John Hall is correct in his observation that we have replaced the indicative tense with the imperative tense.12 The Christendom context already assumed everyone was Christian, the whole empire was homogeneous in that way, and so what was needed was to behave rightly, to act Christian, to act upon what you were already. The Gospel is not what the Church must do – the shoulds, the musts (love God, love neighbour, reduce gun violence, etc.) – those are the implications of the Gospel. The Gospel is what God has done in Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit. Yet, the Church has always been called to be heralds (the Greek kerux) or even witnesses of the faith. A herald was an ancient messenger whose sole task was to run quickly from the battlefield to the awaiting city. Whereupon arriving at the city gates, the herald would tell of what he had seen and heard of what the mighty sovereign king had done on the battlefield to free the city, to deliver the city from the enemy, to save his people. That what heralds do. They tell what they have seen and heard. In a Wikipedia world, how the Gospel is proclaimed is through metaphor and story. Metaphor invites imagination, multiple dimensions and layers of interpretation. Story speaks to the heart and experience of individuals and the community.

Witness in the public square and the ecumenical dimensions Douglas John Hall, who for many years has described the disestablished Church in a post-Christendom context, wrote in his recent book Waiting for Gospel: Our vocation, as preachers and teachers of this faith – is to acquire the wisdom we need to discern what time it is, and to articulate, as best we can, a message that is worthy of this holy and precious word of our tradition, gospel. And this is the vocation, not only of the priests and teaching elders of the church, but it belongs to the whole church, the whole ‘denomination’, the whole ecumenical body of Christians in our much-threatened world.13

Hall recalled Paul Tillich’s observation of the chronic anxieties that all human beings face: (1) fate and death; (2) guilt and condemnation; and (3) emptiness and meaningless.14 With these three combinations of anxieties, the Gospel is the antidote to our human longings. Emptiness and meaninglessness are endemic in the heart and

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mind of North Americans. With the exception of those who are chronically ill, the question of ‘Where will I go when I die?’ has been replaced with the greater anxiety of ‘What is the point of life?’ The question of emptiness and meaninglessness, the purpose of life, the purpose of a Sunday through Saturday existence – working, paying bills, raising families, going to school, saving up for retirement – become the ultimate concern of our next-door neighbours and of us. Millennials and Googlers don’t ask ‘What is the value of going to Church?’ (which was a question of a prior generation) but ‘What’s the point?’ In the public square, ‘What’s the point?’ becomes the crux of the matter. The Church’s witness of the Gospel in a twenty-first-century sphere requires a key component in all human interactions:  humility. Whereas the Church for 1,700 years was seen by the public and self-regarded as having the answers to all of life’s problems, being the sole repository of God’s absolute truths, the twenty-firstcentury Wikipedia world prompts the Church to take on the posture of humility: in its ecclesiology, in its preaching, in its pastoral ministry and in its ecumenical engagement and calling. The World Council of Churches’ Pilgrimage for Justice and Peace and the World Communion of Reformed Churches’ core calling of ‘Called to Communion, Committed to Justice’ underscores at the centre and circumference that visible unity of Christians and churches is not for the sake of unity in itself; rather, it is seeking and praying for unity in the human family for a more just world. A Wikipedia world necessitates the urgency of humility’s posture. What is required is humble improvisation, but a humble improvisation that is confident in the promises of the Gospel, the power of God unto salvation (Rom. 1:16). Iain Torrance, whom this present volume honours, describes the notion of improvisation in this way: ‘Improvisation is an act without an exact precedent. It is neither an imitation nor a repeat. It is not a legal compliance, but it is an act of faithfulness. It is attentive to the circumstances, and it is new.’15 Improvisation takes seriously the closing benediction in Eph. 3:20–21, ‘Now to him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, for ever and ever. Amen’ (NRS). Because ecclesial life in a Wikipedia world privileges what has hitherto been ignored or diminished – namely the human story, human engagement with one another and with God, the calling of the whole people of God – improvisation reminds the Church that the Church does not have all the answers, that in engagement with God and with other human beings the followers of Jesus are



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called to live in the mystery of the Spirit’s work, anchored in God’s sure and certain love, leaving the answers and final resolutions of all things in the triune God.

Notes This essay is modified from my Mark Kraai Lecture in Public Theology, 16 April 2013, at New Brunswick Theological Seminary, originally titled ‘Theological Method in a Wikipedia World: Ritual, Narrative, and Community’. 1 Leonard Sweet, Viral: How Social Networking Is Poised to Ignite Revival (New York: Random House, 2012). Excerpt available at http://www.randomhouse. com/book/201624/viral-by-leonard-sweet#excerpt (accessed 6 February 2012). 2 Ciber, ‘Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future: A Ciber Briefing Paper’, University College London (2008), 7. Available at https://www.webarchive. org.uk/wayback/archive/20140614113419/http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/ programmes/reppres/gg_final_keynote_11012008.pdf (accessed 31 July 2017). 3 Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), 123. 4 Jonathan Sacks, The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations (New York: Continuum, 2002). 5 Ibid., 12. 6 Parker J. Palmer, To Know As We Are Known: Educaton as Spiritual Journey (San Francisco, CA: Harper, 1983), 71. 7 Cited in Gordon Lathrop, The Four Gospels on Sunday: The New Testament and the Reform of Christian Worship (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2012), xvii. 8 Lawrence A. Hoffman, ‘How Ritual Means: Ritual Circumcision in Rabbinic Culture and Today’, Studia Liturgica 23, no. 1 (1993): 78–97. 9 Ibid., 82. 10 Peter Cha, S. Steve Kang and Helen Lee, eds, Growing Healthy Asian American Churches: Ministry Insights from Groundbreaking Congregations (Downer Grove, IL: IVP Books, 2006). 11 Craig Barnes, Pastor as Minor Poet: Texts and Subtexts in the Ministerial Life (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008). 12 Ibid., 6. 13 Douglas John Hall, Waiting for Gospel: An Appeal to the Dispirited Remnants of Protestant ‘Establishment’ (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2012), 10. 14 Ibid., 31. 15 Iain R. Torrance, ‘Hope and Improvisation’, a sermon preached at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, May 2009; also preached at the Yongnak Presbyterian Church, Seoul, South Korea, September 2012.

Index Abramowski, Luise 40 Adams, Robert 218 al-​Ghazali, Abu Hamid 226–9, 232 allegorical method 36, 38 Ambrose of Milan 38, 131 anthropology 33 n.20, 148–9, 151, 237, 263 Aquinas, Thomas 210 Auden, W. H. 230, 281 Audi, Robert 215–17, 219 Augustine of Hippo 31 baptism 36, 119, 121, 129–35, 196–8 Barth, Karl 59–60, 65, 105, 137–46, 175, 177, 184, 187–8, 200, 245–6, 251, 282 Barthes, Roland 13 Belhar Confession 185–9 Bolt, Robert 208 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich 177 Brierley, Michael W. 82 Brock, Sebastian 1, 38, 42, 43 Caird, John 76 Calvin, John 181–4, 187–8, 190–1 Calvinist 94–5, 132, 197, 205 Campbell, George 98 Campbell, Ian 73 Carter, R. E. 36 Carruthers, Mary 38 chaplaincy 2, 203, 212 Chinese Christianity 171–3, 175 Christology 1, 28, 35, 63, 108–9, 150, 174, 179 Church of Scotland 1–3, 8–9, 97, 117, 159, 181, 188, 190–1, 193, 200 Coakley, Sarah 118–26 Costa, Nathaniel G. 39 creation 23–31, 55, 82–8, 109, 159–60, 162, 165–8, 194, 199, 210, 239, 283 Culler, Jonathan 280 Day, Abby 198 Derrida, Jacques 280

discipleship 94, 173–5, 225, 284 divine action 159–69 Earey, Mark 124–5 Eastern Orthodoxy 35, 159–69 Ebeling, Gerhard 113 n.19, 115 n.36, 177 Ecumenical Council 35, 42 ecumenism 4, 7, 59, 148, 153, 157, 279, 281–3, 285–6 education 3, 37, 39, 47–56, 69, 72, 75, 77, 79, 91–3, 95–6, 98–9, 117, 173, 184, 191, 194, 226, 235–6, 240, 242, 256, 259–60, 265–6, 269–70, 272, 280, 283 Edwards, Jonathan 81, 84–8 eschatology 42, 112, 147–56, 168, 174, 183, 240 ethics 1–2, 8, 56, 117, 137–43, 171, 210–11, 218, 220, 221, 250 Extra Calvinisticum 59–61, 64–5 Fiorenza, Francis Schüssler 113 n.13, 114 n.24, 114 n.31 Foucault, Michel 129–31, 133, 135 Gaudium et Spes 147–57 Geneva Bible 69–72 Germanus of Constantinople 41–2 Gregory of Palamas 126 n.22 Goulder, Michael 9–10, 20 n.1 Hall, Douglas John 285 Hector, Kevin 115 n.39 Heitnink, Gerben 264 Hendry, George Stuart 97 Heppe, Heinrich 6 Hill, William J. 101 Hippolytus 30 Hodge, Charles 87–8, 94 Hoffman, Lawrence 282 Holy Spirit 40, 107–8, 111, 117–20, 123, 125, 135, 271, 275, 285 Huffel, Mary–​Anne Plaajies Van 186

290 Huilin, Yang 176 Hungerford, Amy 253 Hunsinger, George 115 n.39, 246 incarnation 59–​65 Irenaeus 27, 31 Jacobson, Howard 255, 256 Jenson, Robert W. 84 Jeong, Dae–​Hyun 262 Kant, Immanuel 208, 210, 212 n.8 Keats, John 270–​1 Kelley, Dean 195 King James Bible 69, 72–​7 Knight, Christopher C. 165–​9 Knox, John 70, 190 Kooi, Cornelis van der 183 Korean Church 264 Kvanvig, Jonathan L. 87 Lathrop, Gordon 123 Lee, Sang–​Yup 260 Leonhard, Clemens 38, 40 Levison, Sanford 218 Lindbeck, George 102, 147–​54, 156–​7 liturgy 38–​9, 40, 42–​3, 122, 272 Louth, Andrew 167 Mackay, James A. 97 Macmurray, John 219 Marshall, Bruce D. 113 n.6 Maximus the Confessor 42, 65 Mazza, Enrico 40 McCabe, Herbert 67 n.15 McCann, Hugh J. 87 McCosh, James 95–​9 McGovern, Jimmy 255–​6 Moses Bar Kepha 43 new humanities 261–​3 New Testament 1–​2, 7, 9–​10, 13–​14, 17, 25, 31, 69–​70, 72, 73, 111, 119–​20, 135, 152, 190, 239 Oman, John 249, 256 Origen 36–​7, 50–​3 Painter, Rebecca M. 254, 257 n.11 Palmer, Parker J. 281

Index panentheism 81–​6, 166 pantheism 81–​4, 87–​8, 166 Parfit, Derek 205 Park, Yi Moon 262 Perry, Michael 218 piety 50, 95, 121 Plantinga, Alvin 87 political theology 70 practical theology 263–​4, 266 prayer 25–​6, 40–​1, 72, 78, 118–​25, 191, 227, 229, 232, 252, 270–​1, 277 public theology 188, 191, 282 Quinn, Philip L. 217 Quintilian 38–​9 Rawls, John 213–​15, 218 Rilke, Rainer Maria 229–​32 Robinson, Marilynne 250–​4, 256 Rodin, David 204 Rorty, Richard 216 Sacks, Jonathan 8, 250, 280 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 76, 101–​12, 138–​9, 140 science and theology 159, 161, 163, 165–​6 Schafer, D. Paul 265 Schwartz, Daniel L. 39 scriptural reasoning 235–​46 Simon, Yves 210 Smedes, Taede 163 spiritual formation 47, 50 Sprott, G. W. 254 Stoeger, William R. 164 Strauss, David Friedrich 112 Streeter, B. H. 13, 16–​17 Sweet, Leonard 279 Tanner, Henry Ossawa 48 Tanner, Kathryn 222 n.24 Tatian 26–​8 Tertullian 27, 29, 30, 219 Thaumaturgus, Gregory 50 Theodore of Mopsuestia 35–​43 theological education 48, 51–​2, 117, 249–​50, 253, 256, 280, 283 theological method 118, 124–​5, 266 Thoreau, Henry David 271

Index Torrance, Iain R. 1, 3, 23, 51, 59, 69, 91, 117, 159, 171, 200, 203, 235, 238, 241, 244, 246, 249, 250, 254, 256, 286 Torrance, Thomas F. 1, 4, 91, 136 n.10, 178, 252–​4 Trinity 40, 59, 62, 101, 103, 107–​9, 111–​ 12, 118, 120–​1, 282 Troeltsch, Ernst 193, 200 Vanson, Frederic 232 Vosté, J.-​M. 40

Wainwright, Geoffrey 118, 123 Wallace, Ronald 183–​4, 190 Walzer, Michael 204, 211 Weithman, Paul J. 218, 222 n.19 Welch, Claude 101, 112 n.2 Wessling, Jordan 85–​6 Wildman, Wesley 163 Wiles, Maurice 118–​20, 125 wisdom 103–​7, 232, 241–​2, 263, 281 Wolterstorff, Nicholas 216–​17, 221

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